The lab call creates new opportunities for industry, entrepreneurs, investors, universities, nonprofits, and other organizations to engage with DOE National Laboratories, plants, and sites and help move DOE technologies from research and development toward the marketplace. National Laboratories can submit proposals to DOE, and organizations interested in participating as potential project partners can add their information to the Teaming Partner List.
The CLIMR lab calls serve the TCF mission by strengthening the lab-to-market pipeline, fostering collaboration, and ensuring that federally funded research delivers tangible benefits to the nation’s economy and energy security.
Connecting DOE technologies with private-sector expertise, capital, manufacturing capabilities, and market insight helps accelerate commercialization, strengthen domestic industry, and ensure that more American innovations are developed and deployed in the United States.
“This lab call is an opportunity for American companies, entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators to work alongside our National Labs to move promising technologies into the marketplace,” said DOE Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of the Office of Technology Commercialization Anthony Pugliese. “By bringing the right partners together, we can accelerate commercialization, strengthen domestic industry, and make sure American innovation continues working for America.”
Opportunities to Partner
The FY26 & FY27 CLIMR Technology-Specific Topics lab call seeks proposals from the National Laboratories in topic areas from the DOE program offices listed below. View the lab call to see list of topics and areas of interest.
Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation
Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response
Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office
Office of Electricity
Office of Nuclear Energy
Organizations interested in partnering with a DOE National Laboratory on a proposal are encouraged to submit their information to the Teaming Partner List (TPL-0000077). The list provides a way for National Laboratories to identify companies and other organizations interested in commercializing lab technologies and contributing capabilities, expertise, market knowledge, or other resources relevant to the lab call topics.
National Laboratory concept papers are due at 3 p.m. EST on November 3, 2026. The full lab call, including detailed topic descriptions, eligibility and cost-share requirements, and application instructions, is available on Exchange.
DOE Announces FY26 TCF Commercialization Enabling Project Selections
DOE OTC also announced six projects that will receive more than $12 million in federal funding through the FY26 TCF CLIMR Commercialization Enabling Topic lab call. The selected projects will also leverage over $6 million in cost-share from partners, bringing total funding to more than $18 million.
Led by six National Laboratories, the selected projects will strengthen the commercialization infrastructure that helps DOE researchers and technologies connect with the marketplace. Projects will support capabilities in areas such as AI tool development, advancing nuclear fission and fusion, and efforts to strengthen collaboration across public private partnerships.
Full details on the selected projects, including project descriptions, lead laboratories, and project partners, are available here.
Across hyperscale data centers, the limiting factor is no longer how many accelerators can be deployed, but how much energy can be delivered, distributed, and used effectively. In many environments, the ceiling isn’t defined by chip density but by the power the system and the facility can sustain.
And that ceiling is coming into focus. Global data center electricity consumption is projected to reach 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, roughly doubling from today’s levels, driven largely by AI workloads, according to a report the International Energy Agency (IEA). As a result, system design is increasingly shaped not by theoretical compute capacity, but by how efficiently available power can be translated into usable performance.
At the same time, AI performance at this scale is no longer determined by individual components. It’s defined by system behavior. Thousands of compute elements operate concurrently, sharing data across complex interconnect and memory hierarchies. What matters is not just how fast any one engine can run, but how efficiently the system as a whole moves, prioritizes, and delivers data under load.
(Davizro Photography/Shutterstock)
As hyperscale AI systems continue to expand, the challenge is shifting from adding compute to orchestrating it. And at the center of that shift is the interconnect.
The Data Center Reframes the AI Scaling Problem
While AI may be almost everywhere, from the edge to the data center, the data center represents its most extreme form.
Here, systems are designed to maximize throughput across massive clusters of heterogeneous compute, such as CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, and other specialized AI accelerators, all operating concurrently on shared datasets. The architectural pattern is consistent: parallel engines accessing shared or distributed data resources can lead to contention if not carefully managed.
Unlike edge systems, which are constrained by fixed power and thermal budgets, data centers operate at the limits of available energy. The question is not just how much compute can be deployed, but how effectively available power can be converted into useful work.
Power spent on inefficient data movement reduces the energy available for useful compute work. And as AI systems scale, inefficient data movement increasingly consumes that budget. As a result, interconnect efficiency has become central to the design of data center AI systems. Moving more data per unit of energy directly translates into higher effective system performance.
The Bottleneck Has Moved Inside the Chip
Much of the industry conversation around AI scaling still focuses on off-chip bandwidth, such as high-bandwidth memory (HBM), or on scale-up and memory-pooling implementations using CXL and PCIe. These are critical, particularly for training workloads where memory capacity and external bandwidth remain key constraints. Still, in many modern architectures, bottlenecks are increasingly distributed across both on-chip and off-chip data movement, requiring coordinated optimization across the entire system.
As AI accelerators grow in complexity, they integrate increasing numbers of compute engines, including multi-core NPUs, systolic arrays, and vector units. All generate and consume data simultaneously. The result is an explosion of internal traffic, and on-chip interconnects must now handle:
High-bandwidth streaming data flows
Latency-sensitive control traffic
Coherency-driven memory access patterns
At the same time, on-chip cache hierarchies are becoming more critical. Local caches can deliver significantly higher effective bandwidth than external memory when data reuse is high, but they also introduce additional traffic patterns that must be coordinated efficiently.
The implication is clear: Even the fastest external memory systems cannot fully compensate for an internal fabric that cannot keep up. AI performance is increasingly determined by how well data is moved, reused, and prioritized within the system, not just by how quickly it can be fetched from outside.
Modern AI systems are inherently heterogeneous. Different compute elements generate fundamentally different traffic behaviors:
GPUs and NPUs drive high-throughput, streaming workloads, performing vector operations on very wide multi-threaded data streams
CPUs introduce bursty, latency-sensitive traffic
Accelerators may require tightly synchronized, coherency-aware communication
Supporting this diversity is not simply a matter of adding bandwidth. It requires interconnect architectures that can manage multiple traffic classes simultaneously, enforce prioritization, and maintain predictable latency under load. This is where concepts such as quality of service (QoS), traffic isolation, and coherence domain management become critical for managing contention and prioritization.
In particular, the distinction between coherent and non-coherent traffic adds another layer of complexity. Maintaining data consistency across shared-memory domains introduces synchronization overhead that must be carefully managed to avoid performance degradation. Without intelligent arbitration and scheduling, contention quickly erodes the benefits of additional compute.
In effect, the interconnect governs system behavior under real workloads, shaping not just data movement but overall performance and efficiency.
Chiplets Shift and Intensify the Data Movement Challenge
To continue scaling AI compute, the industry is rapidly adopting chiplet-based architectures. By partitioning large SoCs into multiple dies, designers can improve yield, reduce cost, and scale systems beyond reticle limits. But rather than eliminate data movement challenges, this architectural shift redistributes them.
Within a chiplet, localized communication can be optimized through shorter wires, higher bandwidth, and lower latency, while memory and compute can be placed closer together to improve efficiency. However, communication between chiplets introduces a new constraint for the die-to-die interface.
Compared to on-chip interconnects, these interfaces are typically more constrained in bandwidth density, latency, and power efficiency. As a result, they can quickly become bottlenecks under AI workloads that demand continuous, high-volume data exchange. At the same time, chiplets increase the need for:
Cross-die QoS and prioritization;
Efficient scheduling of inter-die traffic;
Careful partitioning of workloads to minimize unnecessary data movement.
In this sense, chiplets both solve and create problems. They enable scalable system design, but they make system-level data movement architecture even more critical.
Scaling AI Requires Automation and Architectural Intent
As AI systems grow in scale and complexity, the traditional approach to interconnect design is breaking down. While handcrafted interconnects are effective in tightly scoped designs, they do not scale efficiently to systems with hundreds of compute elements, multiple memory hierarchies, and complex traffic interactions.
The challenge begins earlier than the implementation stage, at the level of architectural intent. Defining how data should move through a system is becoming increasingly complex. Manually specifying these architectures is time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to optimize, driving a shift toward:
System-level modeling and exploration;
Automated interconnect generation;
More abstract, programmable ways to describe architecture.
The goal is not simply to build interconnects faster, but to preserve architectural intent from concept through implementation, and ensure that performance, power, and scalability targets are met predictably. In the data center, where design cycles are compressed and performance margins are tight, this shift is essential.
(VL-PhotoPro/Shutterstock)
The Interconnect Is the New Lever for AI Scale
Historically, interconnect design has often been treated as a secondary concern, addressed after compute and memory decisions are made. In modern AI systems, however, the interconnect is a primary determinant of system performance, efficiency, and scalability, not just infrastructure.
The next phase of AI scaling in the data center is being defined by how efficiently data can be delivered to compute within the limits of available power. For data center architectures, this means:
Prioritizing data movement early in the design process;
Treating interconnect as a first-class architectural element;
Adopting solutions that combine high-performance fabrics with system-level automation.
Performance is no longer determined only by the number of accelerators in a rack, but also by how consistently those accelerators can be kept busy. That requires systems that can prioritize, balance, and deliver data predictably under load, rather than relying solely on bandwidth.
In modern AI systems, data movement must be architected early, intentionally, and at scale. The next generation of AI infrastructure will be defined not just by more compute, but by systems designed from the outset to move data as efficiently as they process it.
About the author: Andy Nightingale, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Arteris, has over 40 years of experience in the high-tech industry. He’s a seasoned global business leader with a diverse background in engineering and product marketing. Andy is also a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society and the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Throughout his career, Andy has held a range of roles, including engineering and product management positions at Arm, where he spent 23 years leading a product marketing team specializing in system IP products that involved network interconnects, memory and interrupt controllers, and system MMUs. In his current role at Arteris, Andy oversees the Magillem system-on-chip deployment tooling and FlexNoC and Ncore network-on-chip products.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: NorthPoint Development wants to build a data center on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills, near Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. As well as seeking to charm the local government with various funding packages, it has proposed paying checks of $10,000 per household. Despite the Pennsylvania town's median income of $60,000, the offer isn't being warmly welcomed by locals, reports the Wall Street Journal. Those interviewed were widely against the data center development plans and cited several reasons for being averse to accepting the payout. The major concerns regarded potential impacts on property values, the specter of noise pollution, and a distrust of both the AI moguls and local government representatives.
Offer letters began to be received by Hazle Township back in June. The WSJ recently talked to several residents about NorthPoint's $10,000 offer. While some say the $10,000 would be handy, it couldn't find many residents who were "eager to welcome the data center for the payout," in the journal's words. [...] Traditionally, developers have offered towns and cities packages worth tens of millions, including funding for local services. But direct cash payments to residents represent a new phase of their charm offensive, the WSJ indicates. Perhaps the idea for the direct payments to residents came after "a raucous public meeting last year, where angry locals asked what they had to gain by supporting the data center," ponders the source.
The locals won't just get the direct payout, though. Other funds up to $120 million over the next 15 years have been dangled like a carrot for community and local services investments -- improved schools, emergency services, and so on. Meanwhile, Hazle Township's government already rejected the data center project on zoning grounds last year, and it has enacted a temporary moratorium on data center construction. Finally, the $10,000 offer to households is simply not enough in many interviewed folks' opinions. Residents could feel insulted by it, regarding the offer as a bribe, concludes the WSJ report.
Sept. 28, 2026 — Xinnor has released xiNAS 3.13, the new production version of its high-performance NFS over RDMA storage platform, with unified management, automation and diagnostics for day-to-day operations.
Separately, Xinnor opened two technology previews showing directions under development for future xiNAS releases: AI-assisted storage management through MCP in xiNAS 3.14, and a mechanism for exposing live xiNAS storage condition to pNFS coordination software in xiNAS 3.15.
xiNAS 3.13 introduces a single control plane for storage provisioning, NFS configuration, health inspection and configuration history. Whether an operation comes from the terminal interface, CLI,REST API or MCP-client, xiNAS follows the same workflow: it builds a end-to-end plan for a particular task showing what will change, checks permissions, applies the approved operation and records it in the audit log.
Operations that can alter or destroy data require the appropriate role and explicit confirmation. This gives administrators a consistent way to manage RAID, filesystems, NFS and networking instead of working through separate management paths.
The xiNAS 3.14 technology preview extends this control plane to MCP-compatible AI assistants and automation tools. Administrators can use an AI client to inspect system health, investigate unavailable shares, review changes or prepare configuration operations.
The AI client does not receive shell access. Requests are mapped to defined xiNAS operations and remain subject to the same permissions, planning, confirmation and auditing rules used by other management interfaces. Diagnostic results also record which checks succeeded, failed, timed out or could not be performed, so missing information is not treated as evidence of a healthy system.
“AI can make storage administration much easier, but it should not bypass the controls that make infrastructure predictable and safe,” said Sergei Platonov, Vice President of Strategy at Xinnor. “In the 3.14 preview, an assistant can inspect the system, explain what it finds and prepare an operation, while permissions, the execution plan and final confirmation remain under xiNAS control.”
The xiNAS 3.15 technology preview explores a separate problem in scale-out pNFS environments: how a coordination layer could take the actual condition of storage servers into account when placing new data.
In the preview, xiNAS publishes the condition of the RAID, filesystem and NFS layers behind each share. A connector can make this information available to pNFS Lattice, an open-source metadata and coordination layer for pNFS. This creates a basis for evaluating placement policies that could avoid servers that are rebuilding, degraded or unavailable.
The 3.15 work is an early technology preview intended for technical evaluation and development; it is not part of the current production xiNAS feature set.
xiNAS was introduced earlier this year on Supermicro storage servers with AMD EPYC processors and PCIe Gen5 NVMe drives. A single 12-drive system demonstrated up to 74.5 GB/s read and 39.5 GB/s write, while two servers reached 117 GB/s read and 79.6 GB/s write.
xiNAS 3.13 is available now as the current stable release. Source branches for xiNAS 3.14 and 3.15 are available separately for technical evaluation. Sergei Platonov will discuss the architecture and safety model behind the MCP preview at SNIA Developer Conference 2026 on September 30.
xiNAS is nominated in the 2026 HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards in the Best HPC/AI Storage Product or Technology and Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch categories.
Xinnor is a software development company that specializes in creating innovative data storage solutions. Our main product is a patented software RAID technology that delivers exceptional performance. Visit xinnor.io to learn more.
An elderly couple in the San Francisco Bay Area is suspected of shooting and killing their 40-year-old son-in-law near a park over the weekend, police said.
A woman filed a lawsuit against Cornell University and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, alleging that she was the victim of a gang rape in 2024. The school said it supports the decision to reopen the investigation.
While the lawmakers in the US House have already left Washington to get a head start on midterm campaigning, the Senate is hoping to wrap up its legislative agenda this week. Today, we can expect a vote at 5.30pm ET on the Protect College Sports act, which attempts to provide greater protections for university athletes in the US.
The bill includes provisions for players to earn compensation from their name, image and likeness – known as NIL payments, and allow them to transfer schools (and teams) without being penalized or forced to sit out for a defined period of time. If the legislation clears the Senate it will still need to head back to the lower chamber before it can head to Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.
A woman, identified only as Jane Doe, alleges she was gang-raped by seven fraternity members in 2024 and accuses Cornell University of failing to protect her.
President seeks midterms boost as White House says project, built by Indian-owned company, will begin in 2030
Donald Trump on Monday announced what he called the largest steel plant in American history to be built in Iowa, giving Republicans a jobs message to take to voters in a state that could help decide control of the Senate in November.
“Using advanced steelmaking technology, the plant will produce some of the highest quality, most affordable steel anywhere in the world,” Trump said in the Oval Office, flanked by Iowa’s top Republicans.
The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in the major climate change lawsuit between two energy companies and the city and county of Boulder, Colorado.
Police said Tasia Fortune, 29, was killed before her body was placed in the tree, and the scene was ‘staged’
A Mississippi judge set a $5m bond on Monday for a third man charged in the death of a Black woman whose body was found hanging from a tree in August.
Police disclosed on Friday that Tasia Fortune, 29, was killed before her body was placed in a tree behind an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi’s capital city.
Amid conflicting statements, local MP and councillors demand answers over how suspects were allowed to enter residential areas of nearby village
An MP and councillors representing the residents of the village near RAF Fairford who were evacuated due to a suspected terror plot have expressed scepticism and concern over the security response to threats made by Iran.
About 85 properties in Whelford, Gloucestershire, were evacuated on Sunday morning after five men were arrested on suspicion of explosives offences in the village. The men, who were later re-arrested on suspicion of terror offences, were released on bail on Monday.
Meta has hired MongoDB CEO Chirantan "CJ" Desai to lead a new enterprise AI business aimed at turning Meta's models, agents and tools into products companies can deploy themselves. Reuters reports: Desai, a veteran technology executive, took over the role from Dev Ittycheria. MongoDB has appointed Ittycheria as interim CEO as it searches for a permanent replacement. "While the departure is disappointing, we believe MongoDB remains well-positioned strategically and view the share-price reaction as overdone," brokerage Piper Sandler said in a note.
[...] Desai will directly report to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the newly created role of chief enterprise platform officer and will focus on turning the company's AI stack into products and services that companies can deploy for their own businesses. Before joining MongoDB, Desai led product and engineering at Cloudflare and spent nearly eight years at ServiceNow, including as president and chief operating officer.
(The Center Square) – Younger voters and Black voters, says AARP, help give Democrat Roy Cooper a 53%-42% lead over Republican Michael Whatley in polling for North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2026 midterms.
Post came in response to rumor of ‘huge migrant caravan’
Brian Dawkins says he did not give permission for footage
The NFL has asked the US Department of Homeland Security to take down a video likening former Eagles star Brian Dawkins’s most violent hits to a clampdown on immigrants.
The video posted to social media on Sunday shows Dawkins’ pregame walkout as he chants “The time has come,” followed by a series of violent hits from his playing career. The DHS post includes the caption “Our time has come” in response to a social media account claiming a “huge migrant caravan” is approaching the United States’ southern border.
President Trump said he is "very seriously" considering a ban on diesel exports. But such a move could drive U.S. gas prices sharply higher, analysts said.
Business cybercrime surged in 2025, with reported incidents rising 18% and losses reaching more than $3.5 billion. But the concentration of reported cybercrime varies considerably from state to state. A new analysis from Opstream examined the newest FBI Internet Crime…
Built through the NSF Prototype Open Knowledge Network program and in collaboration with a broad coalition of federal partners, the network is now available for public use
Sept. 28, 2026 — The U.S. National Science Foundation has announced the launch of the NSF Open Knowledge Network (NSF OKN), a national open-data infrastructure that links 43 interconnected knowledge graphs and tens of billions of connected facts across health, the environment, justice, manufacturing, and national security. The network is live and open to the public at okn.us.
Credit: Shutterstock
NSF OKN provides a structured, persistent, verifiable knowledge layer to complement contemporary artificial intelligence models, providing grounding of facts, attribution, and knowledge governance essential to critical AI applications in a number of fields. OKN’s value goes beyond machines querying structured knowledge: Its deeper value provides AI systems with a shared, explicit, interoperable, and auditable representation of the world on which they are expected to reason and act.
Across science, government, and many key enterprise applications, valuable datasets sit in silos that are not accessible, interoperable, nor ready for use by AI systems. OKN makes federal and public data findable, connected, and machine-readable at a national scale. In its September 2026 statement on a new golden age of science, NSF named AI-ready datasets, next-generation scientific data infrastructure, and a national network of programmable cloud laboratories among its central investments, aligned with the Genesis Mission, the whole-of-government effort to harness AI for scientific discovery. OKN is a working example of the data layer that this vision requires. Where simply producing a plausible answer is no longer sufficient, and the user often needs to know more about the evidence, source, and other details, the NSF OKN provides a robust response.
“The NSF OKN began as an experiment. We asked whether independent teams could build one open knowledge network, and whether NSF and its partners could stand up national-scale infrastructure and sustain it,” said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF Assistant Director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. “The answer is the network going live today. It is open, it is public, and it is already larger than what we originally funded thanks to the public and private partnerships that have formed.”
OKN was built by the Prototype Open Knowledge Network program, initially a $26.7 million, 18-research-team effort launched in 2023, with core support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institute of Justice (NIJ), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Each team built a knowledge graph in its own field, then connected it to the other knowledge graphs through a shared technical fabric. The result is a single federated network rather than 18 separate projects.
It proved successful and grew beyond the 18 initial projects. Federal partners invested their own resources to connect their data. NIH provided $2.5 million in supplements to integrate ten of its knowledge graph efforts, and NASA, USGS, and NOAA added data products including a coastal-zone digital twin and NASA’s Earth-observing knowledge graph. Teams that were not part of the original award joined the federation, which now serves 43 graphs. Today the program has drawn active engagement from more than 12 federal agencies and realized over 90 cross-sector partnerships.
The network’s distinctive result is cross-graph querying that answers questions no single database can. For example, linking supply-chain and manufacturing data maps cybersecurity exposure across more than 7,000 semiconductor products from 247 companies, and pairing contamination data with soil-productivity data connects environmental and agricultural questions that were previously separate.
OKN is built for everyone, not just researchers. A caseworker finding housing for a client, a community bracing for a flood, a company checking its software supply chain for a vulnerability — all these individuals can use the network. “What launches today is public infrastructure that agencies, researchers, and the public can use to answer questions that cross the boundaries between fields,” Gianchandani said.
About NSF TIP
The NSF Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP) seeks to engage all Americans in accelerating critical and emerging technologies to advance U.S. competitiveness. The directorate partners across sectors to advance three strategies — accelerating critical and emerging technology, expanding the geography of American innovation, and building a competition-ready workforce. For more information about NSF TIP, visit nsf.gov/tip/latest.
Open and Secure Synopsys Autopilot Platform Accelerates Engineering Productivity, Improves Design Quality, and Achieves Faster Closure Across Silicon to Systems
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 28, 2026 — Synopsys, Inc. today announced Synopsys AgentEngineer solutions, the industry’s broadest portfolio of domain-specific long-horizon agents that can reason, plan, and execute complete engineering workflows from silicon to systems across verification, system validation, implementation, analog, manufacturing, and simulation and analysis domains.
Synopsys Powers Autonomous Engineering with a Broad Portfolio of Long-Horizon Agents and Autopilot Platform
Built on the Synopsys Autopilot Platform, a comprehensive, open, and secure foundation for autonomous engineering, these agents help teams accelerate engineering productivity, improve design quality, and achieve faster closure across critical workflows while optimizing token efficiency and reducing latency.
“Our customers are re-engineering their engineering workflows across semiconductor and systems products to keep pace with increasing system complexity and tight market windows,” said Ravi Subramanian, Chief Product Management Officer at Synopsys. “Synopsys’ portfolio of AgentEngineer solutions and the Autopilot Platform enable customers to accelerate their shift from AI-assisted design to autonomous engineering, built on trusted EDA and simulation and analysis engines.”
Portfolio of Long-Horizon Agents Across Silicon-to-System Design
Synopsys AgentEngineer solutions bring long-horizon, domain-specific intelligence to critical engineering workflows supporting verification, implementation, analog, manufacturing, and simulation and analysis engineering domains in one unified platform environment.
In addition, task-level agents apply Synopsys engineering expertise to targeted execution, including autonomous coverage closure; software bring-up and validation; multi-die 3DIC assembly; PPA closure; analog layout synthesis and design migration; mask synthesis; combustion, resonance, and signal integrity; and other complex design tasks.
Together, these long-horizon and task-level agents deliver unmatched breadth and depth, enabling autonomous execution of cross-domain tasks. Their effectiveness is powered by deep engineering context, domain expertise, and workflow intelligence uniquely derived from Synopsys’ industry-leading EDA and simulation and analysis ground-truth engines.
Built on Synopsys Autopilot Platform: A Trusted Foundation for Agentic Orchestration
The Synopsys Autopilot Platform provides orchestration, skills, memory, telemetry, and governance for autonomous engineering workflows. It creates a trusted environment for AI systems to coordinate activities, access design knowledge, execute actions, and maintain enterprise-grade security and control.
Built for Optionality: Enables customer choice across Synopsys, partner, and third-party infrastructure, models, data, agents, workflows, and ecosystem integrations, while preserving security and data integrity.
Context Intelligence: Powered by Synopsys’ cognitive model, combines deep domain engineering knowledge and tools, reusable skills, and persistent memory to help AI agents interpret design intent and guide workflows.
Advanced Security & Data Management: Protects customer, partner, and Synopsys intellectual property through architecture flexibility, access controls, encryption, and runtime guardrails.
Optimized for Efficiency: Uses privileged APIs and reasoning over proprietary context intelligence to deliver better results at significantly lower token cost/count and latency.
Advancing Autonomous Engineering at Scale Industry Collaborations
Beyond automating individual tasks, the Synopsys Autopilot Platform helps engineering teams accelerate entire workflows from design through verification and systems development. Engagements with leading companies are validating the promise of autonomous engineering and demonstrating meaningful improvements in productivity, design quality, and workflow closure.
“As a fast-growing innovator developing next-generation processor architectures, we are continually looking for new ways to accelerate engineering execution and improve productivity across our design workflows,” said Alon Mahl, VP of Verification, AheadComputing. “The Synopsys AgentEngineer technology extends AI beyond task assistance to help automate complex workflows and accelerate engineering execution. From RTL handoff through implementation, ECO, and signoff, the Synopsys Implementation AgentEngineer helped us reduce manual engineering effort and accelerate design convergence, enabling our engineering teams to focus more time on the differentiated aspects of our processor architecture.”
“We achieved a 10–30% productivity boost in RTL code generation with Synopsys Verification AgentEngineer capabilities,” said Toshio Yoshida, Senior Vice President and Head of the Advanced Computing Development Unit at Fujitsu. “This was driven by highly efficient generation of SystemVerilog assertions, wrapper modules, and parameterized modules, as well as code refactoring.”
“Advancing the productivity and efficiency of our verification teams is critical as design complexity continues to increase across next-generation computing platforms,” said Manoj Selva, Vice President, Product Enablement, Intel. “Our work with Synopsys Verification AgentEngineer technology highlights the promise of agentic AI for debug, enabling engineers to accelerate issue resolution across verification environments. We believe these advancements can help reduce verification bottlenecks, improve engineering efficiency, and accelerate the delivery of our silicon innovations.”
“Our engineers have consistently pushed the boundaries of analog and mixed-signal design and are continuously looking for ways to dramatically enhance design and layout productivity,” said Ching San Wu, Vice President of MediaTek. “Building on the successful deployment of Synopsys SmartFloorplanning Technology, we are continuing our collaboration with Synopsys on the Agentic AI AMS Platform, driving the next frontier of autonomous analog engineering flows. We believe this transformative technology will fundamentally reshape how our teams create, optimize, and implement complex AMS designs.”
“Autonomous engineering requires AI agents that understand design intent, plan and execute complex workflows, and validate their results,” said Tim Costa, Vice President and General Manager of Industrial and Computational Engineering at NVIDIA. “Synopsys is combining its silicon-to-systems expertise with NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA Agent Toolkit, including NVIDIA Nemotron models and the NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime, to build long-running agents that help engineers improve design quality and accelerate development.”
“Breakthroughs in AI increasingly depend on breakthroughs in memory: the industry calls for higher bandwidth, greater efficiency, and faster innovation cycles,” said JY Choi, Executive Vice President and Head of Memory Design Technology at Samsung Electronics. “Synopsys agentic AI solutions are helping Samsung’s engineering teams accelerate complex development workflows, allowing us to focus more effort on innovating the advanced memory technologies that power the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
“As AI drives the shift to multi-die architectures with unprecedented power densities, increasingly complex power delivery networks demand new approaches for power integrity signoff,” said Aveek Sarkar, Director of the Ecosystem and Alliance Management Division at TSMC. “Through our enduring partnership with Open Innovation Platform (OIP) ecosystem partners like Synopsys, we are successfully enabling agentic AI-based solutions to accelerate critical power integrity analysis workflows. As advanced packaging designs rapidly grow in scale and complexity, these AI-based solutions significantly boost engineering productivity and enable groundbreaking designs for next-generation AI systems.”
Availability and Resources
More than 50 engagements are underway with Synopsys AgentEngineer solutions and the Autopilot Platform, with general availability planned for the end of 2026.
Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) is the leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems, enabling customers to rapidly innovate AI-powered products. We deliver industry-leading silicon design, IP, simulation and analysis solutions, and design services. We partner closely with our customers across a wide range of industries to maximize their R&D capability and productivity, powering innovation today that ignites the ingenuity of tomorrow.
(The Center Square) – A Michigan rabbi says he does not believe a victory by progressive U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed would itself lead to harm against the Jewish community, but worries his rhetoric could influence others and deepen a…
Row comes amid rising division and a tendency towards cynical political posturing in Northern Ireland
Three decades ago, it took the deaths of three Roman Catholic children – the Quinn brothers, Jason, nine, Mark, 10, and 11-year-old Richard – in a petrol bomb attack to bring an end to the Drumcree dispute. “No road is worth a life, let alone the lives of three little boys,” the Orange Order’s County Armagh chaplain said at the time.
It is perhaps extraordinary to think that this could ever have needed saying – but that was then. Northern Ireland is very different place today.
CDC says 392 cases of Dengue were reported for the year so far in the state, along with different county-level data
Several Florida counties recently declared a state of local emergency in response to a spate of dengue fever infections.
Hillsborough county, Florida, officials made the declaration on 24 September as health authorities recorded 134 confirmed cases of dengue fever, which is a mosquito-borne sickness typically found in countries outside the US. Officials said that the spread of the illness poses “an immediate and widespread threat to the public health, safety, and welfare of the residents and visitors of Hillsborough county”.
Over the last few days and weeks or so, a few of the people I follow and interact with on Fedi have been talking about centralising information, tools, applications, and expertise from the Motif (and Xt, Xlib, and X11) ecosystem. There’s a ton of information, resources, and actively maintained applications out there, but it’s all spread out and sometimes difficult to find, and so Thomas Adam – one of the core developers of FVWM, among other things, as well as creator of CoW (FVWM for Wayland, more or less) – has created an effort to centralise all of this.
Motif Central brings together information about Motif, Xt, Xlib and X11: how they fit together, how to program with them, and where to find the manuals, examples and historical material that explain them.
There’s been a whole flurry of activity around Motif lately, including the updated and maintained fork we talked about a few weeks ago. The people loosely collaborating on MotifCentral also submitted patches to CDE to make sure it works on the new Motif fork, with the CDE developers setting up a build pipeline for easier testing. Making sure CDE, the classic Motif desktop environment, works well with the maintained Motif fork quite a few people seem to be rallying around is a worthwhile effort.
We’re still quite far from a complete(-ish) modern Motif ecosystem, but it’s very heartwarming to see just how many people are actually still interested in it. My perhaps misguided hope is that we can somehow get to a modernised Motif/CDE desktop environment and applications, making it possible to more easily run a modern Motif environment on Linux and the BSDs.
Sept. 28, 2026 — Two complementary Chips JU calls are open for projects across the AI compute value chain. With a combined indicative EU budget of €80 million, these calls support European development of functional AI chip demonstrators, and the evaluation, procurement and deployment of AI compute systems.
The opportunities are aimed at organizations working across the AI compute ecosystem, including AI chip design companies, system developers, AI Factories, public AI/HPC infrastructure operators and cloud service providers. The calls are operationally linked: demonstrators developed under the first call will be evaluated through the common platform established under the second, creating a pathway towards rack-level testing and pilot deployment.
The deadline for both calls has been extended to Oct. 27, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. Brussels time.
AI Chip Demonstrators
The first call, AI chip demonstrators for EU compute infrastructure (DIGITAL-JU-CHIPS-2026-AI1-SG), is a Simple Grant with an indicative EU budget of €10 million. The call supports projects bringing advanced European AI chip designs to the demonstrator stage. The Chips JU estimates an EU contribution of up to €1 million per project, although proposals may request a different amount.
Each proposal must include at least one EU-established AI chip design company responsible for the AI chip design and associated intellectual property. System integrators and original equipment manufacturers may also participate where needed for integration, software bring-up and benchmarking. Applicants must demonstrate that the AI chip has been taped out at a commercial foundry, with engineering samples available or expected within the specified timeframe. A PCB hosting the chip must also be in production or expected during the six-month development phase.
Funding will support completion of the demonstrator, including the chip, PCB, cooling and interconnect, as well as software integration and preparation for benchmarking. After development, demonstrators will undergo up to two months of performance-based assessment on the common evaluation platform.
The best-performing solutions can receive the AI Compute Excellence Label, which is a strict eligibility condition for the subsequent Topic A2 rack-development phase. A2 is planned for a later stage and will not be launched in 2026.
AI Compute Evaluation and Procurement
The second call, AI compute evaluation and deployment platform for EU infrastructure (DIGITAL-JU-CHIPS-2026-AI-GfP), is a Grant for Procurement with an indicative EU budget of €70 million. The call will establish the common evaluation infrastructure and services needed to validate Stream A systems against workloads and benchmarks and procure pilot AI compute racks.
It targets a buyers’ group of EU-established legal entities. Proposals should include at least one contracting authority or entity operating an EU AI Factory or comparable EU public AI/HPC facility, and at least two EU-established Cloud Service Providers. The consortium must include beneficiaries from at least three different Member States or EEA countries.
The action will run through three operationally linked phases: first, benchmarking Topic A1 chip demonstrators; second, preparing and conducting the benchmark evaluation of Topic A2 rack systems; and third, procuring, installing and optimizing selected rack systems. The procurement will focus on scaled, multi-rack clusters rather than isolated single-rack deployments, supporting realistic testing of distributed AI workloads. The overall action is expected to run for 42 months.
A Connected Funding Pathway
The two calls form part of a broader initiative structured around two operational streams. Stream A covers European AI chip and rack development through Topics A1 and A2, while Stream B provides the common evaluation and procurement framework through Topic B.
For AI chip design companies, A1 provides funding to develop and benchmark advanced chip demonstrators and, for selected solutions, a route towards subsequent rack development.
For AI Factories, public AI/HPC facilities and cloud providers, Topic B provides funding to establish the evaluation environment and buyer framework and to procure pilot AI compute systems.
The overall pathway starts with the development of European AI chips, which are brought to the demonstrator stage and evaluated through common benchmarking. Selected technologies can then progress to rack development and system-level testing, before moving towards procurement and pilot deployment in European AI compute infrastructure.
Only A1 and Topic B are currently open. Topic A2 is a later-stage opportunity and is not scheduled to launch in 2026.
Relevant links
More information on the calls and their requirements is available on the Chips JU website, while applications should be submitted through the EU Funding & Tenders Portal.
AI chip demonstrators for EU compute infrastructure (DIGITAL-JU-CHIPS-2026-AI1-SG)
The Office of Science Advisory Committee has published the Genesis Mission Frameworks for AI-Accelerated National Breakthroughs report.
Sept. 28, 2026 — DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil has announced the publication of the Office of Science Advisory Committee’s report, Genesis Mission Frameworks for AI-Accelerated National Breakthroughs. The report examines how AI could accelerate progress in biology, fusion energy and domestic rare-earth magnet supply chains as part of DOE’s Genesis Mission. In the post below, Gil outlines the committee’s findings and their implications for the initiative.
In an era defined by rapid technological transition, the defining question is not whether artificial intelligence (AI) will transform science and engineering—it will. The real question is whether the United States will lead that transformation or cede it to strategic competitors.
To help chart this path, I charged the Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC) Genesis Mission Subcommittee with surveying the broader scientific landscape and assessing how AI can be most effectively applied to accelerate national breakthroughs. Today, I am proud to share their response and report: Genesis Mission Frameworks for AI-Accelerated National Breakthroughs.
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative mobilizing the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories in partnership with industry, academia, federal agencies, international partners, and philanthropy to build a unified scientific AI platform. Connecting high-performance supercomputing, AI, quantum systems, and experimental facilities, the platform is designed to accelerate breakthroughs and tackle 33 national science and technology challenges, from fusion energy to pediatric cancer.
Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil
From these critical challenge areas, the advisory committee chose to conduct a deep dive into three specific frontiers, offering strategic insights into how AI-driven convergence can redefine what is possible:
1. Harnessing Biology at Digital Speed
For decades, our ability to read genetic code has outpaced our ability to interpret and engineer it. The committee’s assessment highlights how a dedicated AI-biology campaign can bridge this gap, turning biology from an observational science into a predictive, engineerable discipline. Unlocking predictive biological design offers massive potential to scale the global bioeconomy—projected by some analyses to reach $10 trillion by 2050—and secure American leadership in this critical sector.
Through integrated AI-enabled measurement, modeling, and manufacturing loops, the committee outlines the possibility of extraordinary breakthroughs. These include engineering microbes that convert carbon dioxide into cost-competitive jet fuel on the first batch, and the ability to design therapeutics for previously “undruggable” cancer genes in just nine months.
2. AI-Accelerated Fusion Energy
Fusion is the ultimate energy source. However, controlling a burning plasma—which spans six orders of magnitude in space and time—presents massive engineering hurdles. The report explores how AI can turn these fundamental uncertainties into solvable engineering challenges.
Utilizing AI to guide engineering decisions and predict superheated reactions in real time is vital to accelerating progress toward the ambitious national milestone of delivering an operational U.S. fusion pilot plant to the power grid by 2030–2035. By dramatically speeding up design cycles, AI can help secure a tremendous energy source to power our economy.
3. Rebuilding Magnet Sovereignty
Critical rare-earth permanent magnets are essential for electric vehicles, defense systems, and wind turbines, yet the U.S. relies heavily on a single foreign supply chain. To address this vulnerability, the advisory committee proposes an urgent, five-year AI mission to establish “Magnet Sovereignty” by creating a closed-loop domestic learning system.
The report details how using AI to search through millions of material combinations can potentially help discover high-performance magnet formulas that bypass rare and hard-to-get minerals. Simultaneously, deploying intelligent AI sensors across domestic manufacturing lines and automating recycling systems will enable recovery and reuse of critical materials from discarded electronics inside our borders.
The Path Forward
Ultimately, the committee’s findings show that the Genesis Mission offers an opportunity to accelerate discovery, strengthen American competitiveness, power the economy, and secure our energy future. By combining the processing power of our 17 National Laboratories with the talent and curiosity of our scientific community, we can build a future where scientific discovery is no longer bottlenecked by manual trial and error but unleashed to solve our biggest problems.
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Nvidia on Monday announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, which combines open source software and a reference system design to keep AI agents within set boundaries from testing through deployment. The chipmaker explained that the platform pairs the open-source OpenShell runtime with Sentry, an out-of-band watchdog running on BlueField-4 DPUs. Nvidia says Sentry can monitor agent activity independently and quarantine an agent that crosses its boundaries within milliseconds.
Nvidia is pitching the platform against a backdrop of recent incidents in which frontier AI labs have reported agents escaping the evaluation environments meant to contain them, reaching systems they should not have accessed and, in some cases, misreporting what they did. OpenShell and related skills are available via Nvidia's developer resources page and on GitHub.
Windows 11 received its September update on the 8th of this month, and within days Microsoft had acknowledged or investigated problems involving Remote Desktop, USB audio, Linux and WSL-based apps like Claude Cowork, and enterprise domain issues. Windows Latest also found File History failures, Explorer.exe crashes, and AMD GPU instability, with an emergency update following on September 14 that still did not fix everything.
This got us curious, and we looked back across the nine monthly updates released from January through September 2026 and, rather unsurprisingly, Windows 10 update history isn’t infected with nearly as many bugs as that of Windows 11.
Of course, Windows 10 also isn’t getting nearly as much attention from Microsoft, but that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Whenever Microsoft touches something, especially over the last 5 years or so, it’s one cascade of failures after the other, eroding trust in Windows’ updates even more (if that’s even possible). In that light, why would you want to use Windows 11 and all the headaches that come with it, when Windows 10 is right there, still being supported, albeit without the latest bells and whistles that only seem to break Windows 11 anyway?
If you really do need or want to use Windows, consider switching back to Windows 10 whenever the usual Windows reinstallation time draws near. You won’t lose much, but will gain quite a bit in the process. Of course, this won’t be a responsible or usable choice forever, but at this point in time, I definitely think it’s the optimal choice for quite a few people.
Tehran has been trying to step up attacks on targets in the west but its track record has been mixed
Investigators may be some way from determining exactly what led five men with three vans to a village just outside RAF Fairford in the small hours of Sunday – but the fact they have all been released on bail without immediate charge suggests they are not deemed to pose a serious and violent threat.
In a moment where wider geopolitical tensions mean external threats are perceived to be close, the question of whether Iran had a hand in the alleged plot remains open. Nonetheless, the bailing of the men is a mercifully lower-key development in an investigation that appeared of the utmost gravity.
The dinner comes as Amodei has warned about the "exponential growth" of AI, and has called for safeguards on the industry, which President Trump has rejected.
Britain has confronted dozens of lethal plots traced to Iran in recent years, but the release of the suspects could indicate they were not seen as an imminent threat.
Case of alleged hazing at the University of Arizona is latest in series of controversial incidents involving US fraternities
A college fraternity at the University of Arizona has been suspended after new members were allegedly plied with alcohol and forced to swallow live goldfish.
College officials informed the university’s Sigma Tau Gamma chapter by letter earlier in September that it was under investigation for multiple alleged violations of the student code of conduct, including “endangering, threatening, or causing physical harm” to members of the campus community.
Police say alleged offences could have been committed ‘knowingly or unknowingly’ on behalf of a foreign state
Five men arrested over a suspected bomb plot at RAF Fairford have been released on bail as police investigate why they were so close to the airbase in three vans with suspicious material in the back.
The five suspects were revealed to be British men, all in their 20s and from London. They had been arrested in the Gloucestershire countryside early on Sunday morning on suspicion of explosives offences and preparing an act of terrorism, with an Iranian link a key line of inquiry.
National Rally and allies gain record 14 seats and can form senate group for first time after indirect vote by local officials
The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has said her 2027 presidential campaign will be boosted after her anti-immigration party, the National Rally (RN), and its allies improved to a record 14 seats in partial senate elections this weekend.
Le Pen called the results a “historic victory” and a “major milestone” after her party cleared the 10-seat threshold to be able to form a senate group for the first time, after an indirect vote by local officials including mayors and councillors.
Culture secretary criticises Reform leader after he tried to link suspected bomb plot to small boat crossings
Nigel Farage has been described as a “master of the conspiracy theory” by the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, , after he tried to link events at RAF Fairford to small boat crossings.
The Reform UK leader was criticised over his reaction to the arrests of the men on Sunday, when he said he had been warning for months about “Iranian agents” coming into the UK across the Channel in small boats.
Andrew Bailey will resign as FBI co-deputy director about a year after assuming the position
Andrew Bailey, a deputy director of the FBI who has been overseeing some of Trump’s election-related investigations, will step down from his position approximately one year after assuming his role.
“I am announcing that I am stepping down to return to my family in Missouri,” Bailey wrote in an X post on Monday amid an ongoing shake-up at the bureau.
Austin, TX — Republican Texas Railroad Commission candidate Bo French is facing renewed scrutiny after an investigation uncovered years of social media posts in which he called for the execution of political opponents and government officials.
CNN’s KFile reported that accounts linked to French repeatedly advocated executions, including in 2020 posts targeting former President Barack Obama and other Obama administration officials over claims surrounding the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. One post said the death penalty for what French called the “Obama conspirators” was necessary, while another referenced execution as the historical punishment for treason.
The investigation also found that French wrote in February 2025 that he wanted “public executions” of government officials identified by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort. In another deleted post, he called for the public execution of Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff.
French was already under criticism after posting an image of South Asian students at the University of Texas and describing their presence as a “problem.” Republican Sen. John Cornyn subsequently said he would not vote for French, while other Texas Republicans publicly condemned the post.
French is running for the Railroad Commission, which despite its name regulates Texas’ oil and gas industry. His social media history has now become a significant issue in the statewide campaign.
Campaign broadcast across France encourages people to come forward even if they have little to no memory of attack
Gisèle Pelicot is the figurehead of a new campaign run by her daughter to encourage people who suspect they have been drugged and sexually assaulted to come forward, even if they have little to no memory of the attack.
Caroline Darian, 47, who believes she was also drugged and assaulted by her father, Dominique Pelicot – her mother’s ex-husband – launched a primetime public information push on Monday across France’s television network, on social media, in the press and on posters.
Amazon is preparing to expand Prime Air drone deliveries into Australia and potentially other Asia-Pacific markets, with a new regulatory role tasked with securing the approvals needed to launch service there. The Register reports: "As Prime Air evaluates Australia and other countries, we are hiring a Head of Regulatory Approvals, Australia -- the person responsible for navigating Australia's aviation regulatory system and securing every approval required to deliver to Australian customers by drone," reads a recently published job ad.
Whoever gets the gig in Australia will report to someone who holds the title "Leader, Prime Air Expansion -- Asia Pacific." Whoever gets the job "will be measured by the approvals you obtain, the timelines you hit, and -- ultimately -- Australian customers receiving drone deliveries." That wording suggests Amazon intends to operate Prime Air in Australia and is doing rather more than market evaluations.
The global tech industry, politicians at home and abroad, and international media coverage are transfixed by one question: Will rogue AI end humanity? Few seem to be asking this question of the Department of Defense.
The artificial intelligence sector has rocked itself in recent weeks following a string of disclosures from the frontier AI labs and some of their personnel. OpenAI and Anthropic have both disclosed incidents in which their software, during routine internal testing, unexpectedly broke into the networks of other corporations. The tests were akin to a disastrous demonstration of a guided missile: After humans hit launch, the autonomous technology veered off course in deeply alarming ways.
Observers and industry figures quickly interpreted the incidents not simply as an indicator of the software’s power. Instead, they argued that it presaged an age of computers possessing something no computer ever has: bad intentions.
If computer systems could behave in ways that are unexpected — or even shocking — without being directly steered by humans, it seems only a short step until computers might have desires, ambitions, and even malice. If OpenAI’s tools could unexpectedly crack the servers of a rival corporation to accomplish a task posed to it by engineers, couldn’t it also surprise us with actions that result in harm to people, or even deaths?
Frontier lab employees and executives have answered with an emphatic yes. On September 8, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation on X, writing, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.” Coxon’s former Anthropic colleague Evan Hubinger replied, casually agreed: “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger noted he personally puts the odds of the species’ extermination by AI, somehow, at over 10 percent.
This has all resulted, unsurprisingly, in a global panic, with a sudden flurry of calls for regulatory intervention, from legislation that would require an emergency “kill switch” for AI systems, to a proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders to halt AI development altogether.
Throughout this period of alarm, how exactly a large language model could literally end humanity has remained vague. Some have speculated that this technology could foster the creation of some sort of novel bioweapon; others worry many thousands of AI agents could somehow hack all vital infrastructure simultaneously. In both those supposed doomsdays, the details are still fuzzy.
It should have come as quite the shock, then, when CNN reported on September 18 of a recent incident in which the use of artificial intelligence could have genuinely led to the extinction of the species.
It was under direct human supervision that a large language model almost misled the U.S. into instigating a war with his country.
This past spring, according to the news outlet, a U.S. Special Operations Command analyst used a large language model to generate an intelligence report that indicated “a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.” The finding prompted the U.S. military to make quick preparations to intercept the vessel by force. But this AI-generated intelligence, according to one source who spoke to CNN, was “entirely false.” Yet, the source said, it “almost started a war.”
A shooting war between the U.S. and China could play out in an incalculably wide variety of ways. But one entirely plausible path would be an exchange between the world’s first and third largest nuclear weapons arsenals — an event that would transcend warfare into global cataclysm.
CNN’s reporting garnered attention, but was not followed by nearly the degree of sustained, grave concern of the AI safety news cycles that preceded it. It didn’t seem to prompt company scientists to question their careers, nor did it spur calls for regulatory intervention or self-imposed limits by the companies who furnish the Pentagon with this technology. After weeks of discussion of how AI could hypothetically kill everyone, the public learned of a concrete way in which AI really could have started a war that might have killed everyone, and the world quickly lost interest.
“This [China] incident and the lack of response is an attention problem that the nuclear field has been grappling with for decades.”
At a summit this week with President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinpeng argued that nations must “ensure that the development of AI is always under human control,” again underscoring fears of AI breaking free of human oversight. But it was under direct human supervision that a large language model almost misled the U.S. into instigating a war with his country.
The discrepancy illustrates a gap in concern by both the general public and policymakers over AI risks: There is great alarm over an AI system “going rogue,” disobeying its commands and the interests of its creators and operators, and pursuing a malign agenda of its own. Much of the AI safety discourse revolves around the hypothetical threat of “superintelligence,” defined broadly as a computer system that can outthink even the smartest humans across domains. There’s also the belief that software systems will both achieve sentience and bear a grudge against their creators and act to undermine them, if not destroy them outright.
Yet there is considerably less public alarm over AI performing exactly the actions that the Pentagon asks of it, whether targeting airstrikes or generating actionable intelligence reports for U.S. Special Operations Command.
Following weeks of intense discussion by the industry’s most visible figures whether American AI labs should self-impose limits on their engineering or have such limits imposed by the state, there has been virtually no suggestion that any limits be placed on these companies’ single most powerful customer: the U.S. military.
This has led to seemingly counterintuitive narratives coming from industry leaders, with figures like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman simultaneously warning that his product is existentially dangerous while selling it to self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Despite incessant warnings from AI companies that AI is harmful, even in hypothetical ways, they are in fact promoting that their unreliable products be instrumented within national and safety-critical infrastructure, such as defense and nuclear,” Heidy Khlaaf, chief scientist at the AI Now Institute and former systems safety engineer at OpenAI, told The Intercept. “Given AI’s lack of reliability and accuracy in such critical context, that is what will ultimately lead to a catastrophic accident. However, if such issues were acknowledged, that wouldn’t be profitable for AI companies and would slow down adoption.”
Popular Silicon Valley ideologies tend to consider a hypothetical “existential” threat from a superintelligence more worthy of attention than near-term violence.
U.S. AI players likely have fresh in their minds the recent experience of Anthropic, which was temporarily blacklisted from governmental work after it said it did not want its software used to conduct unconstitutional mass domestic surveillance or operate fully autonomous weaponry. Similar efforts to place limits on how their products can be used to spy or kill might incur the wrath of the particularly vengeful Trump administration, especially as Hegseth has worked to eradicate civilian harm reduction processes to emphasize greater “lethality” as the military’s guiding principle.
The rapid adoption of their technology also represents a massive long-term financial boon to U.S. AI labs-turned-defense-contractors such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic — all of whom once vowed to not pursue military work because of potential harms. Despite these pledges, these firms now have access to the near-limitless Pentagon appropriations spigot, and the $200 million deals many of these firms signed with the Department last year pale in comparison with what the U.S. military could pay in the decades to come. Altman and his peers might also be less willing to sound the alarm on Pentagon-based AI threats because such a clarion call would be coming from inside the house.
Earlier this month, The Intercept revealed contract documents detailing the intimate collaborative relationships between these companies and the military, in which the Silicon Valley giants would have a say in helping the Pentagon craft its overall military AI strategy. This closeness comes at a time when the Hegseth boasts of drone-striking civilian fishing boats across the Caribbean, and the commander-in-chief speaks casually of “annihilating” entire civilizations.
Lucy Suchman, professor emerita of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University, attributed the difference in public alarm and media focus to the power that tech billionaires command when it comes to shaping narratives. Popular Silicon Valley ideologies, such as the Bay Area’s strain of “Rationalism” and the effective altruism movement, tend to consider a hypothetical “existential” threat from a superintelligence more worthy of attention than near-term violence. This priority, she said, that pervades the AI safety research community, obscures the real and present threat that today’s AI models pose in a world chockablock with nukes.
“The almost targeting of the Chinese ship might further underscore the danger not from rogue AI agents, but a rogue U.S. secretary of war.”
“Given the U.S. Dept. of War’s commitment to maximizing the speed and scale of target generation, AI-enabled targeting is already an existential threat for civilians on the ground, and when the targets are the military assets of nuclear armed states, the threat becomes global,” said Suchman, who has studied artificial intelligence since the 1970s and serves as a member of the nonprofit International Committee for Robot Arms Control. “The almost targeting of the Chinese ship might further underscore the danger not from rogue AI agents, but a rogue U.S. secretary of war.”
Hegseth, who once derided the rules of engagement as “stupid,” extends this approach to artificial intelligence, too. Describing the Pentagon’s new AI strategy in a January memo that includes the word “accelerate” 24 different times, Hegseth’s laid out a plan with an intense focus on speed for speed’s sake. “Speed Wins,” Hegseth wrote. The war secretary explained the military would adopt experimental technologies as quickly as possible by “aggressively identifying and eliminating bureaucratic barriers to deeper Integration” of AI, without mention of ensuring that the technology actually works beforehand.
Heidi Kandiel, a legal adviser on new military technologies at the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Intercept that speed itself carries military risks for any country. “I think one of the central issues that comes up is speed and scale, which are often the touted benefits of AI,” she explained. “If a system is unreliable, is operating on poor quality or outdated data or is used within a flawed decision-making process, AI would allow these errors to be reproduced much faster and across a far greater number of targets or operations.”
Reining in a corporation is a very different prospect than putting fetters on a government. Policymakers who feel comfortable blasting the irresponsibility of Anthropic might lack the political will to levy similar criticisms against the president or the Pentagon. Madeline Berzak, a scholar at the University of Chicago’s Existential Risk Laboratory, told The Intercept that nuclear threats have long been met with paralysis (or a shrug) because people feel helpless in the face of them. You can tweet angrily at Dario Amodei, but it’s less satisfying to yell at U.S. Strategic Command. “This [China] incident and the lack of response is an attention problem that the nuclear field has been grappling with for decades,” Berzak said. “‘Doomsday messaging’ is what I call the nuke field’s default communications strategy, and I have this theory that it never works because the fear it tries to generate has nowhere to go.”
“The threat of thermonuclear war is old news,” Suchman lamented.
Some in the AI safety community acknowledge the long-standing threat of nuclear annihilation. They just consider it a lower priority than the as of yet unrealized rogue superintelligence. Daniel Kokotajlo left his role as an OpenAI researcher in 2024 over the company’s alleged recklessness and indifference toward risk. He is the co-author of AI 2027, a white paper laying out a hypothetical scenario in which superintelligent AI systems exterminate humankind with bioweapons to clear up space to build automated robotics factories. History is the reason Kokotajlo is less preoccupied by the prospect of an AI-triggered nuclear war. “It’s definitely something to be concerned about, and it’s something that ideally we would like to improve and fix. But it’s the sort of thing where, even if we do nothing, probably things will be fine for a decade or two or more.”
To Kokotajlo and like-minded researchers, no matter how dangerous nuclear arsenals make the world, superintelligence is simply more dangerous than a bogus intelligence briefing on China. “It’s been 50 years and these sorts of crises don’t happen that often. So far, cooler heads have managed to prevail and figure out the truth in each case,” he said. “And so the probability that it goes all the way to nuclear war in the next five years is low. High enough to be a bit uncomfortable, but low overall. By contrast, if we do superintelligence in the next five years, I think the probability that it goes horribly wrong for us is high, not low.”
Berzak, who leads her lab’s nuclear risk program, says this is the wrong calculation. She pointed to differing approaches to staving off the apocalypse embraced by the novel field of AI safety and nuclear caution that has existed since the dawn of the Cold War. “Attention often goes to what is new and interesting and not what is the most pressing risk,” she said.
Cooler heads have indeed avoided nuclear disaster in the past, but human fallibility and the growing temptation to outsource our judgment to machines perceived as superhumanly brilliant carries an inherent danger, Berzak warned: “Just because there’s this new more pressing risk that has consequences that are rather underexplored compared to nuclear war, doesn’t mean that nuclear war is not a risk because we’ve so far avoided it basically with just luck.”
PARIS, Sept. 28, 2026 — Pasqal is announcing an evolution of the areas of its collaboration with the French public authorities to now focus on commercial applications, in line with the company’s growth strategy and innovation priorities.
This evolution includes the termination of Pasqal’s participation in the defense program LSQUARE (otherwise known as PROQCIMA), to which Pasqal participated in its first phase and successfully completed all the technological objectives. Pasqal thanks the French Direction générale de l’armement (DGA) of the Ministry of the Armed Forces for having supported it during the first phase of the defense program LSQUARE.
Pasqal is now invited to participate in the civil public support programs currently being defined. As a first step in this civil collaboration, the company has been requested by the French Secrétariat général pour l’investissement (SGPI) and the French Direction générale des entreprises (DGE) to submit a specific research and development program for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) based on neutral atoms, and consistent with Pasqal’s advanced technology level and commercial maturity.
This focus on commercial-led development will provide further support to Pasqal to accelerate the implementation of its FTQC roadmap beyond the scope of the PROQCIMA program.
In just seven years, Pasqal has established itself as one of the global leaders in quantum computing, thus demonstrating the ability of French deeptech, with the support of public authorities, to bring forth world-class industrial champions. Pasqal operates the second largest fleet of complex quantum computers in the world, with world-leading companies among its customers.
Dr. Wasiq Bokhari, Chief Executive Officer of Pasqal, said: “We are excited about the evolution of our collaboration with the French public authorities. The visit by Nicolas Dufourcq, Chief Executive Officer of the French Public Investment Bank (Bpifrance), to Pasqal’s headquarters today is a testimony to our close relationship and Pasqal’s strategic importance to France as a sovereign technology asset.”
About Pasqal
Pasqal (Nasdaq: PSQL) helps organizations tackle problems that are difficult or impossible to solve with conventional computing methods alone. Founded in 2019 on Nobel Prize–winning research, Pasqal builds and operates neutral-atom quantum computers, delivered with a full software stack, for industry, science, and governments. Pasqal’s production-ready systems are available both on-premises and through the cloud, enabling organizations to harness quantum computing without requiring in-house quantum expertise. A single hardware platform supports analog workloads today and is designed to evolve toward fault-tolerant quantum computing in the future.
Headquartered in France with operations globally, Pasqal’s quantum computing systems are used by customers across energy, financial services and advanced materials to address complex challenges. Pasqal’s customers include Saudi Aramco, Crédit Agricole CIB, LG Electronics and supported by partnerships with NVIDIA and IBM (Pasqal is part of the IBM Quantum Network).
Sending migrants to countries they do not come from can have deadly consequences and must be halted, says report
The deportation of thousands of migrants from the US to third countries has set off a “cascade of human rights violations” that could have “deadly” consequences, two dozen UN human rights experts have warned.
Since Donald Trump returned to power in 2025, the US government has been offering millions of dollars to foreign governments to take in migrants, including refugees and asylum seekers, with no ties to their countries. Deals have been struck with 35 nations, nearly a third of them in Africa.
Prosecutors in New York said on Monday that they have reopened an investigation into the alleged gang-rape of a student at Cornell University after an outcry over “leniency” shown to seven fraternity members named as the perpetrators.
According to lawyers for the student, who filed a civil lawsuit against the university and her alleged attackers earlier in September, only two members of the Chi Phi fraternity were expelled after the October 2024 incident, in which she said she was drugged and repeatedly raped over the course of seven hours.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
Blacktip sharks provided researchers with a rare opportunity to observe free-swimming sharks in clear, shallow water off Southeast Florida. (Stephen Kajiura / Florida Atlantic University via SWNS)
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to revive for now a policy cutting off medical interventions and social accommodations for transgender inmates.
Bo French, who is running to lead a state agency, has in the past posted controversial and racist statements online
Bo French, a Texas Republican running to lead a powerful state agency, has a history of making controversial social media posts, including calling for the public execution of Democratic leaders, according to a recent investigation from CNN’s KFile team.
French, who is running to lead Texas’s railroad commission, has recently faced criticism from members of his own party after making a racist post on social media. Powerful Republicans, including the Texas senator John Cornyn, said they would not support French in the upcoming election.
An ad accuses Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, of opposing the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender at the center of multiple midterm attacks.
In the Sept. 24 ad, a woman identified only as “Debbie” says, “As a retired junior high teacher, I’m horrified. Susan Collins voted to cover up the Epstein files. She knew 14-year-old girls were raped.” The ad then shows a photo of Collins next to a photo of President Donald Trump and Epstein.
The ad continues: “Turns out that Jeffrey Epstein’s business partner funneled $3 million” to Collins’ super PAC.
The ad is from WinSenate, a super political action committee linked to Democrat-affiliated Senate Majority PAC. A super PAC is a political action committee that can spend unlimited amounts of money to campaign for federal candidates. On Nov. 3, Collins will face Democratic candidate Troy Jackson, a former Maine state senator.
The ad misleads about both Collins’ position on releasing the Epstein files and the PAC donor.
Ad cherry-picks Collins’ voting record
The ad cites a Sept. 10, 2025, vote on an amendment to a defense authorization bill, directing the attorney general to release Epstein investigative files. Collins joined most of her Republican colleagues voting in favor of a motion to table the amendment, essentially blocking it, which passed 51-49.
The amendment “does not belong on the Department of Defense policy bill,” Collins said at the time.
However, she said she previously supported a similar provision in a funding bill.
A few months earlier, during a July 10, 2025, Senate Appropriations Committee hearing that Collins chaired, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., proposed an amendment to a funding bill, directing the attorney general to “retain, preserve and compile” all Epstein files and report the findings to lawmakers within 60 days. The committee unanimously voted in favor.
But pressure on Congress and Trump to release the files grew. After undermining efforts to release them, Trump that fall directed lawmakers to pass such a measure.
On Nov. 18, 2025, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House 427-1 and then passed the Senate via unanimous consent.
“This is an important step for the survivors of these heinous crimes,” Collins said after the vote.
Super PAC donor was a member of same club as Epstein
The ad doesn’t name the PAC donor, but the donation dates cited in the ad match donations by Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. He donated a combined $3 million to Pine Tree Results PAC, a pro-Collins group, in 2025 and 2026.
Schwarzman’s tie to Epstein is weak; we found no evidence they were business partners. Both men were early members of the Core Club in New York City. A club spokesperson told The Real Deal that Epstein paid $100,000 as a founding member alongside 150 other investors.
We asked Lauren French, a spokesperson for WinSenate, for information showing that Schwarzman and Epstein were business partners.
“Being founders of the same exclusive club inherently makes individuals partners in business,” French said.
When the club launched in 2005, The New York Times described it as a “place for a geographically and socially diverse set of wealthy people to gather and meet others of the same disparate tribe.” Its membership list included high-profile people in politics, real estate, the arts and sports.
Blackstone spokesperson Thomas Clements told PolitiFact in an email, “It would be categorically false and reckless to claim or imply that Steve had any relationship with this despicable individual.”
Schwarzman’s name appears in the Epstein files, but we found no evidence there or elsewhere that they were business partners. For example, the file showed an invitation to Epstein to a 2015 cocktail party at Schwarzman’s home to celebrate the release of a movie, “The Imitation Game,” which Schwarzman’s son produced. Clements said a public relations firm working with the film distributors invited Epstein, and he did not attend.
A WinSenate ad said, “Susan Collins voted to cover up the Epstein files” and Epstein’s “business partner funneled $3 million” to a Collins super PAC.
Collins voted against a September 2025 amendment to release the Epstein files, saying it didn’t belong in the defense spending bill to which it was attached. A few months earlier, the Senate appropriations committee which she chairs unanimously voted to direct the Justice Department to preserve Epstein files and provide a report to lawmakers.
In November 2025, the Senate unanimously passed a bill to release the Epstein files and Collins praised that action.
Schwarzman, who donated to a pro-Collins PAC in 2025 and 2026, was one of the early members of an exclusive New York City club along with Epstein. But we found no evidence the two were business partners.
New York, NY — Questions over police access to privately operated surveillance networks are growing after records showed the New York Police Department searched Flock Safety’s license-plate database 1,710 times between March 2023 and December 2025, despite saying it has no contract with the company.
The records, obtained and analyzed by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and LatinoJustice PRLDEF, came from Have I Been Flocked, which compiles audit logs released through public-records requests. Nearly 1,000 NYPD searches reportedly included no meaningful explanation or only vague entries such as “investigation,” “wanted person,” or “inquiry.” At least 131 searches listed the Queens district attorney’s office as the requesting agency.
The NYPD has previously acknowledged that a limited number of authorized personnel can access a national commercial license-plate-reader repository. The newly disclosed logs, however, prompted the two advocacy groups to seek records showing whether officers used Flock through another agency’s contract, along with training materials, policies, audit logs and any payments to the company.
Flock says participating agencies control whether their camera data is shared and that every law-enforcement search is logged for review. The company says it does not sell customer data and has begun adding tighter documentation requirements, including standardized offense categories and planned case-number requirements for searches.
Ithaca, NY — A criminal investigation into an alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University has been reopened after a former student filed a civil lawsuit accusing seven Chi Phi fraternity members of sexually assaulting her over several hours. Prosecutors say the new allegations differ substantially from what was initially reported to police.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said his office intends to present the case to a grand jury with the cooperation of the woman, identified in court filings as Jane Doe. He said investigators will examine whether new evidence exists that could change the earlier decision not to pursue criminal charges.
The lawsuit alleges the woman was drugged and repeatedly assaulted at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. It also claims two fraternity members were expelled while others received lesser university sanctions. No one was arrested or criminally charged following the original investigation.
Van Houten said the woman’s 2024 statement to police described circumstances differently, including her use of alcohol and drugs and the nature of the sexual activity. Her attorney has argued that authorities failed to properly follow up with a traumatized sexual-assault survivor.
Cornell has said the allegations are deeply disturbing and that its Title IX process resulted in sanctions including expulsions and suspensions. The university also said the Chi Phi chapter remains barred from campus.
Bill Gates said an AI "kill switch" alone would be insufficient to address the technology's risks. "The kill switch is, that's kind of a weird thing. It's not enough to have a kill switch," the Microsoft co-founder said in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." He said the more immediate concern is people using AI for cyberattacks or bioterrorism rather than systems acting autonomously. "We're not yet at the point where they autonomously grab computers and, you know, can't be shut down," he said, adding that the public discussion "just sort of shows how nontechnical various people are." Politico reports: Gates said he was not opposed to a kill switch but argued that companies should monitor sophisticated AI models and keep records of "exactly what's being done" to help guard against people using the systems for cyberattacks or bioterrorism. "The United States ought to make sure this is done. China will want to do this," he continued.
[...] Gates also called for legislation requiring safeguards and monitoring, saying voluntary measures by AI companies were insufficient. "No one thinks self-regulation is enough," he said. He argued that the more immediate danger was people using AI to cause harm rather than AI systems acting on their own. "The thing that's urgent has to do with bad people using AI, not the AI going off on its own," he added.
Marie-Celestin Karondwa was attacked on Sunday after promoting measures to prevent spread of disease, his party says
A senior member of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s ruling party was beaten to death on Sunday after appearing on a radio programme to raise awareness about the Ebola outbreak, a party representative has said.
Marie-Celestin Karondwa, the acting president of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) party’s federal executive committee in Butembo, a new hotspot for the outbreak, was attacked after taking part in a radio show during which he promoted prevention measures for the disease, the UDPS federation in the city said in a statement, Reuters reported.
Charles Spencer, the brother of the late Princess Diana, spoke to "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King about writing his new book, "Swan Song: Diana, My Sister."
Lisa O’Carroll is a senior Guardian correspondent.
The head of the SDLP, Claire Hanna, has called for an international mediator to resolve the continuing crisis over a unionist parade in a nationalist area close to Drumcree, the site of some of the worst violence of the troubles almost 30 years ago.
The truth is everybody has got to want to seek mediation and seek compromise and that’s what I’m trying to find, whether there’s that little chink on both sides that we can use to get to a decent compromise that means everybody can walk away with their head held high and their sense of honour.
Shabana Mahmood has signalled she is considering watering down her plans to make it harder for foreign workers to claim permanent residence in the UK amid growing demands for a U-turn from cabinet colleagues and unions.
In a speech to Labour conference, the home secretary said the government would “come to a position that balances fairness for those who came here legally” after acknowledging that “some have said elements of these reforms are not fair”.
A poster showing a sample mail-in ballot is displayed as U.S. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter speaks during a press conference at the Department of Justice on Sept. 22 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned.
According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute.
Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.
Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service.
Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure.
“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said.
ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.
The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives, including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.
“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.
In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.”
Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”
A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.
He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”
In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless.
“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting.
Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed.
Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.
When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.
Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery.
“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.
The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.
The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.
They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list.
“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”
Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”
Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)
Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order.
As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.
For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.
The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.
As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone.
The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.
It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks?
“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.
The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”
Speaking at the Labour party conference in Liverpool, the defence secretary, Wes Streeting, said he could not give further details about the RAF Fairford incident because there is a live police investigation.
However, he used his speech to stress that the UK-US relationship is “the closest alliance” of any two countries in the world, adding the two nations will always “stand together” against those who wish to cause harm.
SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time, successfully deploying 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites after overcoming an early Raptor 3 engine shutdown during ascent. "SpaceX plans to eventually deploy 100,000 upgraded Starlink V3s to expand the company's wireless satellite internet services," notes Space.com. Here's the latest update from the report:
SpaceX has decided to return Starship from orbit earlier than expected. After valuating the upper stage Ship's status during its first orbital checkpoint, SpaceX technicians have decided to return the spacecraft to Earth earlier than expected. Rather than spending another 7.5 hours on orbit, Ship 41 will perform its deorbit burn at approximately 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), with splashdown in the Northern Pacific. You can watch a recorded livestream of the launch on X.
Developing...
A powerful storm known as a nor'easter battered the US east coast, causing power outages, flooding, high winds and hazardous ocean conditions. At least one person was killed in New York City, and hundreds of thousands were left without electricity across the region. The storm struck the mid-Atlantic and New England over the weekend, and was forecast to continue into the early part of the week, while local officials in New Jersey and New York told residents that high tides in the week could potentially bring more flooding. Eight counties in New Jersey remain under a state of emergency.
A Russian drone hit the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv on Monday, killing at least one person, in the latest daytime attack on Ukraine’s capital.
Flames tore through the historic building as people clambered out of first- and second-floor windows to escape, in dramatic scenes increasingly familiar in the heavily bombarded city.
Environmentalists decry move that relaxes requirements on automakers to control pollution from gas-powered cars
The Trump administration on Monday announced it was slashing clean car rules that had been aimed at reducing planet-heating emissions and boosting electric vehicles.
The move, which was criticized by environmentalists, relaxes requirements on automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and light trucks for model years 2022 through 2031.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Pollster Frank Luntz warned Monday that President Donald Trump is pursuing a “very dangerous strategy” by making himself a central figure in the 2026 midterms as Republicans try to motivate voters who backed him in presidential elections.
Luntz told CNN that Trump’s challenge is recreating his presidential-year turnout coalition without simultaneously energizing voters who strongly oppose him. “There are more people who oppose Donald Trump who are planning to vote than those who support him,” he said.
That concern is reflected in CNN’s latest national polling. Trump’s approval rating stands at 33%, his lowest level in CNN polling across either term. Forty-four percent of voters said their midterm vote would be intended to oppose Trump, compared with 19% who said it would express support for him. Democrats led Republicans 49% to 41% on the generic congressional ballot.
Luntz emphasized that the political environment differs from 2024, citing voter frustration with affordability, the Iran war and Trump’s confrontational style. He described Hispanic voters, younger voters and male union members as particularly important parts of the Republican coalition.
Still, Luntz said stronger turnout among Trump supporters could improve Republican prospects, underscoring that midterm participation—not presidential-election history—will ultimately determine results.
Police say attack on two Jewish men in north London in April now being treated as alleged hate crime
The stabbings of two Jewish men in Golders Green, north London, in April are being treated as an alleged hate crime and not as a terrorist attack, police have said.
Essa Suleiman, 45, was arrested by the Metropolitan police on suspicion of attempted murder shortly after the stabbings on 29 April.
Bread experts weigh in on whether the rye sourdough that bakers ‘feed every day’ is worth that much
A loaf of bread has become New York City’s latest viral hit and, somehow, status symbol.
At Rye, the first US outpost of Austrian bakery Martin Auer, a 3.3lb loaf of 100% rye sourdough sells for $60 in SoHo. Made with just water, flour, salt and time, the bread has attracted the kind of attention once reserved for rainbow bagels, cronuts and skyscraper milkshakes. Which raises the inevitable question – is it actually worth that much?
OpenAI chief scientist also among authors of report on prospect of ‘most consequential technological development in history’
Two of the “godfathers” of modern AI and senior executives at OpenAI and Anthropic have warned governments to prepare for an AI “intelligence explosion”, which they say could be the most consequential technological development in history.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Walmart is aiming to assuage customers' fears about its new pricing technology as it rolls out digital price labels at its stores. In a statement posted on the company's website, Walmart's CEO John Furner vowed that the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer isn't using personal information like income, shopping history or a customer's willingness to pay to set prices, and it won't be doing so in the future either. "We don't set different prices based on who you are or the time of day, and we won't," Furner wrote Friday. "Whether you're buying groceries or electronics on a hot afternoon or in a sudden rush for an item, it's never a reason to charge you more."
The pledge from Walmart comes as concerns are mounting from some shoppers, consumer advocates and lawmakers skeptical about the rollout of digital price labels by the discounter and other stores. Digital price labels are rapidly replacing paper shelf tags at U.S. supermarkets and let stores change prices instantly from a central computer instead of having workers swap out paper labels by hand. [...] Walmart said in March that 2,300 Walmart U.S. locations already use digital shelves, and it expects this technology to be chain-wide within the next year.
Mission goes ahead despite some fears an initial engine failure after the Texas launch would scupper the attempt
SpaceX has sent its enormous Starship rocket into Earth’s orbit for the first time on a milestone flight intended to pave the way for future missions to the moon and Mars.
The rocket, the largest and most powerful ever built, blasted off from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in Texas at 7.48am local time (1.48pm BST), marking its 14th test flight and first attempt to circle the planet before falling back to Earth.
RAHWAY, New Jersey — Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. used his only televised debate against Democrat Rebecca Bennett to distance himself from President Donald Trump on several issues important to New Jersey voters, including immigration enforcement and the Gateway rail tunnel.
Kean said he opposes a proposed ICE detention facility in Roxbury Township, declaring, “My focus is to make sure we don’t have an ICE facility in Roxbury.” The position puts him at odds with the Trump administration, which revived plans for the facility after previously abandoning them. Bennett said she had opposed the project earlier, while noting that Kean had not previously taken a public position.
Kean also defended the $16 billion Gateway Tunnel project connecting New Jersey and New York, which Trump has criticized and tried to block from receiving federal funding. “I will challenge anybody who gets in my way, including this president,” Kean said.
The debate also covered Iran, taxes, Israel and artificial intelligence. Kean defended U.S. military operations against Iran, while Bennett argued the conflict has increased costs and made the country less secure.
The 7th District is among New Jersey’s most competitive House races. Trump carried it by about one point in 2024, while Democrat Mikie Sherrill carried it in the 2025 gubernatorial election.
World’s biggest economies release lists of products in latest move away from trade war – but no strategic goods are included
The US and China have released reciprocal lists of goods worth about $30bn each on which they plan to cut tariffs, ranging from consumer electronics and agricultural products to artificial flowers and live dolphins.
The announcements are the latest tack away from the intense trade war between the world’s two largest economies that dominated much of last year, though major strategic products are not included and no timeline has yet been given for the reductions.
The Israeli prime minister’s remarks at the UN weren’t just motivated by personal animosity
In a boastful and defiant speech to the United Nations on Thursday, Benjamin Netanyahu called out a list of villains he insisted are intent on destroying Israel and promoting an anti-Jewish conspiracy by accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza. He singled out the leaders of Hamas, Iran, Qatar and Turkey, among others. But Netanyahu spent considerable time on the global stage attacking an unusual target: Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City.
Netanyahu accused Mamdani of promoting antisemitism, falsely claimed that he supports Hamas, and argued that since the mayor took office in January, “many Jews no longer feel safe in New York.” The Israeli leader also criticized Mamdani’s wife for liking social media posts that supported the Palestinian cause soon after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. Overall, Netanyahu seems to have devoted more time in his nearly 40-minute speech to singling out Mamdani than any other political leader, including Israel’s traditional enemies.
Sales of residential heat pumps increased 11% across Europe in the first six months of the year as the Iran war sent oil and gas prices rocketing and some countries lowered electricity taxes.
Homeowners bought 1.16m heat pumps across 12 European countries, up from 1.05m in the first half of 2025, according to the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA).
Delegation secures strategic ties with D-Wave, Microsoft, and AIST while paving the way for U.S. market entry and regional operations.
SEOUL, South Korea and COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 28, 2026 — The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has successfully led a delegation of South Korean quantum deep-tech startups at Quantum World Congress (QWC) 2026, establishing key international partnerships and expanding their footprint into the U.S. market.
Korean Quantum Delegation (KIST with Startups – OptiQ-Labs, Bright Quantum, xDots)
Serving as the lead organization for the quantum technology sector under South Korea’s Deeptech Incubator Project for Startups—overseen by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and administered by the Korea Institute of Startup & Entrepreneurship Development—KIST spearheaded the initiative through its Global Bridge Program. The program connects Korean startups with overseas research institutions, enterprise partners, and investors to drive global commercialization beyond initial technology development.
For this U.S. program, KIST jointly planned and implemented the Global Bridge Program with the U.S. Embassy in Korea, supporting Korean quantum technology startups in connecting with overseas research institutions, enterprise partners, and investors.
During the event, KIST and participating startups initiated strategic discussions to utilize D-Wave’s quantum computing systems, providing Korean startups direct access to advanced quantum infrastructure for technology development and practical application testing. KIST also met with Japan’s Q-STAR and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to explore opportunities that strengthen bilateral connections between the Korean and Japanese quantum technology ecosystems.
To further expand international corporate connections, KIST facilitated exchanges between Microsoft and startups in the Deeptech Incubator Project to build long-term enterprise collaboration opportunities. These efforts delivered immediate market access outcomes, with participating startup OptiQ-Labs finalizing plans to establish a U.S. East Coast office in November. OptiQ-Labs becomes the first quantum startup supported through the Deeptech Incubator Project to establish a physical regional presence in the eastern United States.
Dr. Kang Sunjoon, Director of KIST’s Technology Commercialization Office and head of the Deeptech Incubator Project, emphasized the importance of turning international connections into sustained partnerships and commercialization opportunities for Korean quantum startups.
“International engagement needs to go beyond individual events and lead to continued collaboration with overseas research institutions, companies and investors,” Kang said. “Building on the connections established through QWC 2026, KIST will continue to support Korean quantum startups in developing technology partnerships, expanding into global markets and creating concrete commercialization opportunities.”
KIST will continue to build on the follow-up partnerships established at QWC 2026, systematically integrating Korean quantum technologies into global research, industrial, and investment networks.
Participating startups at QWC 2026
OptiQ-Labs: Develops optical hardware for quantum technologies, drawing on over a decade of research in isotope-selective laser spectroscopy, resonance ionization, laser cooling and trapped-ion spectroscopy. Its technologies include ultra-narrow-linewidth laser systems, laser stabilization and ion-trap systems, with the goal of delivering complete ion-trap quantum computer hardware.
xDots: Develops diamond quantum sensing solutions for industrial energy efficiency. Its xEnergy platform combines room-temperature diamond NV-center sensors with AI and IoT to optimize equipment operation in real time.
Bright Quantum: Develops on-demand single-photon sources for photonic quantum computing and communication, including commercially available high-end quantum-dot sources and ultra-compact room-temperature systems operating without cryogenics.
SQK: Develops QMEDIC, a medical imaging platform combining quantum technologies and physics-guided AI to improve low-dose CT image quality while preserving critical anatomical structures.
About KIST
KIST was established in 1966 as the first government-funded research institute in South Korea. KIST now strives to solve national and social challenges and secure growth engines through leading and innovative research.
Identity of man, 27, being withheld pending family notification after 700ft plunge
A Base jumper died on Sunday in Utah after his wingsuit failed while he plunged from a 700ft height, according to authorities.
Local news reports cited the Cache county sheriff’s office, which said that the man fell to his death at age 27 in a mountainous region of Hyrum, which is east from the city of Millville.
Israel’s election: What will it mean for neighbours and allies?
8
October 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:15 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Hear from experts on the foreign policy choices facing Israel’s next government.
Hear from experts on the foreign policy choices facing Israel’s next government.
Israel’s upcoming election follows three years of war and a marked decline in international support. Leading candidates to be prime minister offer little in terms of rethinking Israeli foreign policy and all reject Palestinian statehood. The election outcome could have profound consequences for the Palestinians and Israel’s relations with neighbouring states and international partners.
This event discusses:
What is at stake for Palestinians and regional states in Israel’s election?
Would a change of government alter relations with the UK, US and Europe?
How do leading candidates view relations with Lebanon, Syria and Turkey?
How might Israel’s next government approach Iran?
Could a new government change Israel’s approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict?
Can Israel’s next government rebuild international public support?
CARSON CITY, Nevada — Republican Jim Marchant, one of the country’s most prominent election deniers, is again running to become Nevada’s secretary of state, four years after narrowly losing the same office to Democrat Cisco Aguilar.
Marchant has repeatedly promoted unsupported claims of widespread election fraud and has said being labeled an “election denier” is a “badge of honor.” He continues to argue that Nevada elections have been fraudulent since 2008 despite Republican and Democratic candidates winning statewide contests during that period. WIRED identifies Marchant among 197 election-denying candidates seeking congressional or statewide offices nationwide this November.
If elected, Marchant has proposed sweeping changes, including canceling existing voter registrations and requiring residents to re-register, eliminating universal mail voting, moving toward paper ballots and expanding hand counting. He also supported efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election and stood alongside Nevada Republicans as they signed false electoral certificates claiming Donald Trump won the state.
Aguilar, who defeated Marchant by about two percentage points in 2022, has made election security and protection of election workers central to his tenure.
The financial gap between the candidates is substantial. Aguilar reported more than $1 million cash on hand this summer, while Marchant reported just $13.86 after raising $1,000 during the second quarter.
Marchant won the Republican primary in June and will again face Aguilar in November.
Content note: This essay discusses sexual assault, gender-based violence, suicide, and trauma. Please read with care.
Every time news of a sexual assault hits the internet, like it did this week with the news of a civil lawsuit launched against seven Cornell students accused of the drugging and rape of a female student, it sends a wave through those of us who are survivors of all kinds of trauma. Suddenly life isn’t so easy to walk through. Our stomachs turn and our brains slow, words in the news reports echoing deeply. For everyone, there is a different level of devastation and flashing back. Words don’t do this “slow-motion change to life” justice. And our thoughts for and about the victim, for victims everywhere, become too much to bear.
The pain is only exacerbated by the fact that the president of the United States, the leader of the most powerful country in the free world, is someone who has disrespected humanity in his own treatment of women, sending the message that actions that harm women have no consequences in our world.
We can sashay up to the buffet of news of the week and sample five or six more examples where gender-based violence is front and centre.
As I write this, a woman is being assaulted. Many women are.
Photo by Matthew Moloney
I have spent most of my life in knots over the imbalances we face in this universe, whether it’s as a woman, a minority, or anyone who is marginalized. In my song “The Wild Weight of Earth,” I write about Rehtaeh Parsons, who died by suicide after being the victim of a sexual assault that was documented in photos circulated online. One of the lines in the song is, “If the law won’t take ’em down, life will.”
I realized in a sobering moment that so often, life does not take down perpetrators. They are allowed to walk free, experiencing life as anyone else.
These past few days, I’ve tried to anchor into music and voice as a healing tool, but it’s not working.
The anger and frustration with individuals on our planet, the ideology that is carrying people through life which flies against values of kindness, honesty, freedom and equality, is mounting and too much to bear.
The other day I thought about how women have turned to OnlyFans to feed their children. On this site, it’s safe to say you can make a shit-ton more money than some of us can in our jobs. And although I don’t believe we should centre our worth around what that site upholds, I get it. When you’re a mother, nobility doesn’t matter when there are mouths to feed. At the same time, every one of us who resists being seen primarily for our appearance and sexuality and anchors into what we actually do, feel and experience as humans on this planet, every day that we wake up not signing up for OnlyFans, is a fucking rebellion.
Turning to the internet, the very place where horrors are distributed, I found Toby Morton on Instagram, who goes under the handle @wordclown. He publishes websites exposing fascist actions and behaviours and is currently creating a very detailed website to hold the Cornell 7, and their enablers, accountable. Morton is a former writer for South Park. He jokes that he is “just a satirist,” something he was probably called at some point along the way when people underestimated his influence, power and website-building ability.
In my rage yesterday, I did a few things. I’m sharing what I did because I’m at my wits end. I’m not sharing to make myself feel better or to say, hey instead of watching golf for four hours you should DO SOMETHING, assholes. Learning from astronauts and healers and wise women and Mark Frickin’ Carney, I’ve learned we can only control what we do. We can only act in our own integrity, stay positive and remember our vision. So:
I applied to volunteer at Anova, an organization in London, Ontario that provides resources, workshops, and research to help communities understand, prevent, and respond to gender-based violence before it happens.
I began to plant the seed for starting a foundation I have wanted to begin for a long time, to give women the tools they need to write music, to record it, and to hopefully find safety and solace in the same creative process that helps me through periods of volatility and despair in my own life.
Do I feel better having done any of these things? Sadly, no. But we have to move through the dark with faith and dedication.
…
There’s very rarely a woman I work with who hasn’t been through a devastating experience that has threatened her life, well-being and worth. It just makes me go, “what the actual fuck?”
Let’s not stop helping women who need it.
We are also seeing more allies in men across this planet. I used to believe all men were painted with the same inescapable biological brush, the same secret, deep desire to exploit and subjugate women, but it’s not true. Together, we have to fight to create safety, healing and support for those of us who need it, even if it’s funding a South Park writer, if he’s our new freedom fighter, or to teach our sons not to stand by in silence while another human being is being harmed.
And of course, there’s the topic of: you. What the news cycle does to you. And to me. In the quiet moments when the headlines echo and our hearts feel a thousand, million pounds. When the nausea swirls and the hope dissipates. Sigh.
We have to put distance between us and that news cycle at times. We have to step away. Because behind it are more people pulling the strings, preying on human insecurity and thriving in a “get what you want” world.
We need to create our own worlds, our own ecosystems, see ourselves as leaders of new universes.
One thing that does give me hope is observing where I’ve seen evidence of this “creation of a new world”: Coralus, an alternative ecosystem where women-led and non-binary-led ventures anchored into the UN Global Goals are funded and nurtured. Where communities thrive and unSummits take place and women are helping other women, daily.
Calling All Crows, who mobilize fans to fuel feminist movements. Who work to make concerts safe spaces for girls and women.
Things like Lilith Fair and Daisy Chain Fields and Women Who Rock and all the things I would have turned my nose up at when I was a teenager, reeling from my mother pooh-poohing the “women’s libbers”. Because I so desperately wanted to be a musician first, and a woman second.
But one day you wake up and you see that fear and ignorance doesn’t replace reality. Imagining a beautiful, utopian Barbie-esque universe doesn’t help the woman who is clawing back for her sanity.
Music has often been a place where new hopeful universes can be forged. But if the melodies have left you, if the breath underneath the singing has dried and deadened, know that somewhere there is, there has to be love.
And in order to meet another day, I have to believe that love is stronger than the terror of this world.
Today’s students and young adults are true digital natives, having grown up online, learning to navigate digital spaces as a normal part of daily life. As they transition to college, they turn to digital platforms and social media for everything from apartment hunting and job searches to shopping, banking and talking with friends.
That familiarity, however, can create a false sense of security, making younger adults just as much of a target for fraud and scams as older individuals. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report, Americans ages 20–29 reported more than $500 million to internet-crime losses in 2025.
As scammers become more sophisticated, including using AI, students need to be more vigilant than ever about fraud and scams. Understanding the most common ones can help you and your children avoid becoming victims.
Common scams targeting students (and the families supporting them)
Online shopping and marketplace scams
Whether your student is furnishing a dorm, moving into an apartment or buying textbooks–or you’re helping them pay for essentials—online deals and secondhand marketplaces can help you save money while also creating more opportunities for scammers.
Buy from official and trusted retailers whenever possible, double check website URLs for misspellings or other red flags, and make sure the site uses https://. Be wary of deals that seem too good to be true as well. Avoid clicking links in unsolicited emails or text messages, including fake “missed delivery” notifications that often lead to fraudulent websites or malware.
Before making a purchase, read seller reviews and ratings. If you’re buying locally, meet in a safe public place and inspect the item before paying.
Job scams
As students return to school this fall, some may be looking for part-time jobs or internships. Scammers target students with fake jobs offering high salaries, flexible schedules or jobs you can do from a residence hall, apartment or home.
If your child receives a job offer by text, email, or direct message – be cautious, especially if they never applied to work at that company. Encourage them to use well-known job boards and then apply directly through the company’s official website.
Also, if an employer asks them to pay upfront for training, equipment, background checks or application fees, it may be a sign of a scam. Legitimate companies will never charge you to get a job. They also won’t send you money and then ask you to return a portion of it.
Rental and housing scams
Scammers know student housing is in high demand. They’ll often post fake apartment listings or copy legitimate ones to trick potential renters (or their families) into sending money for a deposit.
Rental prices that seem unusually low should raise a red flag. Use a reverse image search to see if photos of the property appear on a different website or in a different location. Research unfamiliar property managers or housing websites before sending money, and avoid paying deposits through wire transfers, gift cards or peer-to-peer payment apps.
Double check the address, read online reviews of the property management company and schedule a tour of the house or apartment before signing a lease or sending a deposit. That way, you’ll know the listing and location is real.
The influence of AI
Thanks to artificial intelligence, scammers can now create cloned voices and deepfake videos, along with fraudulent emails, text messages and even websites and apps that look real. These AI tools let scammers impersonate family members, employers, banks, law enforcement, delivery companies and trusted brands to get you to send money or share personal information. They may even target parents directly—claiming your child is in trouble and needs money immediately.
How to protect yourself (and your children)
No matter what type of scam you encounter, a few simple habits can go a long way toward reducing your risk:
Limit the personal information you and your children share online and make social media profiles private whenever possible. This can help reduce the information scammers can use to target you, guess your security questions or attempt to access your financial accounts.
When you’re making a payment, use more protected methods, such as credit and debit cards, which generally offer stronger consumer protections than wire transfers, gift cards or peer-to-peer payment apps. Treat peer-to-peer payments, such as Zelle, like cash — once the money is sent, it’s often difficult to recover.
Scammers can spoof phone numbers to make calls look like they’re coming from your bank, law enforcement or another trusted organization. Don’t automatically trust your caller ID – if you get a call demanding immediate action or claiming there’s a problem with your account, hang up and call back directly using a verified phone number. Banks will never call and ask you for account information, tell you to transfer money to ‘protect’ it or pressure you to act immediately.
Don’t click links or download attachments from unexpected emails or text messages and avoid accessing your financial accounts or making online purchases on public Wi-Fi, where savvy cybercriminals can gain access to your login credentials.
Perhaps most importantly, slow down. Back-to-school season brings a flurry of financial decisions and scammers know students and families are looking for deals. They often create a false sense of urgency to try to pressure people into making quick decisions. Taking a few extra minutes to verify information can make the difference.
The bottom line
Whether your student is shopping for school supplies, searching for a job or signing a first lease, their status as a student can make them a prime target for scammers—and families can be targeted too.
Stay skeptical of unsolicited offers, verify before you pay or share personal information, and slow down when something feels rushed. Those simple habits can help protect your money, your identity and your family’s peace of mind throughout the school year from scams and fraud.
To help consumers stay ahead of common and emerging threats, Chase hosts more than 1,000 free fraud and scam prevention workshops each year in communities across the country.
For informational/educational purposes only: Views and strategies described in this article or provided via links may not be appropriate for everyone and are not intended as specific advice/recommendation for any business. Information has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but JPMorgan Chase & Co. or its affiliates and/or subsidiaries do not warrant its completeness or accuracy. The material is not intended to provide legal, tax, or financial advice or to indicate the availability or suitability of any JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. product or service. You should carefully consider your needs and objectives before making any decisions and consult the appropriate professional(s). Outlooks and past performance are not guarantees of future results. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates are not responsible for, and do not provide or endorse third party products, services, or other content.
Deposit products provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Equal Opportunity Lender.
Why Should Delaware Care? Wilmington has made adding more housing a priority, but the fight over Bancroft Parkway shows the challenges that can come with bringing larger developments into established neighborhoods. The months-long dispute has raised questions about how the city balances its need for housing with residents’ concerns about the size and impact of new development.
Earlier this month, Wilmington City Councilman Chris Johnson tabled a measure that would have rezoned land along Bancroft Parkway, allowing developers to move forward with plans for a high-rise apartment complex.
If the high-rise were built, it would be the tallest development along the Bancroft Parkway, a century-old greenspace that runs through northwest Wilmington.
The decision came amid months of opposition from nearby residents, who have raised concerns about the size and scale of the proposed development and argued that it would change the character of the surrounding northwest city neighborhood.
For now, those concerns have put the rezoning and the project on hold. But residents and the Wilmington and Newark-based developer, Tsionas, have remained in discussions over whether they can reach a compromise on what could ultimately be built at the site.
In a press release last week, the resident group, Protect Bancroft Parkway, said neighbors recently met with the president of the development company, Angela Tsionas, and her attorney, who presented a concept for what the developer believes it could build under the property’s existing zoning — without the rezoning measure currently before City Council.
Under the presented concept, the development would include 72 apartments across two buildings, one would be three stories tall and the other eight stories, along with approximately 48 surface parking spaces. The apartments would be less expensive than luxury units and would feature fewer amenities, such as a gym or garage, and more modest finishes, according to the press release.
The new concept marks a significant change from the previous proposal, which called for a 12-story apartment building and a parking garage with nearly 300 spaces.
Despite the new proposal, residents made it clear they remain opposed to rezoning the properties, arguing that the change would legally allow a taller, larger development that could increase traffic and parking problems and alter the neighborhood’s character, regardless of the developer’s promises to build something smaller.
“Build within the legal right you have to build. Go to town, do what you want, but don’t try to change the law,” said Kathleen Dinsmore, a longtime neighborhood resident and an organizer of Protect Bancroft Parkway.
Tsionas did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s requests for comment.
According to Johnson, discussions between his office, Tsionas and residents have continued. While the rezoning measure remains tabled for now, he said he believes the development plans are still moving forward.
“Now, what that project is, I can’t 100% say for sure, but they intend to move forward,” he said.
Hundreds of local residents have protested the Tsionas project in recent months, which has slowed the project’s advancement. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Residents push back on rezoning
Back in March, Tsionas originally proposed building a nine-story high-rise along the Bancroft Parkway, submitting an application to the city to rezone two pieces of land so they could move forward with a 315,000-square-foot apartment complex that would have included almost 200 units and an underground parking garage with 325 spaces.
Tsionas currently owns the 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue Apartments, a luxury six-story housing complex that sits near the parkway, at the intersection of North Grant Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s visible from the property where the new project is to be built.
The locations they requested for rezoning included 2140 W 11th St. and 1010 N. Bancroft St., which are both zoned C-1, one of the city’s commercial districts. That current zoning is capped at a maximum height of three stories and 47 feet, while rezoning the properties to the requested C-2 commercial district would allow up to 15 stories and 180 feet.
Tsionas also owns a third parcel at 1100 N. Grant St. that would be part of the development and sits adjacent to the two properties it sought to rezone. Unlike those properties, however, the Grant Street parcel is already zoned C-2.
Tsionas’ mixed-use project, 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue, is visible in the background from the site of 1010 N. Bancroft Parkway. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
In the application, the company’s attorney noted that the plan was developed through a series of working group meetings with the local community, where different proposals were discussed and “reworked based on the working group’s feedback.”
But shortly after the application was submitted, residents began to push back against the development, saying that it would change “the character in appearance and nature” of the area, alter its skyline, and substantially increase traffic in the area.
In April, City Council referred the developer’s application to the City Planning Commission for review. But two months later, the City Council passed a resolution to approve a 90-day extension for the City Planning Commission to make recommendations on the application, in part because of community concerns.
In May, Tsionas submitted an amended rezoning application, which altered the development to a “stepped concept,” including a four-story building along Bancroft Parkway, an eight-story building, and a 12-story building along North Grant Avenue. The following month, Johnson held a town hall to talk with residents.
Then in August, Tsionas submitted a letter to the city council, agreeing to make changes to development and commit dollars to community initiatives. In the letter, the market-rate developer agreed to cap the maximum height of the housing complex at eight stories as opposed to 12. They also agreed to set up parking to direct traffic away from the Bancroft Parkway median.
The company also agreed to commit $300,000 to the Todmorden Foundation’s new senior affordable housing program. They also agreed to provide $50,000 annually for the next three years to a public safety program administered by West Side Grows Together and Cornerstone West CDC.
Later that month, the city Planning Commission held its meeting on the proposal, drawing representatives from Tsionas and 200 residents. Neighbors raised concerns about the development’s potential impact on property taxes and traffic, construction-related noise and safety, and the lack of binding commitments from the developer not to build to the maximum height of 15 feet if the rezoning was approved.
“This development, if allowed to move forward, will destroy our section of Brancroft Parkway for my children’s generation,” said one resident, Andrea Cassidy, during the meeting.
Wali Rushdan, an attorney representing Tsionas, defended the rezoning as consistent with the city’s plan and future needs, arguing the project would not worsen existing traffic and that deed restrictions could address community concerns.
“Your voice does matter, but that doesn’t make you right,” he said. “So again, I ask that you all carefully consider this, all the arguments that have been raised, as well as the current and future needs of our city.”
The commission ultimately voted 4-1 against the rezoning. That decision raised the threshold for approval by city council, requiring 10 of the council’s 13 members to vote in favor rather than a simple majority, according to Johnson.
Johnson told Spotlight Delaware that the commission’s decision was unusual because the city’s Planning and Development Department had recommended approving the rezoning.
“This is quite a unique and rare territory for the city that the planning commission would go against the planning professionals in the city,” he said. “I think part of the issue with this matter is that planning professionals from a city perspective believe this is an appropriate project.”
On Sep. 3, Councilman Johnson decided to table the city council measure that would have approved the rezoning of the properties.
He said he held the measure in response to community concerns over the height of the building.
Kathleen Dinsmore is among the residents of Bancroft Parkway who believe that the Tsionas project will dramatically change the character of their historic neighborhood. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Why residents are still opposed
Dinsmore has lived in the Bancroft Parkway neighborhood for nearly seven years. She is one of several residents who helped start Protect Bancroft Parkway, a neighborhood group formed in April to oppose the rezoning.
The group has since created a website to serve as a hub for residents, providing copies of the rezoning applications, updates on the project and upcoming meetings, as well as a mailing list.
Dinsmore said she first learned about the project in March, after Tsionas submitted its initial rezoning application, from residents who had participated in invite-only working group meetings held by the developer with Councilman Johnson.
She said many other residents were unaware of the proposal. Dinsmore and several neighbors began spreading the word and organized a community meeting at the Woodlawn Library in late April to discuss the rezoning and how residents wanted to respond.
“I just didn’t feel like it was right that people didn’t know. That was my biggest thing. Like we really deserve to have known. I keep going back to that. The developer didn’t have to, but I believe our representative on city council had an obligation,” Dinsmore said.
The group has since sought to demonstrate the extent of the neighborhood’s opposition. Members went door to door on blocks surrounding the proposed development and reached residents at 99 of 123 households, according to Dinsmore. Of those, 93 signed a petition opposing the rezoning.
“People were very angry because for months they had heard that this was just going to happen without us having any way of having our voice heard,” she said.
Dinsmore said broader public outreach from Tsionas and Johnson followed as residents became more vocal about their opposition. That included a June town hall and a meeting earlier this month where residents and the developer discussed, for the first time, what could potentially be built under the property’s existing zoning.
While residents have raised concerns about the proposed development’s density and its potential effects on traffic and parking, Dinsmore said one of their central concerns is what the zoning change itself would permit, not simply what Tsionas currently intends to build.
If the city council approves the rezoning, she said, the properties could legally accommodate a larger development in the future regardless of the developer’s current plans. Residents also do not view a private agreement with Tsionas as sufficient protection, Dinsmore said, because enforcing such an agreement could require residents to take legal action if its terms were violated.
“We are forever subject to possibly having to deal with the developer on anything that they violate,” Dinsmore said.
But the residents’ campaign has also drawn criticism from some who view the opposition as an example of NIMBYism, an acronym for “not in my backyard” commonly used to describe resistance to development near one’s home.
Another resident, Barbara Kanter, told Spotlight that labeling residents’ opposition as NIMBYism or classism is misplaced because the proposed apartments would cater to people with incomes similar to those already living in the neighborhood.
“There is not an argument for it other than the developer wants it there,” she said.
Dinsmore also rejected that characterization, arguing that residents are not seeking to prevent development of the properties altogether, noting Tsionas could still develop the site under its existing zoning, she said.
Instead, Dinsmore said residents’ concerns center on the scale of development that rezoning could allow and whether the surrounding neighborhood can accommodate it.
“I believe we can be pro-development and pro-housing in this city, and care passionately about being Wilmingtonians, and not want a massive building right on a green space in a neighborhood that’s not set up for it. I think we can do both,” she said.
Geovany Andres Rojas, who faces drug trafficking and terrorism charges in the U.S., had been protected from extradition by former Colombian President Gustavo Petro,
Powerful weather system pummels shoreline for a second day, knocking out power to tens of thousands
Residents of coastal communities in the US’s north-east slogged through floodwaters for a second day as a powerful storm known as a nor’easter pummeled the shoreline on Sunday, knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes.
Tidal surges swamped low-lying neighborhoods in New Jersey while wind gusts toppled trees on New York’s Long Island, damaging homes and bringing down utility poles.
The US has already grown used to the horror caused by abortion bans. And Republicans have sought to quash the stories
Abortion has faded from the headlines since the Dobbs decision of 2022, and Republicans like it that way. In the immediate aftermath of the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, as millions of women lost access to the dignity and self-determination that abortion provided them, clinics shut their doors, and the extent of Dobbs’s horrendously adverse public health implications started to become clear, abortion was always, it seemed, in the headlines. There were plenty of stories. There was the first known woman to die as the result of an abortion ban; and then the second; and then the third. There were the various lawsuits and ballot initiatives that for a while turned access off and on and then off again in various states; then there were the state supreme court elections, races that were newly transformed by the abortion debate and on which the health and status of a state’s women now relied. There were the clinics that shut their doors in Republican-controlled states, many of which had provided the essential, stigmatized care for decades, under hostile conditions, with persistence and innovation and determination that were staggering.
But the stories have faded from the headlines as the years have gone by. Feminism has gone dramatically out of style, with the big women’s rights NGOs wounded enough by Dobbs and attacks from the Trump administration that they have been largely unable to push their agenda in either media or policy, and algorithmic social media driving a rise in gender conservatism and politicized misogyny, particularly among young men. But maybe more importantly, abortion has ceased to be a story because the horrors of abortion bans have ceased to be news: the US has grown used to the swift and dramatic erosion of women’s health and status that has followed Dobbs, grown used to the horror stories and upward ticking body counts, grown into ease, and even a kind of compliant boredom, with women’s death and indignity.
Fossil fuel firms have spent years trying to regulate climate research by donating to US universities, study authors argue
Recent attacks on US universities by the Trump administration have built on decades of efforts by libertarian donor networks, fossil fuel companies and conservative thinktanks to reshape university governance and increase outside influence, according to a new study.
The authors of the new perspective study argue that the erosion of university autonomy has left colleges more vulnerable to corporate interests, especially within climate and energy research.
Exclusive: Instructors at tech training company Multiverse hit out at ‘remorseless’ and ‘unnerving’ monitoring system
Teachers at Euan Blair’s £1.6bn tech training company, Multiverse, have blown the whistle about “horrendous stress” and feeling constantly watched after bosses started using AI models to surveil and rate their teaching.
Staff delivering apprenticeship training in computer and AI skills to thousands of UK public and private sector workers now have transcripts of online classroom sessions analysed and scored by an AI programmed to alert human managers when they are suspected of doing things wrong.
Talks expected on Monday after Sinn Féin leaders join those on streets opposing decision to allow unionist parade for first time since 1998
Tensions between unionist and nationalist leaders in Northern Ireland have escalated as a number of Orange Order members remain at Drumcree church, vowing not to leave until they can proceed with their march down a nationalist road in Portadown.
Members of the loyalist Orange Lodge made a third attempt to proceed down Garvaghy Road at 4am on Monday morning, but a line of police Land Rovers blocked their path.
Israel does not have a legal right to act on its plan to close the British consulate in East Jerusalem, the former attorney general Dominic Grieve has advised the UK Foreign Office.
Israel has said it intends to shut the consulate on 8 October in response to the sweeping ban on trade with goods from Israeli settlements announced by the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, this month.
Forecasters say Hurricane Polo could bring "life-threatening winds and flash floods" to parts of Mexico's Baja California Sur and nearby Sonora on Monday and Tuesday.
Hurricane Nolo will continue to strengthen as it moves away from Hawaii, forecasters said, but it was still expected to lash the Big Island and Maui with heavy rain.
Experts warn Republicans may try to sow distrust and claim ‘foreign interference’ in crucial hours after counting begins. Plus, two pandas have a new home thanks to US-China diplomacy
Good morning. Election experts have warned that Donald Trump’s administration could use the crucial hours and days after November’s midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce the crackdown it wanted on voting.
After a succession of court setbacks to plans to restrict voting access, and with less than six weeks remaining until polls close, the post-election “counting window” is being seen as a particularly vulnerable moment by former US federal government officials.
How might Republicans cause doubt over results? Caitlin Durkovich, a former deputy homeland security adviser, said: “I think because the administration has lost so many of their attempts to disrupt the normal process in court, that they are going to use the claim of foreign interference at the end of voting days to either seize equipment or to seize ballots, whether they’re legally justified to do so or not.”
What have authorities said about the plot? Counter-terrorism police said: “At around 12.45am Sunday, police received a call relating to three suspicious vehicles which appeared to be travelling towards the airbase. Armed officers responded and five men were arrested.”
How did the arrests unfold? A resident of the village of Whelford was driving home from a party when she saw three white vans parked on a country road. She was immediately suspicious, she said, and became all the more so when she spotted a “large group of hooded and balaclavaed” men. She called emergency services and police arrived on the scene 15 minutes later. You can follow the latest developments in this story in our live blog.
What has the US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, said about attempts to end the US-Iran war? “They were asking for everything upfront with a promise that they would then talk,” Waltz told CNN. “The president is just not confident that the Iranians are coming in good faith and that we will truly negotiate the end of their nuclear program.”
River charters part of wider movement establishing ‘moral’ framework to protect nature and hold institutions to account
One Monday morning in spring last year, 12 people gathered in the morning drizzle at Joyce’s Pool, one of the sources of the Bristol River Avon, and took the first steps of the inaugural Avon pilgrimage.
Over the course of eight days, a revolving cast of pilgrims walked about 100 miles from the source of the river to the point at which it reaches the sea, in some cases bivvying on the riverside at night. Along the way they planted trees, sowed seeds, restored footpaths and presented councillors and decision-makers with a fledgling Avon charter, developed by the Bristol campaign group Conham Bathing.
Hoping to win back male voters, the Trump White House is pushing the regressive idea that one hormone could be a magic elixir of masculinity
Two years after Donald Trump decisively won the vote of the American man, pollssay male voters are increasingly disillusioned with an administration that has waged wars and enriched itself.
Ahead of the midterms, Trump’s strategy seems to be to find a way to get that masculine animus back, so the male populace will vote not with their heads or their hearts, but with their hogs. At least, that’s one way of understanding why, this summer, Trump’s secretaries of health and defense announced plans that could increase levels of testosterone, or simply “T”, in the civilian and military population.
Oktoberfest is all about sausages with a snap, tangy sauerkraut, and buttery pretzels. These 13 recipes cover the whole German beer-garden spread, from beer-braised brats and pot roast to smoky sides and fried bites.The post 13 Oktoberfest recipes that deserve…
How can we fix our pricing crisis? Economic sociologist Lindsay Owens urges tough new rules – and a consumer uprising
“Repeat after me: it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.” That’s the message to frustrated US shoppers in Gouged: The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet by Lindsay Owens, economic sociologist and head of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive Washington thinktank.
Consumer rage is rising and no wonder – we are all living through the “reinvention of the rip-off”, Owens told the Guardian, an experience that is undermining Americans’ trust in the economy. Nothing short of a consumer uprising and a slate of tough new rules is going to fix the problem, she believes.
The ocean phenomenon could raise sea levels by up to a foot as El Niño keeps warm water trapped along the coast
Concerns are mounting about an ocean phenomenon known as a Kelvin wave that could raise sea levels along the California coastline by up to a foot, as scientists say El Niño is supercharging the threat of storm surges and flooding in the coming months.
As an incredibly strong El Niño continues to develop in the Pacific, the phenomenon brings with it a strange shift in the ocean. The Kelvin wave phenomenon is created when trade winds that usually blow from South America towards Asia die down or reverse in El Niño years, setting off a massive, slow-moving slosh of water.
Donald Trump has taken to repeating a familiar boast: “We have the greatest economy in history,” Trump said recently at a White House press gaggle. The boast comes even though inflation is higher and economic growth lower than when Joe Biden left office, even though gas prices have jumped about 50% since the war against Iran started, and even though 73% of Americans think the economy is in fair or poor shape (48% say it’s in poor shape). What’s more, the Federal Reserve is so worried about inflation that it just raised interest rates.
“It’s bluster, it’s gaslighting for him to say the economy is the greatest ever,” said Darrick Hamilton, chief economist for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main union federation. “The economy is trending down by many measures. A lot of that has been caused by Trump’s unforced errors.”
David Perdue’s remarks come after a Taiwanese minister spoke of the ‘severe’ military threat posed by Beijing to the self-ruled island
Donald Trump offered to sell weapons to China while hosting its leader, Xi Jinping, last week, the US ambassador to China said on Sunday.
David Perdue told Fox News on Sunday: “President Trump continues to say, hey, we sell arms to other people around the world. He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”
Brazil’s presidential election is more than just another polarized contestExpert commentjon.wallace
A Bolsonaro victory would mean Trump-aligned governments dominate South America.
The first round of Brazil’s presidential election is scheduled for 4 October, with 13 candidates competing to occupy the Brazilian presidential palace, Planalto.
For now, the contest is dominated by two men. Only a few percentage points (depending on the poll) separate 80-year-old President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT) – running for his fourth term – and 45-year-old Flávio Bolsonaro of the right-wing Liberal Party (PL).
Flávio is the son of the man Lula defeated in 2022, former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019–23), sometimes referred to as the ‘Trump of the tropics’. Lula squeaked out a narrow victory in the 2022 contest, of 50.9 to 49.1 percent in the second round, after public opinion surveys had seriously undercounted the support of his right-wing rival. Jair Bolsonaro is currently serving time for plotting a coup, after his supporters rioted in Brasilia in 2023 in an effort to overturn the 2022 results.
This year’s contest is more than a familial grudge match. For one, it looks a lot like recent presidential elections in the region. In June, elections in both Peru and Colombia went to a second round. Each resulted in a narrow victory for conservative candidates who, like the Bolsonaros, are aligned with the regional diplomatic agenda of US President Donald Trump.
Another tight contest now looms in Brazil, the most populous country and largest democracy in Latin America, the tenth largest economy in the world, and for decades an international champion of the Global South, through blocs like BRICS.
Both Lula and the younger Bolsonaro face high levels of voter rejection. More than 54 per cent of Brazilian voters disapprove of Flavio according to one poll. Lula does little better in the same survey, with 52 per cent against the president running for a fourth term.
The issues
Brazilian voters are divided over a number of issues relating to Brazil’s political system and its place in the world.
According to a Pew survey conducted in Brazil in early 2026, only 37 per cent of Brazilian voters were satisfied with their democracy, down from 66 per cent in 2013. And Brazilians are ideologically split on favourable views of China versus the US.
57 per cent of Brazilians who identify as leftist have favourable views of China, compared to 40 per cent of those on the right. Those opinions flip on attitudes towards the US: 58 per cent of self-identified right-leaning voters have favourable views of the US, while only 30 per cent on the other side of the ideological spectrum do.
Division on these issues indicates that this election could have major implications for the direction of Brazil’s foreign policy, its global influence, and the PT foreign policy agenda since 2003.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidency…would trigger, if not a pulling out, then a significantly reduced role in the BRICS group.
Brazil’s situation is not unique. Distrust in democratic electoral systems has increased around the world – a sentiment that outsider political entrepreneurs have exploited. Their ability to do so stems from political polarization, discontent with the political class – and the simple fact that casting a ballot and accepting the aggregate macro tabulations of all voters requires a certain commitment of faith. As political tribes have become more separated and disconnected from alternative views and media, it becomes easier to feed on distrust, suspicion and resentment.
According to a recent Chatham House/ Convergent Opinion survey, distrust in the electoral system is greater among those who voted for then-president Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 than those who voted for Lula that year.
Only 45 per cent of 2022 Bolsonaro voters expressed very much or some confidence that elections would be free from political interference this year, compared to 78 per cent of 2022 Lula voters. That is concerning, but not necessarily surprising. Jair Bolsonaro cast doubt on the integrity of Brazil’s electoral system before the 2022 elections. (Flávio has promised to respect this year’s election outcome. But he has also vowed to grant amnesties to those who took part in the 2023 riots).
Fuelling this division is an escalating diplomatic row with the administration of US President Donald Trump. In July, the US imposed new 25 per cent tariffs on some Brazilian goods. The same month, the Brazilian government denied visas to two US envoys, accusing them of planning to meddle in elections – a charge the US State Department called a ‘baseless lie’.
The diplomatic dispute has escalated further, with the White House revoking the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to the US, and Lula’s office accusing the US of ‘a deliberate escalation of hostile measures against Brazil, motivated by ideological reasons’. In his speech at the UN General Assembly on 22 September, Lula warned against foreign interference in the election.
The potential foreign policy about-face
A Bolsonaro victory this year would create another friendly South American government for the Trump administration, adding to the White House’s growing list of aligned leaders (either for transactional or ideological reasons) in Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Dominican Republic, and Ecuador.
Indeed, a Bolsonaro government would probably adhere to Trump’s approach on various issues, including a more martial approach to narcotics trafficking and transnational criminal networks operating in or from Brazil. It will likely see Brazil joining Trump’s Shield of the Americas initiative.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidency would also bring a U-turn to PT-focused foreign policy agendas. It would trigger, if not a pulling out, then a significantly reduced role in the BRICS group, which Trump has criticized for ‘anti-American policies’. And Brazil might well draw back from other global forums, such as the UN, the G20, and COP where Brasilia has staked its claim as a representative of the Global South.
In reality, under the PT, Brazil’s track record in supporting multilateralism has been spotty. Often it has been partisan in defending human rights and democracy even in its own neighbourhood.
Equally, it is not clear that a new Bolsonaro government would represent a triumph for Trump’s so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’, which seeks to establish American supremacy in the Western Hemisphere.
While a Bolsonaro-led Brazil would return Brasilia to his father’s anti-woke cultural battles, it would not necessarily fall into line with the Trump White House, particularly on trade. Bolsonaro distanced himself from Trump’s heavy tariffs. And, as was true for his father and neighbour Argentine president Javier Milei – who both had campaigned on reducing Chinese influence – a new Bolsonaro administration would balk at reducing trade with China, Brazil’s largest trading partner since 2009. China, though, may seek to reduce its Brazilian imports, if Bolsonaro strays too far in challenging Beijing.
Regardless, Brazilians face a stark choice in October. Brazil’s commitment to international law and multilateralism hangs in the balance, as does the Global South’s voice in the global order.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The White House’s official app surged to the top of Apple’s news category after launching its 24/7 Trump TV channel, but cybersecurity researchers say the app collects extensive user data while providing limited clarity about where that information ultimately goes.
The White House says the app has surpassed 2 million downloads and offers direct access to administration news, livestreams and presidential messaging. It promoted the recent rankings as evidence Americans were bypassing traditional media for information directly from the presidency.
A Washington Sun investigation found the app communicates with multiple third-party services and includes software capable of monitoring location and user activity. Researchers also identified a dormant keylogger script, though they said it was unlikely to function as traditional surveillance software on mobile devices.
The White House privacy policy acknowledges that app information can be handled by third-party services and says collected data may be used for tailored content, statistical profiles, policy decisions and lawful information-sharing with government agencies.
Questions have also been raised about federal security requirements. Government records show 45Press received a White House technology-services contract currently valued at about $1.72 million.
The White House did not answer the Washington Sun’s specific questions about security certifications or the researchers’ findings, instead pointing to its announcement celebrating the app’s popularity.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., speaks at a press conference with other members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in Washington, D.C. last year. Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images
An Arizona congresswoman has proposed three bills that would fund literacy classes, dual language programs and training for teachers of students learning English in the state, hoping to remedy gaps highlighted by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, filed the bills Sept. 16, the same day Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica reported that the state had lowered the score students need to pass its English proficiency test. Experts warned the change will push thousands of students out of language services before they know English well enough to succeed in school. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican longtime defender of Arizona’s English-only policies, approved the change.
Grijalva’s Reaching English Learners Act would create competitive grants of up to five years for colleges that partner with high-need school districts or early childhood programs to train teachers to lead classrooms of English learners. It gives preference to programs that recruit teacher candidates who were once English learners or come from underrepresented groups. Colleges would pay at least half the cost of the training. The bill does not specify a cost for the program.
A spokesperson for Grijalva said she had previously drafted the bills but noted that Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s reporting underscored why federal support is needed to improve English learning.
In a statement to the news organizations, Grijalva said, “Superintendent Horne’s mismanagement of the misguided ‘English-only’ model underscores the need for real federal support for English learners, educators, and their families, which is exactly what my legislation would provide. Instead of repeating the mistakes of the past by simply making the English proficiency test easier to pass, we should give students the resources and support they need to actually succeed in the classroom, including through supporting bilingual education.”
Horne disputed Grijalva’s characterization, arguing that the English-only model is superior to bilingual education. “To put bilingual education in schools is to sacrifice the students to dogma and condemn them to not learn English properly, which negatively will affect their future academic endeavors and their hope for good jobs in the economy,” Horne told the news organizations.
The state Department of Education has previously defended its decision to make it easier to pass the test by saying it first administered the exam to 600 native English speakers to set a baseline for the changes. The department skipped this step in 2020, when it made the last major change to the test, officials noted.
As the news organizations reported, after the state lowered the score needed to pass the fluency test, the statewide pass rate, known as the reclassification rate, jumped to 26% in 2026, from 12% the year before. Of the nearly 113,000 students who took the exam, about 30,000 were classified as proficient and removed from English-language services this school year.
Proposition 203, which Arizona voters approved in 2000, established the state’s English-only policies. Students learning English spend two to four hours a day in separate English instruction until they pass a test showing they’re fluent enough to learn in a mainstream classroom.
Past attempts by the state to reclassify large numbers of children learning English as fluent prompted federal investigations. The government alleged that placing such students in classrooms where they struggled because they lacked knowledge of English violated their civil and educational rights. Arizona agreed to a settlement more than a decade ago to resolve the matter.
Grijalva proposed two other bills to aid English learning and literacy.
Samantha Ramos teaches students during her English-language development class at John B. Wright Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona, in August.Cassidy Arazia for ProPublica
One of the measures, the Families Learning and Understanding English Together Act, would authorize $75 million a year from 2027 through 2031 for family literacy programs. Head Start programs, school districts, adult education providers and nonprofits could apply for grants of $150,000 to $1 million a year to teach English and literacy to young children and their caregivers together. To qualify, programs would have to serve areas where English learners are a majority, or growing share, of students at local schools.
The Supporting Young Language Learners’ Access to Bilingual Education Act, would fund dual-language immersion programs for children from low-income families from preschool through fifth grade. Students in those programs would learn in English and a second language and would use the second language for at least half the school day. The bill would authorize $15 million for 2027 and unspecified amounts in the following four years.
Since Democrats do not have a majority in either house of Congress, the bills do not stand much of a chance this year.
Why Should Delaware Care? Housing costs are rising in Delaware, leading to strained budgets, longer commutes and an increase in the homeless population. Part of a new law increases minimum housing density to address this issue, but some in Sussex County question how it will affect traffic congestion.
A new state law that aims to create more cohesive communities is already changing the course of development discussions in Sussex County.
Last week, Sussex County Council was considering whether to rezone the 60 acres of land where developers want to build Lantern Cove, a 179-unit housing development being proposed in the southeastern part of the county.
The county’s Planning & Zoning Commission recommended denying the project, which proposes more dense housing than current zoning rules allow, due to traffic congestion concerns.
But, as Councilman Matt Lloyd pointed out, a recently signed state law, House Bill 450, will soon demand that municipalities allow denser developments like Lantern Cove to be built as part of an effort to provide more affordable housing for Delawareans.
“So, congratulations. The state just approved your project,” Lloyd said during the discussion.
The council ultimately deferred its decision on the proposed rezoning for Lantern Cove. But if the council decides to reject the project, the developer could submit another proposal that would likely have to be approved once HB 450 takes effect next summer.
HB 450 mostly reforms traffic study requirements. But it also requires towns, cities and counties to allow developers to build denser homes — townhouses, mixed-use buildings and apartments — in areas slated for growth.
“We are in a housing crisis right now,” the bill’s prime sponsor Rep. Bill Bush (D-Dover) said about the provision at a real estate conference earlier this month. He did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment.
The goal of the legislation is not only to build smaller, more affordable homes, but also to support developments that produce more walkable and bikeable communities and pave the way to expanded public transit options.
But some Sussex County officials have questioned how it will affect mounting concerns over traffic congestion in some of the areas targeted for future growth.
Sussex County Administrator Todd Lawson said allowing more dense housing in areas with sufficient transportation infrastructure makes sense. But he is not sure that’s the case for all the places currently labeled as growth areas in the county.
“If you’re putting density where there isn’t the transportation system to support it, [it’s] going to create problems,” he said.
Lawson said the county will soon reconsider which areas should be labeled for growth as part of its comprehensive planning process. But that process will finish in 2028, after HB 450 takes effect.
But HB 450 could arguably be just as consequential for how new housing is developed in Delaware once the law takes effect next summer.
HB 450 primarily focuses on speeding up the building permit process by limiting when developers would have to conduct traffic studies.
Another provision requires municipalities to establish a minimum density of four units per acre in areas slated for growth.
That’s twice the amount of homes currently allowed in Sussex County’s agricultural-residential zoning district, which covers some of the county’s growth areas.
On Friday, John Kane, Gov. Matt Meyer’s policy director, held a training session for government officials on how to implement SB 23 and HB 450. He said that building denser housing, as opposed to the spread-out homes in areas of suburban sprawl, generally helps lower transportation infrastructure costs.
“Density is necessary,” he said. “We have to continue to contain the sprawl and to focus our resources into infill areas and cities.”
Which areas will have dense housing?
The state’s recently published guidelines for how to follow SB 23 and HB 450 say any area that is designated as Level 1 or Level 2 by Delaware planning officials are considered “growth areas.”
The state strategies map shows where the state plans to invest in infrastructure improvements. State officials create it based on counties’ and municipalities’ comprehensive plans, which are roadmaps for future growth that are supposed to be updated every 10 years.
The state recognizes four different levels of anticipated investment, with Level 1 expecting the most and Level 4 as the least. The Lantern Cove housing development south of Millville is in a Level 2 area.
Certain areas labeled for growth have roads that some residents say can’t handle any more traffic.
For example, the Route 24 corridor between Route 1 and Love Creek Bridge is almost all labeled on the map as Level 1, meaning it’s a prime location for more development.
Yet, nearby residents strongly opposed a proposed housing development in that area known as Belle Mead that would add over 300 apartments and 125,000-square-feet of commercial space to the already crowded corridor. A group of residents took Sussex County Council to court for approving the plan. That lawsuit has not yet been resolved.
The state guidelines say municipalities may be able to permit only lower-density developments in some growth areas “as reviewed on a case by case basis with justification.”
Kane said the unique character of historic districts or areas facing threats of coastal flooding are examples of possible exemptions to the pending higher density requirements of new state law.
The state’s housing agency is working on statewide guidance for how to implement the new residential density thresholds, Kane said, which will be published “in short order.”
Scientists and entrepreneurs knew the dangers of AI a quarter-century ago. But animated by curiosity and profit, they went ahead anyway
Over the past few weeks, many of us have struggled to concoct a mental image of brains in the cloud jumping their “sandbox”, sneaking on to the internet, recruiting “swarms” of other “agents” to cheat on a test, and, after discussing the ethics of the act, hacking into a wiki platform with the weird name Hugging Face.
We knew that artificial intelligence was devouring our jobs, degrading our kids’ education and deepfaking our politics; that datacenters were sucking up our water and electricity and sending us the bills. But until 8 September, when the Anthropic computer scientist Jacob Coxon posted his existential terror on Twitter/X, few of us suspected AI might be endangering our survival.
Get Involved Community Chapstick’s next concert is during Wilmington Porchfest on Saturday, Oct. 3. The band will play at noon at 812 N. Van Buren St. Porchfest will feature many free performances citywide. Learn more here. Stay up-to-date about Community Chapstick by visiting the band’s website.
North Delaware rock band Community Chapstick had instructed the audience at The Queen in Wilmington to dance like Beyblades. Much like the toy tops, rag doll bodies in the crowd dizzily spun around, bouncing off of each other to the beat.
A teen in a fur trapper hat kept running back and forth, leaping into the air like a bird learning to fly. A pair of friends played Ring Around the Rosie until one of them wiped out, becoming a human mop. Some concertgoers stayed on the sidelines, bobbing their heads with drinks in hand, but for the most part, it was chaos.
Community Chapstick vocalist/guitarist Donavan Burt performs at The Queen. | PHOTO BY @SISTER.LAIN, COURTESY OF COMMUNITY CHAPSTICK
At the eye of the storm were the MTV stars from another planet: Community Chapstick.
The most low-key of the trio was drummer “Ebbi,” who kept the beat with machinelike precision in jeans and a T-shirt.
Meanwhile, vocalist and rapper Donavan Burt worked the crowd in “Baby Girl” sweatpants and a denim jacket that only had sleeves and a collar, exposing their bare chest.
“Prince is a real big inspiration,” they said. “Clothes don’t have a gender.”
Vocalist “Disko” wore thigh-high platform boots plastered with buckles. Their magenta-dyed hair matched Burt’s. Burt gripped a V-shaped guitar; Disko, a heart-shaped bass.
“I just want to look like a Bratz rock angel at all times,” Disko said. “You ever see a play or a movie, and you’re like, ‘Damn, that (outfit) looks amazing!’ I want to mimic that in everyday life. I want to feel like I’m a character.”
While the members of Community Chapstick certainly embody characters onstage, their performances are rooted in authenticity.
“When we get on stage, it’s not that it’s a persona; it’s that I’m actually being myself now,” Burt said. “The songs we write are important to us. So, the expression just comes out. It’s not even really planned.”
Better than Earl Sweatshirt
Community Chapstick performs at Kelly’s Logan House. | PHOTO BY @RHIVNNUN, COURTESY OF COMMUNITY CHAPSTICK
Disko likes to refer to Community Chapstick as a “rock diary.” The band experiments with various genres and instruments like violin, kalimba and Stylophone, but rock is at the heart of everything they make.
Community Chapstick’s latest EP, “KEEP ON SPINNING,” which was released in August, demonstrates that ethos.
It begins with a raunchy rap track, “BUSH!” Burt’s in-your-face delivery contrasts with Disko’s soaring, ethereal, cadence on later tracks like “Vagabond,” an ode to new beginnings that was named after actor Tim Curry’s memoir.
Burt and Disko’s contrasting styles reflect their backgrounds. Disko grew up singing in church choir, while Burt began rapping at 16 with one goal: to surpass Earl Sweatshirt.
Did Burt accomplish their goal?
“No,” they said with a laugh. “But it built my confidence up. So, do I think I’m the best rapper now? Yes.”
Bearded dragon in a stroller
Burt and Disko were both solo musicians in the Delaware music scene when they decided to form Community Chapstick a little over a year ago. Ebbi, who is a producer, joined the band after hosting a jam session for the duo.
Finding bandmates and collaborators locally isn’t difficult, Disko said.
Delaware rock band Community Chapstick released its latest EP, “Keep on Spinning,” in August. | PHOTO BY @RHIVNNUN, COURTESY OF COMMUNITY CHAPSTICK
“Delaware is so small, but it has such a great lust for music,” they said. “If you tell someone, ‘I want to throw a show,’ they’ll be like, ‘I’ll offer up my house.’”
Burt added that many people still need to “learn how to have fun again” after the COVID pandemic and aren’t aware that the Delaware music scene exists.
That’s obvious whenever band members hand out concert flyers on the street. Usually, they’re met with reactions of fear or annoyance when they try to spark conversations. But people tend to open up once they realize they’re talking to a musician.
Disko often brings their pet bearded dragon, Barbie, in a stroller to act as an icebreaker.
“They’re like, ‘Oh my God! Your lizard! Can I pet her?’ And I’m like, ‘She wants to give you something. It’s a flyer for a show,’” Disko said. “Some people don’t know what they’re missing out on until you show them.”
‘Spanish For Dummies’
Community Chapstick performs at the Newport Folk Festival. | PHOTO BY KAIT DUGAN, COURTESY OF COMMUNITY CHAPSTICK
The Community Chapstick name is inspired by Disko’s discovery that their co-workers kept a shared stick of lip balm. But it’s also a promise to build an atmosphere of acceptance and solidarity in their fanbase.
That’s why the band has played benefit shows for families affected by the actions of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Disko and Burt have started writing songs in Spanish in the wake of ICE’s mass detention of both documented and undocumented Hispanic people. Disko and Burt have Dominican and Panamanian heritage, respectively, and are self-described “no sabo kids” — as referenced in the “No Sabo” EP cover, which shows Disko reading “Spanish For Dummies.”
“People are even scared to speak Spanish, which sucks. I’m like, ‘No. We should speak it more.’ Let’s all learn it together,” Disko said.
The members of Community Chapstick hope their shows are a welcoming environment where audience members can find a sense of belonging and be their authentic selves.
“We had a little girl come up to us, and she said we were the first Spanish rock band she’s ever seen,” Disko said. “It was really cool to have someone say that and open up the window, like, ‘Someone who looks like you and me could do this.’”
Social and news media commenters seize on senator’s gaffe, with some characterizing it as a Freudian slip
With speculation about whether he may defect from the Democratic party swirling around him, the US senator John Fetterman described himself seemingly unintentionally as a “lifelong Republican” during a fireside chat in Texas over the weekend.
Fetterman made the comment when someone listening to him speak with CBS News political correspondent Major Garrett at the Texas Tribune Festival on Saturday asked the Pennsylvania senator why he had not become an independent.
As the demands of cinematic rendering continue to grow, creative applications are increasingly converging with traditional high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Physically based rendering engines must process complex lighting, textures, geometry, and visual effects at scale, placing considerable pressure on compute infrastructure. The whitepaper, Accelerating Creativity: Evaluating OpenMoonRay Performance on Lenovo ThinkSystem HPC Servers with Intel® Xeon® 6 Processors, examines how next-generation server and processor technologies can provide the performance, scalability, and energy efficiency required for modern rendering pipelines.
The evaluation focuses on OpenMoonRay, DreamWorks Animation’s open-source Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer. Originally developed for feature-film production, OpenMoonRay is designed to create photorealistic imagery using distributed rendering, task-based parallelism, and SIMD acceleration. Unlike rendering engines that rely primarily on GPU acceleration, OpenMoonRay is CPU-centric. This makes it a particularly useful benchmark for assessing the capabilities of high-throughput, multicore server architectures. Its open-source design also enables detailed instrumentation and performance analysis across different hardware configurations.
Testing was conducted on Lenovo ThinkSystem HPC platforms, including the ThinkSystem SR630 V3 Server and the ThinkSystem SC750 V4 Neptune Server. Lenovo’s ThinkSystem portfolio is designed to support compute-intensive workloads across industries, offering scalable configurations, high memory bandwidth, fast interconnects, and advanced thermal management. The SC750 V4 uses Lenovo’s sixth-generation Neptune direct water-cooling technology, which can operate with warm water at inlet temperatures as high as 45°C. This design can reduce data-center energy consumption, eliminate server-fan power draw, decrease reliance on chillers, and support more consistent processor temperatures.
The benchmark compared 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® Xeon® 6 processors. The tested CPUs included the 64-core Intel® Xeon® 8592+, the 72-core Intel® Xeon® 6960P, and the 128-core Intel® Xeon® 6980P. Intel® Xeon® 6 processors introduce architectural improvements intended to increase throughput and performance per watt, including higher core counts, greater memory bandwidth, larger caches, enhanced vector-processing capabilities, and additional BIOS-level performance optimization. The testing environment used Rocky Linux 9.5 and the Lenovo EveryScale Best Recipe, a validated software and firmware stack designed to maximize system performance and reliability.
Researchers evaluated all 10 example scenes available in the OpenMoonRay GitHub repository. Performance was measured according to rendering time, throughput—the number of completed jobs relative to total rendering time—and relative performance compared with the baseline system. A Design of Experiments approach was also used to determine how CPU frequency, memory bandwidth, and L3 cache size affected performance.
The results demonstrate that OpenMoonRay is primarily compute-intensive. Performance showed an 87.4% correlation with CPU frequency, compared with 27.4% for memory bandwidth and only 5.6% for L3 cache size. This indicates that processor frequency and overall compute capability have a much greater influence on OpenMoonRay performance than either memory bandwidth or cache capacity.
Among the tested configurations, the Intel® Xeon® 6980P delivered the highest throughput, achieving up to 2.11 times the performance of the 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor baseline. It also provided nearly 1.5 times greater energy efficiency based on CPU thermal design power. The Intel® Xeon® 6960P achieved a 1.5-times performance improvement despite having only 1.13 times more cores than the previous-generation processor, demonstrating that the gains extend beyond core-count increases. Testing also found that most scenes reached optimal or near-optimal throughput when four or eight jobs were executed sequentially.
Overall, the findings show that Lenovo ThinkSystem HPC servers powered by Intel® Xeon® 6 processors can substantially accelerate CPU-based cinematic rendering. Faster frame completion, increased job throughput, improved energy efficiency, and more effective use of compute resources can help creative organizations shorten production timelines while controlling infrastructure and operating costs. These capabilities position the platform as a compelling foundation for the next generation of rendering, digital content creation, and other demanding HPC workloads.
Read the full whitepaper to explore the complete benchmark methodology, performance results, and insights into accelerating next-generation creative workloads.
The boss of the family-owned jeweller Beaverbrooks has called on the government to give business “a bit of a break” by halting cost increases amid flat sales and falling profits.
The retailer, founded in 1919, revealed a 9% fall in underlying operating profit to £7.8m last year after an increase in employer national insurance contributions (NICs) and the legal minimum wage introduced by the former chancellor Rachel Reeves.
DANVILLE, Pennsylvania — Immigration enforcement near hospitals and medical facilities in Pennsylvania is raising concerns that immigrants may delay or avoid healthcare because they fear arrest, according to advocates and medical professionals.
Earlier this month, ICE and local police arrested construction workers near Geisinger Medical Center in Danville after they left work. Officials emphasized that no arrests occurred on hospital property, but witnesses reported seeing unmarked vehicles around the medical complex before the Sept. 2 operation. ICE says it arrested 10 people that day, while advocates and witnesses say the broader operation may have resulted in more than 40 arrests.
The concern extends beyond Pennsylvania. Doctors interviewed by Stateline said increased immigration enforcement has caused some families to skip appointments, delay treatment and avoid hospitals altogether, with some children developing more serious medical problems as a result.
The Trump administration eliminated a longstanding policy in January 2025 that generally restricted immigration enforcement in or near hospitals, schools and houses of worship. ICE says immigration status, not location, determines who is subject to enforcement.
Immigrant advocates argue that even when arrests occur off hospital grounds, visible enforcement nearby can create a chilling effect. Mirna Miranda of CASA said some immigrants now weigh the risk of detention against seeking medical treatment.
The Geisinger operation follows another Pennsylvania case in which ICE arrested 24 construction workers traveling to a worksite at Mount Nittany Medical Center.
K.K. Bautista, left, and her adoptive mother hold their respective children outside a camper at the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park, where homes previously washed away. Bautista moved there because it was the only place she could afford after Helene destroyed her previous home. Jesse Barber for ProPublica and The Assembly
This past weekend marked the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, which claimed more than 250 lives — 108 in North Carolina — and left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days to weeks. In Asheville, the largest city in the western part of the state, the storm left residents without drinking water for 53 days.
Part of what made the storm so devastating to the region when it hit, 400 miles inland from where it made landfall, is that the Appalachian Mountains’ typically porous soils were already saturated by recent rainfall. The rainwater hit bedrock and raced down steep mountain slopes like water on a slide. It overran the banks of normally shallow creeks and rivers, carrying the earth above it. One in 4 of those who died from the storm in North Carolina did so because of mud and landslides.
I’m a reporter with the North Carolina online magazine The Assembly, and my stories have also covered natural disasters in California, Arizona and Texas, where I was a data reporter on ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative team. In my recent story for The Assemblyand ProPublica, I wrote about how a gap in federal flood policy is putting mobile home residents in harm’s way again and again, allowing people in North Carolina to move onto the same lots where homes previously washed away.
Joe Rogers moved into a riverfront mobile home park in Haywood County in 2006, his front door less than 100 feet from the river’s banks. At the time, the flood maps showed that the land the park sat on was at risk but didn’t have his home in the 100-year floodplain, which would have required expensive elevation. The lot was empty, and at $200 a month, the rent was affordable. Rogers reckoned he had at least 40 years until another storm came around.
In 2021, the park was hit by a tropical storm, and the river rose a couple of inches into the home of Rogers and his wife, Sandra. When firefighters knocked on their door in the middle of the night in 2024, the couple figured Helene would play out like the last storm. Instead, the frigid, muddy river water rose from ankle deep to chest high in under an hour. Neighbors helped Joe escape, but before he could get Sandra out, the river lifted the home off its foundation and drove it downstream. Sandra’s body was found five days later, about 15 miles down river.
It wasn’t the first time that floodwaters destroyed homes at that park. In 2004, Hurricane Frances brought torrential rainfall to Western North Carolina. From his home on the park’s hillside, Dave Masters could see his father’s mobile home surrounded by water. Masters forced his then 63-year-old dad to leave, and the two watched as the river pried the home loose and drove it down the street like a car, where it crashed into a telephone pole before getting stuck under a bridge.
When the county sought properties to buy out to reduce the future risk to life and property after the 2004 floods, it bought out a home across the river but not the mobile home park. New residents moved into harm’s way.
Asked why residents are again allowed to live by the river, Haywood County’s current recovery officer told us he “did not know it was even possible” to buy out a mobile home park. Small counties like Haywood often look to the state for direction. North Carolina Emergency Management, which reviews buyout applications, said buying out a park is no different from commercial or residential properties, and put the onus on the property owners to participate in the program and work with the local government. The park’s current owners did not respond to our questions.
Joe Rogers at his new home in Candler, North Carolina. Hurricane Helene destroyed his former home at Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park and killed his wife, Sandra.Jesse Barber for ProPublica and The AssemblyRogers’ dogs, who survived HeleneJesse Barber for ProPublica and The Assembly
Allowing people to continue to live in locations with severe and repeated flooding is one of several weaknesses reporters at ProPublica have identified while investigating deadly floods.
When it comes to updating floodplain maps, government agencies have prioritized coastal areas, as they often have large populations that can experience complex storm surges and sea level rise, said John Dorman, the retired director of North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Program.
Many inland areas are still operating with their original flood maps from the 1970s or ’80s. In rural places that have experienced population growth and development since then, the maps don’t account for the way these places have changed. New homes, for example, take up valuable areas where floodwater is supposed to run, displacing water not unlike what happens when adding an ice cube to a glass of water.
In North Carolina, my reporting shows what can happen when cash-strapped local governments adopt the minimum federal floodplain regulations, which allow campers to reside in floodplains and enable recreational vehicles to park in locations where they would never approve homes at ground level.
At the park where the Rogerses lived, five campers now sit on riverfront lots where mobile homes were anchored into the soil until Helene hit.
Weaknesses in flood policy revealed themselves in the Texas Hill Country, too, when floods claimed more than 130 lives over the July 4 weekend in 2025. The majority of the people who died in the 2025 Central Texas floods were in places identified as flood-prone by the federal government, our analysis showed.
The Hill Country floods highlighted issues about missed evacuation orders and the need for robust emergency action plans. In the months that followed, the Association of State Floodplain Managers developed model ordinances that require annual permits for campgrounds in floodplains, updated emergency plans and restrictions on building floodways.
Chad Berginnis, the director of the ASFM, likened the minimum federal requirements to a standard recipe and said states can do more. He told me how the state of Wisconsin requires anyone who seeks to even move dirt in the floodway to have an engineer certify that it won’t raise the flood level.
If you are a part of the network of disaster response and recovery partners, we need your help to build a comprehensive picture of the real conditions across the country.
Texas has more structures in flood-prone areas than any state besides Florida, according to a nationwide structure analysis by ProPublica and the Tribune. The Texas Legislature has repeatedly failed to pass bills that would allow local leaders to curb potentially unsafe development, the two newsrooms found. Without major changes, that means the same federal, state and local rules that allowed residents to live near the Guadalupe River are allowing many of them to rebuild there after the floods.
As the Tribune’s Emily Foxhall reported, Joan Connor and David Stearns were one couple who were determined to get back in their home after surviving the 2025 floods by clinging to their pergola. With help from volunteers who repaired the storm damage and donated furniture, they were home by Christmas. It took less than a year for their home to fill with water again. They still plan to repair the house.
Likewise, in Western North Carolina’s Haywood and Buncombe counties, residents are going back to the same locations that were destroyed by storms, including the lot where Rogers lost everything during Helene. Rogers wonders how the local and federal government can keep allowing people to live in harm’s way.
“Ain’t that the definition of insanity: keep doing the same thing, hoping for a different result?” Rogers said. “They’re going to — I hope none of them does, you know — lose a spouse and everything that they own.”
Are AI chatbots quietly shaping the perceptions of U.S. voters? Voters trying to educate themselves about candidates "are unknowingly being served partisan talking points in the guise of neutral news summaries," write two news researchers in Politico magazine:
Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half of the time when people ask about candidates and issues that the partisan sites have covered in the midterm campaign, according to a new audit by NewsGuard, an organization focused on news reliability where we work as analysts... NewsGuard prompted seven leading AI tools with queries based on recent coverage of candidates and issues by 12 pink slime sites — six left-leaning and six right-leaning. The results were stark. Collectively, the chatbots cited pink slime sites along with other sources in 48.2 percent of their responses.
In 7.7 percent of responses, pink slime sites were the only sources at all that were cited in chatbot responses, although other sources appeared in the source list provided at the end of the response.
None of the AI tools received results they'd probably be eager to boast about, though the percentage of chatbots' responses that cited a pink slime site had a relatively large range: 70.8 percent for OpenAI's ChatGPT, 54.2 percent for Microsoft's Copilot, 54.2 percent for Perplexity, 50 percent for Anthropic's Claude, 41.7 percent for Google's Gemini; 37.5 percent for Meta AI and 29.2 percent for xAI's Grok... The seven chatbots were also collectively three times more likely to cite left-leaning pink slime sites (cited in 36.3 percent of responses) than their right-leaning counterparts (cited in 11.9 percent of responses) — though that may have more to do with the progressive sites' far more frequent posting than any political bias from the chatbots.
"While citing the pink slime sites, only one chatbot response out of 168 total queries noted the partisan nature of the source," the article points out.
But they also note that the real problem seems to be that consumer-oriented AI chatbots just "use much of the internet's content — regardless of the reliability or standards of the source — to frame their answers."
Capital city submerged in waist-high flood water, while elsewhere Hurricane Nolo threatens Hawaii’s Big Island
Bangkok was declared a disaster zone by its city officials towards the end of last week, after streets in Thailand’s capital city were submerged in up to waist-high flood water. The flooding stemmed from an active cell of low pressure across central Thailand that brought continuous heavy rainfall and thunderstorms to Bangkok and surrounding regions.
The heavy rain began early on Thursday when the weak area of low pressure travelled north-westwards up the gulf of Thailand before then sitting over central Thailand by Friday morning. For most of the following two days this low pressure remained roughly in situ, which allowed unrelenting downpours over Bangkok and nearby areas. One weather station near Prachin Buri, just north-east of the capital, recorded 213.5mm within a 24-hour period between Friday and Saturday evening local time – for comparison, London receives an average 585mm a year). Fortunately, the centre of the low-pressure cell shifted north-westwards on Sunday and brought an end to the torrential rainfall.
Sept. 28, 2026 — Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) experts Rodrigo Bartolomeu, René Halver and Godehard Sutmann received the Best Paper Award last week at the EuroHPC User Days 2026 for their submission “Scaling and performance aspects of the P3M method on multiple GPUs“. The three scientists work in the JSC’s Simulation and Data Laboratory Complex Particle Systems. In their award-winning work they developed a library for electrostatic solvers with implementations for different mathematical methods, which is optimized for CPU and GPU architectures.
Rodrigo Bartolomeu receiving the Best Paper Award at the EuroHPC User Days 2026. Small images (top to bottom): Rodrigo Bartolomeu, René Halver, Godehard Sutmann
The Computational Bottleneck in Particle-Based Simulations
Long-range electrostatic interactions constitute a major computational bottleneck in particle-based simulations, particularly when periodic boundary conditions are employed. Without applying sophisticated methods, such computations have a computational complexity of O(N2), which means that the number of required calculations grows exponentially with the number of particles in the simulation: For 100 particles the number of required calculations is a function of 1002=10,000; for 1000 particles it is already a function of 1,0002=1,000,000.
Mesh-based Ewald methods, such as the particle-particle particle-mesh (P3M) approach, reduce the computational complexity to O(N log N), i.e. for 100 particles the number of calculations is a function of 100*log10(100)=200 instead of 10,000, and for 1,000 particles it is 1,000*log10(1,000)=3,000 instead of 1 million computations. But these methods introduce challenges related to parallel scalability, communication overhead, and efficient utilization of modern heterogeneous architectures, i.e. to how well and efficient they run on a supercomputer. While highly optimized implementations exist in established molecular dynamics packages, these are typically tightly coupled to full simulation frameworks, limiting their flexibility and reuse in emerging HPC applications.
A New Library with an Efficient Parallel Solver for Heterogeneous Platforms
In their paper, Rodrigo and his colleagues present a performance-portable library for electrostatic solvers, providing implementations of both classical Ewald and P3M methods targeting CPU and GPU architectures. The library is designed to enable the efficient execution on multi-GPU systems while maintaining portability across heterogeneous platforms.
They investigate the scaling and performance characteristics of the P3M method, with particular focus on the FFT-based long-range component, which is known to limit scalability: Strong-scaling experiments demonstrate that small problem sizes are dominated by communication overhead, leading to reduced parallel efficiency, whereas larger systems achieve near-ideal scaling over a wide range of GPU counts.
The results highlight the importance of balancing computation and communication in mesh-based electrostatics and demonstrate that portable, decoupled implementations can achieve competitive performance on modern HPC systems. The presented approach facilitates integration into diverse simulation workflows and provides a foundation for further optimization of long-range solvers in exascale computing environments. The authors used three supercomputers for their project: MareNostrum5 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, and JURECA-DC and JUWELS Booster at the JSC. Their work is part of the MultiXscale Centre of Excellence.
Figure 4 of the publication: Speedup (left) and Parallel efficiency (right) of the strong-scaling benchmark results for different system replication numbers (8 to 64) on 1 to 128 GPUs (1 to 32 nodes) on the MareNostrum5 accelerated partition. Dashed lines represent the ideal speedup taking as reference the smallest amount of resources that could compute the system size. Parallel efficiency measures how effectively parallel resources are used; ideal scaling corresponds with a parallel efficiency of 1 (i.e. 10^0).
The EuroHPC User Days
The EuroHPC User Days are this week the place-to-be for the European HPC community. The event provides supercomputing users in Europe with the chance to explore various topics and enhance their understanding of the opportunities provided by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and the support available to users. EuroHPC projects are showcased that have used European HPC, Quantum Computing and AI supercomputing resources to present best practices in the development of these projects, gather feedback from EuroHPC users and engage with potential new users. This year, the event takes place in Dublin, Ireland, organised by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, together with the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science of Ireland, under Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Rodrigo Bartolomeu received the award certificate today evening during the Award Session.
The paper is available under open access:
Rodrigo A.C. Bartolomeu, René Halver, Godehard Sutmann. Scaling and performance aspects of the P3M method on multiple GPUs. In Procedia Computer Science, Volume 286, 2026, Pages 14-23, ISSN 1877-0509, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2026.08.015
Renewed fighting between Iran-aligned Houthis and Saudi-backed Yemeni forces has shattered four years of relative calm
In the mornings, 13-year-old Muneer Farie went to school, and in the afternoons he helped his father feed the livestock. He took his studies seriously, dreaming of becoming the first teacher in his family of farmers.
As fighting approached his village in al-Wazeyah district in Taiz, Yemen, two weeks ago, Muneer’s focus started to drift from his lessons. The classroom echoed with the distant sounds of explosions and gunfire. His home was suddenly on the frontline of renewed fighting between the Iran-aligned Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
The New England quarterback was a revelation in the 2025 regular season. But Sunday’s loss was just the latest in a series of crushing lows
After the New England Patriots pulled out a win in Week 2 over the Pittsburgh Steelers, despite another uninspiring performance from Drake Maye, Mike Vrabel avoided answering questions about his quarterback. Vrabel joked with a reporter not to “ruin my Sunday” when asked about Maye. And this was after a win.
On Sunday, Maye was largely responsible for ruining Vrabel’s afternoon in the Patriots’ 35-6 loss to Jacksonville, a result that feels like rock bottom (the Pats hope). Simply put, Maye was atrocious. The 2025 MVP runner-up was 14 of 25 for 199 yards, no touchdowns, two interceptions, three sacks and a lost fumble.
Soccer took North America by storm this summer, with the continent hosting the FIFA World Cup. Stars like Lionel Messi, Lamine Yamal and Cristiano Ronaldo displayed their talents in front of packed stadiums. The tournament shattered the previous attendance record by more than five million people, reflecting the significant growth of soccer.
As the dog days of summer begin to shift into cool autumn nights, that fascination with the “beautiful game” does not have to fade as well. Delaware men’s soccer provides an avenue for soccer fans, whether new or lifelong, to continue enjoying the sport.
It is only fitting that we explore exactly what this 2026 squad has to offer.
Similar to other Delaware athletic teams, Blue Hens men’s soccer experienced their first season in a new conference last year. Delaware boasted a perfect record at home (8-0) and advanced to the Summit League semifinals. Delaware did eventually fall to Kansas City on the road in that contest to finish the season with a record of 12-2-3.
All in all, a successful debut in the Summit League in 2025. Led by Coach Tommy McMenemy, the 2025 Blue Hens found significant success offensively. Forward Marius Stenner led the team in points, totaling 11 goals and nine assists. Midfielder of the Year Rich Monath followed behind Stenner with 12 goals and two assists and Stenner’s forward partner Mikey Johnson added 11 more goals with three assists.
Midfielder Freddy Jeffreys assisted nine times in 2025, which tied him with Stenner for the most on the team.
A formidable 2025 squad that finished the season unsatisfied with a loss in the conference semifinals provided the perfect mix for another step forward in 2026.
McMenemy returned to lead the Blue Hens into their second year in the Summit League. He made sure to bring back some of his weapons as well. Stenner and Monath both returned, with Johnson graduating in 2025.
Important pieces in defense also return for the Blue Hens this season. Captain Luke Chatten anchors the defense at center back, while Sean Smith and Emmett Kershner both add to a stalwart Blue Hen backline.
With any new season comes some new faces as well. Delaware welcomed forward Frederik Flaskager, a transfer from Penn State. Additionally, German Argueta joins the Blue Hens. Argueta, a freshman from Silver Spring, Maryland, played briefly for the D.C. United system and abroad on the El Salvador U20, U17 and U15 sides.
The Blue Hens started their season with a 1-0 victory against Howard University at home in the Stuart and Suzanne Grant Stadium, led by a goal from midfielder Liam Penny.
The Delaware defense stood strong as Jeffreys netted his first goal of the season en route to another 1-0 victory against Temple University on Aug. 23.
Delaware then traveled down to our nation’s capital to play ninth-ranked Georgetown University. The Blue Hens suffered the first defeat of the season with a 1-0 loss to the Hoyas.
Staying in Washington, Delaware tied American University 0-0 on Sept. 1, pushing their record to 2-0-2.
Blue Hens played their third straight game in the greater Washington area against the Maryland Terrapins. Goals from Stenner, Mason Booz and Flaskager were not enough as Delaware conceded four to the Terps, including Maryland’s game-winner with less than nine minutes to go.
The Blue and Gold got back into the win column with a pair of goals from Flaskager and one from Argueta, leading to a 3-0 victory against Loyola Maryland.
After four straight road games, the Blue Hens returned to Newark to face Mount St. Mary’s University. Two goals from both sides led to a highly contested draw, with Jeffreys and Flaskager adding to their goal totals. The tie in Newark put the Blue Hens at 3-2-2 on the season.
Some massive, unexpected news came for Delaware on Sept. 14 when it was announced that Stenner signed a professional contract with Akademisk Boldklub, a second division team in Denmark. Stenner became the first player to go professional during McMenemy’s tenure and praise came in from across Delaware athletics.
It is a tremendous accomplishment for Stenner and a proper reflection of the success of this Delaware men’s soccer program, but nonetheless, Stenner’s departure is still a difficult loss for this Blue Hen squad, especially midseason.
There is no doubt that talent is present within the Blue Hens locker room to continue the charge in pursuit of a conference championship and NCAA tournament appearance.
"A federal jury in San Diego awarded Taction Technology more than $5.7 billion in damages Friday after finding that Apple infringed claims from two haptics patents,"
reports CNBC:
Taction sued Apple in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. The company alleged that Apple was improperly "capitalizing on Taction's innovation and success" by selling devices that infringed on its vibration technology, according to the complaint. Apple initially won dismissal in 2023, and the Federal Circuit later revived the case....
Taction argued that Apple's "Taptic Engine," which is embedded in its Apple Watches and iPhones, uses its inventions without proper license or authority.
Taction's lead counsel told CNBC "Taction waited five and a half years for this case to get to trial, so it was a long time coming."
CNBC also reported that the jury "did not find Apple's infringement willful" — and that Apple said they'd appeal.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping whether China would be interested in buying American weapons, according to U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue, an unusual proposal given Washington’s longstanding security competition with Beijing.
“President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” Perdue said Sunday on Fox News Sunday. “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some, at one point,” according to The Hill.
Perdue did not specify what weapons Trump had in mind, whether Xi expressed interest or whether any formal proposal followed. The White House also has not announced plans to loosen U.S. restrictions on military technology exports to China.
The remarks come amid persistent tensions over Taiwan. The United States is obligated under the Taiwan Relations Act to help Taiwan maintain its defensive capabilities and has approved billions of dollars in weapons sales to Taipei. Beijing considers Taiwan part of China and strongly opposes those sales. Reuters reported ahead of Xi’s Washington visit that Beijing wanted Trump to reduce or halt them.
Trump and Xi concluded a three-day Washington summit Friday that produced limited public agreements beyond trade measures and continued diplomatic engagement. Reuters described the meetings as emphasizing personal diplomacy while leaving major disagreements unresolved.
Trump said afterward that he expects to meet Xi twice more before the end of 2026.
Foreign secretary will tell party’s conference ‘we are not here to accept the status quo but to change it’
Ed Miliband will tell campaigners and party members who raised the plight of Palestinians they were right that Labour’s approach had not been enough, saying he was heeding the calls of millions of people by imposing sanctions on Israeli settlements.
The foreign secretary will tell the Labour party conference that the government will take more explicitly progressive foreign policy positions under Andy Burnham, and that the UK will be a leader among like-minded countries in a new age of diplomacy.
Show at Kin Museum in Kiruna marks handover of long-awaited report on abuses committed by the state against the Indigenous people
From a detailed multi-perspectival drawing of reindeer to written accounts of belief systems and childbirth, Johan Turi’s work offers unparalleled insight into his life as a Sami person living in northern Sweden at the start of the 20th century.
In the face of racist discrimination, land disputes and the spectre of encroaching industry, Turi wanted his 1910 book Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sami) to set the record straight about the lives of Europe’s only recognised Indigenous people.
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.
Sussex to discuss future under SB23
Middletown project seeks taxpayer grant
School funding commission to meet
Senate to consider judges, board appointments
Commission to discuss rural healthcare, measles outbreak
Sussex to discuss SB23 future
More than a month after pausing any consideration of subdivision plans while debating the impact of newly passed state legislation, Sussex County officials will meet Monday to discuss how they will proceed.
Senate Bill 23, also known as the Housing for Every Delawarean Act, requires municipalities to adopt provisions aimed at increasing their affordable housing stock, including foregoing public hearings for some projects. The law has generated an outsized reaction in Sussex County compared to its northern counterparts due to the sheer number of new subdivision plans in the pipeline there.
During a special joint County Council and Planning & Zoning Commission workshop meeting on Monday, officials are scheduled to discuss “land use development, the Delaware Department of Transportation, and implementation of Senate Bill 23 and House Bill 450,” referring to another state initiative around land planning.
📍 The joint Sussex County will start at 1 p.m. Monday, Sept. 28, at the Sussex County Public Safety Complex, located at 21911 Rudder Lane in Georgetown. For more details, click here. There does not appear to be a virtual attendance option.
Middletown project seeks taxpayer grant
The Council on Development Finance, a state government board that considers applications for taxpayer-backed grants for economic development projects, will meet Monday morning to hear from a developer looking at a Middletown project.
Information on the company, identified only as SJRC LLC in the meeting notice, is scant ahead of the meeting, but it is seeking $1.9 million for a Level II Site Readiness Fund grant, which would fund site preparation for a future project.
If approved, it would be tied for the third largest grant given out by the Meyer administration since he took office in January 2025.
📍 The Council on Development Finance will meet at 10 a.m. Monday, Sept. 28, at the Delaware Public Archives, located at 121 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
School funding commission to meet
The Public Education Funding Commission — tasked with recommending reforms to the state’s 85-year-old school funding system — will meet on Monday for the first time since Gov. Matt Meyer signed two bills into law that lay the groundwork for Delaware to implement a new school funding system advanced out of a Senate committee.
One of the bills, sponsored by State Sen. Laura Sturgeon (D-Brandywine Hundred), enabled the Delaware Department of Education to begin implementing the hybrid school funding model. It also included a mandate that no school receive less money under the model than it would have under the previous funding model.
Sturgeon, who serves as chair of the PEFC, also introduced Senate Bill 303, which establishes it as a permanent body to continue studying and evaluating the state’s funding formula in the years to come.
On Monday, the task force will discuss the first phase of implementation updates. The group will also discuss student growth updates and a “support draft framework” for school performance.
The meeting comes a few days after Delaware Secretary of Education Cindy Marten unveiled a draft framework that consists of five tiers, ranging in support and accountability measures for district schools and charter schools. The universal expectation is for schools to be in Tier 1, which has the lowest level of intervention.
While additional supports are introduced at Tiers 2 and 3, state intervention begins at Tier 4 and is carried into Tier 5.
If none of the state-implemented supports work, the school would be placed in Tier 5 — resulting in receivership, where the Delaware Department of Education would take over operation of a school and appoint leadership, until conditions improved.
📍 The Public Education Funding Commission will meet at 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 28. The meeting is virtual-only For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Senate to consider judges, board appointments
The State Senate will reconvene Tuesday for a special session to consider a slate of 18 gubernatorial appointments as well as Delaware’s new surgeon general, Dr. Neil Hockstein.
Among those to be considered are seven new judges, including corporate attorney Kyle Lachmund who has been nominated for an all-important vice chancellor seat on the Court of Chancery. The other 11 appointments are largely to administrative boards of commissions, but include three on the Delaware State Board of Elections, and one to the University of Delaware Board of Trustees.
Prior to the special session, all 18 appointees and Hockstein will testify during the Senate Executive Committee meeting, giving lawmakers the opportunity to discuss their backgrounds and roles.
📍 The Senate Executive Committee will meet at 12 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 29, at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. The full Senate is scheduled to meet at 4 p.m. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Commission to discuss rural healthcare, measles outbreak
The Delaware Health Care Commission will meet on Thursday to provide updates on the state’s measles outbreak, as well as discuss a multi-million-dollar federal grant meant to bolster rural health.
Earlier this summer, Delaware declared an outbreak of the measles after multiple residents in Kent County tested positive for the virus.
Additionally, the commission of state health leaders will discuss a federal program in which Delaware received $157 million to improve its rural health access.
📍 The commission will meet at 9 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, at the Herman M. Holloway Sr. Health and Social Services Campus, located at 1901 N. DuPont Highway in New Castle. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Lamar Jackson completed a 27-yard pass to Zay Flowers and alertly called a timeout with one second left, setting up Tyler Loop’s 56-yard field goal to cap a stunning seven-second drive that gave the Baltimore Ravens (2-1) victory over the Dallas Cowboys (1-2) in Brazil. The Ravens and Cowboys put on a entertaining show in front of a crowd of 72,792 during the NFL’s third game in Brazil and first in the city of Rio de Janeiro. For a moment, it looked as though it would be the Cowboys who would win the game in regulation.
Phillies were at risk of blowing comfortable wildcard lead
Victory over Rays deprives Diamondbacks of comeback
Bryce Harper and Edmundo Sosa homered, and Zack Wheeler delivered like a Game 7 ace to bring the Philadelphia Phillies back from the brink of collapse and send them into the playoffs. Their 7-3 win over the Tampa Bay Rays on Sunday clinched the final National League wildcard berth.
The Phillies could have clinched a playoff berth as early as Wednesday before they lost four straight games and nearly coughed up their wildcard lead to Arizona. But the Phillies win on Sunday, meant they snatched the final wildcard place in the National League.
John Kennedy pushes back against such spending as pro-Trump ‘public service announcements’ air before midterms
As the White House expands a taxpayer-funded advertising campaign to promote Donald Trump’s political agenda before the November midterm elections, Senator John Kennedy told CBS News on Sunday “there ought to be a rule” against such spending – before tacitly admitting such spending is “probably” illegal.
Kennedy, the US president’s fellow Republican, was asked by Margaret Brennan, the CBS Face the Nation host, about the White House spending to air multiple ads featuring Trump – including one that was produced for his 2024 election campaign.
A new Brookings Institution study notes the "strikingly physical" economic footprint of AI's buildout, from specialized chips and electricity to purpose-built data centers. (Two-thirds of a data center's costs are IT equipment, with one-third going to real estate and its associated power infrastructure.) "At an average of 3.63 percent of GDP per year, the projected buildout would be larger relative to the economy than the major U.S. canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunications investment booms."
This is pushing up prices for workers, electricity, and even commercial real estate (as well as consumer products that use chips), notes the Wall Street Journal, and reducing the construction on new houses and apartment buildings. And in addition, the paper points out, projections for this buildout "would double the electricity consumption of the entire U.S. residential sector."
The calculations come from Columbia Business School finance/real estate professor Stijn van Nieuwerburgh — and Reuters explains their significance:
Just as the rail and telecoms expansions led to notable bubbles and busts, Van Nieuwerburgh wrote that the extent of the buildout, the still-untested revenue streams, and the intricate financing structure emerging around AI mean it could be primed for a fall. "This is freaking complicated," he said in a briefing with reporters of the arrangements emerging between AI firms, major tech hyperscalers, banks, private credit lenders, real estate firms, and a host of other players involved in building what he conservatively estimated at 183 gigawatts worth of new data-center capacity over the next seven years, compared with about 57 gigawatts currently installed.... The investment underway already has outstripped what the major players can fund from their own cash flows. The shift to outside financing has increased leverage, redistributed risks across the economy, and made the venture dependent on revenue streams that have yet to be proven, Van Nieuwerburgh noted in the paper, which will be presented on Friday...
"These developments do not imply that financial distress is imminent. Strong growth in AI applications, high utilization, and continued improvements in model capability could support the projected infrastructure and generate stable cash flows," he wrote. "But the combination of uncertain demand, rapid technological change, execution bottlenecks, and high leverage creates meaningful downside risk if expectations are revised." As an example, he wrote that the AI industry will need to be earning about $3.7 trillion in annual revenue by 2032 to achieve the expected return on the investment, and "given current estimates of annual combined revenues of OpenAI and Anthropic of around $100 billion, revenues would need to grow at roughly 80% per year."
The paper suggests policies that "improve measurement and transparency" for financing.
Slinger Francisco, who performed as the Mighty Sparrow, died on Sunday surrounded by family in New York
Slinger Francisco, known on stage as the Mighty Sparrow and dubbed the “calypso king of the world”, has died aged 91.
Francisco, who got his breakthrough in calypso music with his 1956 hit song Jean and Dinah, died peacefully surrounded by his family in New York on Sunday, his family said in a statement.
Polling for rights group shows issue is concern for voters and many feel recent policies have had negative effect
Free speech will be a big concern for voters at the next general election, with the government’s current approach on the issue perceived by many to be bad for Britain, polling suggests.
Three in five people said a political party’s position on free speech would affect how they voted at a general election. The human rights organisation Liberty, which commissioned the polling from More in Common, claimed the results showed that Labour’s failure to protect free speech could cost it votes.
Hurricane Nolo is moving away from Hawaiian islands but threat of heavy rain, flash floods and strong winds persists
Hurricane Nolo was moving away from the Hawaiian islands on Sunday, but the threat of heavy rain, flash flooding and strong winds persisted in areas of the island chain still recovering from previous storms.
Nolo was about 365 miles (585km) south-south-west of Honolulu and moving away from the Big Island at about 12mph (19km/h). But the Hawaii county civil defense agency said a high wind warning, wind advisory and high surf advisory remained in effect for parts of the island through Sunday evening as Nolo’s maximum sustained winds rose to 115mph.
The United States made a stunning rally to capture an 11th consecutive Presidents Cup title on Sunday, completing a 17-13 victory over the Internationals with Donald Trump in attendance.
Jacob Bridgeman secured the clinching point at Medinah by sinking a four-foot par putt at the 18th hole to defeat Australian Min Woo Lee 1-up.
Couple was seriously injured after attack on 19 September and are mourning the death of their French bulldog
A bear attack last weekend has left a California couple seriously injured and mourning the death of their French bulldog, who tried to protect them from the animal.
In the early hours of 19 September, Jeff Wilson, who lives in rural northern California, let his dog Cassie go outside, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Just some feedback and buyer beware, to save someone else the trouble.
I placed an order with 1 Wheel Parts on August 31st, and recieved an email message after ordering, informing "Thanks for your purchase! We're currently getting your order ready for shipment. I am currently running anywhere between 1-14 business days on shipping ALL orders. . This is a one man operation! So please be patient! You order will be made and shipped. Emails are responded to within 1-5 business days. We’ll send you a notification as soon as your order is on its way."
While I would have preferred the company communicate that on their page, prior to placing an order, I was okay with it to support a small business.
I then emailed them on Sept 15th, as I had not received tracking or my order yet. They responded on the 16th that "I have your order in my pile. I fell a little behind! It will ship by this Friday at the latest!"
I appreciated the honestly, and looked forward to receiving my order a few days later, as communicated.
Its been 11 days, Ive contacted them twice since then, and recieved no response, no tracking, and no order. They use the Shop App for tracking, but it shows no information, other than the order being placed.
Local people say members of WhatsApp group noticed suspicious activity around vans in Whelford overnight
In the early hours of Sunday morning, a resident of the village of Whelford was driving home from a party when she saw three white vans parked on a country road. She was immediately suspicious, she said, and all the more so when she spotted a “large group of hooded and balaclavaed” men. She called 999 and police arrived on the scene 15 minutes later.
The resident, who asked not to be named but reportedly is a local farmer, told the Press Association: “It would appear that by doing so I just derailed whatever they [the men] were planning. A plucky amateur shouldn’t be spotting an unusual bit of activity at 1am when the airbase is on high alert. I think it’s absolutely astonishing.”
At least one person killed and about 110,500 households still without power from North Carolina to New England
A strong, deadly storm known as a nor’easter battered the US’s east coast over the weekend, bringing power outages, flooding, damaging winds and hazardous ocean conditions.
Trees and power lines were knocked down across the region, at least one person was killed and hundreds of thousands were left without electricity.
US attorney general argues that president was ‘sick and tired’ of inaccurate reporting by CNN, MS Now and Politico
Donald Trump’s attorney general, Todd Blanche, argued on Sunday that the administration was permitted toban three news outlets from the White House because “it is a privilege and not a right to be there”.
Appearing on the ABC News program This Week during the second week of the White House’s dispute over press credentialing and access, Blanche also said that the administration took the decision to ban CNN, MS Now and Politico beginning on 19 September because the president was “sick and tired” of what he considered to be those media outlets’ inaccurate reporting.
Arizona rider first US champion since Lance Armstrong
Pre-race favourite Evenpoel fails to add second gold
Brandon McNulty, a UAE Emirates teammate of Tadej Pogacar, succeeded the Slovene as world champion with an unexpected solo win in the men’s UCI road race in Montreal.
In the biggest triumph of his career, the 28-year-old American took his country’s first win in the UCI’s blue riband event since Lance Armstrong’s lone victory in Oslo in 1993.
Breanna Stewart produced yet another clutch performance in the WNBA playoffs with 34 points and 12 rebounds for the New York Liberty in a 91-75 victory over the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx to open their best-of-three first-round series on Sunday.
Stewart, the two-time league MVP, added six assists, two steals and two blocks. She shot 11 for 18 from the floor with her friend and former college teammate Napheesa Collier, the 2024 WNBA defensive player of the year, guarding her most of the afternoon.
I’ve had my Pint X for about 3 years now and it’s been great I love the thing to death. Currently in college so it’s be incredible for my commute.
Unfortunately, this past Friday I got on the board and was riding for a few minutes when I tried to get over a bump, it nosedived and completely shut off.
Now it’s unresponsive, no lights at all, and when I plug it in the light stays green on the charger and nothing happens. Something else to note is the wheel has noticeably more resistance than normal. It’ll move an inch and then get more stiff then move another and so on.
I looked around to see if other people had a similar issue and I mostly found people saying that the controller is fried. I reached out to FM to see what they thought but they essentially just told me to send it in. It’s out of warranty even though I only put about 350 miles on it, and I don’t have the $$$ to pay for FM to fix it.
I’m thinking about just buying a new controller secondhand or doing a budget VESC conversion but I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anything else that possible broke before I chalk it up to only the controller that went bad.
I appreciate any feedback anyone can give me greatly. Thanks.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rep. Ro Khanna said Sunday that Democrats should consider impeaching President Donald Trump for a third time if they regain control of the House, arguing that doing so would establish standards for presidential conduct rather than simply punish Trump.
Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, the California Democrat cited several potential grounds, including Trump’s initiation of war with Iran without congressional authorization, firings of federal employees and allegations involving foreign governments and the Trump family. “It’s about setting a standard,” Khanna said.
Khanna also urged the administration to accept Iran’s proposed seven-day ceasefire framework aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump publicly rejected that proposal Saturday, while Iranian officials said Sunday that diplomacy remained the only viable solution.
Democratic leaders have not committed to impeachment if they win the House. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has said relevant committees would determine what oversight or accountability measures are warranted.
Republicans argue another impeachment would be politically motivated. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan said Sunday that Democrats would use control of the chamber to investigate Trump, his family and senior administration officials rather than conduct “legitimate oversight.”
Trump was impeached twice during his first presidency and acquitted by the Senate both times.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for calm in Northern Ireland on Sunday after the Orange Order was given the go-ahead by the High Court in Belfast in a late-night sitting.
The USC Trojans have suspended their linebacker Desman Stephens II after what was described as a “disgusting play” that left Oregon quarterback Dante Moore in hospital.
Moore was carted off the field after a late hit by Stephens in the first half of Oregon’s 41-27 win over USC on Saturday. During the play, Moore took off on a scramble. As he attempted to slide, he was hit in the head by Stephens, who was called for targeting and disqualified from the game. Moore was taken to hospital, and an Oregon spokesperson later said the quarterback had movement in all of his extremities and was being evaluated.
Vučić not allowed to seek third presidential term and election will test his grip on rule after widespread protests
Serbia’s populist president, Aleksandar Vučić, has resigned to pursue an attempt to become prime minister in an early parliamentary election that will test his firm rule in the Balkan country after nearly two years of protests.
Vučić’s second presidential term would otherwise end in May next year. He is banned by the constitution from seeking a third term and said he was resigning to lead his rightwing Serbian Progressive party (SNS) in the 25 October ballot.
Waymo's self-driving car technology "continues to outperform human benchmarks," the company claimed this week. "It was involved in 841 fewer injury-causing crashes — an 82% reduction compared to human drivers."
Electrek reports:
We've seen various Waymo crash data before, with Waymo claiming crash reductions. That's all well and good when the company says it, but we've also seen independent data confirming similar (though lower) crash reduction numbers...
Waymo has enough miles that it's ready to start quoting how many injuries it has prevented, and the number is pretty high. Its newest crash data states that it had operated a total of 271 million driverless miles through June of this year, which is 50 million more miles added in the 3 months since its end-of-March update. Over those miles, Waymo says there was an 82% reduction in crashes that caused injury, and a 95% reduction in crashes that cause "serious injury or worse" [compared to human drivers].
Waymo also says that compared to human drivers it's reduced injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians by 93%, cyclists by 86%, and motorcyclists by 82%.
Waymo's analysis comes from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and Phoenix, and its blog post includes video showing some near-misses where it says its automated system prevented an injury-causing collision.
Andy Burnham will fight the next election with a pledge to finally fix the broken social care system, acknowledging he is willing to expend political capital by asking taxpayers to cover the cost.
As Labour’s party conference began in Liverpool, he pledged to “rip the plaster off” to radically transform care, setting out a vision for a universal service that would be free at the point of use for everyone in England.
Counter-terrorism police investigate whether Iran is behind suspected bomb plot after member of public calls 999 over suspicious vehicles
Counter-terrorism police are investigating whether Iran is behind a suspected bomb plot after armed officers found explosives on three vans parked minutes from an RAF base used by the US military.
The Guardian understands that after five men were arrested on terrorism charges, investigators were examining materials found in the vans, with an initial view being they were consistent with improvised explosive devices.
Thom Tillis says Trump’s decision to back Paxton over John Cornyn has put the Senate seat at risk for Republicans
US senator Thom Tillis on Sunday criticized Donald Trump, his fellow Republican, for the president’s support of Ken Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn in the Texas Senate Republican primary.
“He made a colossal mistake,” Tillis, a frequent Trump critic from North Carolina, said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union in reference to the president’s support of Paxton who defeated Cornyn in the May primary.
Apologies if this is not the place to ask these questions. New to this.
Bought a pint on FB marketplace. Worked great. Decided to leave it in my trunk in the Texas heat for a couple weeks. Wasn’t really thinking about it.
When I charged it back up, it is now giving me ‘battery overcharge’ error code in the nosedive app. Will not do anything other than flash yellow 3 times. Anywhere I can take in DFW to fix it? Hope I didn’t ruin this thing.
Voltage was reading 63 when I first tried to start it but now reading 61.9 as I’ve been letting it blink yellow for 5 minutes. Hope this thing isn’t fried. What a dumb move to leave it in my trunk and potential ruin the battery?
On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Alexander Yui, Taiwan representative to the U.S., join Margaret Brennan.
Even Andy Burnham’s closest allies accept that deposing Keir Starmer to install their man as leader was a huge political gamble. But if the mood at the Labour party conference in Liverpool is anything to go by, it is one that – so far – has paid off.
The contrast with last year, when Starmer retained his grip on the party and Burnham slunk away from Liverpool early, could not be more stark. Their relief at their turn of fortune is tempered only by the fiscal headwinds ahead.
Shabana Mahmood will announce a new legal route for refugees that prioritises Afghan women and girls and Palestinians, unfreezing a scheme that will put the most vulnerable refugees on a faster path to permanent status.
The change marks a shift in Mahmood’s approach to asylum seekers after the abrupt closure of the Afghan resettlement scheme last year and changes that will keep refugee status under constant review for two decades.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A new television advertisement featuring President Donald Trump and rhetoric closely resembling his 2024 campaign messaging aired Sunday on Fox News Sunday with an unusual disclosure: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
The 30-second spot shows Trump walking through a hallway while audio plays from a campaign-era speech describing a “final battle” against the “deep state,” globalists, communists, Marxists, fascists and the “fake news media.” Mediaite reported that the wording is nearly identical to a Trump campaign video released in 2024.
The ad is part of a broader government-funded campaign that has appeared on Fox News, Newsmax and other networks. The White House says the spots are public service announcements intended to promote patriotism and educate Americans, not campaign advertisements.
However, federal appropriations law prohibits taxpayer money from being used for “publicity or propaganda,” and the Government Accountability Office has previously said that restriction applies to communications that are purely partisan or designed to aid candidates or parties. No court has ruled that the Trump ads violate that prohibition.
The campaign has drawn criticism from lawmakers and political figures across party lines, particularly because it is airing weeks before the midterm elections. AP reported that government spending on the ads had already reached hundreds of thousands of dollars.
President Trump said U.S. and British authorities were working together on the investigation. He said he believed the suspects were “looking to do big damage.”
Waltz says Trump rejected Iran’s proposal to end war because they ‘were asking for everything up front’
The Trump administration’s ambassador to the United Nations said the US rejected Iran’s proposal to end the ongoing war there because Iranian negotiators “were asking for everything up front”.
Echoing comments by Donald Trump on Saturday, the president’s UN ambassador, Mike Waltz, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that Iran had asked for relief “from billions and billions of sanctions that are going into place” as part of an economic blockade on Iran. The blockade is aimed at putting pressure on Iran to stop its attacks on vessels in the strait of Hormuz.
I just replaced my foot pads, bumpers and tire and then found this sub. After seeing the mods y’all have done, I’m wondering how long I have until I need to swap out this battery and go for one with more torque and range. How long do y’all think I have?
My one wheel pint will not charge unless I kill the battery. It’s incredibly annoying because I have to ride a little extra if I finish a ride with ten percent left and it’s not enough to go anywhere. If I go for a quick ride and leave my battery at 80% then I only get that much for the next ride- I can’t just top it off. The 10% part is the more obnoxious part. Why is it doing this and can I fix it?
The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Sept. 27, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Sept. 27, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Alexander Yui, Taiwan's representative to the U.S., that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Sept. 27, 2026.
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said that it's "entirely possible" his party wins control of the Senate in the midterm elections, while leaving the door open on his own political future.
I'm really interested in getting a single-wheel board, but I definitely don't want to drop $2,000 on an original Onewheel. I recently came across a good deal on a Funkywheel (which is basically a Trotter). On paper, it looks like it offers pretty much the same experience for a fraction of the price.
Does anyone here own one or have experience with these boards? How does it feel to ride, how's the build quality, and is it actually worth buying as a budget alternative?
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook said Sunday that Democrats retaking the House has looked like a “done deal” for some time and that winning control of the Senate has become “very realistic,” though his comments represent an election analyst’s assessment rather than a guaranteed outcome.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Cook said he expects Democrats could gain roughly 20 House seats and four or five Senate seats. He pointed to competitive Senate races in Michigan, North Carolina, Alaska, Iowa, New Hampshire and Minnesota, with Kansas potentially joining that group.
Cook attributed the changing environment to a familiar midterm pattern: supporters of the president’s party becoming less motivated while opposition voters turn out more heavily and independents move away from the governing party. He described the current environment as a “red undertow” rather than a uniform Democratic wave.
Recent polling provides context for that assessment. A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted Sept. 17-20 found President Donald Trump’s approval at 32%, while Democrats held an eight-point advantage over Republicans when respondents were asked which party they would support for Congress.
Decision Desk HQ’s separate forecasting model has also recently treated control of both chambers as competitive, with its Senate model describing the contest as essentially even.
Cook emphasized that individual races remain uneven and that candidate quality, turnout and local issues can still alter results before Election Day.
Airport chiefs say 2035 operations deadline unachievable as critics say new delay makes case for project ‘even more dubious’
Plans for a third runway at Heathrow are once again up in the air after the prime minister refused to say whether he backs the “contested” project which is delayed by up to four years.
Over the weekend it emerged that Heathrow no longer expects to meet the original 2035 deadline. Instead, the airport hopes to secure planning permission by 2029 and then open the runway “within a decade”, meaning it would not be operational until 2039.
(The Center Square) – With early voting in Illinois underway in most jurisdictions, Lt. Gov. Julianna Stratton – the Democrat hopeful to replace Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., in Congress – sat down with The Center Square to discuss politics, policies…
(The Center Square) — Competitive races across Iowa are expected to determine partisan control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections, where candidates are divided among affordability concerns, farming and tax policies.
Pontiff also uses visit to Catholic shrine at Lourdes to criticise assisted dying as ‘false compassion’
The pope has called on the Catholic church to heal “deep wounds” and “painful errors”, before meeting survivors of child sexual abuse as he continues his four-day visit to France.
Addressing a crowd in a large field near the Catholic shrine of Lourdes on Sunday, Pope Leo XIV called on the church to reckon with its past, without directly referencing sexual abuse scandals in France that affected at least 330,000 children over seven decades.
In recent weeks there has been much speculation in some parts of the media that Andy Burnham would be calling an early general election. Speculation that existed largely in the heads of those writing the stories, as even the most favourable polls suggest that Labour would lose its huge majority and become the largest party in a coalition government. But to stop the chatter dominating his party conference, Burnham made it clear there would be no early election. His reward? Headlines in the rightwing press that he had bottled it. By not calling an election he had never planned to call. Sometimes you just can’t win.
There again, you might call this a first-world problem for the prime minister. This time last year, Burnham had been hanging around the fringes of the conference as he and his allies attempted one of the most half-arsed coups in living memory. One that fizzled out almost before it had started and became the butt of many jokes among Keir Starmer’s inner circle. Andy looked to have blown himself up on the runway, leaving Keir safe for the duration of the parliament.
70% vote against tightening centuries-old neutrality, which far right said was being eroded by sanctions against Russia
Swiss voters have decisively rejected a proposal for a strict definition of neutrality that would have required Switzerland to curb cooperation with Nato and abandon sanctions against Russia.
All cantons and about 70% of voters rejected the proposal for a strictly defined version of neutrality to be written into the Swiss constitution, final results from the Federal Statistical Office showed. The motion had been promoted by the far-right Swiss People’s party (SVP).
"OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest AI models," reports the Associated Press, "as reports of AI agents going rogue mount."
The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching federal government websites acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gathering and distributing information... OpenAI said in a statement that it will resume training "only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards" in place, adding that it expects it will have to "hit pause" again as AI develops and other issues emerge... It is the second time in three months that OpenAI has halted development of its models. The first came in July after disclosure of a cyberattack targeting AI startup Hugging Face, a now notorious incident that raised fears the industry was losing control.
OpenAI "also said it had notified dozens of third parties about improper activity," reports Reuters:
As of mid-September, one person briefed on the matter estimated that OpenAI had found roughly two dozen incidents of its agents acting in undesirable ways. But the number has continued rising as OpenAI teams sift through internal logs of the agents' activities and find previously unknown cases, the two people close to the company said... OpenAI has acknowledged a general need for more transparency around rogue AI behavior... Even so, two people familiar with OpenAI's investigation into its agents' activity described it as locked down and shaped by company lawyers.
The process has been unusually compartmentalized for a company that some former employees say was more open about these issues in the past, the people said. Roughly 100 people were in some way involved in the process to understand the Hugging Face hack, three people briefed on the matter said. During that process, evidence of other incidents surfaced. Reuters has previously reported that OpenAI investigators looking into the Hugging Face breach were discouraged by the company's lawyers from expanding the scope of the investigation to include other incidents. OpenAI said its lawyers did not discourage deeper investigation.
Many incidents have been uncovered by outside researchers rather than OpenAI directly. In several episodes, the agents took problematic actions that went unnoticed by the company for months.
Meanwhile, Axios reports that Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 model "sought to escape a sandbox — a secure testing environment — in 1.5% of test runs, though the company emphasized that these were adversarial experiments where a task couldn't be solved without escaping the sandbox." Anthropic points out that those tests were run "without the additional safeguards we apply in production". But they acknowledged that then Claude Opus 5.5 "when given apparent credentials to a public package registry in a simulated security exercise, took potentially harmful actions in roughly half of cases. Very rarely, pre-release snapshots produced and acted on spontaneous malicious tool calls, and during training some snapshots concealed actions from an automated grader."
Claude Opus 5.5 "showed less misaligned behavior and less cooperation with misuse than any other recent Claude model on nearly all measures," Anthropic adds, and "took overeager or destructive actions less than any other model we tested." But Axios makes an interesting estimate about that 1.5% of test runs (without safeguards). "Anthropic and other companies conduct hundreds of thousands of test runs on their models, or more, sources said. That means even a small percentage of misaligned behavior can still amount to tens of thousands of incidents in which the models behaved in unexpected, sometimes troubling ways."
The sheer number of incidents, which occurred in recent months in internal testing and the real world, indicates that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known. The findings, which are surfacing as part of internal work to assess models and in investigations at both companies into model behavior, raise questions about whether either company — or any top model-maker — is currently capable of establishing complete control over their technology. The episodes include bypassing guardrails, creating message boards, escaping sandboxes, website hijacking, self-prompting or seeking to bypass monitors, sources said. They occurred in internal testing and in the real world, and many have yet to become public as security researchers continue to investigate, sources said...
Some at OpenAI see Hugging Face as a one-off, with disclosures about future incidents likely to be less severe due to improved controls and the unusual nature of the testing they conducted, which involved an unreleased model, sources told Axios. AI security researchers agree that there are simple fixes that will help AI companies avoid aspects of what made the Hugging Face episode appear so dangerous to outsiders.
Other AI executives and safety researchers, however, cautioned that they have limited confidence that AI companies will be able to prevent all problematic model behavior... It's not about how damaging each individual instance was, Connor Leahy, AI researcher and executive director at ControlAI told Axios. The "crazy thing," he said, is that these instances involve "autonomous systems doing things they were told not to do," potentially including crimes.
US-owned firm says average monthly users at its UK arm surged to 700,000 with sales up by a third
Love them or hate them, Lime ebikes are an increasingly common sight on England’s roads with new figures showing annual profits more than doubling thanks to a surge in riders.
Lime’s average number of monthly users jumped 31% to approaching 700,000 as it added more than 4,500 ebikes and scooters to its fleet, taking the total to almost 38,000, the company’s UK arm, Lime Technologies, said in accounts filed at Companies House.
Today the public's appetite for true crime – from TV shows and podcasts to the big screen – has never been bigger, as devotees of the genre even spend their free time trying to solve crimes.
Sylvester Stallone was a struggling actor who wrote the perfect script for himself – and refused to sell it unless he played the title role. He talks about his new memoir, "The Steps," that recounts his rocky road to fame before and after "Rocky."
Firms manipulating process to avoid emission controls and scrutiny of their projects, environmental groups warn
Datacenter developers are manipulating the EPA’s air pollution permitting process to avoid emission controls and scrutiny of their projects, environmental advocates allege.
Companies need federal permits to emit a range of pollutants. In their permit applications, some in big tech are avoiding “major” reviews by dividing their emissions sources into separate, multiple “minor” sources that require less regulatory oversight, the advocates say.
(The Center Square) — One of the closest U.S. Senate races in the country is in Alaska between candidates who offer key similarities and differences in their tax policies.
AI experts discuss the risks inherent in artificial intelligence teaching itself to become smarter; and whether recent declarations of AI's threat to humanity are to be taken seriously.
Seventeen people killed near Johannesburg in suspected ‘illegal goldmining turf war’, as 10 killed in separate incident at barbecue venue near Cape Town
Two separate mass shootings near South Africa’s two biggest cities killed at least 27 people, as the country grapples with one of the world’s highest murder rates amid investigations into corruption and criminality within the police.
The South African police service said on Sunday that 17 people were killed on Saturday night when eight suspects armed with AK-47 assault rifles and pistols opened fire at a bar in Wedela township, about 50 miles south-west of central Johannesburg. At least 15 other people sustained gunshot injuries in that attack, police said.
Got too close to a slanted curb, tried yo save it, tried to bail and run out....... pretty sure my toes touched my shin. Broke metatarsals 2&3 and possibly #4, won't know until I see an ortho. I dont think my hands hit the ground at all.
I'm going to be super disappointed if this ruins my snowboarding season.
"Sunday Morning" explores the latest art exhibits at museums across the country this fall, including a joyous and colorful look at three-dimensional works by Keith Haring at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.
Two of Hollywood's biggest hits this year – "Obsession" and "Backrooms," horror films with tiny budgets directed by YouTube creators – have studios searching for other social media-savvy talent, making YouTube a valuable new kind of film school.
Ping Ping and Fu Shuang to live at Atlanta zoo in Georgia as part of loan deal between Chinese and US governments
Two giant pandas from China arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, on Sunday morning as part of an agreement between the Chinese and US governments.
While in Washington DC for a three-daysummit with Donald Trump, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, announced that the pandas would arrive in Atlanta in the coming days. The loan of the pandas to the Atlanta zoo was one of the few concrete outcomes of Xi’s state visit with the US president, which saw expressions of goodwill between the leaders, but no fixes to any of the longstanding differences between the two countries.
The Guardian spoke with surrogates across the US about what they think of the controversy surrounding the practice
Surrogacy has been thrust into the national spotlight in recent weeks, with both the announcement of Lena Dunham using a surrogate to start a family and the ongoing legal battle surrounding McKenna West, a gestational surrogate who fled to Texas to avoid having an abortion that was requested by the child’s biological parents.
With a renewed public interest on commercial, or compensated, surrogacy, the Guardian spoke with surrogates across the US who shared their experiences and how they feel about surrogacy being part of a global, public conversation.
This past weekend, I visited my boyfriend at his college and one of my top priorities was for us to get more photos together.
On my plane ride back to the university, I scrolled through the 60 or so photos that we took. While all of them captured the happiness of the moment and the excitement that I felt of getting to see him, ultimately, only one photo made the cut for my Instagram post. Why just one, you may ask?
My reasoning was simple –– this particular photo matched the aesthetic of my page.
As a chronically online teenage girl, it has come to my attention that there has been a major change recently in how people (myself included) present themselves online. Across all social media platforms, teens and college students in particular are obsessed with making their accounts look “aesthetically pleasing” with a consistency and cohesiveness to their account.
For both our self-care and awareness, it’s important to recognize that these habits that have become so ingrained in our lives. Social media has already created a draining, divisive, inauthentic world for us to obsess over what our individual posts look like. So, why add to the madness by making us care about what our posts look like collectively?
Now, we can’t just constantly be pointing the finger at social media. While it has changed our lives immensely, we the users are what make up social media and have control over what it becomes. Ultimately, by breaking away from trends, we gradually become more comfortable being ourselves, making social media a more positive environment that celebrates being unique.
It is important to understand what the term “aesthetic” actually means. In the article The Importance of Aesthetics, author Erin Stenson describes this concept as a psychological experience of brain stimulation (or lack thereof) that humans have when interacting with pretty much anything. The experience of whether or not something is pleasing to look at dictates if and how we engage with it in the future.
A couple of the many examples of trending TikTok aesthetics include “Beach Girl,” “Cottage Core,” or one of my personal favorites, the “Frazzled English Woman” aesthetic. Many people who embody these aesthetics and present themselves accordingly on digital platforms are essentially creating a brand for themselves, the impact being the way we perceive others online, and also how we approach what we put on social media.
I have fallen victim to this. The aesthetic I have attempted to curate for myself is the “Downtown Girl” look, achieved by posting city landscapes and subway photos. Whether or not I have succeeded in this attempt or failed miserably, matching this aesthetic is something that I am always conscious of when deciding what to post.
Unfortunately, I found that the need for my account to look consistent with a color palette and photo subjects has actually stopped me from posting photos where I am genuinely happy or in the moment.
My peers do this as well. When scrolling through a close friend’s Instagram account, I noticed that she had deleted a photo of herself taken at a group outing to an apple orchard in October. When I asked her about it, she said she archived the image because “it didn’t match the vibe” of her page.
I did not judge her because I have also done this. It did, however, make me realize how critical we are of not just individual photos that we upload but how they collectively represent us.
We can also look for examples among our favorite influencers and celebrities. Music artist beabadoobee captures her cool rockstar vibe across her social media accounts by consistently wearing dark colors and frequently posting photos of herself rocking out on stage with her electric guitar. She is also typically photographed with a digital camera that makes the images look vintage and faded.
Famous TikTok influencer Lexi Hidalgo, who has close to three million followers, has found the formula to capturing her outdoorsy beach life in her videos. She is usually wearing colorful bathing suits or summer clothes, filming “Outfit of the Day” videos in front of the ocean and making most of her content in front of palm trees or vibrant coastal backgrounds.
Hidalgo and beabadoobee have concerts to promote, brand deals to post and millions of followers to keep up to date. We, on the other hand, have no huge audiences to please, sponsorships or tickets to sell. Yet, we still fixate on our personal digital appearance every single day.
Unlike the digital world we have come to know, life is not aesthetic, and formulating everything we put online separates us from one another. We need to step out of the boxes that we have put ourselves in. Whether you’re the “Cool Girl” or the “Beach Girl,” we are all just people, and authenticity is the best personal brand that one can have.
Cece Cummins is a staff reporter at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached atcecehc@udel.edu.
When the evening takes an unexpected turn, a warm bowl of soup can make dinner easier. These 17 recipes offer creamy chowders, hearty meat soups, noodles, vegetables, and simple bowls for chilly nights.The post 17 soup recipes delivering real comfort…
Kuenssberg puts it to Burnham that, according to the Health Foundation, a system offering adult social care free at the point of delivery (like healthcare delivered by the NHS) would cost £18bn.
Burnham says the cost is “not that high” (ie, not as high as £18bn).
Not that high.
But can I directly deal with this issue of the costs?
Louise Casey is still doing an official review for us, so I will set out the vision, if you like, on Tuesday [in his speech to the conference].
Louise will then help us with the how. How do we make this happen? When can we make it happen?
HOUSTON, Texas — A University of Houston student whose parked car was riddled with police gunfire during a July shootout was initially told the city owed her nothing, even though authorities do not accuse her of any wrongdoing.
Abigail Trujillo, 20, was working at Highland Village on July 6 when Houston police confronted Jamarcus Spates, who was driving a reportedly stolen vehicle. Nine officers opened fire, and dozens of bullets struck Trujillo’s Nissan Altima, totaling it. She still owed money on the vehicle and depended on it for school and work.
When Trujillo sought compensation, city attorneys denied her claim and wrote that they “regret your inconvenience.” The dispute highlights a broader legal fight over whether governments must compensate innocent property owners when police destroy property while pursuing suspects.
A similar Texas case involved Vicki Baker, whose McKinney home was heavily damaged by a SWAT team pursuing a fugitive. In May, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling requiring McKinney to pay Baker nearly $60,000 under the Texas Constitution.
After publicity surrounding Trujillo’s case, Houston Mayor John Whitmire said the city had “totally mishandled” it. He said officials would help replace her car and review other previously denied property-damage claims.
La Salle College High School (PA) defeated Salesianum, 28-10, Friday night. The loss was Salesianum football’s first this season.
The Salesianum captains start to walk to mid-field for the coin toss prior to their game against La Salle.
Swoop and a pair of Eagles cheerleaders stand at midfield. The Eagles celebrated their Friday Night Captains Program which helps promote and celebrate local high school football.
The teams go through the coin toss with Swoop and the Eagles cheerleaders in the background. As a part of the Friday Night Captains program, the Eagles will make a donation to both football programs.
Sallies quarterback Brady Nabb fires a pass on the game’s opening possession.
Salesianum defender, Jett Healy, attempts to knock the pass down on La Salle’s first offensive possesion.
Sallies senior Liam Sherlock finds an opening to run through against the Explorer defense.
The Salesianum student section was packed as they cheered on the Sals.
Sallies senior Tysir Jones races down the right sideline on his 78-yard reception. This play came right after La Salle took the lead on its prior drive.
Jones was brought down at the La Salle two-yard line. Jett Healy scored the game tying touchdown on the next play.
Various factors block sufferers of disease from receiving treatment that is effective and has widespread availability
Sickle cell patients are missing out on an effective treatment despite widespread US hospital access to the technology, new research has found.
That treatment is called a red blood cell exchange, a procedure that discards a patient’s damaged red blood cells while simultaneously mixing the patient’s remaining plasma, platelets and white blood cells with red blood cells from a donor before returning them to the body.
President has let rip with swearwords in recent months, redefining norms about acceptable language in public office
With a lifetime of political memories stretching back to John F Kennedy’s assassination and the Black civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Cheryl Johnson had one complaint above all else about today’s politicians: the swearing.
“All this cursing in politics, we never heard that before,” said Johnson, a retired social worker living in the Pittsburgh area. “Words are very powerful, and the past 45 presidents of this country, have not used such vile language.
Bears are increasingly entering places where humans live in the US, forcing wildlife workers to make tough decisions
Dan Thompson, supervisor of the large carnivore section of the Wyoming game and fish department, enjoys the field work of capturing mountain lions, wolves, black bears and grizzly bears to study them.
“I have always been personally intrigued with carnivores and their role throughout any ecosystem,” Thompson said. “I actually feel very fortunate to get paid to do what we do.”
Grassroots organizer Yasmin Radjy on the Democratic ground game leading into the midterm elections
In the run-up to the US midterm elections, Swing Left – a grassroots political group focused on electing Democrats to office – has spent time canvassing in dozens of districts across the country to hear from hundreds of thousands of voters.
Now, with fewer than 40 days until the US midterm elections, the group’s executive director, Yasmin Radjy, sets out what she feels Democrats have been getting right and wrong this election cycle, and why these races are vital for the party’s future control of the US Congress in the years to come.
Chilly fall evenings call for a steaming bowl of something homemade. These 13 soup and stew recipes bring together rich broths, tender meat, creamy vegetables, and familiar flavors for a filling dinner.The post 13 hearty fall soup and stew dishes…
Decision to allow development of 190 new homes in north Somerset sparks campaign for change in the law
Houses can be built on floodplains even if they fail a crucial safety test, according to a high court judgment that will be of “immense interest” to developers across England and Wales.
The ruling clears the way for a highly controversial development of 190 new homes on north Somerset’s floodplains, despite the site being in “flood zone 3a”, the highest level of flood risk before land is considered a functional floodplain.
People evacuated from village after men are arrested on suspicion of explosives offences near Gloucestershire airbase used by US forces
Counter-terrorism police are leading the investigation in which several men were arrested on suspicion of explosives offences near an RAF base used in American attacks against Iran.
After the declaration of a major incident at RAF Fairford, a bomb squad was sent to the village of Whelford with extra security measures, including the fortification of entrances to the base, put in place. Roadblocks and armed police have also been seen in the area over the weekend.
Two troops of chacma baboons are breaking into homes and shops but animal rights activists insist coexistence is the answer
Cape Town’s city council has said it will “imminently” round up two baboon troops coming into repeated conflict with residents. The animals will be sterilised and permanently moved to a newly constructed sanctuary. The plan has been fiercely criticised by animal rights activists, who say the monkeys should remain roaming freely, and that less destructive options have not been properly considered.
Cape Town’s baboon problem has been brewing since the 2000s, after the city stopped culling troops in the late 1990s after pressure from the public. But in the past two years it has reached boiling point. A 2025 census found that the population had grown by a third since 2000, from 360 baboons to 493, now living in 12 managed troops.
The streaming channel was full of the president’s vanity and myopia. It was also deeply, deeply dull
Are you currently at an airport? Strapped to a hospital bed, with various tubes protruding from your body? Maybe you’re on a treadmill or visiting an elder care facility? Chained to a radiator in the basement from the Saw movies?
If you said yes to any of these questions, you might be watching cable news while reading this column. Or maybe you’re one of the hundreds of people currently watching Donald Trump’s answer to cable news, Trump TV – a YouTube streaming channel that airs nothing but White House-sanctioned content 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
Ukrainian forces airdrop supplies to city where bodies are left to be eaten by dogs because of deadly risk from drones
The phone message sent out of Russian-occupied Oleshky was grimly matter-of-fact: food had finally run out for the 2,000 or so civilians, including 50 children, remaining in the city and its surrounding villages.
“We’re in Oleshky [and] we can’t get out. We’re going hungry … Right now, I’ve got absolutely nothing to eat,” read the message from a woman in the besieged city who was waiting to be evacuated by the occupying forces.
‘The push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives’
The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like. The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”.
When Reich asked whether this state would be a democracy, he got a cool no. “Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back,” he was told. “To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.”
Before she became infamous as one of the youngest American women ever sentenced to die, Christa Gail Pike was a North Carolina teenager who broke into a community center to steal some candy. At 5-foot-3, with thick auburn curls, she’d been in trouble at home and in school but not with the law. A juvenile court judge put Pike on probation, but she ran afoul of the rules. In the fall of 1991, when she was 15, Pike was sent to the Juvenile Evaluation Center in Swannanoa. She arrived just before Thanksgiving.
Nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains, just minutes away from Asheville, the center first opened in the 1960s as a “haven for troubled children,” in the words of the press. It was supposed to be an alternative to more severe “training schools,” but by the 1990s was skewed toward punishment. According to former staff, progress was measured in points, which were added or subtracted according to a child’s behavior. Infractions ranged from having “contraband” — including pencils or pens, which were allowable only in sanctioned study areas — to running away.
The system didn’t work for Pike. “She was not following the rules or she was doing something to sabotage herself,” one social worker would later testify at a hearing in Pike’s case. Although her violations weren’t generally serious, they did keep her stuck in place. Most kids stayed at the center for a few months; Pike stayed for well over a year.
It seemed possible that Pike might not actually want to go home. From the time she was a little girl, she’d been hurt and neglected by the adults who were supposed to protect her. Months before arriving in Swannanoa, Pike had been temporarily removed from her home by the state’s social services agency, which found that her mother’s live-in boyfriend was physically and sexually abusing her. Shortly afterward, Pike wrote a letter to her best friend saying she wanted to kill herself. Among a list of reasons, she wrote that she’d been raped by a different man, a neighbor who assaulted her when she was 11 years old.
Nevertheless, Pike stood out among her peers at the juvenile center. She was engaging and intelligent; she earned her GED and became a teacher’s assistant. “Christa was open and willing to grow,” one counselor would later write in a clemency letter on Pike’s behalf. “Though she had psychological struggles and resulting behavioral difficulties, I could see that Christa was a good child who was trying to find her place in the world. I never saw Christa act aggressively or violently. She was trying to figure out how to heal from her traumas.”
“She is so much more than the darkness which has followed her from childhood into adulthood.”
Pike finally left Swannanoa in March 1993. The following year, the counselor got a letter from her in the mail. “She shared that she would be visiting Asheville soon and invited me to meet up with her,” the counselor recalled in the clemency letter. But the visit never happened. In January 1995, Pike was arrested alongside two other teenagers while enrolled at a Jobs Corp program in Knoxville, Tennessee. At 18, she was charged with first-degree murder.
The crime seemed pulled from a horror movie — an act of savagery that would become imprinted in the public psyche. Nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of Pike’s classmates, had been lured into a secluded corner of a city park, then beaten, bludgeoned, and slashed with a boxcutter. Her body was found naked from the waist up. On her chest, her attackers had carved a pentagram.
Pike admitted her guilt within days. In a tape-recorded statement to investigators, she sobbed that she had begun hitting Slemmer and just didn’t stop. “I literally thought I was going crazy cause I’d never seen myself act like that before in my life,” she said. Before long, witnesses came forward with disturbing new details. In the public’s eye, Pike transformed from an 18-year-old who committed a shocking act of violence into a woman driven by the devil himself.
Weeks after her 20th birthday, Pike was convicted and sentenced to die.
Pike had been on death row for nearly 30 years when Tennessee announced her execution date: September 30, 2026. In a lengthy clemency petition submitted earlier this month, Pike’s lawyers urged Gov. Bill Lee to spare her life. They told a story of Pike’s upbringing that her jury never heard, a childhood shaped by untreated mental illness and sexual abuse beginning when she was just two years old. They enclosed dozens of letters from people who have known Pike over the years, including in North Carolina.
“We in North Carolina — myself included — failed Christa.”
One of the letters came from the lawyer who represented Pike in her first juvenile delinquency hearing, not long before she was sent to Swannanoa. Now a retired tribal court judge, he was filled with regret. “In my view, this proceeding was the most pivotal event of Christa’s sad childhood,” he wrote. It set in motion everything that would follow. Rather than treating her like a vulnerable child in need of support, the juvenile system had compounded her trauma through more punishment, with devastating consequences.
“I regret to tell you, Governor, that we in North Carolina — myself included — failed Christa,” he wrote. He urged Lee to make up for his state’s mistakes. “She is so much more than the darkness which has followed her from childhood into adulthood.”
If Lee does not show mercy — and barring any last-minute intervention by the courts — Pike will be executed by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Wednesday at 10 a.m. She would be the 19th woman executed in the country in the modern death penalty era — and the first woman put to death in Tennessee in two centuries.
Pike, who turned 50 this year, has spent her entire adult life at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, nearly all of it in solitary confinement. Although there was one other woman living under a death sentence when Pike first arrived at the prison, her sentence was commuted and she was paroled in 2011.
One of Pike’s co-defendants was released long ago, while the other, her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, remains eligible for parole. Shipp was 17 when he participated in Slemmer’s murder, which prevented prosecutors from seeking the death penalty under state law. In a letter asking Lee to grant clemency, Shipp’s trial lawyer wrote that he was surprised that Pike’s attorneys had not emphasized her boyfriend’s role at her 1996 trial. “When I represented Tadaryl in his 1997 trial,” he wrote, “the defense I presented was to shift as much blame as possible to Christa.”
Like many women condemned to die, Pike became an object of lurid fascination. In 1998, after Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker, interview requests poured in from talk shows, filmmakers, and journalists all over the world, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, which compared the level of interest to that of the late Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. Pike, the newspaper said, “has become a death-row celebrity, a child star of the true-crime beat.”
The article described Pike as a “savvy subject,” a kinder version of an accusation that has followed Pike from the start: that she reveled in her notoriety while showing no signs of remorse. For many people, including Slemmer’s mother, who plans to witness Pike’s execution, the image of an unrepentant killer basking in attention has remained fixed in time. So has the claim by the lead detective that Pike was filled with excitement by the murder. He told interviewers in the 2025 podcast series “Unrestorable” that Pike was “giddy” while recounting what she’d done. “This was the greatest thing that ever happened to her,” he said. “She was just happy as a lark.”
Audio of Pike interrogation’s does not match these descriptions — and numerous people who know Pike say that she has expressed remorse for years. One woman, who began visiting her 30 years ago, wrote in a clemency letter that Pike has matured into a compassionate person who cares for those around her. “She has told me repeatedly that she would trade places with Colleen Slemmer so that her mother … could have her daughter back,” she wrote.
Although the Tennessee Department of Correction routinely denies interviews with people under a death sentence, Pike addressed the matter through one of her attorneys for the 2025 podcast. The older she has gotten, she said, the more she has absorbed the magnitude of what she stole from Slemmer and her family. “She had a whole world of her own that I just jerked her out of. And there’s a big empty spot there, where she could be shining right now. And she’s not.”
Pike’s case may stand out for its brutality and sensationalism, but her background shares much in common with other people on death row, especially women, whose lives are frequently marked by sexual violence and trauma. One clinical psychologist describes the amount of abuse and neglect Pike experienced from the time she was a preschooler as “almost impossible to grasp.”
This history should have been key to Pike’s defense. But like many others condemned to die, she was also tried in an era in which attorneys assigned to capital cases were often not up to the task. Pike was represented by a pair of court-appointed lawyers who were inexperienced and overworked. Neither had ever handled a capital case — nor had her trial judge.
Perhaps most telling, her own lead attorney would end up being one of a slew of people who seemed eager to cash in on the case. Post-conviction records show that he asked Pike to sign an agreement giving him the rights to her story. “My thought was, I would write a book on Christa, the human side of Christa,” he later testified at a court hearing. “I thought to do that I would probably need to get some kind of release. It was one of those spur of the moment things. I drew it up, I took it over, she signed it. Nothing ever became of it.”
“Looking back,” he added, “it’s probably something I shouldn’t have done.”
There would be no shortage of people telling Pike’s story. Her crime has been described in countless articles, podcasts, and sensationalistic TV series with names like “Mean Girl Murders.” All of them include a disturbing and singular detail that has come to define the case: Slemmer’s body was found with a piece of her skull missing. It would be discovered in the pocket of a jacket belonging to Pike.
“When the piece of skull got out, that’s kind of the death knell for Christa,” a former Knoxville journalist who now creates true-crime coloring books told the “Unrestorable” podcast. “You’re not coming back from that.”
Christa Pike wipes away tears in a Knoxville, Tenn., courtroom during a 2008 post-conviction hearing challenging her death sentence.Photo: Courtesy of Christa Pike’s legal team
This ghoulish revelation fueled the belief that Pike was driven by satanic beliefs. The murder coincided with a societal fixation now known as the “satanic panic,” in which reports of devil-worshipping cults took hold across the country during the 1980s and ’90s, leading to false accusations and wrongful convictions. Fears were especially pronounced when it came to young people, who appeared to be “dabbling in the trappings of satanism,” as the AP reported in 1988, “whether serious or as a prank.” In most cases, there was nothing to back up the hysteria. But many saw Pike’s case as chilling proof that the crisis was real.
The lead investigator in Pike’s case, Knox County Police Detective Randy York, had attended a training on satanism and cults just before Slemmer was killed. In interviews, he has maintained that the pentagram was the key that unlocked the case; a woman called police to say that her daughter was in the Jobs Corp program and was worried about a satanic cult, which ultimately led York to Pike. But there was a more straightforward link: Slemmer was in the same residential program as her attackers. On the day of the murder, all four teenagers signed out at the same time. Only Slemmer failed to sign back in.
Regardless, it was Shipp, not Pike, who was interested in satanism. The teenager kept a satanic altar in his room. But as his lawyer would later write in his clemency letter for Pike, for all the focus on satanism, “that was never the motivation behind what happened.” By most accounts, Pike targeted Slemmer because she believed that she wanted to steal her boyfriend; Pike has said she did not plan to kill Slemmer, only to fight her. But there was no explaining such a senseless crime. “We were all just really screwed up kids,” Pike said on the “Unrestorable” podcast. “We were all going through things that no one understood.”
Pike’s lawyers have long argued that the media frenzy over the crime made it impossible to get a fair trial. Nearly every prospective juror had heard of the case. News cameras filmed the trial from beginning to end, which cast further scrutiny on Pike’s demeanor. Wearing modest floral dresses day after day, Pike was deemed to be inappropriately cheerful, enjoying the limelight of her case.
In his own letter asking for clemency, Pike’s lead trial attorney, William Talman, said that he, too, was unnerved by his client’s seeming contentment at the crowds in the courtroom. As he remembers it, she told him at one point that she was “happy,” which struck him as bizarre. When he asked her why, he wrote, she responded in a way that has haunted him ever since. “It was the first time in her life that she could remember so many members of her family being there for her.”
It’s possible that Pike would have been sentenced to death no matter what her lawyers did. But her legal team has long argued that Talman and his co-counsel failed their client in key ways. On the eve of the trial, prosecutors offered Pike a plea deal that would have sent her to prison for life. She declined. Pike has said that Talman assured her that a jury would never vote to execute a pretty young girl — an account he has denied. But he conceded in court testimony that he should have done a better job discussing the offer with her.
Case records show that Talman’s most devastating blunder was his mishandling of the sentencing trial — the single most critical part of any death penalty case. Today, capital defense attorneys are trained to prioritize mitigation, delving into a client’s early life to uncover any history of abuse, trauma, and mental illness — factors that can persuade jurors to spare a client’s life. Between Pike’s age at the time of the murder and her harrowing childhood, there was plenty to draw from. A clinical psychologist hired as Pike’s mitigation expert put together binders of information that Talman planned to use. But for reasons long in dispute, Talman decided at the last minute not to call her as a witness.
Christa Pike immediately after her sentence was read in a Knoxville, Tenn., courtroom in 1996.Courtesy of Christa Pike’s legal team
At a post-conviction hearing, Talman cited two reasons for his hasty decision. For one, he had discovered during the trial that the psychologist had previously been in a romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor. Although she would testify that it was long over by then, she admitted that she didn’t disclose it as early as she should have.
The other reason, according to Talman, was that the judge ordered him to hand over copies of his expert’s binders to the lead prosecutor, who flagged parts that might bolster their case for the death penalty. “He had about a million stickies, little sticky notes, in the report,” Talman said. He feared that the file would end up doing more harm than good.
In the end, that’s precisely what happened. Talman did not call the witness with the best chance of conveying Pike’s lifelong trauma, while the state pulled the most damaging details from the defense’s own file to use against his client. In his closing statement, the prosecutor described Pike as a “monster that we have to deal with.” It took the jury less than an hour and a half to sentence her to death.
Colleen Slemmer Would have turned 51 this month. Her mother, May Martinez, has often expressed indignation over the attention devoted to Pike. She feels it has eclipsed the memory of her daughter, a caring young woman who helped students with disabilities and loved working on computers with her stepdad. Martinez told the Nashville Banner that she hopes the execution will bring her peace — “and that Colleen can always be remembered as the sweet little girl that she was.”
Pike’s advocates emphasize that their calls for clemency should never be mistaken for a lack of compassion for her victim. As they stepped up their appeals to the governor last week, youth counselor Sarah Bailey joined a press conference in Nashville, where she said she knew what it was like to lose a loved one to homicide — someone murdered her own son. She also knew what it was like “to have adults decide who you are while you are still becoming a person.” Bailey was convicted of murder for a crime she committed at 16, a devastating mistake that for years defined her “entire identity.”
Finally, she knew Pike. When she got to prison as a frightened teenager, Pike helped her navigate the world around her. “She sent me stamps, she sent me commissary, and she sent me love,” Bailey said. “That said a lot about who she was, and that says a lot about who she has become.”
Bailey echoed what many have said about Pike in recent years. Some of the most urgent pleas for mercy have come from women whose voices are the least often heard. “I’d like to ask that you look past the fact that I am incarcerated when reading this,” one clemency letter reads. “I am an inmate; however, I am also a woman who understands the importance of seeing people as the human beings that we all are.”
“The Christa you will meet today is a far cry from the one who walked through the doors from the beginning,” the letter goes on. “For those of us who have found themselves housed near Christa she has offered hope when there should have only been despair. In a time of pain and struggle, Christa’s small voice rings out to let you know that you are not alone.”
Update: September 28, 2026 On September 28, Gov. Bill Lee released a statement rejecting calls to stop Christa Pike’s execution: “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”
In a statement, Pike’s attorneys — Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, and Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey of the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender — said they are “heartbroken” by the decision. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women,” they wrote. “We will continue to support Christa through every remaining avenue.”
Could this push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33% limit? Interesting Engineering reports:
Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy "hot electrons..."
When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start electrons into action. The most energetic photons create super-charged hot electrons... [but] in fractions of a trillionth of a second, these high-energy particles rapidly cool, dumping their bonus energy as waste heat before ever leaving the solar cell... In collaboration with Maria Antonietta Loi, professor of Photophysics and Optoelectronics, the team created an experimental setup. Using a specialized solar cell material called tin-based perovskite, Loi's lab performed a feat many thought impossible: she slowed the heat loss down by a factor of 1,000.
Suddenly, the extra energy lingered for nanoseconds instead of vanishing in picoseconds... To solve the puzzle, Koster and PhD student Tim Faber built digital simulations to peel back the quantum layers. And discovered a surprising double-action mechanism at work... The simulations matched the exact nanosecond delay observed in the lab... These specialized materials could be used to build a new generation of super-efficient solar cells.
Tin-based metal halide perovskites are non-toxic, eco-friendly crystalline materials for high-performance solar energy conversion... The material possesses an unusually low electron mass. As a result, electric charges move quickly and retain extra thermal energy for extended periods. This combination of broad light absorption, efficient charge movement, and prolonged energy retention makes these materials prime candidates for next-generation solar panels.
"There are many other questions that still need answers," the team said in their announcement, "but in theory, this discovery could allow the creation of more efficient solar cells, beyond the theoretical limit of 33 percent."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the article.
Andy Burnham has said that he is going to “rip the plaster off” to fix the broken social care system, as he set out a vision for a universal service that would be free at the point of use for everybody in England.
The prime minister said the new NHS-style social care service would be funded by “everybody” but did not give further details of how his radical long-term plan would be paid for.
Fears grow that loyalists in key states could use critical period when votes are counted to amplify false claims
Election experts have warned Donald Trump’s administration could use the crucial hours and days after November’s midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce a crackdown on voting.
With less than six weeks remaining until polls close, and control of US Congress in the balance, the post-election “counting window” is seen as as a particularly vulnerable moment by former US federal government officials.
The popular Twitch streamer has been vilified by Republicans, but the socialist commentator has a large audience that some Democrats have courted
It’s only9am and the latest media shitstorm is well under way. Hasan Piker scrolls through his social media feeds as he comes down the stairs of his home in West Hollywood.
An interview with Axios, in which Piker said the US had committed more atrocities than al-Qaida, is blowing up his phone. Requests from reporters arestreaming in. Comments on the interview flood his replies.
A picture of the pylon at Delaware Stadium during the Blue Hens first game of the 2026 season against Merrimack. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The Virginia Cavaliers (3-1) defeated the University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens (2-2), 42-3, on September 26, in the Blue Hens’ final non-conference game of the regular season.
Virginia quarterback Beau Pribula received the snap standing at the Delaware 15-yard line during the Cavaliers’ first offensive possession of the game. Pribula faked a hand-off to the running back on his left and quickly shuffled his feet to reset for a throw to wide receiver Da’Shawn Martin breaking right toward the middle of the endzone.
Pribula hit Martin in stride and completed Virginia’s 13-play opening possession with an 11-yard score. The drive ate up over seven minutes of the opening quarter and was a sign of more to come in Virginia’s 42-3 victory over the Blue Hens, Saturday evening.
The Cavaliers scored touchdowns on four of their six offensive possessions throughout a first half fueled by their passing game. Pribula finished the half with 264 yards passing, completed 21 of his 24 pass attempts and threw for all four of Virginia’s touchdowns.
Martin was on the receiving end of Pribula’s first score on a drive in which the former Penn State and Mizzou quarterback threw a perfect eight for eight to start the game. Fourth year receiver Rico Flores Jr. caught Pribula’s second touchdown throw on the first play of the second quarter and the final two were hauled in by third year receiver Kameron Courtney in the final five minutes of the frame.
The Blue Hens lone scoring drive came in the early stages of the second quarter and featured a good balance of production from the running game and passing game. Running back Jo Silver ran the ball five times for 27 yards and Minicucci completed all four of his passes to get the Blue Hens into Cavalier territory for the first time.
The drive stalled at the Virginia 22-yard line due in part to a holding penalty that negated a first down scramble from Minicucci and the Blue Hens turned to kicker Tucker Smack for a 39-yard attempt. Smack kicked it in giving Delaware its first — and only — points of the night.
The scoring drive provided a spark for Delaware which trailed, 14-3, after the score and the defense capitalized by forcing Virginia’s offense into its only three and out on the night. Any hope those two positive drives provided Delaware fans was extinguished on UD’s next offensive possession.
Facing a collapsing pocket on second down, Minicucci scrambled out to his right and turned upfield for an eight yard gain, sliding to the ground to avoid being met by a pair of Cavalier defenders. Minicucci immediately grabbed the back of his right leg in clear discomfort after the slide and struggled to get to the sideline before the training staff stopped him right before the out of bounds line to check on him.
Minicucci left the game and didn’t return. Junior Braden Streeter took over under center for the Blue Hens with a little under six minutes remaining in the second quarter and played up until UD’s final drive of the game. The ACC Network cameras showed Minicucci on crutches with a brace on his right leg along the sidelines in the second half.
Pribula led the Cavaliers on their first drive of the third quarter and scored his fifth total touchdown on a 14-yard quarterback run. Cavalier backup Eli Holstein took over for Pribula following that drive. Pribula finished the game with an 86 percent completion percentage, 279 yards passing, five total touchdowns and the Cavaliers ahead, 35-3.
Virginia finished the game with 556 total yards of offense and held the Blue Hens’ offense under 200 yards of total offense for the first time since 2023. Virginia entered the game ranked amongst the top 40 defenses in the country allowing under 17 points per game to its opponents.
The biggest concern for the Blue Hens will be the status of their starting quarterback as the team prepares for their first conference game of the season against the Liberty Flames. The Flames beat the Blue Hens, 59-30, at home last season and enter this upcoming game on a three game win streak.
Delaware’s game against the Flames will be played at Delaware Stadium on Friday, October 2. The game will start at 7:00 p.m.
I have finally decided to get a x7 sport or long range from fungineers. By the end of this day, I am going to decide, if it is going to be long range or the sport version and then place the order.
I wanted to ask you guys, what things I should know or read or watch beforehand. I am totally new to one wheels in general, didn’t have one from From future motion. Which apps do you use, do you combine specific apps or use one specifically?
I weigh below 155 lbs, 🥶 so the x7 might be totally over spec’d for me, but it is cheaper than getting an equivalent version from future motion.
Also, I saw in some other post, that people might shred their batteries by certain actions, like letting it go to 0 or stuff like that. Is there anything I need to know, how to handle my battery in a good way?
EDIT: I just placed the order - black x7 sport! I will keep you updated… damn im excited. Hope it doesn’t take 60 days as that was the default during checkout.
The fans who witnessed the United States’ 4-1 thrashing of Peru in Orlando on Saturday did not have to wait long to get their flashbulb moment. It came just four minutes into the match, only moments after 19-year-old Orlando City attacker Justin Ellis headed home the US opener.
Ellis, making his first appearance for the US, sprinted toward the near corner to celebrate, then turned and faced the US supporters in the north end of Inter.co Stadium – a supporters’ section nicknamed “the wall”. Quickly, he was joined by Villarreal defender Alex Freeman, himself an Orlando City product. For a moment, the two former teammates posed arm in arm, gazing up at the home crowd. Then they embraced, laughed, and attempted to run back to the center circle. Gio Reyna, who’d assisted on the goal, shoved him back toward the fans.
As Pope Leo XIV visits France, the number of converts is growing in secular Western countries, and some in Gen Z are rediscovering the faith of their grandparents.
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist speaks with NBC’s Kristen Welker in interview airing on Sunday
Bill Gates has called on the US’s federal legislators and law enforcers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), saying in an interview airing on Sunday that the technology left unchecked could cause “a billion deaths” and “no one thinks self-regulation is enough”.
“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said to Kristen Welker, the NBC Meet the Press host. “And that has to be a required thing.”
The Washington Post was granted rare access to one of five boarding schools the government has opened. They are part grief counseling and part boot camp.
On the last day of the Prairieland trial, in which nine Texas protesters were accused of crimes including providing material support to terrorists, the attorney for activist Benjamin Song presented a novel argument that, if true, would have upended the federal government’s case.
Song had been charged with attempted murder for allegedly firing a gun at the first police officer who arrived on the scene after a noise demonstration outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado on July 4, 2025.
The defense — more than a dozen attorneys representing clients with varying degrees of involvement in the protest — had rested their argument without calling a single expert witness, owing to what they thought was the weakness of the government’s case.
“Attempted murder requires that you intend to kill. And if the government can’t prove that intent, that’s a not guilty — period.”
During closing arguments, however, Phillip Hayes, Song’s attorney, raised what he said was a major flaw in the government’s depiction of what happened: Song never aimed his weapon at the police officer. Relying on evidence introduced by the prosecution — a photograph of the bullet, witness testimony, and CCTV footage of the incident — Hayes said his client never intended to shoot Alvarado Police Department Lt. Thomas Gross.
Rather, Hayes said, Song fired his weapon at the ground and the bullet ricocheted off a hard surface before striking the officer just below the neck. That would explain the plumes of dust that were visible in the video. According to Hayes, the only photo of the bullet, which appears severely bent and with several missing fragments, backs up the theory.
“Attempted murder requires that you intend to kill,” Hayes, a lanky, soft-spoken criminal defense attorney, told the jury on March 11. “And if the government can’t prove that intent, that’s a not guilty — period.”
The jury didn’t bite. Instead of being acquitted, Song was convicted and sentenced to 100 years in prison.
One reason the ricochet theory didn’t play a bigger role in the trial was that the federal government prevented it from being fully aired. Key details about the shooting, and the officer’s actions, were only revealed during the trial itself. Prosecution motions and favorable rulings by the judge, a Trump appointee, made it difficult for Song’s lawyers to fully vet the idea or argue that he had acted in self-defense.
And an independent ballistics expert hired by Song’s defense team before the trial was denied access to the defendant in federal prison. As a routine part of any case about a murder or a shooting involving a police officer, said Daryl Parker, the former Marine Corps officer and criminal defense investigator hired by Song’s team, a ballistics expert will meet with an alleged shooter to collect information. Nothing about the Prairieland case, however, was turning out to be routine.
It was the first time in his 25-year career that the forensics expert had been denied access to a client in a federal facility.
In emails reviewed by The Intercept, Parker and Hayes repeatedly wrote to Federal Medical Center Fort Worth, the federal detention center where Song was held before and during the trial, asking to visit the defendant. All the requests went unanswered. (FMC Fort Worth declined to respond to a request for comment.)
Parker never got a response from the jail official in charge of Song’s detention, let alone visitation rights.
“We sent him everything he asked for,” Parker, speaking publicly for the first time about the case, told The Intercept. “But approval never came.”
It was the first time in his 25-year career that the forensics expert had been denied access to a client in a federal facility.
In the end, members of the jury never received a full airing of the argument nor the multiple pieces of evidence that support it.
The ricochet theory, though, may yet be part of Song’s appeal and the basis of a new trial, according to two lawyers on Song’s defense team in his state-level case. New evidence, including material revealed for the first time in this Intercept investigation, shows that Song, a former Marine reservist and expert marksman, may have never intended to shoot the police officer.
New Evidence
The Prairieland case was touted by the Trump administration as the government’s first prosecution of an “antifa cell,” moving from indictment to trial in the Northern District of Texas in just a few months. For such a complex high-profile case, there wasn’t much time to prepare. And key pieces of information were hidden within or even omitted from discovery.
Buried within the tens of thousands of pages of evidence provided to the defense team was a grainy photograph: the government’s only image of the bullet that struck the police officer. According to two ballistics experts interviewed for this story, the photo is of such poor quality that it is difficult to conclude anything from the image alone.
Shaun Jaikissoon, a former firearms examiner with the New York City Police Department for 10 years who now has his own consulting firm, said the photo of the fragment provided by the prosecution tells us almost nothing and may even be deemed “unsuitable,” meaning it lacks value for a forensic analysis.
Parker, the independent ballistics expert hired by the defense team, said he agreed the photo was of little value.
“It is sparse,” he said. “You should have images of the end of the bullet — 360 degrees — so you can properly evaluate it.”
A bullet photographed on Aug. 26, 2026, as part of an investigation of a shooting involving a police officer at ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center.Photo: Court Filing
Despite the photograph’s limitations, it does reveal that the bullet was severely deformed, indicating a possible ricochet.
“It’s a copper banana,” said Parker. “It obviously struck something.”
The opinion is shared by one of the government’s own witnesses. During the trial, Philip Stout, a forensic scientist for the Texas Department of Public Safety, described the extreme curvature of the bullet as characteristic of a projectile fired into a water tank.
“When you’re dealing with higher velocity bullets, they slow down very quickly, so it gets that curved — I refer to it as a banana shape, but it’s more of a semicircle shape,” said Stout. “What that tells me is that bullet struck something and slowed down very quickly.”
Other questions arose from the shooting and investigation, Parker said. Perhaps most important is the fact that Gross’s bulletproof vest — level IIIA soft body armor — would not have been able to withstand the force of a bullet fired from an AR-15-style rifle at such close range. Even the label on the vest, introduced into evidence by the government, says: “This is NOT intended to protect against rifle fire.”
According to Parker, if the bullet had struck Gross directly — without first hitting another surface or object — it would have ripped through him “like Swiss cheese” and almost certainly killed him. Instead, the bullet came to rest inside Gross’s vest, with Gross sustaining minor injuries. He was released from the hospital a few hours later.
“The standard body armor that police officers wear is not rated for rifles,” Parker said. “It’s only rated for handguns. It’s not even rated for knives.”
“The fact that the officer is not dead, to me, is a big red flag that Song wasn’t aiming at him.”
Another clue that points to a ricochet, according to Parker, is Song’s skill as a marksman, especially given the short distance between the two shooters and Song’s previous training as a Marine.
“The fact that the officer is not dead, to me, is a big red flag that Song wasn’t aiming at him,” Parker told The Intercept.
Together, this new evidence of a ricochet matches the information that became apparent only during the trial when Gross testified that he drew his weapon first and aimed at a fleeing protester. Drawing on this testimony, along with video evidence, Song recounted the same version of events in a statement he read during sentencing.
“When I saw Lieutenant Thomas Gross stop pursuing and point his gun at the back of a running, unarmed protester, like he testified, I was terrified,” Song said. “As a firearms instructor and a United States Marine Corps veteran, I understood what I was seeing. As the evidence shows, I did not want to hurt anyone.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prarieland Detention Center is seen on Jan. 30, 2026, in Alvarado, Texas.Photo: Shafkat Anowar/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images
Shots Fired
That Gross drew first and aimed at a protester’s back were among the facts that, according to Song’s lawyers, were not revealed to the defense until the trial itself. Also missing from the pre-trial discovery was evidence indicating that bullets fired at the scene struck the ground. The marks in the pavement were not documented as part of the investigation.
Given these late-breaking revelations, Song’s lawyers had to scramble in the middle of the trial to put together their argument. Song’s defense team, in a motion for a new trial filed in April, said that the failure to disclose evidence of the bullet strikes sooner deprived them of the ability to make their case that Song never intended to shoot officer Gross.
The existence of bullet strikes was only revealed during the second week of the trial, when evidence from the investigation, headed up by the Texas Rangers, an elite unit within the state’s Department of Public Safety, was divulged in court. Texas Ranger Billy James Hill Jr., responsible for photographing the scene, admitted during cross-examination to finding “recent looking defects in the concrete surface.”
Tailim Song, Benjamin Song’s father and a civil attorney who was part of his son’s defense team, said the ricochet theory only began to take shape when they learned about the deformations in the road.
“It really didn’t come home until the Rangers said there were fresh bullet strikes in the concrete.”
“In my mind,” Tailim Song said, “it really didn’t come home until the Rangers said there were fresh bullet strikes in the concrete.”
The photographs from the scene, however, didn’t include shots of the ground. When asked during the trial whether he had taken any photos of what he believed to be bullet strikes, Hill, the Texas Ranger, responded that it “wasn’t part of my responsibility.”
Hill had taken photographs using a high-tech camera system called a Leica RTC360 Digital Crime Scene Scanner, which creates reconstructions of the alleged events. The reconstruction, however, omitted photographs and chemical swabs of where the bullets had struck the pavement as well as the crucial trajectory analysis and shooter-position determinations. (The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Department of Justice did not respond to questions about the investigation or crime scene reconstruction.)
Ryan Rider, a former Texas police officer who teaches crime scene reconstruction at Tarleton State University, said the technology, if used properly, can provide precise measurements — down to the millimeter — that can be used with other evidence like testimony and physical evidence to track the bullet’s pathway in relation to the shooter.
“It does tell you a story,” said Rider, who is slated to train law enforcement agencies on the Leica system.
Rider — who spoke to The Intercept generally about investigations, since he has not examined the Prairieland evidence — also said shootings involving officers are potentially chaotic environments with multiple agencies involved in collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, and securing the crime scene.
In the Prairieland case, Alvarado Police Department; the Johnson County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office; the Department of Homeland Security; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the FBI; in addition to the Texas Rangers; were all present. Not documenting the bullet strikes — especially if the Rangers knew they were there, as Hill acknowledged in court — is hard to explain, Rider added.
“A trooper shouldn’t be up on the stand saying, ‘That wasn’t my responsibility,’” Rider said. “If they’re on the scene, people are going to expect them to be the ones to say, ‘Hey, get pictures of this.’”
“A trooper shouldn’t be up on the stand saying, ‘That wasn’t my responsibility.’”
With the gaps in the forensic evidence and crucial facts withheld until the middle of the three-week trial, defense attorneys couldn’t pull together a coherent, countervailing version of events quickly enough. Even when they tried, as evidence undermining the government’s claims trickled out, the lawyers faced new hurdles.
Gross gave his testimony early in the trial about drawing his gun first, information that was left off a police report and not included in discovery. Then the judge granted a prosecutors’ motion barring Song’s lawyers from using a self-defense argument, which became a frequent point of contention.
At one point, during his closing argument, Hayes, Song’s defense attorney, suggested that Gross may not have been justified in pulling his weapon so quickly. The judge, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, admonished Hayes for treading too close to a rationale for self-defense.
Appealing for His Life
The Prairieland trial unfolded as Trump escalated his crackdown on anti-ICE protests across the country. The verdicts were celebrated by the Trump administration as its first successful prosecution of a violent “antifa cell,” and the first eight defendants were sentenced to more than 450 years in prison altogether.
“These guilty verdicts and convictions rightly reflect the vicious, armed attack that these Antifa cell members planned and executed against law enforcement and detention center officers on the night of July 4 last year,” a top Department of Justice official said after the convictions were handed down.
The government’s narrative rested on the premise that the noise demonstration was an organized ambush of law enforcement officers and that Song’s intent from the outset was to kill a police officer. But this version of events relies on an incomplete picture of what transpired that night.
Whether information that came to light during the trial is adjudicated as part of the appeals process will be decided by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative courts in the country and one that Trump’s Justice Department has used to secure favorable rulings.
Patrick McLain, an attorney representing another Prairieland defendant, said it would likely be several months before any appeals are filed; it is still unclear what the focus will be and if the defendants will mount a coordinated effort.
“My hope is that we’re going to have nine solid briefs that are mutually supporting and not contradictory,” McLain said.
The 5th Circuit has not issued a briefing notice. Once it does, defense teams will have 40 days to submit their documents, according to John Kuchera, Song’s court-appointed appellate lawyer. Kuchera, reached by phone, said he has not yet had time to review the record and has not met with Song. He declined to comment on whether the theory about the bullet would be included in the appeal.
“What my opinions are about anything will show up in my brief,” he said. “Whatever issues that I think need to be addressed will be in that.”
Ultimately, the 5th Circuit will decide if evidence in the Prairieland case, including the bullet that struck Gross, can be reexamined and if Song, who now faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, will be granted a new trial.
Correction: September 28, 2026 This story has been corrected to note that Ryan Rider, the crime scene reconstruction expert, has not yet begun training law enforcement agencies on the Leica crime scene scanner.
A look evoking memories of All Saints and Destiny’s Child has fashion editors, Brad Pitt and the high street all blending in
Discussing their style while in All Saints, Nicole and Natalie Appleton said earlier this year that some things don’t change: “Army trousers and combat trousers will always be a staple with us.”
If, for a long time after All Saints’ noughties heyday, the sisters would have known this look was not the height of fashion, things have changed in 2026. Judging by those attending shows at London fashion week this month, camo is very much back.
US president is said to expect renewed strikes after the midterms
Donald Trump has said he has rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the strait of Hormuz within a week and resume nuclear talks in return for the lifting of the US naval blockade of Iranian ports.
“They made a proposal but I reject it,” the US president told reporters at the White House.
Criminals are trying to glean login details to harvest players’ in-game currency and personal data
Your 10-year-old son has started playing Roblox, when he realises all of his in-game currency, Robux, is gone.
When you try to find out what happened, he says he was recently promised extra Robux if he followed a link on YouTube. When he signed on at the site link, he was taken to the Roblox site as usual but there was no sign of the extra currency.
The United States and China have agreed to "launch a dialogue" on AI, reports Reuters.
On artificial intelligence, the two sides agreed to hold a dialogue on the technology's risks and benefits, with the next round of discussions set for November, and to set up a communication channel for AI-related incidents, the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the White House said.
The White House said that the leaders had agreed to use the term "super intelligence" in place of "artificial intelligence." In a separate statement, the Chinese ministry said that Beijing valued Washington's use of the new term. As AI technology continues to advance, the two sides should step up exchanges and work toward consensus in line with new developments, it said.
But CNN argues that "Despite growing calls to prevent AI development from spiraling out of control, the Trump-Xi summit has produced little substance, as many experts expected."
The right thing to do on AI, [China's leader] Xi said during talks with Trump, is to "draw on each other's strengths, not guard against each other" — a reference to Beijing's concern about US containment, from existing tech export controls to potential AI restrictions. "The two sides can continue their dialogue on AI, exchange views on its risks and benefits, and jointly prevent the misuse and abuse of AI," he added. But the summit has yielded little progress on AI beyond a formal dialogue and a bilateral communication channel, proposals discussed before the two leaders' summit — underscoring the entrenched mutual mistrust amid contrasting visions on AI... Because of low levels of trust, cooperation between the two superpowers remains limited, said George Chen, chair of digital practice at The Asia Group consultancy. "Beijing continues to believe Washington seeks to contain China's rise in AI and other emerging technologies, a perception that will shape the pace and scope of future engagement for the two countries on AI," he said.
CNN also points out that while China trails the US in frontier AI models, "it's rapidly narrowing the technology gap while championing a more open ecosystem centered on accessibility and lower cost."
In July, Chinese leader Xi Jinping launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization — a rival grouping to the Pax Silica alliance that Trump formed last year to reduce reliance on China for AI supply chains. While over two dozen countries and the European Union signed up to Trump's Pax Silica, Xi has recruited 29 countries, including Russia, Indonesia and Pakistan, to his alternative vision of open models, which allow users to freely download, customize and run without paying hefty fees to American firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. For developers in the Global South, an inexpensive Chinese model from DeepSeek or Moonshot may be more useful than a slightly more capable system requiring an expensive subscription and access to a foreign cloud provider, said Eric Olander, editor in chief of The China-Global South Project, a research agency....
China's embrace of open systems has not always been a top-down strategy by Beijing. Restrictions on access to the most advanced chips because of US export controls, coupled with smaller capital markets, have pushed Chinese developers toward open models as a way to compete with leading US proprietary systems. That shift has proved effective. In a year, Chinese models' global usage skyrocketed from less than 15% to over 54% last week, led by DeepSeek, according to AI leaderboard data by OpenRouter, a marketplace for models. Even American firms, from Airbnb and DoorDash to Shopify, have embraced Chinese models, tapping into the advantages of open systems, including lower costs and greater flexibility for customization.
CNN adds this insight from Alex Colville, an analyst focusing on tech and security at the government-backed Australian Strategic Policy Institute. "The more capable Chinese models become, the less likely it is Beijing may leave them unrestricted."
Central Washington coach Scott Power noted earlier this week that Sul Ross State showed some flashes of offensive prowess despite some struggles this season.
The FAA is investigating a software glitch in some Boeing 737 Max jets that could prompt an automated flight guidance system to disengage during an aborted landing.
Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways
OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest artificial intelligence models as reports of AI agents going rogue mount.
The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching federal government websites acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gathering and distributing information.
Last weekend KDE's annual Akademy conference included a presentation proposing
an AI-native KDE," writes The Register. This led KDE developer Nate Graham to open a discussion about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions which "rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventually removed the thread."
But as Graham writes on his blog, "A bunch of people mostly outside of KDE who disapprove of LLM usage derailed KDE's attempt to add restrictions to LLM usage."
Two people unknown to any KDE contributors appeared and began fighting with one another about the broader topic of the morality of AI, not the proposed guidelines... Someone else outside of KDE set up kdeforpeople.com in an attempt to... pressure KDE into banning LLMs. A bunch of people signed onto it, almost none of whom are known KDE contributors.
The topic was picked up on social media and the press with... varying levels of accuracy. The draft proposal was removed and the whole topic hidden... Yep, that's where we're at in the state of online discourse around AI...
The "lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE" idea was presented by two people important to KDE in decades past, but who had not made any contributions recently besides this Akademy talk. Their idea does not reflect the overall direction of KDE or Plasma, and I don't think it ever will. If "a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE" freaks you out, I believe it is completely reasonable and safe to ignore...
I completely understand why a lot of people have problems with LLMs. I have these concerns as well.
He concluded by asking people not to derail any future process to set usage guidelines, fighting over "the broader topic of AI in general."
"The discussion is gone, but the argument continues," adds The Register:
GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has also published The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want, proposing that LLMs be barred from creating or modifying anything submitted to GNOME or hosted on its infrastructure.
"You might be asked to prove your code meets this requirement," Petridis writes, arguing for proposals that target the norms around developer behavior. His rationale? "The GNOME Project prioritizes the social and human aspects of collective software creation,"
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he rejected an Iranian proposal that could have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and paused regional fighting within seven days, prolonging uncertainty over one of the world’s most important shipping routes.
Iran raised the initiative during the United Nations General Assembly and transmitted it through Qatari mediators. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran was prepared to begin a seven-day countdown toward reopening the strait if Washington agreed to the framework, with broader negotiations potentially following.
“I reject their proposal,” Trump told reporters at the White House, arguing that Iran wanted the strait reopened because its economy was suffering. The United States has imposed a blockade on Iranian ports in an effort to pressure Tehran to reopen Hormuz.
The conflict has sharply reduced shipping through the strait and disrupted global oil flows. Iran has said any broader settlement would require reduced U.S. military pressure and relief from the blockade, while maintaining that it will not surrender its uranium-enrichment rights.
The Wall Street Journal, cited by Reuters, reported that Trump has privately told aides he considers renewed U.S. bombing after the November midterms likely, though officials cautioned that his position could change.
Iranian officials continue to say negotiations remain possible despite the rejection.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump is dismissing reports that Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds reduced references to Trump on his campaign website, even though archived versions show that several prominent mentions were removed.
Trump called the coverage “Another Fake Story” Saturday and argued that Donalds remains firmly aligned with him. Donalds also said he was “proud to have” Trump’s endorsement.
But the underlying website changes are real. An archived version featured a top banner urging visitors to “chip in to support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds,” along with repeated “Trump-endorsed” branding. The current homepage instead emphasizes the slogan “Fighting to defend the Florida dream,” while Trump’s endorsement remains in a rotating list with other supporters.
The Washington Post reported that at least eight references to Trump’s endorsement disappeared, along with a photo of Donalds and his wife with Trump and a policy section titled “Enact the Trump Agenda.”
Donalds’ campaign says the redesign reflects a greater focus on affordability, insurance costs and government transparency, not a break with Trump. CBS News likewise reported that Donalds denied distancing himself from the president despite the reduced prominence.
Trump’s criticism therefore disputes the interpretation that Donalds is politically separating himself from the president, rather than the documented fact that multiple Trump references were removed.
US president doubles down on criticism of CNN and MS Now as Akayla Gardner questions attempted White House ban
A day after the White House barred CNN from traveling aboard Air Force One to provide pool television coverage of the president’s trip to Tennessee, Donald Trump doubled down on his criticism of that broadcaster and another, MS Now, he has attempted to ban over coverage of him he calls overly negative.
As he left the White House early on Saturday, Trump was asked by MS Now White House correspondent Akayla Gardner: “Do you only want outlets that support you to be a part of the press pool?”
Orange Order march along Garvaghy Road could take place for first time in 28 years after injunction dismissed on appeal
A controversial loyalist parade along a nationalist street in Portadown could go ahead for the first time in nearly 30 years, after a ban was overturned late on Saturday night.
The Orange Order parade down the Garvaghy Road will be allowed to go ahead on Sunday morning, following a legal back-and-forth in recent days amid fears the march could unleash fresh sectarian violence.
You have probably heard of 16-year-old Philadelphia Union phenom Cavan Sullivan. But there are 12 other highly rated potential debutants on the roster for this international window.
Sullivan, 16, starts in youngest US appearance in years
Ellis and Hall score as Pochettino’s new faces impress
Playing in their first match of the 2030 World Cup cycle, the US men’s national team crushed Peru 4-1 in at Orlando’s Inter&Co Stadium on Saturday, riding goals from newcomers Justin Ellis, Zavier Gozo and Justin Hall to victory. The win marked the US debut of 16-year-old Philadelphia Union midfielder Cavan Sullivan, whose appearance in the US starting XI makes him the youngest player to feature for the national team in over two decades.
Sullivan received the lion’s share of the attention in the lead-up to Saturday’s match but it was Orlando City’s Ellis who stole the show early, nodding home a Gio Reyna free kick in the fourth minute to give the US an early lead. Playing in his home stadium, Ellis himself was involved in the build-up that led to the free kick, part of a nifty interchange with midfielder Malik Tillman that ended with Ellis drawing a foul at the near side of the pitch some 25 yards from goal. Reyna’s service was excellent; Ellis’ headed finish was awkward but perfectly-placed at the far post.
Justin Verlander got an unexpected hook in his major league finale when his 7-year-old daughter came to the mound with Detroit Tigers manager AJ Hinch in the sixth inning of Saturday’s game against the Pittsburgh Pirates.
After Brandon Lowe hit a foul popup starting the sixth, Hinch walked from the dugout toward the plate and pointed toward the seats. Genevieve Verlander, wearing a Tigers jersey with her dad’s name and number, sprinted to the mound and hugged her father, who reached down to embrace her and started shaking and sobbing.
Preparation begins for extreme conditions as Nolo bears down on areas still recovering from previous storms
Heavy rain and powerful winds are expected to bring flash floods and extreme surf to the Hawaiian islands over the weekend as Hurricane Nolo bears down on areas still recovering from previous storms.
Nolo was churning slowly south of Hawaii’s Big Island on Saturday with maximum sustained winds of 105mph (165km/h). The storm’s center was about 145 miles (235km) south of Hawaii’s southern-most point and could strengthen into a potentially life-threatening and catastrophic storm through the weekend.
Residents across New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware and New York without electricity as storm hits
A slow-moving, powerful storm known as a nor’easter crept along the coast of the US north-east on Saturday, producing high winds that knocked out electricity to thousands of people while whipping up big waves and heavy rains that created dangerous conditions in some places.
Tens of millions of people were in the path of the storm, which was forecast to affect the mid-Atlantic area and New England throughout the weekend. About 100,000 customers in the region were without electricity Saturday.
Microsoft's senior product manager for Excel acknowledges that "Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell." But that's now changing with arrays in cells (as well as nested arrays) and lists.
"You can create a list by selecting Insert > List or pressing Ctrl+J, then typing or pasting items separated by commas or semicolons, depending on your regional settings. Selecting the icon in the cell shows the individual values..."
"With lists, you can filter by one or more individual items instead of whole text entries. Referencing a list returns all its values for calculations. For example, =B2 spills those values into separate cells..."
"For the first time in Excel, arrays can exist natively in cells as values or as formula results. They can be any size or shape and can even contain other arrays. You can now keep the result of any spilling formula in a single cell by "wrapping" the formula body with braces { }."
"Since the introduction of dynamic arrays, array results have spilled across cells — for example ={1;2;3}. Wrapping the original array with braces creates a 1x1 array around it, so instead of spilling to multiple cells, the array stays in a single cell. Braces have long been used to describe arrays in Excel and this extends that behavior by allowing multiple layers of braces. This gives you more flexibility when building spreadsheets. Instead of leaving room for a formula to spill, you can keep the result in one cell."
"Arrays can now also 'nest' inside other arrays... Previously, a formula that produced an array of arrays would return a truncated result or #CALC! error. Now, supported formulas return the complete nested result... FLATTEN(array, [pad_value], [levels]) simplifies nested arrays by removing one or more levels of nesting..."
Three HAS functions check whether values are in an array:
— HAS(array, value) returns TRUE if value appears anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.
— HASANY(array, values) returns TRUE if any of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.
— HASALL(array, values) returns TRUE if all of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.
As the 2026-27 school year began, the university welcomed incoming freshmen to campus — full of nerves about roommates, too many packed bags and overly doting parents. But on East and North Central Campus, two residence halls (and one dining hall) were left out of the fanfare, with Russell and Brown Residence Halls, and Russell Dining Hall closed for the foreseeable future.
The Russell Complex, located on the Harrington Turf next to Lane Hall, was a focal point for freshmen on campus because it includes both a residence hall and a dining hall. Brown Residence Hall houses upperclassmen on the North Central Green, surrounded by Sharp, Harter and Sypherd Halls.
Russell and Brown’s closing was announced prior to the start of the academic year. Russell Dining Hall was also closed for unspecified renovations and absent from the list of dining options posted Aug. 20 on the university dining Instagram account.
All Russell Dining Hall staff retained their positions and were relocated to two other dining halls on campus, either Caesar Rodney or Pencader, as confirmed with another university dining Instagram video on Aug. 25.
The university has updated the Russell and Brown Hall websites to reflect their closures.
“[The halls are] closed for fall 2026 to support university renovation opportunities,” the websites state. “We are still in the reviewing and planning phase; however, strategic renovations are anticipated, and the closure allows for full review of space and building systems without disrupting students.”Sophomore Claire Nichols lived in Russell last spring.
“I have a love-hate relationship with that building because, like on one hand, we have the best dorm layout with the Z-shape,” Nichols said. “But there was no AC, so it was gross. There were cockroaches. We had to get sprayed for spiders. The bathroom was always breaking.”
Similarly, junior Pablo Charriez, who lived in Brown Hall during the 2025-26 school year, had mixed feelings.
“Lack of AC wasn’t great, but the rooms were pretty big, and it’s a really great location,” Charriez said. “The main study lounge was in pretty rough shape and there was like a random dorm room that was also in there.”
Both Nichols and Charriez agreed that with the renovations in Russell and Brown, air conditioning should be added.
Last March, junior Ellery Williams received an offer to be a Resident Assistant (RA) for this school year. She was initially placed in Russell, and went into the summer believing she would be there.
However, in mid-July she received an email which was sent out to all RAs.
“Going into the fall 2026 semester both Russell and Brown Halls will be closed to support university renovation opportunities,” the email stated.
No positions were being eliminated at the time, despite the closure. This was a shock to Williams as there had been no indication of this occurring prior.
“So I didn’t know where I was living,” Williams said. “I didn’t know where I was going to be an RA.”
After a lengthy process, she became a traditional RA on Ray Street C, but even when school started she had no further information about the renovations.
As the semester progresses, specific renovations have yet to be announced, but more information may be released as work continues.
Sullenberger landed a disabled passenger plane safely in the Hudson River in 2009 without any loss of life
Capt Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III – the pilot known for safely landing a US Airways flight in New York City’s Hudson River during a 2009 emergency – has been inducted into the US’s National Aviation Hall of Fame, two months after he went public with an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis.
Sullenberger, 75, received the honor during a ceremony held in Washington DC on Thursday, 17 years after he engineered what has become widely known as the Miracle on the Hudson.
(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, once again, was the only Democrat on Thursday to vote against a resolution which would limit President Donald Trump’s military actions against Iran.
Currently have a GT with 420 miles, but I really wanna upgrade to the X7 or just vesc the GT, I’m really not sure yet..
That being said, I seen someone say there’s a chance the X7 could ship from a U.S warehouse and be here fast, is that true? Biggest thing stopping me from the X7 is the crazy long wait.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he “loves women” while rejecting former President Barack Obama’s suggestion that governments might function better if women were put in charge for a period of time.
Obama said earlier this week that he had sometimes imagined placing women in charge of every government for two years to see whether conditions improved, adding that he believed they likely would.
Asked whether he agreed, Trump responded: “I love women, I think they’re great. But what a ridiculous statement that is.”
The exchange comes amid renewed attention to Trump’s repeated verbal attacks on female journalists. Mediaite columnist Ana Marie Cox recently highlighted his past insults toward reporters including Maggie Haberman, Rachel Scott, Nancy Cordes, Mary Bruce and Catherine Lucey. Trump has called Haberman “unattractive,” Scott a “horror show” and Cordes “stupid,” among other remarks.
Earlier this month, Trump also called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “very dumb and unhappy,” and later objected to her presence at the United Nations, telling her CNN “should not be here” after his administration had barred the network from White House access.
Trump’s response to Obama did not address those previous remarks, instead framing the former president’s gender-based leadership argument as overly broad.
Suspect, charged with felony assault, under investigation for making racist and homophobic comments before attack
A Seattle woman will need surgery for a gnarly wound, after a stranger, who called her “an inferior race”, took a bite of flesh from her forehead in a surprise attack.
The incident occurred in broad daylight on 18 September when Diana Gonzalez, 36, was walking to a local convenience store and the alleged assailant, identified by prosecutors as Kamilia Chadli, threw a food wrapper at her, the victim told Seattle police.
Air Force One flies low over Neyland before kickoff
Schools coordinate with Secret Service over headsets
No 1 Texas holds off No 14 Tennessee for 20-17 win
Encouraging fans to get inside Neyland Stadium earlier than usual with Donald Trump coming to Tennessee’s college football game against Texas sure worked Saturday.
Security checks on the stadium’s perimeter went relatively smoothly with Tennessee officials opening the stadium 30 minutes earlier than normal. Fans got half-price off concessions as a reward for showing up early, and Tennessee faithful had the stands half full 90 minutes before kickoff and nearly packed an hour before.
Eric Clark, 45, charged with murder as autopsy concludes Fortune was dead days before body discovered in tree
A third person has been arrested in the death of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune in Mississippi’s capital city, while investigators said they had determined the scene where her body was found hanging had been staged.
Eric Clark, 45, surrendered to authorities on Friday and was charged with murder, according to the Jackson police department (JPD). Clark was scheduled to make a court appearance on Monday.
The tech giant has launched a cute ‘little guy’ that can answer emails, book travel or do your weekly food shop
After the recent backlash against Meta’s so-called “pervert” smart glasses, this week Mark Zuckerberg launched a much cuter alternative: the Muse “charm” device.
With a screen that shows a cutesy little avatar, it has drawn comparisons with Tamagotchis. “We’ve packed a lot of technology into this little guy,” the Meta founder told the San Francisco audience.
Pledges found covered in food in heated basement of fraternity house near University of Wisconsin-Madison
Police are investigating suspected illegal hazing after about 30 partially clothed young men covered in food, condiments and other liquids were found recently in the basement of a fraternity house near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Madison police said some of the men, whom they described as pledges of a fraternity, had signs of being physically assaulted.
Emergency teams discovered victims after two-storey building in historic Plaka district collapsed ‘in seconds’
Greek authorities say they are trying to discover what caused a two-storey apartment block in the heart of ancient Athens to collapse “in a matter of seconds”, killing six people.
Emergency teams found the victims, including four American tourists, on Saturday, more than 24 hours after the early morning explosion in the historic Plaka district.
Police have identified similarities in some of the killings but said they had not found conclusive evidence that the same person or people were responsible.
Exclusive: UK prime minister says delivering fiscal stability would be ‘crucial’ to be able to fix bigger problems
Andy Burnham has said he can deliver on his promise of radical change for the country despite severe economic headwinds, telling the Guardian: “There’s always things you can do; it’s just whether you’re prepared to do them.”
The prime minister acknowledged public finances were “challenging” ahead of next month’s budget but said delivering fiscal stability would be “crucial”, because only then would the government be able to focus on fixing bigger problems.
Salesianum senior Tysir Jones evades a defender during his 78-yard reception in Salesianum Football’s matchup against La Salle College High School. Photo credit: Dave Reeder.
La Salle College High School defeated Salesianum, 28-10, on September 25, in Salesianum Football’s final game of the season against out-of-state competition.
WILMINGTON, DE — The La Salle College High School Explorers dealt Salesianum its first loss of the 2026 season, defeating the Sals, 28-10, Friday night.
La Salle entered the game ranked as one of the top 30 programs in the state of Pennsylvania, according to MaxPreps, and showed what makes them a formidable opponent.
Following a scoreless first quarter, the Explorers’ scored on their third drive of the game starting at their own 37 yard line. La Salle ran three plays before a pass from junior quarterback Luke Gordon to junior Bryce Hanton brought the Explorers to the Sallies eight yard line with a gain of 45-yards. The Sallesianum defense stopped the La Salle offense on their first three attempts near the goal-line, but on fourth and a yard to go, Gordon completed a pass to receiver Evan Pettine for the one-yard score.
Gordon’s passing touchdown put the Explorers ahead with 7:45 remaining in the first half. The lead held for a total of 34 seconds.
Salesianum’s senior quarterback, Brady Nabb, led the Sallies offense out to the field at their own 20 yard line, following the Explorer scoring drive. Nabb caught the snap in the shotgun formation on the drive’s first play and delivered a five-yard strike to senior wide receiver Tysir Jones coming back toward the ball. Jones caught the pass and quickly turned his attention upfield.
Jones side stepped the first La Salle tackler and used a stiff arm to intercept a second would-be tackler, before settling near the sideline. Jones took the reception 78-yards down the right sideline to the La Salle two yard line. Senior Jett Healy ran in a two-yard touchdown on the next play, tying the score with 7:11 to play in the second quarter.
La Salle scored a touchdown on its following possession via a five-yard run from Hanton and the Sals answered the score with a 28-yard field goal by junior Giuliano Villa before the end of the half. The Explorers led 14-10 at halftime in front of a packed Abessinio stadium crowd that included a fan favorite mascot.
Swoop, the Eagles’ mascot, was in attendance along with members of the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleading team as a part of their Friday Night Captains program, which helps celebrate and promote local high school football programs. Fans entering the stadium were given Eagles towels and Swoop made his way through the stands to take pictures and interact with the crowd before the game. As a part of the celebration, it was announced pregame the Eagles will make a donation to both football programs.
La Salle scored the last two touchdowns of the game in the third and fourth quarter, tallying a second score from Hanton on a 46-yard touchdown run in the third and a ten-yard touchdown catch from Pettine in the fourth.
The Explorers defense only allowed the Sallies offense to cross the mid-field line twice and forced a pair of Sallies turnovers in the second half, holding Salesianum without a score in the frame. The Sallies offense finished the game with over 220 yards of total offense, the majority of which came through the air. Jones finished the game as the Sals’ leading receiver with five catches for 126 yards.
Salesianum will play its first road game of the season next week when they travel to Georgetown, Delaware, for a matchup against Sussex Central High School. The game will start at 7:00 p.m. on October 2.
Sallies defeated Sussex Central, 31-7, last season at home.
Exclusive: Policy initiative for England will help more young people on to property ladder, prime minister tells Guardian
A new help-to-buy scheme aimed at giving first-time buyers who cannot rely on the “bank of mum and dad” is to be introduced in a big policy announcement by Andy Burnham.
The programme, called “Your first home”, is intended to help buyers in England who have a regular income but have been unable to save for a large deposit or don’t have financial support from their family.
Alexander Millington-Cotes is concerned for welfare of the 82-year-old, who hasn’t been seen in public for two years
The stepson of Sir Ranulph Fiennes has launched a crowdfunder to pay for “specialist legal advice” in an attempt to locate the explorer, who hasn’t been seen in public for more than two years.
Alexander Millington-Cotes, 31, has set a target of £55,000 for the fundraiser, to enable him to instruct lawyers to “locate and safeguard” Fiennes.
"Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli
AI has transformed bug discovery from "a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine," notes Canonical's blog, leading to a "recent explosion in the volume of CVEs".
Additionally, the upstream kernel community became its own CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) and assigned CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) identifiers to thousands of bugs, arguing that at the kernel level, almost any type of bug that can affect a running system, could potentially be classified as a vulnerability. As a result, the volume of CVEs has skyrocketed exponentially, creating a massive backlog of alerts and forcing defenders to drastically increase the speed of their fixes to close the window of risk.
To address the growing volume of CVEs and the demand for faster security fixes, we are transitioning to a unified, 2-week release cycle...
While a patch is being prepared, Canonical aims to provide safe workarounds where applicable, so users aren't left exposed in the meantime. Where no safe workaround exists, Canonical will say so clearly and point users toward general hardening steps instead. The goal is to get environments into a defensible, safer state within 24 to 48 hours of public disclosure — well before a patch ships. This doesn't replace the patch; it buys the time needed to fix the vulnerability properly, without sacrificing security.
"Linux did not suddenly become wildly insecure overnight," notes the blog Nerds.xyz. "We are getting much better at finding and cataloging problems that may have previously gone unnoticed."
There is something almost ironic about all of this. AI is routinely pitched as a tool that will make software development faster, but it is also making vulnerability discovery faster. That means maintainers now have to accelerate the other side of the equation too.
For Ubuntu users, that should ultimately be good news. More bugs being discovered is preferable to vulnerabilities sitting unnoticed in the Linux kernel.
Attorney says fishers ‘losing their livelihoods’, but Marco Rubio maintains US still willing to ‘blow up ships if need be’
While the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was being decorated in Quito by Ecuador’s president for “helping to promote peace in the region”, 10 Ecuadorian fishers whose boat had been blown up by US forces were adrift in the eastern Pacific.
On 8 September, a day before Rubio arrived, a US patrol vessel intercepted the fishing boat Don Rufo in international waters near Ecuador.
Crowds line Place de la Concorde on second day of pontiff’s first official papal visit to France in 18 years
Hundreds of thousands of people lined the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris on Saturday to attend an open-air mass with Pope Leo, on the second day of his visit to France.
The Vatican estimated 700,000 people turned out for the outdoor mass with the 71-year-old American pope – about 100,000 more than the number of people who had registered to attend.
Authorities discovered a body hidden in a home’s crawlspace in 2020, 13 years after Jill Maiorca disappeared
A man was recently charged in California with the killing of his ex-wife six years after her remains were discovered in a crawlspace beneath a home – and about two decades after when she went missing, according to investigators.
Jeff Maiorca, 53, faces a charge of murder in the death of Jill Maiorca, who was 29 when she was killed, authorities said in discussing what could be one of the latest cases in the US to be solved with modern DNA techniques.
BBC broadcaster was shot in 1999 in case detectives have previously said may never be solved
Technological advances are allowing police to review old CCTV footage in the unsolved murder of the BBC broadcaster Jill Dando, Scotland Yard has revealed.
Advances in CCTV enhancement technology have allowed detectives to return to 27-year-old footage of Putney Bridge Underground station, Scotland Yard said. But detectives stressed that the review was part of existing inquiries – not a new investigation.
Less than 1% of infected have been vaccinated, with 173 people hospitalized and four deaths so far
The Pennsylvania department of health (DoH) announced on Friday that 55 new measles cases had been reported in the state since Wednesday, with officials continuing efforts to contain an outbreak of the disease that has spread across dozens of counties.
In a news release, the DoH said that 890 measles cases had been confirmed across 39 counties in the state so far for the year. The outbreak had resulted in 173 hospitalizations in the state and four measles-associated deaths, the statement added.
Tim Tebow said Friday he is “pausing his relationship” with Life Surge, a Christian organization that’s been accused of using predatory sales tactics to exploit its followers’ faith and financial insecurity.
Tebow, the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner who is currently a college football analyst with ESPN’s SEC Nation, said his team is conducting an internal investigation. He spoke on campus in advance of the Mississippi-Florida game at Florida Field on Saturday.
A marvel of engineering and a model of sustainability, Bart has been financially distressed since the Covid pandemic
A marvel of engineering and a model of sustainable public transportation, the San Francisco Bay Area’s transit system, financially distressed after years of declined ridership, is now staring down a fiscal cliff – and a potential death spiral that would have massive repercussions for everyone in the globally influential metropolis.
As soon as early 2027, Bay Area Rapid Transit could be forced to close as many as 15 stations, reduce frequency of service by 63%, increase the cost of rides and parking fees by 30% and end all service at 9pm. If service becomes less frequent and more expensive, there will be fewer commuters, less fare revenue and a downward cascade of financial austerity with ripple effects for all Bay Area residents, not just those who use public transit regularly.
Beth Macy, author of Dopesick, is drawing on her reporting experience to win Virginia voters in a longtime Republican district
Virginia’s sixth congressional district has been in Republican hands for over 33 years, but Beth Macy, a longtime reporter with the Roanoke Times and author of Dopesick, a powerful account of the opioid crisis that swept through Appalachia two decades ago, has a plan to change that.
The plan, drawing on her experience as a reporter, is to canvass the district in the mountainous west of the state, knocking on doors, going to food pantries, meeting with veterans. It’s what any political hopeful might do, but with a twist: Macy carries her reporter’s notebook and jots down the good stories she’s been told.
Paper raises questions about safety of food and other products as early onset breast cancer rates surge worldwide
New research has identified at least 485 chemicals used in US pesticide products that are linked to breast cancer, raising questions about the safety of food and other products at a time when early onset breast cancer rates are surging worldwide.
The new peer-reviewed paper, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a top journal from the American Chemical Society, highlights what public health advocates say are a range of deficiencies in how US pesticides are regulated. The review includes active pesticide ingredients, but also hundreds of so-called “inert”, or inactive, ingredients that typically do not undergo a thorough safety review.
Outlet had been scheduled to fly with Donald Trump to Tennessee for a college football game, network said Friday
The White House has blocked CNN from traveling aboard Air Force One on Saturday, impeding its TV press pool duties in the latest escalation of the administration’s battle with the news media.
CNN had been scheduled to fly with Donald Trump to Tennessee for a college football game, the network said on Friday. The White House confirmed CNN’s exclusion when it did not list the network on guidance sent to the press corps regarding Trump’s schedule for Saturday.
Twenty-five years ago, a Soviet-designed helicopter crossed the mountains of Afghanistan with the first CIA officers sent into the country after 9/11, the opening move in what would later become America's longest war.
Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian, who is also a physician, says he has visited Iran's supreme leader twice and talked with CBS News' Margaret Brennan about Mojtaba Khamenei's health.
Mosaics by Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian priest-artist, were covered up after at least 20 women accused him of sexual and psychological abuse. He is now on trial.
Housing secretary says Home Office moved goalposts with ‘disruptive’ change to permanent residence rules
Angela Rayner has stood by her criticism of Home Office reforms that would make it harder for foreign care workers to claim permanent residence in the UK, describing them as “disruptive”.
Last year, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, announced that low paid migrants on jobs below graduate level would have to be in the country for 15 years before applying for settlement. Rayner previously attacked the plans as being “un-British”.
Minutes into a run, Caroline McCaffrey was struck with a massive headache. The resulting medical journey would reveal a family risk for a dangerous condition.
As she mulls another presidential run, the former VP is building bridges with progressive and Arab American leaders
Does Donald Trump secretly want Republicans to get annihilated in the midterms? Because he’s certainly acting that way. He continues to brush off concerns about the cost of living, saying last week that high gas prices are a very “inexpensive price to pay” for the war on Iran.
And, of course, the president seems to have no plans to end that disastrous war, apart from making vague threats about blowing the entire country up. Trust me, he keeps saying, everything will get better after the midterms. But by the looks of his dismal polling numbers, not many people are swallowing his empty promises anymore.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez has bullet lodged in back as accounts differ over events leading to traffic-stop shooting
The Venezuelan man shot by federal immigration officers after a traffic stop in Texas needs surgery to avoid losing feeling on the left side of his body, according to his supporters.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, has spent the past five days in detention with a bullet lodged in his back, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rapidly removed him from a hospital in Austin where he had been taken on Sunday after the shooting.
Freshly baked cookies have a way of bringing everyone into the kitchen. These 15 recipes include soft chocolate chip favorites, rich cocoa treats, spiced pumpkin cookies, and sweet bakery-style surprises.The post 15 cookies proven to vanish while the tray is…
"Copilot+ PCs" were Microsoft's official branding for Windows 11 "AI PCs" that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch "didn't go smoothly," writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed "Recall" feature was woefully insecure:
This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand, and over the last two years more and more OEMs have dropped the moniker from marketing materials and product names. In fact, even Microsoft has seemingly stopped mentioning it. I've noticed that none of the Surface PCs launched in 2026 include the Copilot+ PC moniker in their product names, unlike the Surface PCs that launched in 2025 and before. Now, you have to go digging to find any mention of Copilot+ compatibility in specification sheets... It's also worth mentioning that NVIDIA hasn't gone anywhere near the Copilot+ PC brand for its upcoming RTX Spark platform, even though all RTX Spark PCs meet the Copilot+ PC specification bar. I suspect that's a deliberate decision.
It seems pretty obvious that the Copilot+ PC brand hasn't resonated with the market, and OEMs and Microsoft itself are now quietly pulling back on that branding. The specification baseline for Copilot+ PC experiences still exists, it just no longer has a pretty marketing name tied to it.
Give your recipe binder a fall refresh with 17 pumpkin-inspired dishes, including quick muffins, spiced waffles, creamy soup, easy cakes, cookies, and a few unexpected twists for dinner.The post 17 easy pumpkin recipes that deserve a permanent place in the…
Ministers have been speaking to farming activists to try to build bridges after tax changes introduced under Starmer soured relations
As an arable farmer, Olly Harrison’s WhatsApp messages are normally concerned with the more mundane matters of working the land: logistics, supplies and the occasional chat about the weather.
So when a recent message came through from Andy Burnham, it was more than a little unexpected.
Israel ‘categorically rejects’ publication and says businesses on database have committed no wrongdoing
The UN human rights office has added 61 more companies to a blacklist of firms that it says are involved in violating Palestinian human rights through business ties to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The vast majority of the total 214 companies, which are based in 11 countries, are Israeli. Five of the 158 companies listed last year were removed in the latest update.
Artists including Tinie Tempah and the Smiths’ drummer Mike Joyce ramp up pressure on government to keep its pledge to outlaw for-profit resales
The government has stepped up work on new laws to stop ticket touts fleecing fans, as the prime minister came under pressure from artists including the drummer from the Smiths, one of his favourite bands.
Behind the stories of bombings and mass deaths, the everyday challenges facing Palestinians living under siege portray a quieter tragedy we rarely hear
What does it take to make a morning cup of tea in Gaza?
For Alaa Hessi, in her final month of pregnancy, this small ritual begins with a calculation of gas rations. Her family gets a ration of 6kg of gas every three months – enough to heat a pot for 18 precious minutes a day. That’s needed for cooking – so for tea, a fire must be built instead.
Locals say Google’s $15bn project in Andhra Pradesh has resulted in smallholdings being taken back off them by the government
When the government officials arrived in Tarluvada last year, they came with abundant promises.
Google, one of the world’s richest and most powerful tech companies, would soon be bringing a “golden opportunity” to this tiny village in south India: a $15bn AI datacentre.
University staff voice concerns over reputational risk of partnering with company behind ChatGPT
The University of Oxford has allowed the company behind ChatGPT to train its AI models on historical texts from its Bodleian Library, as tech companies scour academic institutions for fresh data.
The Bodleian material digitised by OpenAI has been used to “populate the OpenAI training set”, according to internal documents.
The idea of 16-year-olds like Cavan Sullivan playing for the USMNT was once unfathomable – until Mike Slivinski, Mark Jonas and Nelson Vargas appeared in a 1991 friendly
If 16-year-old Cavan Sullivan takes the field for the US men’s national team in the coming days, he will join a list of youngest-ever US players that has no shortage of recognizable names.
At the top is onetime phenom (turned cautionary tale) Freddy Adu, still the youngest player to ever appear for the US men. Names in the top 20 like Eddie Gaven and Bobby Convey will feel familiar to longtime US fans; Christian Pulisic, Yunus Musah and Gio Reyna are all still very much in the picture and may well prove to be Sullivan’s future partners in attack.
Third US president wrote in 1787 about importance of peace, paying off debt and supporting agriculture
A remarkably prescient letter written by Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, advising how the newly created country could prosper, has been put up for sale by a private collector. The handwritten document from 1787 warns specifically against many of the missteps Donald Trump has taken to drag down his own second term of office.
Written in Paris, where Jefferson was the fledgling government’s minister to France, the note to David Rittenhouse, a friend and fellow member of the American Philosophical Society, muses on the priorities and principles he believed future presidents should follow.
Debates over AI development, regulation and datacenters have become buzzy topics for US presidential candidates
The debate over artificial intelligence development, how to regulate it and the construction of datacenters that power the technology has become a buzzy topic for potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates.
Already, concerns were mounting over the environmental and energy impact of datacenters, which consume vast amounts of resources to power AI. But worries about the rapid development of AI came to a head in mid-September when tech executives issued a flurry of dire warnings that the technology could harm humans.
President’s tariffs have hurt fishers, loggers and others in a state with deep bonds to Canada – will voters show their displeasure in the midterms?
It was an ideal summer to cut trees.
The weather in Maine’s Penobscot county – one of the most heavily forested counties in a statedense with trees – was warm and dry. Yet even as the county’s wood had grown to an ideal size to harvest, the machines Molly London typically uses sat idle.
Ten years ago, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback refused to stand for the national anthem. He was accused of disrespecting the flag, the game, and America. In a rare interview, he talks about inspiring a global gesture of civil rights
Colin Kaepernick still gets up at 4.30am every morning to train. “Strength training, speed training, position training – still do all of the same type of workouts I did while I was playing,” he says cheerily. “And then go about the rest of my day.” It is almost 10 years since Kaepernick last played a game of top-flight football. His career was abruptly and cruelly cut short just as it was peaking, after the National Football League (NFL) effectively closed ranks and shut him out for being too political. Now, at 38 years old, he is well aware that his chances of a return are dwindling by the day, but he remains as game-ready as ever. “I stay relentless at it,” he continues in his easy drawl. “I look at it from the perspective of, ‘What are the things that I can control?’ And what I know I can control is being prepared for when opportunity knocks, and to also continue knocking, on my end, looking for ways and opportunities … just staying resilient and focused and disciplined – that is what’s gotten me to this point in my life.”
Kaepernick’s story is defined by the events of late 2016, when he repeatedly refused to stand for the pre-game national anthem – resulting in a chorus of booing on the pitch, insults and outrage off it, and exclusion from the sport he still loves. He was one of the biggest names in the game at the time; quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, a national celebrity, sponsored by major brands, and looking back, his actions fed into so much that has happened since: the rise of Donald Trump, the Black Lives Matter protests and a global reckoning with racism, then the backlash against what is now being called “Woke 1.0”, and the resurgence of a white nationalism that the US complacently assumed was in the past.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Cook Political Report moved 15 House races toward Democrats on Friday, another sign that the battlefield for control of the chamber has shifted significantly in the final weeks before the midterm elections.
Cook’s updated ratings show Democrats favored in 208 races rated Solid, Likely or Lean Democratic, compared with 205 seats in the equivalent Republican categories. Another 22 races are rated Toss Up. Democrats need a net gain of three seats to secure a House majority.
Many of the competitive districts are seats President Donald Trump carried in 2024. Cook’s September Battleground District Project found Democrats leading Republicans 49% to 47% on the generic congressional ballot among 1,052 likely voters across 37 competitive districts. Trump had carried those same districts by about five points collectively in 2024.
Cook attributed much of the movement to dissatisfaction with Trump’s handling of the economy and changing political conditions in Republican-held districts.
Republicans still retain important advantages, including significant campaign resources. An NRCC spokesperson dismissed the ratings changes and argued that Republican candidates have stronger organizing and financial operations in competitive districts.
With more than a month remaining, the ratings reflect Cook’s current assessment of competitiveness rather than election results, and several closely contested districts remain unresolved.
The US’s oil deal with Venezuela faces multiple legal and logistical problems, including questions about whether it can be implemented
Donald Trump has long coveted the oilfields of other nations and declared an agreement with Venezuela to be “the biggest oil deal in world history”. But the deal, reached after the US seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, is almost certainly doomed to collapse amid a wide array of legal and logistical issues, a Guardian investigation has found.
The US president first mused about taking oil from Iran in 1987, when he told ABC’s Barbara Walters that Iranian attacks on American shipping during the Iran-Iraq war required an extreme response. “Why couldn’t we go in and take over some of their oil, which is along the sea?” he asked. Over the ensuing years, he has returned frequently to the idea that America should seize oil from other countries after military conflict, from Libya to Iraq.
A Philadelphia man created hundreds of thousands of degrading images of women, police say. At least five may have been dead when they were photographed or recorded.
Since the Iran war sent gas prices soaring, Georgia, Kentucky and Indiana have cut or suspended their gas taxes. Similar proposals are under consideration in Ohio and Massachusetts.
SAN FRANCISCO, California — OpenAI says some of its autonomous AI agents accessed public information on U.S. government websites in ways the company did not expect or intend, adding to concerns about how increasingly capable AI systems behave when given access to the internet.
The company said its review found interactions with public data on two Securities and Exchange Commission websites and the U.S. Census Bureau. OpenAI said there was no access to private accounts, misuse of credentials, system breach or alteration of government data.
The disclosure followed research by independent AI evaluation group Transluce, which identified agents attempting to exploit vulnerabilities on several public-data websites. Researchers linked some of that activity to agent swarms previously confirmed by OpenAI and said the systems sometimes pursued unauthorized methods while performing otherwise routine information-gathering tasks.
Transluce documented attempted compromises involving Data USA, the University of New Mexico’s digital library and an Australian government health website. OpenAI has been reviewing broader cases of agent “misalignment,” where models pursue goals in unexpected or prohibited ways.
The incidents follow an earlier case in which OpenAI said experimental models autonomously breached systems operated by AI platform Hugging Face.
OpenAI said most government-site activity involved ordinary research on publicly accessible information, but acknowledged that some agents violated website policies or behaved unpredictably.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump will campaign next week in Oklahoma and Alabama, two states he won overwhelmingly in 2024, as Republicans prepare for a difficult final stretch before the November midterms.
Trump is scheduled to hold a rally Thursday in Durant, Oklahoma, followed by a Friday event in Mobile, Alabama. He carried Oklahoma by roughly 34 percentage points and Alabama by about 30 points in 2024, while the Senate and gubernatorial contests in both states are considered safely Republican.
The appearances come as the national political environment has grown more challenging for the GOP. The Cook Political Report shifted several Senate races toward Democrats this week, moving Kansas from Likely Republican to Lean Republican and South Carolina from Solid Republican to Likely Republican.
Trump has said he plans to visit dozens of campaign locations during the final month before Election Day, including more competitive states.
His standing has also weakened nationally. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week put Trump’s job approval at 32%, a career low in that survey, with dissatisfaction over living costs and the Iran war contributing to the decline. Republicans still view Trump as an important tool for motivating their base, particularly in a midterm election where turnout can be decisive.
Alan Milburn said 16- to 24-year-olds with most complex needs should not have to keep proving they cannot work
Young people whose complex disabilities mean they have little prospect of getting a paid job should get fast-track access to disability benefits, an official review of youth employment will say.
The review, by the former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn, will say 16- to 24-year-olds with the most severe lifelong needs should be guaranteed swift and unconditional benefit support rather than having to prove they cannot work.
Only 26% of PHEVs sold across top 20 models can use chargers with power of 50kW or more, analysis finds
Three-quarters of the 20 top-selling plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) in the UK cannot use rapid chargers, research has found, amid concerns that many are essentially “petrol cars pulling round a heavy battery”.
The cars, which can run on electric batteries as well as combustion engines, have been promoted by carmakers as a way to cover long distances in a single drive – unlike fully electric cars – while still reducing emissions.
Aminata Seck’s detention shows the bargain facing international college athletes: universities eagerly recruit them, but support can disappear when their immigration status becomes precarious
Earlier this week, news broke for the first time that Senegalese Division II Kentucky State women’s basketball player Aminata Seck was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport on 7 August during a trip to attend the HBCU All-Star game in New York. Seck is listed as a Kentucky State senior and last year started 20 of 26 games, earning third-team all-conference honors and an SIAC Elite 16 award for academic achievement. According to a lawyer involved with her case, Sadiqa Reynolds, Seck has been moved through four different ICE facilities since her initial apprehension: Clay County, Chicago, Clark County and Grayson County. Reynolds noted that the reason for Seck’s imprisonment was a missed student visa deadline – what she characterized as “a paperwork situation” – due to back surgery. Reynolds also said that Seck has been suffering from an ACL injury while detained and has received only ibuprofen but no proper medical care.
ICE arrests in Kentucky have risen by 70% this year.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick and co-host of The End of Sport podcast.
Simran Kaur Sethi is Assistant Professor of Sport Leadership at the University of Kentucky where she studies equity and inclusion for international college athletes.
Derek Silva is Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University and co-host of The End of Sport podcast.
It was late May, the French Open was on and DraftKings was pushing me into the action.
A promotion pinged on my phone. “BET & GET,” it boomed, offering to boost my profits if I threw down on tennis, punctuating the point with a cartoon stack of cash. I was already in the middle of a two-hour betting spree, ripping 64 wagers on the clay courts of Paris from my office chair in New York City.
A $75 bet that Claire Liu would win the fifth point of her first set tiebreak against Maria Sakkari? Wrong. How about an easy $300 on Francisco Comesana to win the first game of the second set against Luciano Darderi? Negativo.
I’ll be the first to admit that my backhand needs some work. But this wasn’t about sports. It was about scratching an itch.
For the past six weeks, I’d been gambling like a man out of control, testing the guardrails of one of America’s most popular — and controversial — products: online sports betting. I’d morphed from a prudent, just-for-fun $40 bettor into a “degen” (sports betting slang for a degenerate gambler) who casually yeets $1,500 on a game. I’d feverishly jumped from sport to sport, following playoff basketball bets with live Czech table tennis. And I’d gone hog wild at the online casino, doubling down at the blackjack table. Most of the time, I’d lost — then chased those losses with more bets. Now, I was in the grips of yet another binge.
And as I approached $4,500 in losses in 24 hours, transferring money from my bank directly into my DraftKings account, the company seemed to clock the problem, sending me an in-app notification.
“Take a loss? Now take a beat,” it read. This felt right after the tear I’d been on. To date I’d blown about $12,500 in total on DraftKings. That’s the equivalent of six months of mortgage payments in as many weeks.
I followed the prompt to the site’s “responsible gaming” center, where I opted to limit myself to just two hours per day on the app and barred myself from depositing more than $100 in a 24-hour period. That pause is an essential part of DraftKings’ seemingly paradoxical business model — to make as much money as possible from the nation’s growing ranks of sports bettors without encouraging gambling addiction. The company says these limits are a cornerstone of that strategy.
Yet 30 minutes later, the company pushed me in the other direction. My phone buzzed with the first of four promotional alerts that day. Betting opportunities, they said, were waiting.
If you’ve bet on sports with FanDuel or DraftKings, you can help ProPublica understand how these apps work. Use our browser extension to download your betting history, then upload the files to us.
This wink-and-a-nod dynamic is now at the center of a fierce public policy debate over online gambling, addiction and consumer protection.
Since 2018, when the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports betting, Americans have put more than $600 billion into play. Sports betting is now legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. Add in prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, and more people are betting on sports than ever before.
That explosive growth has come with consequences: About a quarter of active sportsbook account holders surveyed by the Siena Research Institute this year said that they’d lost enough on a bet that they’d have trouble meeting their financial obligations. As a result, regulators and lawmakers from Colorado to Massachusetts are starting to question whether things have gone too far — and some are now proposing stricter consumer protections.
Amid the mounting scrutiny, major operators like DraftKings have pushed back, arguing that their responsible gaming system provides adequate safeguards to protect their customers from spiraling out of control. “I think as a business, as an industry, we’re doing a good job of educating people, of raising awareness, of making tools and resources available, of monitoring accounts,” Lori Kalani, the company’s chief responsible gaming officer, told me. If a customer waves too many red flags, she said, the company will proactively close the account. But when I asked how often this actually happens, DraftKings wouldn’t say.
So I decided to find out for myself: If I bet like a compulsive gambler, would DraftKings stop me — even if it cost the company money?
I opened an account under my own name and linked it to my debit card. ProPublica bankrolled me. When the app asked me what I did for a living, I disclosed that I was a reporter. I assembled a panel of addiction specialists, recovering gambling addicts and professional sports bettors who pointed me to the telltale wagering habits of someone who’s out of control. And then I got to work.
Over the next 10 weeks, I’d mimic those patterns and come to find out just how much DraftKings would encourage my recklessness — and just how little pushback I’d get as I spiraled downward.
I used the NBA playoffs as my launching pad, and, like much of New York, I was all in on the Knicks. After a week of moderate betting, I waved my first red flag during Game 3 of the Knicks vs. Atlanta Hawks first-round series.
I slept fitfully after my night of loss chasing and awoke at dawn to catch a train to Boston, where I attended a symposium on online gambling put on by the Public Health Advocacy Institute at the Northeastern University School of Law.
There, Matthew Gaskell, a British psychologist and expert on gambling addiction, said that the bettors that companies are most interested in are, well, losers like me. Indeed, a modest set of very active losers account for a substantial amount of sportsbooks’ revenue, he said. (A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.) And the companies have created sophisticated technology products designed to squeeze maximum engagement out of them, just as social media companies like Meta did years earlier with users of Facebook and Instagram, added Darragh McGee, a researcher at the University of Bath.
In fact, as The New York Times reported, DraftKings employs machine learning and data scientists to identify losing customers and entice them with promotions to keep them going — even if those are exactly the kinds of customers at risk of becoming addicts. DraftKings told the newspaper its promotions are geared toward users who spend a lot of time on the app and that the company “rejects any implication that its marketing practices are unfair or improperly targets customers.”
To keep users loyal, the major operators offer VIP programs, not unlike what airlines or rental car companies do. As a bettor climbs the tiers, the perks get bigger and better, from free bets and swag to primo seats at games, fancy dinners and even concert tickets. A FanDuel VIP in Pennsylvania received a personalized video message from MLB slugger Bryce Harper.
I wanted to be a VIP. I wanted cool perks.
To help get that status, I’d tapped the skills of Isaac Rose-Berman, a precocious 26-year-old professional sports bettor and policy expert at the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank that focuses on policy issues impacting dudes. He had a hunch that by chasing losses and displaying other signs of problem gambling I’d eventually get an invite. We just didn’t know when it would come — or how much it would cost.
It happened sooner than either of us thought.
At 5:01 p.m. the day after I lost nearly $1,800 on basketball in one night, during the closing remarks of the gambling addiction symposium, an email popped into my inbox. “Welcome to the DraftKings VIP Showcase,” the subject line read. I couldn’t believe it. My night of loss chasing was being rewarded.
The VIP showcase is basically a three-week tryout. Every week I’d get a new promotion as the company sussed me out to make sure that I was worthy of the title. It wanted to know whether I was actually a big spender, aka a whale, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing — a pro bettor, like Rose-Berman, who, armed with math, can beat the house more often than most by exploiting mispriced odds. Bettors like these, known in the business as sharps, calculate savvy wagers that have as much to do with sports knowledge as with probability. The apps do not like losing money to them and so limit how much they can bet.
For long-term losers like me, though, those limits don’t apply. I’m not a sharp. I’m a square.
And when I read the fine print of the VIP loyalty program, I was floored to see the incentive structure laid out so plainly: The more I spent on long-odds wagers, the quicker I’d accumulate the credits I needed to advance from tier to tier — from bronze, to silver, to gold, to diamond, to Onyx — and thus get closer to the cool perks I so desired. The upshot? Full send every time, baby!
Before I could get started though, I encountered my first in-app responsible gaming prompt since I began betting.
Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
In just over a week, I’d gambled away roughly what a minimum-wage worker in New York City earns in a month by chasing my losses and repeatedly tapping my bank account. But the notice wasn’t served to me because of how I’d been betting. It was sent because when New York lawmakers legalized mobile sports betting in 2023, they required the apps to notify users when they hit $2,500 in total deposits.
The law also requires sportsbooks like DraftKings to submit a “problem-gaming plan” to the state regulator but leaves the specifics of it up to the companies. The plan must include, among other things, procedures “for identifying users with suspected or known problem-gaming behavior” and for “providing information to users concerning problem-gaming identification and resources.” But the exact details are unclear because such plans are not publicly available. (A DraftKings spokesperson wouldn’t provide a copy, and my request for it under the state’s open records law with the gaming commission is under review.)
The app’s response to my $2,500 in deposits was tepid. With a click I could either set limits on my betting or avoid doing so altogether. Eager to gamble, I clicked “I Understand” and moved on. That was it, warning resolved. I got on the horn with my panel of experts to map out the next phase of my experiment. It was time to up the ante.
One of my advisers, Joshua Grubbs, who studies gambling disorders at the University of New Mexico, said he’d expect to see someone on my trajectory pick up the frequency of his betting, have longer sessions on the app, jump from sport to sport in search of fast action and start experimenting with more exotic betting products, like parlays and prop bets.
OK, I said. Let’s rip some parlays.
Parlays link multiple events into a single wager, drastically decreasing the likelihood of all parts happening while simultaneously increasing the potential payout. They’re enticing, aspirational bets. And, Grubbs was quick to remind me, they’re known by another name: a sucker’s bet.
DraftKings heavily promotes parlays, offering “profit boosts” that juice their potential payouts.
The companies say these bets make watching a game more fun and exciting. They’re a reason to tune in, and hang on, if you’re not otherwise interested in whatever’s on TV.
Do enough parlays, though, and you become seduced by what’s known as the “near miss” effect — a psychological phenomenon in which your brain basically tricks you into thinking you’ve got skill after almost winning.
Mathematically, however, you’re actually four times more likely to get three out of four legs of a parlay, for example, than all four. Yet every time I got close, I wondered if maybe I just needed to tweak my formula, even as my rational brain recognized that I couldn’t hit a parlay to save my life.
Prop bets play on a different dynamic in your brain. They are wagers on a player’s stats or a specific event within a game that’s divorced from the overall outcome. Among the most controversial forms is the microbet, which offers very fast action — who will win the next point in a tennis match, will the next pitch be a strike. Another one of my consultants, Natasha Schull, an anthropologist at New York University and the author of “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas,” said microbetting is as close as you can get in sports betting to playing slots, widely considered to be one of the most addictive forms of gambling.
So I followed Grubbs’ and Schull’s advice to escalate my risk-taking as I bet from my living room couch.
Betting on the couch was fun enough, but I was itching to feel what it was like to have money riding on a game being played right in front of me. So in early May, when my neighbor and I went to see the Yankees play, I decided to give betting IRL a try.
It’s hard to overstate how heavy-handed the sports betting messaging in Yankee Stadium is. When I went to get a hot dog, there were ads from DraftKings’ chief rival, FanDuel, on the monitors that displayed the menus.
I settled into my seat, cracked a cold one and logged into DraftKings. It was time for more microbets. When Yankees shortstop José Caballero was up in the fifth inning, I bet $50 that he’d either get a hit or take a ball on his third pitch. I was right! Easiest $95 I’d ever made.
So I kept going — with less success.
I lost $50 on the next pitch to Caballero, then I went 0-5 at $20 a pop trying to guess what Baltimore Orioles center fielder Leody Taveras would do from the box during his third plate appearance. I’d managed to squander my payday in just a couple of minutes.
Schull told me that since there’s so little lag time between placing your wager and getting your result, you can quickly get into a flow of submitting and repeating bets — exactly the kind of trance she observed in gambling addicts pulling slot machine levers. The result, obviously, is that it’s very easy to lose a lot very quickly.
I’d soon find out that DraftKings knows this, too, though its take on microbetting was far less full of doomerism.
Three days after the Yankees game, on May 7, following yet even more parlay losses, the company served me a “responsible gaming” pop-up video — the first I’d been served in the app since the New York-mandated one on April 25.
“Took a loss? Now take a beat,” it read, directing me on how to visit the “My Stat Sheet” page on the app, where I could set a budget or impose limits on my ability to spend. I clicked “Maybe Later,” and the interruption was over.
But DraftKings’ apparent concern for my well-being was belied by a promotion the company sent me just hours later: A 20% profit BOOST on bets of up to $250 for an unlimited number of live microbets on baseball plate appearances. This was exactly the kind of bet that had led me to lose so quickly at the ballpark. Now the company was encouraging me to run it back at even bigger dollar amounts for as many times as I wanted until the promotion expired later that day. “Bet, settle, repeat!” read the push notification that popped up on my phone. I could practically hear the crank of a slot machine lever.
On May 7, the app served me the first “responsible gaming” pop-up since the New York-mandated one on April 25.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublicaJust hours later, DraftKings sent me a promotion urging me to place microbets on baseball.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
When I described this bet-pause-promote progression to Kalani, DraftKings’ responsible gaming chief, she told me she’d “take that back” to her team for review but added, “I just don’t think we should be drawing broad conclusions from, you know, your single account, what you did.”
A few days later, exactly two weeks after my first big night of loss chasing during the Knicks game, I was formally accepted into the VIP program and assigned my very own, personal concierge. It had taken only three weeks and $5,800 in deposits on the app. My rep said he’d be “keeping an eye out for opportunities and perks tailored specifically” to my account, plus “reminders about Responsible Gaming.”
I could text him directly. I could reach out for special treatment. Rose-Berman explained to me that this meant I could ask for “bonus bets,” free one-time bets using house money, or, more commonly, “deposit matches,” extra house money called DK Dollars, that fattened up my account when I made a transfer from my bank. He said that sportsbooks are happy to provide these freebies to losers like me because they’ve assessed, rightly, that we’re likely to end up gambling it right back — and that the special treatment will keep us loyal. I’d be earning crowns that I could convert to DK Dollars as I climbed the tiers of the loyalty program, which I could use to bet more or buy merch. I couldn’t help but hope that I’d also get the really cool stuff. A personalized video from a major leaguer? Tickets to a game? Swag?
My rapid ascent to VIP at DraftKings made me wonder how its major competitor, FanDuel, would handle a problem gambler like me. So I repeated the behavior there, placing the same kinds of bets at the same odds over the course of a week on their app.
One night I blew $529 on playoff basketball bets and then chased my losses with a $750 wager on professional hockey, backing the Minnesota Wild in a high-scoring matchup against the Colorado Avalanche. When the Avs won and my money was gone, I found the only remaining live action I could: a cricket match between Indonesia and Malaysia.
Like most Americans, I have no idea what cricket is. But whatever. It was near midnight and this was work, so I deposited $500 and tried to put it all on Malaysia. That bet would’ve netted me $11,000 had Malaysia won, but FanDuel wouldn’t accept it and required me to lower my wager amount. When I later asked the company about this, FanDuel wouldn’t say whether it did so because it didn’t want to lose the money or out of a commitment to responsible gaming. In any event, I put $200 on Malaysia instead and, of course, lost.
The app also put some speed bumps in my way over the course of that night, prompting me with “Reality Check” reminders six times that showed me the amount of time I’d been on the app and the amount I’d wagered thus far.
One of six FanDuel “Reality Checks” I encountered while betting on the app on May 3.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
And unlike on DraftKings, my weeklong betting behavior on FanDuel didn’t result in a VIP invite. When I reached out to FanDuel for comment, the company touted its responsible gaming tools. A company spokesperson added in a statement that FanDuel’s program is “designed to identify potential risk early and empower customers with real-time information about their play.” For some customers, the statement said, “trained specialists” will intervene “or apply protective measures, including limits or exclusion,” though the company didn’t say how often that happens and what it takes, exactly, to trigger those measures. The New York Times reported that FanDuel is one of several operators that have signed up with third-party firms that help gauge customers’ risk for problem gambling to curb it. DraftKings is not among them but said it has its own tools.
Over on DraftKings, things were heating up. A month into my experiment I’d already lost $4,671 — enough scratch to buy a used car (with a lot of miles) — and my bet size was growing, too. I was getting used to risking large sums. I looked back on how nervous I’d been to place $200 bets when I first started and couldn’t believe that I’d been so naive.
I’d been wagering so much, in fact, that the quick-tap deposit buttons in the app had increased to $500, $750 and $950, making it even easier to mindlessly transfer large sums from my bank into my DraftKings account.
The default dollar figures exemplify “dark patterns” aimed at making betting large amounts as frictionless as possible.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica. Debit card number redacted by ProPublica.
Computer scientists have a term for this choice of user design: They call it a “dark pattern.” Critics say this is a key way that apps essentially trick you into subscribing to or purchasing things you don’t want or need with just one click.
And boy, was I getting fed opportunities to click. I’d selected the open settings for notifications on DraftKings, and as a result I was just getting pummeled with push alerts to my phone. Sometimes there’d be six in a day, offering BOOSTS. In the app, they’ve even got their own tagline: “BOOSTS DON’T STOP.”
I was hoping for tickets to a game or swag or anything super cool, but so far my VIP rep had hooked me up with only a 12-month ESPN subscription. That and lots of promotions to bet, at all hours. On Saturday, May 16, as I was getting the kids home from my son’s baseball game, DraftKings pushed me an “Exclusive Offer” to double my winnings on any bet up to $250. I pieced together a parlay on the subway, placing the bet as my service cut in and out.
The Yankees were playing the Mets that night, and Rose-Berman had encouraged me to shoot the moon — to climb the tiers of VIP status — so I strung together a five-leg parlay for the full eligible amount. My payout, highlighted in purple at the bottom of my slip, would be $6,250 if it hit.
The Yankees lost, and I hit only one leg of my parlay. As I nursed my wounds I began to wonder: Would I have spent that $250 but for the promotion?
I promise you I wasn’t trying to lose. Sure, I was firing unlikely bets, but I wanted them to win. If you could lose intentionally then you could win intentionally, and gambling wouldn’t exist. Over time most gamblers lose, and like them my performance was trending southward consistently — and fast.
But then, heading into Memorial Day weekend, I got on a hot streak. In statistics, this is called variance, but colloquially we refer to it as luck. Over five days, I notched real wins betting serious cash. After winning $3,869 on parlays from a Yankees game and the thrilling double overtime Spurs win in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, I almost forgot that, net, I was still down $8,836. And you know what? I felt like Superman.
To my betting brain, I was flying high. I was hot. I contacted one of my advisers, Rob Minnick, himself a recovering gambling addict who hosts a YouTube channel about problem gambling, and asked what he did after big wins.
He told me to withdraw the deposit I’d made immediately before my hot streak and then bet the winnings left in my DraftKings account with gusto because, hey, it’s just house money.
“I always say on my channel, like all wins are just future losses because when you don’t stop, it eventually gets given back,” he said.
Today, nearly a quarter of all Americans, and half of men ages 18 to 49, say they have an active sportsbook account, according to the Siena Research Institute. And with the advent of prediction markets, millions more are believed to be betting on sports.
But companies like DraftKings and FanDuel don’t just offer sports action: You can also gamble on casino games like blackjack and roulette in the handful of states where that’s legal. The companies call it iGaming, and they want it to be legal everywhere that sports betting is.
“I do think it’s a when, not if, that a lot of these states are going to legalize iGaming,” DraftKings CEO Jason Robins said at a June investor conference. “Customers want it. The tax revenue potential is real. And so we’re seeing a lot of momentum develop in different states.”
New York doesn’t permit that kind of gambling, but New Jersey is one of the roughly half dozen states that does. Since I was headed down the shore for Memorial Day weekend and my DraftKings account was flush from playoff basketball betting, it proved to be the perfect opportunity to try out iGaming.
I logged into my account from the beach on May 22 and was hit with a reminder of the app’s responsible gaming suite of tools, including the option to set a budget. I bypassed the prompt with the swipe of a finger, and there, on the main page, was a shortcut straight to the card table.
New Jersey allows iGaming, so I could access the casino right from DraftKings.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
I explored the expansive casino offerings: I played roulette and tried out blackjack. The cards were dealt on a table that looked straight out of Vegas but for your phone. I didn’t have to think about how much to wager because DraftKings had already done that for me: With the click of a button I could bet as much as $1,000 per hand. And I was struck by how DraftKings cross-promoted iGaming to the sports bettor.
That included “baseball blackjack” and “basketball blackjack” — a regular deck of cards but instead of a felt card table background, there was a baseball diamond or basketball court.
I didn’t think much of that until after I bet on the Knicks and Cavs in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals the next day. At the bottom of the receipt of my bet slip, I noticed for the first time a “Suggested For You” section. Mine advertised baseball blackjack and basketball blackjack. The app was drawing me back to the table.
In states where it can offer iGaming, DraftKings has casino games like baseball blackjack.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublicaThe app suggests sports-themed iGaming like football, baseball and basketball blackjack.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
Not that I needed that hard of a nudge to start playing cards again.
Rose-Berman and I had discussed a strategy for the weekend: To escalate my compulsive betting late into the night, I transitioned from my usual sports fare to even faster, more exotic sports action (read: Czech table tennis) and then, ultimately, to the casino, following the path DraftKings was all but paving for me.
As I devolved in Jersey, Draft Kings promoted me to silver-tier status.
I’d played about 500 rounds of blackjack in a couple of days — accounting for just over half of my total betting activity during 10 weeks on DraftKings. By the end of the holiday weekend, I’d blown close to $3,000 on casino gambling. Before I left the Garden State, I asked my VIP rep whether there was any way to get just the casino stuff off my phone.
Days later he responded, informing me that, no, unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. But he did ask me whether I needed “help with setting in app limits.” I declined the offer.
DraftKings’ Kalani told me I wasn’t the first user to voice this complaint and said the company was working on allowing customers who’d rather just bet on sports to toggle off the casino on their phone.
I came away from my betting mania with an overarching takeaway: that the “responsible gaming” prompts that were served to me were no match for the product design pushing me to do more gambling.
While I was fighting off sleep to play cards, DraftKings occasionally threw me some responsible gaming speed bumps. Just before midnight, for example, a “time reminder” popped up on the blackjack table, telling me I’d been on the app for three hours and 45 minutes.
The pop-ups were barely disruptive: They covered a small part of the screen and could be swept away in a second. The design of the blackjack game, by contrast, facilitated betting big and chasing losses. That’s because DraftKings has made doubling your bet one of the options you’re served in between hands — literally enabling doubling down in a millisecond with the push of a thumb.
A time reminder from DraftKings.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublicaThe “x2” button is another “dark pattern.”Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
Minnick, who, in addition to hosting a YouTube channel on problem gambling, has co-founded a nonprofit industry watchdog that Rose-Berman advises, told me this dynamic pretty much summed up how he has come to understand the industry’s “responsible gaming” approach.
“It’s like an entire system that’s just built to appear to be doing something good while giving them basically like a free pass to do everything bad by saying, ‘Hey, we told you, you know, you have a responsibility, it’s your fault,’” Minnick said.
In a statement, DraftKings disputed that characterization, saying that all 5,000-plus of its employees are trained on responsible gaming every year and that it’s “not a side initiative. It is embedded across our business and essential to DraftKings’ long-term sustainability.”
But either way, Minnick and others said the framework for protecting consumers shouldn’t be entrusted to a publicly traded company that’s driven to grow revenue. “It’s unfair for us to expect or require a private business to do something that goes against its own mission of generating profit, right?” Minnick said. “Well, if you choose the industry standard, it’s going to be the least effective means.”
By late May, according to my expert panel, I was enthusiastically waving all the red flags of a compulsive gambler. Loss chasing? Check. Regular depositing? Yup. Exotic betting products? Lots of ’em. Long hours on the app and bets of increasing size and frequency? Yes and yes.
Yet the only pushback I got from DraftKings came in the form of responsible gaming prompts that required me to opt in to the app’s tools. The company told me it sent a total of 32 such notices over my 10 weeks of gambling, including emails that every DraftKings customer gets. By my count, I got in-app notifications about my betting on 14 of the 71 days I gambled.
Kalani, who served as DraftKings’ outside lawyer before becoming its responsible gaming chief, says her 51-person team manually reviews user accounts suspected of problem gambling. But I’d never heard from a single one, and I wondered if it was because I wasn’t compulsive enough.
So to erase any conceivable doubts about my status as a problem gambler, I went full “degen,” as sports bettors say when they’re on a particularly wild tear.
This is the moment that I bet feverishly on the French Open. I was fueled with $1,100 I’d won from my second bet ever, on April 16, a $200 wager on the Knicks to win the Eastern Conference finals. Now, six weeks later, I was compulsively betting on tennis, a sport I’d never bet on before. Once I blew my stack, I went straight to the responsible gaming center to set limits on how much I could deposit and how many hours I could be on the app.
The company says it doesn’t want there to be a stigma attached to using responsible gaming tools, but instead wants to encourage its users to budget, impose limits and avoid going off the deep end. DraftKings says millions of customers have visited its responsible gaming center, but the little data available publicly suggests only a small percentage opt into these tools.
As of April, just over 8% of active DraftKings users in Massachusetts were using them, a company official told state regulators this summer. This number was trending up, which was a good thing, the official said.
But when I used the tools, it didn’t take long to see their limitations. Just a half an hour after opting in, I received the first of four push alerts.
When I asked Kalani if the push notifications undermined my efforts to control myself, she dismissed the issue.
“People use our tools all the time, and they also appreciate being offered the same things other customers are also offered,” she said. “I think they are two very different things.” Besides, she said, those kinds of marketing materials aren’t sent to customers who opt into more severe restrictions, like a “cool-off” period.
I knew she was right about that from firsthand experience because I’d opted into a three-day cool-off after blowing another couple of grand on tennis to really communicate to DraftKings that I was struggling.
When you’re cooling off, you literally can’t log in. I’d picked a torturous time to enroll — the NBA Finals were underway as I was headed to a reunion trip with the college bros. I couldn’t have scripted a more stereotypical scenario for betting. The Knicks were playing the Spurs in Game 1, but I couldn’t get in on the action!
When I emerged from betting purgatory, it did seem like DraftKings had taken its foot off the gas. I wasn’t getting push alerts. Some of the bonus perks the app regularly fed me weren’t available. Even the dark patterns deposit buttons had returned to the default amounts of $10, $20 and $50.
So on June 8, ahead of Game 3 in the Knicks-Spurs series, I texted my VIP host to see what the deal was — and to see how firm the guardrails were. I asked whether I could get some extra DK Dollars in exchange for making a big deposit. I wondered if, given the circumstances, he’d invoke responsible gaming. He responded a day later and initially demurred.
But on the advice of a recovering gambling addict I’d been speaking to, I tried another tactic: asking for a bonus bet — just to remind my rep that I was eager for action.
Not one week after coming off my three-day cool-off, my VIP rep juiced my biggest deposit to date with an extra $1,250 in free DK Dollars.
Kalani told me she didn’t see a problem with this, either. It had been me, after all, and not my host, who first made contact following the cool-off. “At that point, again, you’re a VIP customer, and you’re asking for something that we would give to any customer,” she said.
Overall, “the system worked the way it was supposed to” in my case, Kalani said. The range of behaviors and indicators that DraftKings scans for that trigger closing or manually reviewing an account didn’t ping for me, she said.
While I often played late into the night, I wasn’t playing in the wee-est hours, between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., she said.
I found this response revealing, though perhaps not in the way she’d intended it to be. I’d deposited $21,600 into my account in less than eight weeks, exhibiting just about every sign of compulsive gambling there is, according to my expert consultants. By DraftKings’ metrics, I didn’t even register for a manual review. Kalani had told me that the company was motivated to retain customers who were betting “within their means and can sustain their own entertainment.”
So I asked Kalani straight up: Does DraftKings ever cut somebody off purely based on their betting history and not because they’ve disclosed that they’ve got a problem? “Yes, we do that all the time,” she told me. She repeated the same answer when I asked her how often. I pressed again, and a spokesperson interjected, telling me he could take the question as a follow-up. I checked in later, but the company told me that “we do not share the specific number of closures.”
Sportsbooks know how to identify and restrict gamblers’ behavior. In fact, they already do so when it comes to sharp bettors like Rose-Berman. Gaming regulators in Massachusetts who crunched the numbers on this last September found that, on average, just 0.64% of gamblers in the commonwealth were limited as of December 2024 and that, within that group, winning bettors were more likely to have their bet maximums lowered than losers.
Sportsbooks could do the same to losers who are digging deeper and deeper holes. In fact, the Times reported, data scientists at DraftKings had developed a tool to identify customers who were headed in this direction, but the company didn’t adopt it. Kalani told the Times that DraftKings’ existing system for identifying problem gamblers was a “better methodology.”
As it stands, the current system relies on users to opt into setting responsible gaming tools like budgets or time limits. That model restricts the tools’ utility to those who have the wherewithal to police themselves, said Brianne Doura-Schawohl, a gambling reform advocate who lobbies statehouses to impose stronger consumer and public health protections on behalf of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling.
To stem the flow of casual money losing and potential addiction, advocates say, the design should be the exact opposite, requiring users to opt out of setting limits, especially since research shows that gambling can impair decision-making.
The argument about responsible gaming tools, while legitimate, misses an even larger public policy question, Doura-Schawohl added. States that have legalized sports betting derive billions of dollars in revenue from it — even as research shows that gambling disorder diagnoses are skyrocketing in those places. That makes it harder for lawmakers to impose stiffer regulations on specific offerings such as VIP programs or prop bets, like microbets, that are huge sources of revenue for companies and thus state coffers, she said. Other countries have already taken aggressive steps to curb some of the industry’s more problematic products, from marketing practices to advertisements. But in the U.S., the industry has actively opposed proposed reforms in Washington as well as statehouses across the country, and it even seeded a political action committee with $41 million to influence elections this year.
“We want regulations like deposit limits, the reconsideration of microbets. Let’s talk about the inundation of advertising that we’re all sick of,” Doura-Schawohl said. “How do the products themselves impact harm? I think VIP is a big problem with that.”
Midway through June, the unimaginable happened: The Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in more than half a century.
It’s hard to add anything of substance to the canon of what’s already been written about the historic turn. But what I can say is that from a betting perspective, this was very good for me. My first bet, for $100, was on the Knicks to take home the chip. And ahead of Game 5, I had laid down my biggest bet ever: $10,000 on the Knicks — five times my biggest bet to date. As the city erupted in celebration, my account was as flush as ever, with $25,350. I’d erased all of my previous losses and netted a couple grand in profit.
And as it turns out, I was far from alone.
In fact, so many New York fans went big that the unlikely win resulted in sportsbook operators reporting a $48.5 million loss for the week ending after the Knicks secured the championship, the first time that’s happened since state lawmakers legalized online sports betting.
This confusing series of events presented a wrinkle in my experiment: What does the problem gambler who has been a consistent loser do when, by the grace of God, he comes out ahead?
Minnick, Grubbs and Rose-Berman all had the same answer: He keeps on going. “Congrats on becoming a huge world cup fan,” Minnick texted me.
It was good timing. The 48-team tournament was a major betting event, with billions wagered on the regulated apps alone. DraftKings was eager to get me into the action.
For the first time in the 12 days since my cool-off, with my account newly fat with house money, the company turned back on the push notifications notifying me of BOOSTS and betting opportunities. Between 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. on June 16, for example, I got five alerts pushing me to bet. “Defending champs Argentina start their quest for back-to-back glory,” read one. “Can they score 3+ goals vs Algeria (+180)?…” So I threw myself into World Cup betting with enthusiasm. And guess what? I was winning. A lot.
I was up $16,000 on top of my initial investment — astronomical heights. I frankly started to wonder: What if I was really good at this? What if I kept on winning?
My experts knew better. Winning, and winning big, can actually be dangerous for a problem gambler because it instills in that person a false confidence, a validation of their betting behavior. What I experienced was also a representative snapshot of how it really plays out on a problem gambler’s account.
“Most people’s gambling stories aren’t straight down,” Rose-Berman told me. “The whole point is that so much of the asymmetric downside is caused by the initial upside.”
Do You Know More About DraftKings, FanDuel and Sports Betting?
We’re still reporting. If you are a former or current employee of a sportsbook or prediction market, or know more about the online gambling industry, please contact us.
I had to keep going. I was putting more money than ever into play, placing between $3,000 and $7,000 a day on games, going for lucrative, unlikely parlays.
Think about that. That’s well above monthly rent for most people.
But I was hit in the app with responsible gaming prompts on only one of the 10 days that I spent so lavishly on the World Cup, receiving time reminder pop-ups notifying me of how long I’d been on the app, and how much I’d wagered, on June 17.
In fact, DraftKings was egging me on. Because of my VIP status, I’d been able to bet up to $250 to qualify for a profit BOOST. But as I kept spending more and more, DraftKings lifted the qualifying bet amount from $250 to $500 and even $1,000.
I’d recently hit the gold tier of VIP, but I still hadn’t gotten any cool perks as a result of my status. So I texted my host to see if I could get tickets to a World Cup match in New Jersey. No such luck, he said.
That should have been an omen. My fortune was turning.
In all, I’d lost $10,702 and decided enough was enough. I’d eventually withdraw the remainder and return it to ProPublica.
But before closing out my experiment, I wanted to see just how far DraftKings would let me go. So I asked my VIP rep if I could get a match on a (hypothetical!) $25,000 deposit.
If I deposited more, my rep said, he could “look into the account and see what is available to add in.”
If you’re one of millions of Americans who have placed an online bet on a sporting event, you know how quickly you can go from celebrating your wins to feeling like the odds are stacked against you.
ProPublica is trying to understand how sports betting apps incentivize users to keep playing and when they warn users to pump the brakes. To do that, we need your help: We’re aiming for at least 250 people to upload their gambling history from apps like FanDuel and DraftKings. We’re not quite there yet, so if you’ve used these apps, you can help our journalists. If you’ve worked in the industry, you can also help us by answering a few questions. (You can also reach us on Signal.)
Sharing your transaction histories and insights about the apps can help us understand when companies provide boosts, invite you into VIP programs and push responsible gaming notices. Without this data, there is no way to know how the companies truly operate.
Learn more about this project and how to share your data by visiting our website.
President’s ‘hard, drastic and necessary measure’, likely to attract widespread public support, polls suggest
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has signed an order banning fixed-odds sports betting just over a week before the first round of the presidential election, in a move he said was designed to tackle the pervasive problem of families falling into debt.
The decision ends the operation, offering, intermediation and advertising of betting.
I’m looking to buy my very first Onewheel just to see if I can adapt to it and learn how to ride. Someone on Marketplace is selling a 2021 Pint .
The details: Mileage: 195 miles What’s included: Original charger and a matching sage green fender. My main concern is the battery. Since this board is almost 6 years old and has barely been ridden, I’m terrified that the battery sat uncharged/neglected for years and is completely degraded (e.g., dropping percentage instantly or losing juice way too fast). I don't actually know how to ride yet, so I won't be able to test ride it during the meetup.
What is a fair price for a 2021 model given the age?
Is buying an almost 6-year-old board a bad idea ?
Since I can't ride it, how can I thoroughly test the battery health using just the app or stationary tests during the meetup?
Would love to hear your thoughts before I meet up with the seller! Thanks!
53 images that users uploaded into OpenAI models were included in training data — and then AI agents in an OpenAI research environment posted those 53 images on public image hosting sites.
While posted as links that weren't publicly listed, "the images could still be discovered even if the links were not publicly listed," reports TechCrunch:
OpenAI said it was working with the hosting providers to remove this content, though some of it is apparently still online. OpenAI said it could not notify the affected users because "our technical approach and privacy policy" prevent it from "reassociating" the images with the original providers, but declined to say how the lab determined whether the images were provided by users.
The news came in a post collecting public statements from the lab's ongoing review of incidents in which its models escaped the company's scrutiny, accessed the open internet, and misbehaved in various ways. OpenAI said it would continue disclosing anonymized accounts of incidents like these, and said it had contacted dozens of victims, including governments, universities, public agencies, to notify them of the agents' activities.
Friday night news also broke that OpenAI's agents also tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate the U.S. Department of Education's site this summer "without the company's knowledge," reports Politico.
And OpenAI's models also accessed the website of the U.S. Commerce Department using credentials found in online code repositories, according to the article. OpenAI confirmed the incident Friday, "saying its technology did not manage to access information that was not already public or change government data and systems." The article adds that OpenAI's models also accessed the web site for America's Securities and Exchange Commission:
One senior federal IT official said the government still did not have a clear understanding of what happened across the three agencies. "We still don't know what public data was accessed and how it was accessed, because OpenAI has not shared specific technical details with us yet," said the official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it. OpenAI discovered the Commerce and SEC incidents as part of its ongoing review of incidents where its technology has acted in unintended or "misaligned" ways.
About the models posting user-uploaded images, TechCrunch's article notes that OpenAI stressed "that its enterprise users are automatically opted out of having their interactions used to train future models; however, consumer users are opted in unless they affirmatively choose not to share their data." (As OpenAI's announcement describes it, some of their agents' training data "contains content from, or derived from, training-eligible user interactions.")
Posting the images is "not an appropriate use of this data," OpenAI acknowledged, adding that it happened before new safeguards added after the Hugging Face incident. This latest incident appears as an update on a new OpenAI page that "brings together our reports and updates on the Hugging Face incident, related research and public presentations, additional activity we have identified, what we have learned about the role of model misalignment, and measures we're taking to strengthen our systems." (It also notes that there's now a name for models posting on third party sites — "agent spam" — which they consider distinct from cybersecurity, though "we need to address both.")
"As part of our response to our ongoing investigation, we have improved our training and evaluation processes, including building safety cases, securing and red-teaming our systems to prevent the model from exfiltrating data, and implemented additional monitoring. We are continuing to review agent activity in research and evaluation runs, working backward month by month starting from the Hugging Face incident."
Exclusive: Dog Painting 17 is believed to be one of only six of works from Dog Series in private hands and first to be auctioned
David Hockney adored his dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie and let them run riot – so much so that after one had an accident in the LA home of the actor Dennis Hopper, the painter is said to have quipped: “It’ll be dry in the morning, luv, and you can just pick it up.”
But Hockney did not just indulge his four-legged companions, he treated them as portrait subjects for a series of paintings, one of which is to be sold by Christie’s.
Trump tries to dominate at the UN as his approval ratings plummet and even some Republicans stray from the script
Donald Trump stood before the United Nations on Tuesday and threatened to “annihilate” Iran. Yet even as the most powerful man on the planet flexed his military muscles, he was powerless to keep the gravitational pull of domestic politics at bay.
Heading into the UN building in New York, the US president was questioned by Kaitlan Collins, an anchor at CNN, which he had banned from the White House before a judge ruled against him. “I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me,” the 80-year-old snapped. “You should not be here covering me.”
The French president’s resolve seems to have rubbed off on the leaders of other ‘middle powers’
On the first day of the United Nations general assembly this week, two world leaders outlined competing visions for the future. Donald Trump’s speech was disturbingly similar to those he’s given before: a litany of false boasts and odd tangents, peppered with grim military threats against a variety of nation states. Discussing his seven-month war with Iran, he mused over whether to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly”.
In Trump’s eyes, the world is there to be ruled – and ruled only by the US, whose economy is “the envy of the world” and military is “the most powerful on Earth”.
Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is urging U.S. service members and their families to register and vote in the 2026 midterm elections, saying hundreds of thousands of troops failed to register two years ago. The Hill reported the appeal Friday.
Hegseth directed troops to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which helps military personnel and eligible family members register, request absentee ballots and vote while stationed away from home. He also told commanders their role was not to influence choices but to encourage participation: “You’re not telling them who to vote for. You’re just telling them to vote.”
According to FVAP data cited by The Hill, about 67% of active-duty service members were registered for the 2024 election, down three percentage points from 2020. Roughly 71% of the 1.3 million active-duty force qualified for absentee-voting protections because they were stationed away from their voting residence.
The Pentagon’s 2026 voting plan already directs voting-assistance officers to publicize elections, help troops complete registration forms and conduct voter-outreach campaigns.
Hegseth has also appeared at Republican campaign events this year, including stops supporting candidates in Kentucky and Iowa. The voting message itself, however, did not endorse a party or candidate.
New research suggests the technology could be used to increase out-of-hospital access to life-saving devices
Drones could help cut the time it takes to get a defibrillator to people experiencing cardiac arrests when not in hospital, researchers have suggested.
In the UK alone, there are more than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests a year where emergency medical services attempt to resuscitate the individual, according to the British Heart Foundation. However, fewer than one in 10 people survive such an event, and some who do are left with neurological problems.
Outgoing secretary Lonnie Bunch rejects claims the institution is unpatriotic, telling audience ‘You cannot understand all without illuminating the dark corners’
Lonnie Bunch, the outgoing secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, has defended the organisation against political interference, insisting that telling the unvarnished and complex truths of history is an act of “great love” for the country.
Speaking on Friday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, Bunch received a standing ovation from hundreds of audience members and rejected claims that the institution’s staff or exhibitions were unpatriotic.
Trial had been set for Monday over claims by Alabama that TikTok misled parents about tools meant to shield children from harmful content
TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100m and enact time limits and other restrictions for teenage users, avoiding a trial with a settlement that was modelled on Instagram-owner Meta’s recent agreement with US states.
Alabama described it as a “first-in-the-nation settlement” with a state in the sweeping litigation over social media’s affect on teen wellbeing.
Recently got a onewheel about a month ago, specifically the Pint S, and I love riding it but I have to take breaks maybe every 15-30 minutes when riding. My feet cramp up and get real sore, to the point where I have to stop and step off the board, and stretch my feel by flexing them, bending them and by walking.
I’m usually wearing my Emerica skate shoes or my Etnies when riding, which I used to wear skateboarding a few years back. I don’t really skate much anymore as I’ve gotten older.
I’m thinking the soreness and cramp could be from a few things, but I was hoping maybe the community here could help me to understand what might be happening or give perspective on what factors I might need to look at.
So far I’m thinking it could be:
Poor shoes for this. Might need something with a bit more padding or maybe I need a tighter fitting shoe.
My feet aren’t used to riding, and so I don’t yet have all the muscles needed to ride for extended periods of time. Possible that riding more will strengthen these muscles and it’ll get easier over time.
Maybe this is normal, to only be able to ride for ~30 minute intervals? Maybe I’m overthinking this and this is just the way it is?
Please let me know what you think and I’d appreciate any recommendations on what might help, or insight into this. Thanks in advance for your time!
A New Mexico jury on Friday "found Facebook liable for deceiving users" about its privacy protections, reports the Associated Press.
A New Mexico newspaper calls it "another massive legal victory" against Facebook, reporting that the jury found Facebook "had committed tens of millions of violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act in connection with its lies to consumers about how their personal information was handled by the company and third-party users."
The state has asked the company be ordered to pay the maximum civil penalty of $5,000 per violation meaning a judge could potentially order the company to pay billions in penalties to the state. The jury also found the company had been dishonest about its investigation of and response to the 2013 Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal, in which approximately 300,000 Facebook users took an online personality quiz, only to have the app that hosted the quiz harvest data from tens of millions of their "friends." The data was then transferred to the British consulting firm, which used it to create targeted political ads during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
More details from Reuters:
The verdict followed a two-week trial over a lawsuit filed by New Mexico's attorney general in 2021, three years after news reports revealed that the firm, Cambridge Analytica, had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app... At a press conference after the verdict was announced, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the case revealed "in stark detail the way in which this company plays fast and loose with the rules."
Jurors found 26 of 29 statements identified by the state were misleading, including comments about user data... Judge Francis Mathew will now determine civil penalties after jurors found more than 43 million violations, based on the number of people affected by the company's misleading statements... [New Mexico Attorney General] Torrez said his office is evaluating how much to seek but will push for the maximum penalty based on the jury's findings. The state will also ask [Judge] Mathew to direct Meta to make changes, which could include corrections to its past misstatements as well as an audit of the way it manages user data, Torrez said.
Mountaineer’s body recovered about 20 metres below the summit of Torrecerredo, the highest peak of the Picos de Europa range
A British man has died after falling about 61 metres (200ft) while descending from the summit of a mountain in northern Spain, according to local law enforcement.
The 28-year-old mountaineer fell down a vertical gully on the east side of the Torrecerredo – the highest peak of the Cantabrian mountains – on Thursday afternoon, the Spanish Civil Guard for the Asturias region said.
Xi Jinping and his wife are back at the White House for the final day of the Chinese president’s pageantry-filled visit to Washington, where President Trump has given him an unexpectedly warm welcome.
The itinerary for the final day of Xi’s visit – which included a red carpet welcome on the tarmac on Wednesday, then a full day of talks followed by a lavish state dinner on Thursday – included an appointment for tea at the White House, followed by a tour of the National Archives, where the nation’s founding documents are on display.
President Trump moved to cancel almost $1 billion in spending that was approved by Congress, marking the second time his administration has employed a rarely used tactic that some lawmakers in both parties have called illegal.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian airing on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Sept. 27, 2026.
JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri — The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked Missouri from using a Republican-drawn congressional map for the November midterms, marking the third time the justices have intervened against the Trump-backed redistricting plan.
In an unsigned order Friday, the court suspended lower-court rulings requiring use of the 2025 map, saying changing districts after absentee voting had begun would “usher in electoral chaos.” No justice publicly dissented. Missouri will instead use the congressional map adopted in 2022.
President Donald Trump had urged Republican-led states to redraw congressional boundaries mid-decade to improve the party’s position in the House. Missouri lawmakers responded with a map that dismantled Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City-based district and could have given Republicans seven of the state’s eight seats.
The Missouri Supreme Court previously ruled that the new map could not take effect until voters considered a referendum backed by more than 300,000 petition signatures. A federal appeals court nevertheless ordered the map restored Monday, prompting another emergency appeal.
Timing proved critical. Absentee ballots using the 2022 districts were already being distributed, while more than 1 million Missouri voters would have been shifted into different districts under the new lines.
The ruling does not end the underlying litigation, but it determines which districts Missouri will use in the November election.
President using rare power to revoke expenditure with bipartisan approval to aid immigrant services
Donald Trump is canceling nearly $1bn in spending approved by Congress, the White House announced on Friday, using a rare and contested power to axe funding for immigrant services and diversity-focused initiatives.
Trump’s office of management and budget described the funding cut as focused on “the most harmful government spending”.
Drs. Travan and Travis Jasper, identical twins, are co-directors of the emergency department at Chippenham Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, the city where they grew up in poverty.
Disclosure reveals new area of privacy risk for the company and illustrates how difficult it is to inventory unauthorized activity tied to its agents
Two months after OpenAI disclosed the accidental hacking of Hugging Face, the ChatGPT maker is still working to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity, two people briefed on the matter told Reuters.
The latest example came on Friday when OpenAI said its agents had leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users. OpenAI declined to say if the images were AI-generated or identified real people. It also declined to say when the images were posted.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll never pass up a free coffee.National Coffee Day lands on Sept. 29, and this year's freebies span breakfast spots, coffee chains and even a burger joint. Here's where to get your cup — no…
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we’ll tell you, and one can drag them, we’ll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don’t get what’s so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers.
A deeply technical look at not just how the Amiga managed to achieve this stunning functionality way back in the ’80s on machines with 7MHz and less RAM than a keyfob, but also how this functionality can be useful. I’ve always found the concept of screens on the Amiga quite interesting, and Svensson’s article does a great job at demystifying the whole concept.
Of course, expect a lot of lovely Amiga OS screenshots.
Some Democrats say taxpayer-funded ad could be illegal government propaganda aimed at influencing voters
The White House on Friday defended its decision to use taxpayer funds to buy airtime on Fox News for a White House-produced, pro-Trump ad that some Democrats said could be illegal government propaganda aimed at influencing voters in the upcoming midterm elections.
In a lengthy statement sent to news outlets, the White House press office insisted that versions of the ad, which feature audio of Trump urging voters to help him “defeat communism” and a whirlwind video review of his second term, were simply routine “public service announcements” like those produced by previous administrations.
It’s time for an overview of another month of Redox OS progress, and over the month of August – they’re a bit late, don’t believe the publication date – they’ve implemented multicore support for ARM, and considerably improved the I/O performance for the NVMe driver, RedoxFS, and RAMFS by implementing a ring buffer communication API. There’s also initial support for NUMA-based memory management, QEMU is now working on Redox, and much more.
Of course, there’s also the usual long list of improvements to the kernel, relibc, drivers, and more.
Can you run an operating system with a graphical user interface and applications on the Atari Jaguar? Well, you can.
A long time running idea and work-in-progress, I’d like to finally announce the current version of JagOS ‘Spot’ for the Atari Jaguar, running from the RetroHQ GameDrive.
I’m slow at releasing things and try not to announce in-progress stuff due to lack of free time but would like to push this along. Maybe it’ll motivate me to work on it more if the interest is there or just release it as-is if not. The idea is based on the unreleased Atari Jaguar Painter Computer prototype, that a merged Falcon with Jaguar chipset-based computer would have found its way into consumer hands after the Falcon030.
The screenshots and YouTube video are quite impressive, but as it’s not actually released, it’s difficult to really say anything more about this project for now. I hope there’s enough interest to get this project’s code out there so it can be further improved and expanded.
Court puts end to long-running legal dispute as it rules Republican-friendly map cannot be used in November
The supreme court on Friday turned away an attempt to use a new Missouri congressional map backed by Donald Trump, putting an end to a long-running legal dispute as absentee voting is under way in the midterm elections.
The justices halted a federal appeals court ruling that would have revived the Republican-friendly map for the November elections, which will determine control of Congress. There were no noted dissents.
(The Center Square) - There were 647 assaults against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers during the first 21 months of the second Trump administration, compared to 37 assaults during the Biden administration's first 21 months, according to new data…
Jane Smith reportedly used ChatGPT to edit photo to show name Trump ordered US agencies to use for Lake Ontario amid trade war with Canada
The CEO of a Michigan credit union is no longer employed there, according to the organization, after she posted on social media what appeared to be an AI-generated image of her and her family wearing sweaters emblazoned with the Donald Trump-associated words “Lake America”.
In the statement recently announcing that Jane Smith would no longer be its CEO, Family First Credit Union also apologized “for the concern, disappointment and pain this situation has caused”.
This summer, undergraduate and graduate students collaborated with ALCF mentors on cutting-edge research projects, gaining valuable hands-on experience in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Sept. 25, 2026 — This summer, student researchers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) explored the challenges and opportunities of high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and computational science. Through research projects with ALCF staff mentors, students gained experience working on real-world problems while developing skills that will shape their future studies and careers.
Credit: ALCF
This year’s students contributed to projects across the ALCF, from improving software development workflows and advancing numerical methods to enhancing tools that support large-scale computing. We spoke with five students about their work, their experiences at Argonne, and what they will take away from their time at ALCF.
“It’s important to give students opportunities to explore what comes next, build confidence, and gain new experiences by working on meaningful research projects outside the classroom,” says Michael Papka, ALCF director and professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Our summer student program gives them a chance to see what’s possible and get a better sense of where their careers might take them.”
Building Tools to Improve AmSC Workflow Performance
For Kausalya Sankaranarayanan, this summer’s internship at the ALCF was a natural extension of a collaboration that began years earlier. A PhD student in computer engineering at Northeastern University, Sankaranarayanan has worked with ALCF for about two and a half years, deploying and evaluating her thesis work on Argonne systems before joining the lab as a summer intern.
Kausalya Sankaranarayanan
Her research focuses on using operational data from large-scale computing systems—including workload traces, scheduler logs, and GPU telemetry—to develop tools and policies that improve system efficiency and usability. As part of her collaboration with ALCF, she led efforts to optimize scheduling policies to improve job wait times without changing the scheduler architecture or user experience. The resulting scheduling technique is now deployed in production on the Polaris supercomputer.
This summer, Sankaranarayanan turned her attention to the American Science Cloud (AmSC), a key component of DOE’s Genesis Mission that is being developed to connect researchers with computing, data, and AI resources across DOE facilities. Her project focused on building an end-to-end observability capability for AmSC workflows, including tools to capture what a workflow did, reconstruct its execution from traces, and identify failures and inefficiencies.
AmSC workflows can span multiple HPC facilities, making it difficult to determine where a problem occurred or why a workflow performed differently than expected. Sankaranarayanan’s project addresses that challenge by extending existing telemetry with workflow-specific information and providing visualizations of workflow executions as both directed acyclic graphs and timelines. These views can help identify bottlenecks, gaps between events and other anomalies across workflow runs.
The work also lays the foundation for future AI-assisted operations. Sankaranarayanan says the instrumentation could support an AI4Ops system capable of automatically detecting anomalies and generating performance reports, helping both facility staff and users identify issues without having to manually monitor every workflow.
For Sankaranarayanan, one of the most valuable parts of the summer has been the opportunity to work closely with people across the lab. “The biggest takeaway has been how much being embedded here changes what you can actually see,” she said. “Since arriving, talking to many more people across the lab has surfaced real problems I hadn’t seen from the outside, ones I can now actually work on solutions for.”
The experience has reinforced her interest in performance engineering and distributed systems, particularly systems that span multiple computing facilities. “That’s exactly the path toward the kind of systems researcher I want to become: someone who turns operational data into tools and policies that make large-scale computing more efficient and accessible.”
Advancing Reliable Numerical Methods for Scientific Simulations
Minyeong Kim, a Ph.D. student in Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics at the Oden Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, joined ALCF for the summer to conduct research on computational mechanics, finite element methods, and isogeometric analysis, with a focus on the mathematical foundations of numerical methods and their applications to complex scientific problems.
Minyeong Kim
Kim was drawn to the ALCF because of its role as a leading center for high-performance computing and its connection between mathematics, scientific computing, and large-scale simulations.
During his internship, Kim worked on numerical methods for acoustic fluid-structure interaction simulations. His project investigated the mathematical origins of spurious circulation modes that can appear in displacement-based formulations of acoustic problems and explored approaches for suppressing these numerical artifacts.
Kim implemented finite element methods using penalty formulations, conducted numerical experiments on benchmark problems, and analyzed how different mesh geometries and numerical parameters affect the accuracy and robustness of computed eigenmodes.
Improving the reliability of numerical methods can benefit scientific simulations across a range of fields, including structural mechanics, fluid dynamics, acoustics, and multiphysics applications. Kim’s work also explored how floating-point arithmetic influences numerical precision and robustness in large-scale computations.
“One of the biggest takeaways from this summer was realizing how closely mathematical theory and computational practice are connected,” Kim said. “While numerical methods are often evaluated by their computational performance, understanding the underlying mathematics is equally important for developing reliable simulation tools.”
Looking ahead, Kim plans to continue investigating numerical formulations beyond the internship and pursue a research career focused on developing advanced computing methods for challenging scientific problems.
Improving Software Development Workflows Through Testing and AI Exploration
Marija Stojanoska, a combined degree student at DePaul University, returned to the ALCF for her second summer with the facility. After previously working with the infrastructure team in ALCF Operations, Stojanoska joined the web development team this summer, where she focused on software workflows and front-end technologies.
Marija Stojanoska
Stojanoska is currently completing her undergraduate degree in computer science and will continue into a graduate program in AI in Software Engineering. Her interests center on exploring how AI can transform software development workflows, including ways AI could help engineers work more efficiently.
This summer, Stojanoska focused on improving the user interface for Cypress, a front-end web automation tool built for modern applications. Stojanoska ran tests by minimizing timeouts from asynchronous calls and addressing inconsistencies across tests. She also worked to strengthen her understanding of frontend concepts while learning more about her team’s workflows, processes, and tools.
Her work could help ALCF teams more efficiently identify software issues by reducing time spent investigating errors caused by testing inconsistencies rather than actual bugs.
Reflecting on her experience, Stojanoska highlighted the importance of learning from those around her. “My biggest takeaways from this summer at ALCF have been that, you should not be afraid to ask questions, and to absorb as much knowledge from the scientists on your team as possible,” she said.
Making Portable Programming Models More Accessible for HPC Developers
Michael Lance, an undergraduate in the University of Wyoming’s School of Computing Applied Software Development Program, joined the ALCF this summer to develop an open-source software tool for conducting wildlife censuses using aerial photography and convolutional neural networks in Dr. Ben Koger’s lab.
Michael Lance
Interested in HPC and the challenges of scaling software systems to use massive computing resources, he worked with the ALCF’s Performance Engineering group under ALCF computational scientist Thomas Applencourt. Lance’s summer project focused on modernizing SYCL Academy resources, which provide educational materials for developers working with SYCL, a C++ programming model for building portable and high-performance heterogeneous compute applications on Aurora and other HPC systems.
Lance migrated lesson materials to use the Unified Shared Memory model, improved their visual presentation through in-browser syntax highlighting, and enhanced the existing continuous integration pipeline to catch syntax mistakes and runtime errors.
SYCL applications are used across scientific computing, and Lance’s work helps make the programming model more approachable for the growing HPC community. He also emphasized the importance of maintaining accurate learning resources as AI coding tools become more common.
“The quality and correctness of the changes you make are far more important than the total volume of changes you make,” Lance said. “Code should be written with the future in mind; the most expedient solution today can transform into a massive headache months or even years down the line.”
Lance said his experience at the ALCF reinforced his decision to pursue graduate studies and expanded his view of future opportunities in computing. “My time at the ALCF reinforced my choice to pursue a graduate degree and helped broaden my horizons,” he said.
Moving forward, Lance hopes to pursue a career in HPC and scientific computing, bringing the lessons he learned at the ALCF back to his work at the University of Wyoming.
Advancing Agentic AI for Performance Engineering and User Support
For Akhilesh Bondapalli, this summer’s internship at the ALCF marked his second experience at the lab, following his first internship there last summer. A second-year Ph.D. student at Clemson University, Bondapalli’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and high-performance computing, and he hopes to build a research career leading a lab group in academia or at a national lab such as Argonne.
Akhilesh Bondapalli
Bondapalli was drawn to ALCF by the range of opportunities it offers to work with researchers across different fields and tackle problems at significant scale. “I was drawn by the seemingly boundless possibilities that ALCF offers,” he said. He also highlighted the opportunity to meet and collaborate with scientists in their fields, as well as the facilities and resources available at the lab. Being in Chicago, he added, “certainly adds a nice touch!”
This summer, Bondapalli worked on two projects focused on agentic AI. The first involved developing an autonomous, agentic performance engineering system capable of porting full applications at the complexity level of ECP proxy applications, including thousands of lines of code and complex build systems. He also contributed to the ideation and design of an agentic version of the AskALCF chatbot and user support system. The goal of that work was to develop a self-improving agentic system that could identify and diagnose failures and autonomously update its knowledge base and tools based on user interactions.
Bondapalli’s performance engineering work addresses challenges facing leadership computing facilities as computing architectures become increasingly specialized. With the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling, he noted, advances in computational power increasingly depend on specialized parallel architectures. This creates additional demands for performance engineers, who must keep pace with new accelerators while porting and optimizing existing applications to run efficiently on them.
The system Bondapalli developed could assist performance engineers with some of the most tedious and error-prone parts of that process. One of the project’s important findings, he said, was that the agentic system performed dramatically better when given expert guidance about the physics of a problem and its performance bottlenecks. “Simply put, this means that the expertise of performance engineers is more valuable than ever, and the emerging agentic capabilities of large language models need human collaboration to perform better.”
For Bondapalli, the summer also provided an opportunity to explore the limits of current AI systems. He had access to frontier models and agentic harnesses, allowing him to test their capabilities at a scale that would not have been possible without ALCF’s support. Despite their capabilities, he found that agentic systems remain fundamentally dependent on human expertise. “The biggest takeaway from my work is that agentic systems, while capable of impressive feats of engineering, are fundamentally limited in ways that require human expertise to overcome.”
The experience will become part of Bondapalli’s Ph.D. journey and will form a chapter of his dissertation. Beyond the technical experience, he said the internship gave him the opportunity to see how an elite research team enables innovation. He expressed particular appreciation for his staff mentor for their guidance, enthusiasm, and broader perspective while working through technical challenges. The experience, Bondapalli said, “reinforced my determination to succeed in research and has taught me how effective collaboration amplifies individual capabilities.”
The ALCF is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.
Learn more about Argonne’s educational programs
Argonne offers a variety of internships, research appointments, and cooperative education opportunities every year to students interested in advancing science and technology. To learn more about student opportunities, visit the Educational Programs and Outreach webpage: anl.gov/education/graduate-programs.
Alleigha Botner tells court Caleb Flynn, charged with murder of wife Ashley Flynn, sent her AI love songs
The Ohio former pastor and American Idol contestant accused of fatally shooting his wife fantasized to his then lover about killing his spouse and sent her AI-generated love songs, according to evidence presented at trial this week.
Caleb Flynn, 40, is on trial for aggravated murder in connection with the 16 February shooting death of Ashley Flynn. He also is charged with two counts of felonious assault and three counts of tampering with evidence, according to a March indictment. Flynn has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Xi’s state visit to the US emphasized personal rapport with the US president, rather than substantial agreements to pause their respective countries’ AI arms race
Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping wrapped up their Washington summit on Friday, facing criticism that they had squandered an opportunity to pause their countries’ artificial intelligence (AI) arms race.
The three-day state visit emphasised pageantry and personal rapport rather than substantial agreements. The US president and Xi discussed the wars in Iran and Ukraine and the status of Taiwan. Their biggest policy announcement was a modest two-month extension of a trade truce.
"Signature forgery." It's a new way to break RSA keys — and it doesn't require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to "reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold" and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude.
There's "a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions," according to a paper co-authored by University of California, San Diego professor Nadia Heninger, who argues that gap "gives classical cryptanalytic evidence in favor of moving away from RSA entirely during the current post-quantum transition."
The practical risk is limited, but still significant. Applying the attack against the deprecated use of 1024-bit keys took a handful of months on an academic CPU cluster, significantly less than the current estimates for 1024-bit factoring that would require resources that only nations or companies with massive resources could achieve. Widely used RSA implementations are also safe. Nonetheless, the research has taken cryptographers by surprise... "If this result holds up under peer review, it would indeed be a conceptual break-through," Karsten Nohl, a cryptography expert and the head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. "RSA is as difficult to break as it is to factor large integers, at least so we thought. The researcher suggests that you can practically break RSA without cracking its key...."
The key forgery attack Heninger and the other researchers devised poses an immediate threat to 1024-bit RSA. Even for 2048- and 4096-bit keys, the method reduces the security of RSA to unacceptable levels. The National Security Agency, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and European Union Agency for Network and Information Security require that any cryptosystem should provide a level of no less than 128 or more bits, meaning the operations required must exceed 2**128. The forgery attack drops these levels to 2**65, 2**90, and 2**119 for 1024-, 2048-, and 4096-bit keys respectively. These levels may further drop because Heninger's team did all the coding by hand and used no AI or GPUs in performing the forgeries. The researcher said these tools will "almost certainly" drop the security levels further.
The attack works only against blind-signature implementations of RSA... Still, some real-world systems continue to use blind-signature, also known as textbook, RSA... The paper's authors and other researchers stress that the new attack poses little real-world threat. It does, however, drastically lower the estimated security of textbook RSA, and it does so in a way no one knew of previously... The new attack will further increase the urgency of completely moving away from the cryptosystem.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader phatrabt for sharing the article.
Challenging documentaries and award-winning features are among the offerings of New York City's leading cinema event, starring such luminaries as Pedro Pascal, Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore and Godzilla.
According to report, school staff recommended event move to a more secure location weeks before Kirk was fatally shot
A new report says that Turning Point USA insisted the conservative political group’s leader Charlie Kirk speak outdoors at Utah Valley University – where he was ultimately assassinated – despite security concerns raised with his team by the school’s leaders and its police chief.
The independent report with those findings was commissioned by UVU and released on Friday. The report examined security procedures leading up to the 31-year-old’s fatal shooting on 10 September 2025 during a talk at the university’s campus in Orem, Utah.
Barriers, checkpoints and surveillance have made the plight of Palestinians easier to keep hidden. But thanks to films like ‘NAZA,’ that’s starting to change.
Sheri Mecklenburg resigned from the Department of Justice this week, penning a scathing letter in which she said U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros "personally directed" the Broadview 6 prosecution that she says ended her career.
This week's guests include Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes and Alexander Yui, Taiwan's representative to the U.S.
Siete de cada 10 estadounidenses sienten presión por hacer que cada viaje "valga la pena" económicamente, según una nueva encuesta. La encuesta realizada por World of Hyatt y Talker Research de 2.000 estadounidenses encontró que el 51% ha hecho un…
In the Texas Senate race, comments Republican Ken Paxton made in 2022 about the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, are circulating on social media, thanks to posts by his opponent, Democrat James Talarico, and the Democratic Party. But their posts use just a snippet of Paxton’s remarks, depriving voters of the full context.
Talarico’s campaign posted on X on Aug. 2: “Ken Paxton said the Uvalde shooting was part of a ‘plan’ by ‘God.’ 21 elementary school children and teachers were murdered in the shooting.” The campaign similarly cited those words in a post in early September. On Sept. 24, the Democratic National Committee and Texas Democrats posted on Instagram what it called “leaked audio,” offering a 6-second clip of remarks Paxton publicly made on a radio program in 2022, and which had already circulated back then. Others are sharing similar posts on social media.
The Democrats’ post highlights Paxton saying: “Look, there’s always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short, no matter what it is.” Paxton did say that, but there was more to his remarks. He faced criticism even for his fuller comments at the time, so voters likely would have different reactions to the interview. But voters can’t properly evaluate what Paxton said without seeing or hearing his full remarks.
Paxton, who has been the Texas attorney general since 2015, was interviewed by radio host and pastor Trey Graham in the days after the May 24, 2022, mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. An 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children, whose ages ranged from 9 to 11 years old, and two teachers.
In the interview, which aired May 29, Paxton said the shooting and shooter were “evil.” He was invited by Graham “to speak a word of comfort … to the families and those who have lost tragically children in this situation. As a follower of Jesus, as an elected official, what might you be able to say that might give a little comfort?” (Starting at the 9-minute mark.)
Here’s Paxton’s full response:
Paxton, May 29, 2022, interview: Look, I think it’s difficult to give comfort. If I lost one of my children, I’d be pretty devastated, especially in a way that is so senseless and you know seemingly has no purpose. I think I would, I would just have to, if I had the opportunity to talk to people, I’d have to say, look, there’s always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short, no matter what it is, and certainly we’re not going to make sense of, you know, a young child being shot and killed way before their life expectancy. And so, even though we can’t make sense of it, I would just have to encourage them to hold on to their faith and to hold on to their belief that there really is purpose in what God does. And we may not know it now, but someday we will.
The online news site Salon wrote about Paxton’s comments on June 14, 2022. He faced criticism, including from the father of one of the students killed in the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. The Houston Chronicle editorial board wrote that Paxton had “demurred on offering words of comfort for Uvalde victims’ families, opting for cold resignation.”
Wooden crosses at a memorial on June 3, 2022, dedicated to the victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
The headline on a June 2022 Washington Post opinion piece called Paxton’s comments a “shameful … cop-out.” Columnist Karen Tumulty wrote: “It was all in God’s plan. That’s a suggestion we often hear from pious, well-meaning people when other words fail in the face of an unspeakable, inexplicable tragedy. The idea is that some day we will all understand that larger purpose of our suffering. It is meant to be a balm.”
She continued: “But those words sound more like a shrug when an elected leader — and in this case, one who is his state’s top law enforcement officer — offers that as an explanation for a horror that was preventable and exacerbated by human error.”
Paxton opposed tighter restrictions on guns in the wake of the tragedy. He told Graham in the radio interview: “There are murder laws, and this guy didn’t follow that murder law. And so, if you had a gun law that said he didn’t have a gun, I don’t think that that would have been very effective for him. … Don’t suggest that somehow having more gun laws would have stopped this guy from shooting because that’s not the answer.”
Paxton said that schools could “hire policemen at every school” and also “train other people” to respond before law enforcement can arrive. “And had there been somebody in the classroom with a gun, we could have, we could potentially save every life,” he said.
When we asked the Talarico campaign about its X posts, JT Ennis, the campaign press secretary, pointed us to 2022 articles critical of Paxton’s remarks, most of which we described above, and the 6-second snippet of Paxton’s comments, as posted by Shannon Watts, founder of a group advocating stricter gun laws to prevent gun violence. The campaign didn’t respond to our question about whether some voters would have a different view of Paxton’s remarks with additional context.
We also asked the Paxton campaign about the Democrats’ posts and whether Paxton had a response to the 2022 criticism of his comments. We haven’t received a reply.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
Chinese tech companies made several announcements recently that show they’re pushing the limits on scale, including new cluster, interconnect, and storage offerings from Huawei and new chips, servers, and AI models from Alibaba.
Huawei made several announcements during its annual Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai on September 17, showcasing new products designed to deliver AI inference at scale, as well as the capability to train AI models with up to 10 trillion parameters. These announcements were made as part of the company’s new Peerium Computing Architecture that spans servers, storage, and networking.
On the storage front, Huawei unveiled the OceanStor M900 Context Memory Storage, a new storage system designed to deliver petabyte-scale key-value caches with global one-hop connections for AI models running on the company’s SuperPoDs. The M900, which supports up to 64PB of SSD storage, combines CPU, network controller unit, and NAND controllers into a single unit, delivering 40 TB/s of aggregate bandwidth in a single cluster. Each Huawei Ascend neural processing unit (NPU) connected to an M900 can support terabytes of KV cache, enabling single context windows to exceed one million tokens, the company says.
A key part of the Peerium architecture is the Unified Bus, a new interconnect that will ship in the OceanStor M900 and will be used for scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across connections. The Unified Bus consolidates multiple network protocols and delivers TB per second of bandwidth across both copper and optical connections, the company says.
For the scale-up interconnect, Huawei offers the UnifiedBus LinkBlade, a cable-free design that can connect up to 4,096 NPUs in a SuperPoD. Scale-out is served by the UnifiedBus LinkDevice, an optical switch that serves 1.6 Tbit/s bandwidth per port across 176 ports, delivering 280 Tbit/s aggregate bandwidth. Finally, the UnifiedBus UBG switch connects up to 1,024 end devices, enabling Huawei to build its million-NPU SuperCluster and enable customers to train AI models with up to 10 trillion parameters.
Huawei also rolled out new AI SuperClusters, including the TaiShan 950 and Atlas 960 SuperPoDs, which consist of the OceanSTor M900 and Xinghe UBG switch. The Atlas 960 SuperPoD also will be the industry’s first server to feature near-packaged optical (NPO), Huawei said.
The company also rolled out a series of new UnifiedBus-based appliances, Kunpeng and Ascend, that support one to eight NPUs. Smaller outfits that need to run AI models with up to 1 trillion parameters may be interested in the new capability to create a small-scale SuperPoD composed of two Atlas 650E air-cooled servers that are connected directly through UnifiedBus and which feature a switch-free interconnect across 16 NPUs.
Huawei said that more than 1,000 Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoDs have been deployed to date and the Atlas 950 SuperPoD is seeing large-scale commercial use. It’s currently developing the latest Ascend 960 chips, with deliver expected in early 2027.
Huawei’s Ascend 920 AI chip is part of the company’s effort to build domestic alternatives for AI computing
“We’re evolving our Ascend chip series on a one-generation-a-year cycle,” said David Wang, the company’s deputy chairman of the board and rotating chairman. “In 2028 and 2029, we will roll out the Ascend 970 and 980 chips, respectively. Thanks to the Tau Scaling Law, not only will their compute specifications continue to double, but you can also expect to see huge improvements across the board in terms of memory bandwidth, memory capacity, interconnect bandwidth, and more.”
Huawei is one of the leading semiconductor companies in China, as well as the top phone maker. The company’s products are banned in the US, but are exported to Europe and countries in other regions of the US.
In May, the company’s then-rotating, Xu Zhijun, thanked the US for the export ban. “If the United States hadn’t forced our country, our companies, and our industry, we wouldn’t have done something like this,” he said according to a published report. “But we are also grateful to the US for enabling our country’s semiconductor industry chain to truly grow.
Alibaba Updates Roadmap
Alibaba, which is the number one public cloud in China, also made several compelling chip and AI announcements this week at its annual Apsara Conference.
For starters, the company announced that its T-Head chip design unit has unveiled the Zhenwu V900, its latest AI training and inference processor. The Zhenwu V900 delivers 216 GB of GPU memory and 1.2 TB/s of inter-chip bandwidth, which is three times that of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890. The chip delivers supports FP8 and FP4, enabling it to handle a mix of AI workloads. It’s scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2027.
Alibaba unveiled an upgraded “supernode server,” which integrates the Zhenwu V900 processor, ICN Switch, Panmai SmartNIC, and Zhenyue SSD controller chip, enabling a cluster composed of up to 500,000 computing cards.
Alibaba shared its roadmap for its next-generation Yitian 720 CPU, which is scheduled for launch in 2027. The cloud giant says the Yitian 720 features enhanced single-core performance, higher core density, and increased energy efficiency compared to the Yitian 710. It also shared that the Yitian 730, which is being developed on T-Head’s proprietary microarchitecture, will deliver a 40% performance increase over the Yitian 710’s.
(Tao Jiang/Shutterstock)
On the AI front, Alibaba announced that its next-generation model, Qwen 4, is currently in training. The company said that the upcoming Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 model series will be able to scale up to 10 trillion parameters.
Qwen models are improving through Alibaba’s focus on recursive self-improvement, or RSI. Qwen3.8-Max completed more than 33 RSI cycles over a month of fully automated training runs, enabling it to boost its Artificial Analysis score from 40 to 45, the company says.
Qwen is showing progress in chip design. Alibaba said it subjected Qwen to more than 60 hours of RSI across 10,000 electronic design automation (EDA) tool calls, which resulted in a chip with a reduced size of 42%, “with zero compromise in performance,” the company says.
Several new Qwen AI models were introduced at the conference, including Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate, Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS (Text-to-Speech), and Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime, Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Next, Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR, and Qwen-Image 3.1.
(The Center Square) – The federal government loses as much as $304 billion a year to tax fraud, and the IRS has no agency-wide strategy for stopping it, congressional auditors said in a report Friday.
The storm is expected to bring winds up to 60 mph, heavy rain and coastal flooding to areas including New Jersey, New York City, Long Island and New England.
Indulge me for a moment in memories of 2007. It was a time when gaucho pants were inexplicably cool, Apple was about to release a brand new iPhone and, yes, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note topped 5%. It…
A Republican super PAC has been running an ad that makes the misleading claim that North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper “let 16,000 untested rape kits sit on the shelf” when he was the state’s attorney general. The evidence kits were in the custody of hundreds of local law enforcement agencies and were never submitted for testing by the state crime laboratory that Cooper oversaw as attorney general.
The kits, which include swabs and other materials to collect blood, urine and DNA samples, are used in forensic medical examinations and become evidence in sexual assault cases. It was not known how many of the completed kits local law enforcement offices throughout the state still had in their possession until an audit was required under a new state law in 2017, when Cooper had ascended from attorney general to governor.
Cooper, the Democratic candidate, is facing Republican Michael Whatley in the race that will determine who replaces Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
The ad attacking Cooper was paid for by No Going Back PAC Inc., a newly formed super PAC with ties to another super PAC, MAGA Inc., which is affiliated with President Donald Trump. More than $2.3 million has been spent running the ad on broadcast and digital platforms since Sept. 10, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact.
The ad begins with the narrator saying, “What kind of politician betrays rape victims? Ask Roy Cooper. He let 16,000 untested rape kits sit on the shelf. Cooper denied justice to survivors.”
But that gives viewers the false impression that Cooper had the evidence kits in his possession and didn’t do the tests. That’s not what happened.
In 2017, a state law was enacted that required local law enforcement agencies to do an inventory of the kits in their custody.The kits, for various reasons, had never been submitted to the North Carolina State Crime Laboratory for testing when Cooper was head of the state Department of Justice, which includes the crime lab. So, the number of untested kits was not previously known.
The audit language was included in a budget bill that Cooper vetoed as governor. The bill became law after the General Assembly overrode Cooper’s veto.
After the statewide inventory was done, the NCDOJ reported in early 2018 that more than 500 local law enforcement agencies had 15,160 kits in their possession, and the department said it would devise a plan to get them tested.
In its report, the state DOJ said the statewide audit in 2017 found that 3,820 of the untested kits were tied to cases in which “allegations were determined to be unfounded as a result of further investigation,” 2,741 kits were linked to cases that had already been resolved in court, 1,054 kits were associated with cases in which a “suspect admitted to the sexual act in question,” and in 390 cases “the victim wished to remain anonymous and did not report the incident to the authorities.” The other 7,545 kits did not fall into any of those four categories.
In 2019, the Legislature passed a bill, the Survivor Act, which Cooper signed into law, that included funding to do the tests, and created a requirement that local law enforcement agencies submit sexual assault evidence kits to the state crime lab, or another approved testing facility, within 45 days of receiving them from a medical office.
We were not able to get in contact with No Going Back PAC Inc. for this story. We called the treasurer listed on its Federal Election Commission filings, and reached out to MAGA Inc. for a contact as well.
As supporting evidence, the ad cites an April 2024 Carolina Journal news article about North Carolina, under then Democratic state Attorney General Josh Stein, clearing its “decades-long backlog of untested rape kits” that year, referring to the thousands of kits that local law enforcement had been holding. The story said the untested kits had been a “bad mark on the state dating back to the time when Gov. Roy Cooper served as the state’s attorney general for 16 years,” from January 2001 to January 2017.
In an interview, Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy at the Joyful Heart Foundation, a national nonprofit organization that runs the End the Backlog initiative, told us that blame for the thousands of kits that were not tested doesn’t lie with one person. She said both local and state officials could have done more to treat sexual assault crimes seriously and prioritize kit testing.
“One of the important things to remember or understand about rape kit backlogs is that it’s the result of kind of a system-wide failure, and it starts at the very local level,” she said. “It comes down to there are often no laws on the books saying what has to happen with this evidence, and so the decision whether or not to send a rape kit for testing would be up to one detective” who “would make the decision not to send it sometimes based on their own conclusion of the credibility of the victim, or the likeliness of the case” to be successful.
If there had actually been 16,000 rape kits sitting in the State Crime Laboratory, waiting to be tested, “you could pass some blame pretty clearly” onto Cooper, Knecht said.
“But in this situation, it was all these [local] jurisdictions making 1,000 decisions a year not sending kits, and it was kind of hidden,” she said. “Until the inventory happened, it was hard to really know what the extent of the problem was.”
“Could everybody have done more and done better? Of course,” she said. “It’s just a multifaceted problem that involves a lot of different stakeholders.”
The Cooper campaign responded to the ad’s claim on a FAQ page on its website.
“The 16,000 rape kits this question refers to was a tally of kits sitting in local law enforcement offices across the state that were discovered over a year after Roy had left the Attorney General’s office. No state office had knowledge of where they all were, possession or control of them and no statewide count of all untested rape kits in the possession of local law enforcement even existed until after Roy was elected Governor,” the page says.
Released Inmates
The ad narrator also makes the claim that Cooper “caved to the defund the police radicals and released 3,500 criminals.” That’s a reference to a court settlement that Cooper reached in February 2021 to release that many North Carolina inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic, after being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and other activists seeking to protect inmates and corrections staff by reducing the state’s prison population.
As we previously wrote, Cooper had objected to the early releases until a judge issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the plaintiffs and called on the state to come up with an inmate reduction plan.
The narrator then says, “Released early, this convicted child molester shot a man dead,” wrongly suggesting that Jimmie Speight Jr., the man shown in the ad, was an inmate Cooper released early.
Speight was already out of prison when the settlement was reached, according to his state prison record. He completed his previous prison term and was released as scheduled on Nov. 25, 2020. He was on a nine-month post-release supervision term when he was taken into custody on March 9, 2021, for violating the terms of his release because of new misdemeanor charges, including larceny.
“On 03/11/2021, following a preliminary hearing on the violation, Speight’s post-release supervision was reinstated because the pending charges were misdemeanors,” Keith Acree, communications director for the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, told us in an email. “Speight’s reinstatement met the definition for an early reentry under the NAACP v. Cooper settlement terms, which is why he appears on the settlement list even though he was already out of prison,” Acree said.
About a month later, on April 8, Speight was arrested on murder charges, as well as rape and kidnapping charges stemming from a separate incident. In 2023, Speight was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to more than 32 years in prison.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
Sept. 25, 2026 — A year ago, Microsoft Quantum committed to building a quantum research center in Maryland. That center is now open in the Discovery District Maryland, and the company is extending its commitment through new research and training partnerships.
Microsoft’s quantum research center in Discovery District Maryland. Photo credit: Stephanie S. Cordle, University of Maryland.
As advances in AI and quantum accelerate scientific discovery, the ability to bring together talent, skilling, infrastructure, and execution is becoming increasingly important. Microsoft’s partnership with Maryland is focused on enabling an environment where new ideas can move more quickly from research to implementation.
With support from Governor Wes Moore’s Capital of Quantum Initiative, Maryland acquired and renovated the Discovery Center. Microsoft then worked with UMD and the Capital of Quantum Initiative to design its newest 15,000 square foot quantum research center within that space. Over the last year, this collaboration has built dedicated areas for Microsoft’s proprietary research, space for DARPA’s topological system and future prototypes, labs and offices for partner companies, and a community-focused training laboratory. This research center is capable of supporting quantum research, partner integration, workforce development, and government engagement.
The partner space is intended to support different kinds of relationships. Companies that build quantum technology can work with Microsoft to integrate their machines or components with the Microsoft Quantum platform, and developers and end-users can work with Microsof to understand how the platform can impact their missions. Having a place designed for both is part of how Microsoft intends to help partners scale their technologies and accelerate the impact of quantum computing to customers.
Microsoft’s Delivery to DARPA
Microsoft is designing quantum computers for utility scale, which means understanding and building the systems required to solve problems with real value that are beyond the capability of classical computers. DARPA is an ideal partner for this work because its test and evaluation team brings expertise across the computing stack, from hardware and controls to software and applications. DARPA will have full access to Microsoft’s latest topological system on site.
This delivery to DARPA follows the announcement of Majorana 2, Microsoft’s second-generation topological quantum computing chip, which uses a new material stack that replaces aluminum with lead for increased performance. Making a system available for independent testing is an important step in evaluating the company’s approach toward a large-scale and economically relevant quantum computer.
Microsoft is one of the first companies to advance to the final stage of DARPA’s Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing program, part of DARPA’s broader Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. The evaluation effort brings together the Air Force Research Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and national laboratories including Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore. Maryland’s investment and local talent help give that federal collaboration a place to interact directly with Microsoft hardware.
Learning by Doing
Microsoft’s research center will also feature a quantum hardware makerspace. Here, industry, academia, and government can work together to develop new approaches to hands-on quantum training. Microsoft’s initial partners in this call to action include AMD, Bluefors, Intel, IQM, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Riverlane, and Quantum Motion, whose collective contributions will give learners access to real hardware and the people who understand it. Imagine a space where students, researchers, educators, and people transitioning into quantum from other fields will be able to work on open-ended projects alongside experts from the community they live in. Microsoft believes these types of hands-on experiences are vital to training the next generation to build these machines alongside UMD and other community partners.
Microsoft’s work with Fermilab extends beyond training—the company is collaborating to broaden the applicability of quantum-control technologies across hardware platforms while working with UMD to explore how tools such as Fermilab’s Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, or QICK, can be incorporated into education.
Unlike quantum education efforts that focus primarily on theory or software, this initiative emphasizes experiential learning across the quantum hardware stack. This model will enable people to develop their critical thinking skills by deciding which design is worth building, working out what to measure, and knowing where to look when a result does not make sense. And they will have parts to put together to make small scale but real quantum computers, from some of the leading companies in quantum and computing. Moreover, as AI expands what can be explored, execution and intuition about what to build will matter more than ever. Ultimately, Microsoft’s hope is that as the company continues to pilot this approach with its partners, the lessons, educational content, and collaborative model pioneered in Maryland will serve as a broadly scalable framework for workforce development in quantum hardware.
Cultivating a Measurement-Based Quantum Community
Microsoft is a world leader in measurement-based quantum computing, which the company sees as an enabler of large, useful machines. For 18 years, Microsoft has tackled the hardest problems in quantum information science, with impact not only in topological quantum computing but in quantum error correction, new atomistic material stacks, and measurement-based computing. When measurement results determine what happens next, their speed and fidelity become part of the computer’s architecture, shaping the error-correcting codes that can be used and how to establish that a computation has done what was intended.
Microsoft wants to further accelerate this research community around those questions, across multiple types of qubits. The company is beginning with an annual workshop series with the goals of pushing the limits of how fast and accurate measurements can be and developing new error-correcting codes and verification and validation protocols for measurement-based computing.
Alongside those workshops, the first Microsoft-funded quantum postdoctoral positions at UMD will support research in areas of mutual interest to university faculty and Microsoft Quantum. Together, these commitments give the company more ways to develop new ideas with Maryland’s researchers and extend Microsoft’s collaboration beyond the work already taking place in the center.
Building the World’s Computer
Microsoft builds the world’s computer. The company is bringing the same model to quantum, incorporating partner technologies throughout the computing stack just as the company does in its cloud computers today. The goal is simple to state and hard to do: Offer customers the best quantum computers, high-performance computing, and AI available at every stage of the journey to useful quantum computing, through an ecosystem of end users, companies, universities, nonprofits, and government agencies.
The Microsoft Quantum platform spans developer tools through a real-time operating system for quantum computers in Azure, with support for different qubit technologies. The purpose of that shared software and infrastructure is to help partner machines scale faster while allowing researchers to co-design systems around customers’ most demanding workloads. This contrasts with developing hardware first and only then asking which applications it might serve.
With Atom Computing, Microsoft is applying its platform’s quantum error correction to neutral atoms to build the world’s most powerful quantum computers. The first machine, Magne, is planned to have 50 logical qubits and is slated for operation by QuNorth in Denmark by early 2027. The Microsoft Quantum Development Kit, included in Microsoft’s platform, provides developer-facing tools for quantum programming, error correction, chemistry, and other applications. Its latest addition is a private-preview analytics library: an emerging collection of quantum algorithms and data-science tooling for advanced analytics and large-scale data analysis.
The Pace of Science Is Changing
AI is changing the range of questions that can be pursued. For example, the Microsoft Quantum team can now explore hardware architectures in a week that previously would have taken a year or more to analyze. Being able to compare more alternatives before committing to a design alters what is possible, but it also makes the connection to experimental infrastructure more important because people and equipment that can turn a promising architecture into something that can be built and measured are needed.
Microsoft Discovery, an enterprise agentic AI platform for research and development, and the company’s $60 million investment in the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, are complementary efforts to accelerate science. The opportunity extends beyond individual research teams to the places that can combine these new tools with the skills, infrastructure, and pace of execution needed to use them.
Maryland has shown how much can be built in a year when state investment, university talent, federal expertise, and industry work toward a shared goal. Stakeholders need to keep that partnership adaptable, developing new ways to continue working together as technology changes. Maryland has demonstrated that it is the place where ideas in quantum computing can be conceived, tested, and implemented through collaboration.
Sept. 25, 2026 — As part of the EuroHPC User Days 2026 held in Dublin this week, four EuroHPC users received awards for their outstanding contributions to the European supercomputing ecosystem. Two awards were granted for Best EuroHPC Users and two for Best Papers.
From left to right: Dr. Rodrigo Bartolomeu (Best Paper), Thomas Saillour (Best User), Stephen Beller (Best User), and Ilja Rausch (Best Paper). Credit: EuroHPC JU/ Julie de Bellaing.
Best EuroHPC User Awards
The 2026 Best EuroHPC User awards were presented to two users, Stephen Beller and Thomas Saillour. The selection of the laureates was made by the European supercomputing centres hosting and operating the EuroHPC supercomputers. The awards celebrate the users’ strategic use of EuroHPC resources and their proficiency in optimising workloads on the machines.
Stephen Beller was chosen for his work on creating multiparameter pictures of the subsurface from multicomponent seabed seismic data using 3D elastic Full Waveform Inversion (FWI). Generating detailed images of the geological structures beneath the ocean floor helps researchers understand how the Earth’s crust is formed and behaves. This research can support safer and more informed decisions about energy, carbon storage, infrastructure, and environmental management. To handle the complexity of simulating wave propagation using the spectral element method, the project was conducted on the MareNostrum5 GPP partition through the Extreme Scale Access call.
In the process, Stephen consumed 489,000 nodes over a year and successfully carried out large-scale simulations, achieving a particularly efficient use of both CPU and memory resources.
Thomas Saillour was also awarded EuroHPC Best User for his SeaReport project conducted through the Extreme Scale Access call and the Regular Access call. Making use of the MeluXina CPU and the MareNostrum5 GPP partitions, on which the team were allocated 160,000 and 240,000 node hours respectively, the project aims to advance the Joint Research Center’s global metocean modeling capabilities. It would enable the creation of more accurate 3D simulations and forecasts of storm surges and changes in water levels, helping coastal communities prepare for extreme weather events caused by climate change.
Throughout their work, Thomas and his team were shown to make particularly good usage of EuroHPC systems and had positive interactions with the teams of the centers hosting the supercomputers. They notably worked with EPICURE, an Application Support Team (AST), to create an optimized code making more efficient use of the supercomputer’s hardware resources.
Best Papers Awards
This year, two papers were recognised as Best Papers at the EuroHPC User Days 2026.
Carolina Oliveira Costa, formerly of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation, was awarded Best Paper for her submission “Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Multilingual Continual Pretraining: Lessons from EU Institutional LLMs”. As Carolina has since moved to a new role outside the Commission and was unable to accept the award herself, Ilja Rausch, co-author and principal investigator for the project, accepted the award on behalf of the team.
Best Paper: Carolina Oliveira Costa and Ilja Rausch. Credit: EuroHPC JU/ Julie de Bellaing.
The scientific review board selected the paper in recognition of its relevance to the needs of European Union (EU) institutions, its strong methodological approach, and the practical value of providing a guide to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM).
The paper explores how to improve EU Institutional LLMs by enabling them to support all 24 official EU languages. To that end, the team focused on reducing catastrophic forgetting, where a model loses previously learned capabilities as it learns new material. Their results revealed the challenges of balancing multilingual adaptation with high-resource language preservation.
The project was conducted on the Leonardo Booster supercomputer.
Dr. Rodrigo Bartolomeu, from the Julich Supercomputing Centre in Germany and part of the MultiXscale CoE was also awarded the Best Paper award for his submission “Scaling and performance aspects of the P3M method on multiple GPUs”. The scientific review board selected this paper for its clear and strong contribution to making complex scientific simulations run faster and more efficiently on modern supercomputers.
Best Paper: Dr Rodrigo Bartolomeu. Credit: EuroHPC JU/ Julie de Bellaing.
The paper focused on a common problem in particle simulations: calculating how large numbers of charged particles affect each other over long distances, which can take a great deal of computing time. To address this, the team developed a flexible software library using the Ewald and P3M methods, designed to work efficiently on both CPUs and GPUs, including systems with multiple GPUs.
Their results showed that performance depends on finding the right balance between calculations and exchanging data between processors.
Computational experiments for the project were conducted on MareNostrum 5 Accelerated partition.
In congratulating the awardees, Anders Jensen, the EuroHPC JU Executive Director stated: “These awards recognise the exceptional work of the researchers and teams behind these projects. Their achievements show how EuroHPC supercomputers can support scientific excellence and innovation and bring practical solutions to some of the most pressing issues of our time.”
"Weird Al" Yankovic's name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com.
Yankovic's asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by "several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University; Tim McCoy, one of the main curators of meteorites at the Smithsonian Institution; and University of Arizona research scientist Melissa Brucker, leader of the Spacewatch program, which has discovered more than 179,000 asteroids.)
The scientists also convinced the International Astronomical Union to name an asteroid after one of Yankovic's major influences, famous musical humorist and political satirist Tom Lehrer, who died last year at age 97. Lehrer's work includes "The Elements," a 1959 song in which he recites the entire periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song." "He was a mathematician and teacher and also wrote math- and science-themed songs," McGraw said. "We felt that someone who had that kind of science enthusiasm really deserved to have their name up in the sky...." McGraw is hoping that naming space rocks after stars like Lehrer and "Weird Al" will cast some reflected light on two things she's passionate about: asteroid research and science communication.
Six years ago a 92-year-old Tom Lehrer released all his lyrics into the public domain. (Wikipedia notes he'd "largely retired" by the 1970s to become a mathematics teacher at the University of California, Santa Cruz.) Slashdot ran a brief career retrospective when Lehrer died last year at age 97.
And the IAU writes that "Generations of scientists have been inspired" by Weird Al Yankovic's "comedic musical works, including 'It's All About the Pentiums' and 'White and Nerdy'." ("I'm fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon," Yankovic sings in the latter.) He appears in a song envisioning a rap battle between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Sir Isaac Newton... And in 1999 he recorded a five-minute summation of Star Wars: Phantom Menace, sung to the wistful tune of Don McLean's American Pie. Performing it last month in a NPR Tiny Desk concert, "most of the audience was singing along," remembers an interviewer at NPR. "It felt like something that was very personal to them."
Weird Al: It's one of those songs that means a lot to people, particularly "Star Wars" fans, of course. But I mean, I see a lot of people in the audience cosplaying as Jedi Knights and waving their light sabers... I've even heard that, you know, they play that song at "Star Wars" conventions, and people get weepy... [I]t really hits people in a tender place somehow...
"Oh my, my, this here Anakin guy
may be Vader someday later, now he's just a small fry.
And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye,
sayin' soon, I'm gonna be a Jedi."
Yankovic has led a geek-friendly career. In the heyday of Napster, he released an anthem-style parody mocking the arguments of the Recording Industry Association of America, titled "Don't Download This Song. ("Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong...")
"Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law...
you start out stealing songs, then you're robbing liquor stores
And selling crack and running over school kids with your car..."
As a student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Yankovic bootstrapped a career in 1979 by recording his first novelty song "My Bologna" (a parody of "My Sharona" by the Knack) while playing his accordion in a bathroom for its acoustics. And even the IAU acknowledged the geeky themes in his 1999 song "It's All About the Pentiums" (a filk on Puff Daddy's "It's All About the Benjamins").
"You're usin' a 286? Don't make me laugh
Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You're the biggest joke on the Internet..."
An originally dumb $650 impulse buy turned out to be one of my favorite purchases yet. It's my first board +XR (4208) with 300 miles on it. I’ve since put about 50 miles on it in a week. Scratches the itch of surfing when conditions aren't great.
Southern Delaware event moves because of incoming storm; Wilmington’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s remains scheduled for Oct. 31
REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — The Southern Delaware Walk to End Alzheimer’s has been postponed to Saturday, Nov. 14, because of the incoming storm, organizers announced Friday.
The walk had been scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 26.
The Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter made the decision to move the event as potentially disruptive weather approaches the region.
The Southern Delaware event is one of two Walk to End Alzheimer’s events planned in Delaware this fall. The Wilmington walk remains scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 31.
The annual walks bring together people living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias, caregivers, families, friends and supporters while raising money for Alzheimer’s research and the association’s care and support programs.
Participants can walk individually or as part of a team and raise money in support of the Alzheimer’s Association’s mission.
A signature part of the event is the Promise Garden ceremony. Participants carry different-colored flowers representing their personal connection to Alzheimer’s and dementia, including those living with the disease, caregivers and people walking in memory of someone they have lost.
The Delaware walks are part of the nationwide Walk to End Alzheimer’s program, which the Alzheimer’s Association describes as the world’s largest fundraiser for Alzheimer’s care, support and research.
The organization provides education and support for Delaware families dealing with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Its 24/7 Helpline also connects families and caregivers with information, local resources and support.
The postponement gives Southern Delaware participants several additional weeks to register, organize teams and raise money before gathering Nov. 14.
The Wilmington event is not affected by the Southern Delaware postponement and remains scheduled for Oct. 31.
To Go Box
Southern Delaware Walk to End Alzheimer’s
When: Saturday, Nov. 14
Original date: Saturday, Sept. 26
Status: Postponed because of the incoming storm
Wilmington Walk to End Alzheimer’s
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Participate: Individuals can register to walk, create or join a team, volunteer or make a donation through the Alzheimer’s Association.
Learn more: Visit the Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter online or call its 24/7 Helpline at 800-272-3900.
The Justice Department said Thursday it has ended more than 50 long-standing consent decrees dating back decades that sought to curb unlawful racial segregation that was prevalent during the Jim Crow era.
COLUMBIA, Missouri — The University of Missouri has barred a man from campus and referred an incident involving comments endorsing political violence to university police, Columbia police and the FBI after a confrontation at a Turning Point USA event.
Video from Thursday’s “Pick Up the Mic” event shows the individual wearing a shirt styled after one worn by Charlie Kirk when Kirk was fatally shot in Utah in September 2025, with what appeared to be fake blood added. During an exchange, a TPUSA speaker asked whether the man supported people being killed over freedom of speech. “Yeah, absolutely,” he responded.
Turning Point USA’s Missouri chapter initially described the individual as a student, but the university later clarified that he is not enrolled at Mizzou. Officials said he was formally trespassed from campus and that the incident had been referred for further investigation.
Columbia police confirmed they were notified following the event and were coordinating with University of Missouri police. The FBI’s Kansas City office also confirmed it was aware of the incident, according to the Washington Examiner.
No arrest or criminal charge had been announced as of Friday. Authorities have not publicly said whether investigators consider the comments a prosecutable threat rather than protected speech.
From tacos and live music to gardens, history and a fall festival, here are outings for Sept. 26-27, with a website for every stop.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Whether you are planning a family afternoon, a date night or a drive through the Brandywine Valley, there is plenty to do this weekend. With a weather forecast that looks like rain, here are some options both inside and out! Check the weather
Newark Community Day — Newark. Music, food, crafts and children’s activities fill the University of Delaware Green from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. A good choice for families and grandparents. Website: newarkde.gov. newarkde.gov
Rum & Red Roses: A Pogues Tribute — Wilmington. John Byrne and fellow musicians celebrate The Pogues at The Crown at The Queen at 8 p.m. Saturday. Doors open at 7 p.m. Website: thequeenwilmington.com. thequeenwilmington.com
“Fiddler on the Roof” — Arden. Pair a musical with Candlelight Theatre’s dinner theater experience. Check the performance schedule and ticket availability before going. Website: candlelighttheatredelaware.org. candlelighttheatredelaware.org
Delaware Art Museum — Wilmington. Explore the galleries and sculpture garden, then consider lunch nearby. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Website: delart.org. delart.org
Delaware Taco Festival — Wilmington Riverfront. Tacos, entertainment and children’s activities take over Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park on Saturday and Sunday. General admission runs from 1 to 7 p.m. each day. Website: tacofestival.com. www.tacofestival.com
Fifer Orchards Fall Fest — Camden-Wyoming. Head to the farm Saturday for a corn maze, pumpkin and apple picking, activities and cider doughnuts. Fall Fest is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Website: fifers.com. www.fifers.com
History Book Festival — Lewes. Authors and readers gather across town for a weekend devoted to history. Saturday offers a full day of free presentations; Friday’s keynote and Sunday’s closing event are ticketed. Website: historybookfestival.org. www.historybookfestival.org
Longwood Gardens’ Festival of Fountains — Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Visit the gardens during the day or book Saturday’s 8:15 p.m. “Electric 80s” Fireworks & Fountains Show. Longwood closes at 6 p.m. Saturday to visitors without a fireworks ticket. Website: longwoodgardens.org. longwoodgardens.org
Fall Jamboree at Mt. Cuba Center — Hockessin. Live music, lawn games, fire pits, guided tours and haywagon rides run from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday. Sunday is the rain date. Website: mtcubacenter.org. mtcubacenter.org
IndiaFest — Wilmington. The Indo-American Association of Delaware hosts its cultural celebration Saturday at St. Mark’s High School, 2501 Pike Creek Road. Check the organizer’s site for the program and admission information. Website: iaadelaware.org. www.iaadelaware.org
Historic New Castle day trip — New Castle. Walk the historic streets and riverfront, and visit the Court House Museum or the free exhibition at the Arsenal. The city also lists a Belgian Beer Fest from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday. Websites: newcastlehistory.org and newcastlecity.delaware.gov. history.delaware.gov
Brandywine Valley art and scenery — Chadds Ford and Greenville. Plan your own afternoon around the Brandywine Museum of Art, Winterthur’s grounds and a scenic drive. Check admission and tour availability before leaving. Websites: brandywine.org and winterthur.org.
To Go Box
When: Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 26-27. Some events run on only one day.
How to plan: Use the website listed with each option to check tickets, schedules and weather updates before traveling.
A small uncrewed vessel has embarked on a lap around Antarctica and may not return for months.
The seven-metre craft, which looks like a large kayak in hi-vis orange, is expected to travel about 22,000km through inhospitable waters, propelled by powerful westerly winds and energy from the sun. The journey is seven times the distance between Sydney and Perth.
More than 130 world leaders descended on the United Nations headquarters in New York this week, joining the pageantry and speechmaking of the annual general assembly.
Many of the visiting presidents and prime ministers delivered their set-piece addresses to a sparsely populated hall, but contributions from two unlikely visitors in the nearby security council chamber stood out.
TAMPA, Florida — Hillsborough County has declared a local state of emergency after the number of locally acquired dengue fever cases climbed to 170, making the Tampa-area county the center of Florida’s current outbreak.
Florida’s latest surveillance data counted 190 locally acquired cases statewide, with Hillsborough accounting for nearly 90% of them. Neighboring Pasco and Pinellas counties also declared emergencies Thursday as officials stepped up mosquito-control efforts aimed at limiting further spread.
The Hillsborough declaration took effect Sept. 24 and is initially scheduled to last seven days unless extended or rescinded. It gives county officials additional authority to deploy emergency resources and may allow reimbursement for certain response costs.
The increase has been substantial. Florida health officials reported just 59 locally acquired infections in Hillsborough County on Sept. 4, meaning the county’s total has nearly tripled within several weeks.
Dengue is spread primarily through bites from infected mosquitoes. Symptoms can include fever, severe aches, nausea, vomiting and rash. Most symptomatic patients recover within about a week, but roughly 1 in 20 people who become sick can develop severe dengue, which may cause internal bleeding, shock or death.
Officials are using mosquito traps along with ground and aerial treatments while urging residents to eliminate standing water and protect themselves from bites.
The debate over taxing home-produced distilled spirits is almost as old as America itself, and the latest controversy has arrived at the Supreme Court for consideration.
Distilled spirits are alcoholic beverages produced by heating and condensing a fermented liquid to increase its alcohol percentage, as compared with beer and wine, which is produced using fermentation with a lower alcohol content.
Two petitions filed in recent months at the Supreme Court seek to settle the question of the ability of Congress to ban the home production of distilled spirits, while allowing people to make their own beer, wine, cider, and lower alcohol-content drinks and beverages for their own consumption.
The home-distilling ban is based on federal tax laws from 1866 and 1868 that amended an existing excise tax on distilled spirits to prohibit their production “in any dwelling-house” or areas located on the same home property like sheds. Since then, Congress has enacted other laws to regulate the location of all distillate plants, including large operations.
In Ream v. Department of the Treasury, petitioner John Ream of Ohio is a former home brewer and current brewpub owner who took legal action in 2024 against the federal government ban on home distilling. Ream wishes to make whiskey at home to sample, and he will pay any federal taxes on it. A federal district court initially ruled against Ream. On April 21, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit also ruled in favor of the government.
Just 11 days earlier, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit came to a different conclusion. In Department of Justice v. McNutt, four members of the Hobby Distillers Association, including Scott McNutt, sued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas over the same question. The court decided only McNutt had standing to pursue legal action. It then ruled in favor of McNutt, saying the congressional tax statutes did not apply in his case. The Fifth Circuit reinstated the other three plaintiffs and held that Congress’s power under the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause didn’t extend to the home distillers such as McNutt.
Petitions from both cases will now be considered by the Supreme Court on October 9, 2026, in private conference.
The Founding, Reconstruction, and Taxing Spirits
In its petition to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department notes that the federal power to tax distillates goes back to the First Congress. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton urged the “expediency” of taxing distilled spirits by the federal government. The department brief cites a quote from historian Gallus Thomann in 1885 that during the Founding era “nearly every farmer distilled his own whiskey and deemed it his inalienable right to evade the tax and resist the collector.”
Congress passed several statutes taxing liquor, leading to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Among the biggest opponents to Hamilton’s taxes was Thomas Jefferson, who told James Madison in 1794 that “the excise law is an infernal one. The first error was to admit it by the Constitution; the 2d., to act on that admission; the 3d & last will be, to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union, & setting us all afloat to chuse which part of it we will adhere to.”
Over time, the federal government taxed distilled spirits in different ways including a brief repeal. During Reconstruction, Congress saw the need to crack down on widespread evasion of liquor-production taxes. The separate tax laws from 1866 and 1868 form the basis for the current tax laws that set taxes on distilled spirits the moment they are produced in all locations.
Under 26 U.S.C. 5178(a)(1)(B), the distilling of spirits is prohibited in locations including “any dwelling house, in any shed, yard, or inclosure connected with any dwelling house, or on board any vessel or boat, or on premises where beer or wine is made or produced, or liquors of any description are retailed, or on premises where any other business is carried on (except when authorized under subsection (b)).” The subsection allows the government to approve production that “will not jeopardize the revenue.”
Comparing the Two Cases
At the heart of both petitions to the Supreme Court is the Necessary and Proper Clause in Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution. It is the final clause in Section 8, which lists (or enumerates) powers directly granted to Congress. The clause empowers Congress “[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
The Justice Department is asking the Supreme Court to affirm that the tax laws about home distilling are “necessary and proper for carrying into execution Congress’s enumerated power to lay and collect taxes.”
The department cites the landmark case, McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), as supporting its argument. Under McCulloch, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that “a law is necessary and proper if it is ‘convenient’ or ‘useful’ for carrying an enumerated power into effect, and ‘plainly adapted’ to that legitimate end,” the department argues.
“Under McCulloch and its progeny, courts may not second-guess Congress’s reasonable judgment that the increased ability to collect taxes from those complying with the restrictions would offset any reduction in the tax base from others who would forgo distilling altogether. And because the location restrictions were enacted only after lengthy experience with tax evasion, upholding those restrictions would not open the door to hypothetical laws restricting other conduct lacking that history,” it concludes.
The department also finds fault with the Fifth Circuit ruling in favor of the home distillers, which it says, “departs from this Court’s precedents and imperils Congress’s legislative power.”
In their petition in Ream, the home distillers make differing arguments. Their attorneys state that the home distilling ban is “a relic of Reconstruction-era politics.” They also believe the punishment for violations under the tax laws are excessive. “Federal law also makes it a crime—punishable by five years’ imprisonment, a $10,000 fine, and forfeiture of the offender’s home—to produce distilled spirits in that home.”
Their main argument finds fault with the Justice Department’s interpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause as permitting the home distilling ban. “Asked which enumerated power authorizes that prohibition, the government answered: the power to tax the very conduct it prohibits. Banning the taxed activity, on this theory, is a ‘necessary and proper’ means of taxing it.”
They note the clear split between the two federal appeals courts. “The Sixth Circuit accepted that theory and upheld the prohibition. And it did so eleven days after the Fifth Circuit, in a materially identical challenge to the same prohibition, rejected the same theory and held the prohibition unconstitutional.”
Ream’s attorneys also ask the Supreme Court to consider the appeal in the context of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause in conjunction with its precedent in Gonzales v. Raich (2005). In Raich, a divided Court said Congress could prohibit marijuana use for any purpose in states under its Commerce Clause powers, including those states that had legalized its use for medical purposes.
The cases seem likely to be seriously considered at conference for a grant of certiorari by the Supreme Court for several reasons. The two federal appeals courts present clearly conflicting decisions. Both sides want the cases heard by the Court. However, the Justice Department does not view the cases as supporting an attempt to reconsider the Raich precedent.
It will take four justices to accept the case for arguments at the Court. One key question for Court watchers is whether the Court adds a second question about whether to reconsider Raich if it accepts the case.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
New energy and trade routes could bypass Hormuz and change the Middle East. But major challenges remainExpert commentthilton.drupal
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is accelerating a wider reordering of the region, as Iraq, Syria and Lebanon plan new oil pipelines and transport corridors. But whether they can seize the opportunity to diversify will ultimately depend on wider reforms.
The war on Iran and the resulting disruption to the Strait of Hormuz has exposed the vulnerability of existing trade and energy routes and unsettled the old balance of power across the Middle East.
In this context, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are seeking to capitalize on their position between Europe and the Gulf and improve their connectivity via oil and gas pipelines, roads, railways and digital corridors. Once central to an Iranian regional order, all three governments are now aiming to achieve greater sovereignty by diversifying their economic ties, a shift supported by the Trump administration.
Yet they are attempting to do so while facing foreign occupations and military action, and while also confronting domestic endemic corruption and fragmented political systems that empower armed groups.
Whether they can seize this opportunity to become more connected – and more sovereign – will therefore depend not only on the infrastructure they build, but on whether they can reform their states to govern it.
Changing energy routes
The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused severe disruption to regional energy flows, including from Iraq.
Pre-war, Iraq was exporting around 3.3 million b/d from its southern oilfields. By the second week of March, exports from southern Iraq had collapsed. Southern exports gradually recovered from mid-April, reaching 2.3 million b/d in August, aided by Iraq giving discounts for buyers and by Iran reportedly giving permission for Iraqi oil tankers to pass through the Strait.
Syria and Lebanon have been less directly impacted by Hormuz, given neither is a major oil exporter and they both have access to the Mediterranean. However, the crisis has spurred a potential wider reconfiguration of regional trade and energy routes, as countries like Iraq look for alternatives.
Both Beirut and Damascus have an opportunity to position their Mediterranean ports and transport networks as gateways between the Gulf and European markets in a reconfigured regional trading system.
Iraq–Syria pipeline
Iraq is already pursuing several ways to diversify its export routes. Baghdad is seeking to expand exports through Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, where Iraqi crude already flows, and is even discussing the revival of a long-stalled idea for a pipeline to Jordan’s Red Sea port of Aqaba.
Iraq and Syria are also pursuing a new pipeline that would carry Iraqi crude oil westwards to the Mediterranean. This would aim to give Baghdad another alternative to its overwhelming dependence on exports through the Strait of Hormuz.
This planned corridor is often described as a revival of the historic Kirkuk–Baniyas pipeline, which once carried oil from northern Iraq to the Syrian coast. But it entails new infrastructure to form a wider network connecting Iraq’s southern and northern fields to a hub at Haditha in western Iraq, from which oil could flow west through Syria to the Mediterranean port of Baniyas and north towards Turkey.
—
Base map made with Natural Earth data. Pipelines adapted from Global Energy Monitor dataset, accessed 22 September 2026, CC BY 4.0. Only select pipelines shown. The proposed new Iraq-Syria pipeline requires new infrastructure and may not follow the exact route of the badly damaged historic Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline that is shown as the proposed route here.
Estimates put the cost at around $15 billion, with construction likely to take around four years. The Trump administration is reportedly supporting the plan as part of a strategy to reduce Iran’s regional leverage by diversifying away from Hormuz.
The new network, which has a proposed initial capacity of around two million b/d, would allow Iraq to divert a substantial share of its exports away from Hormuz, reducing Iranian leverage. But it would diversify rather than replace Hormuz: most Iraqi crude exports go to Asian markets, particularly China and India, which are far quicker to reach from the Gulf than the Mediterranean.
New East–West corridors
Lebanon and Syria are also exploring the restoration of railway links that could eventually connect the Lebanese coast through Syria to Iraq, Turkey and the Gulf. This month, Lebanese and Syrian officials inspected a potential rail route connecting the Lebanese port of Tripoli to Homs in Syria. This could be the potential first step in re-establishing Syria as a transit state, with Tripoli as a potential Mediterranean gateway.
Yet while rebuilding the short Tripoli-Homs railway may seem feasible, establishing a wider regional corridor will require much more infrastructure and faces challenges. Lebanon’s previous plans to revive the same railway stalled before work began, in part over financing and mismanagement. Syria’s railway system is badly damaged by war, with the government estimating that its rehabilitation could cost around $5.5 billion.
The same pursuit of connectivity is extending into the digital realm. New fibre-optic networks through Iraq and Syria are intended to give Gulf states alternative land routes for the vast quantities of data that currently travel through vulnerable submarine cables.
Energy under attack
For now, there is a considerable gap between ambition and reality. Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are pursuing these infrastructure projects in the shadow of a war they cannot control and while facing external occupations or interference.
In Lebanon, Israeli forces occupy a self-declared security zone in the south, with more than a million people displaced. In Syria, Israel seized the demilitarized buffer zone in December 2024 and has maintained a military presence there since.
Iran retains influence through its political and armed networks across the region. This includes groups embedded within Iraq and Lebanon that have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to threaten critical infrastructure.
In Iraq, for instance, the Khor Mor gas field has suffered repeated rocket and drone attacks blamed on militias. More recently, attacks launched from Iraqi territory forced the temporary closure of Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline, which is also designed to reduce Riyadh’s dependence on Hormuz. The Houthis have attacked Saudi oil tankers and seized the Bab al-Mandab Strait coastline this month.
The threat to infrastructure is not limited to Iran-aligned armed groups. Israel has repeatedly targeted transport infrastructure during the current conflict, including in Lebanon, demonstrating how the conflict can disrupt the physical networks on which greater connectivity would depend. And in eastern Syria, through which the proposed new Iraqi energy corridor would pass, armed groups including ISIS have attacked oil wells and tanker trucks.
Internal obstacles
Another obstacle is entrenched corruption. Iraq, Lebanon and Syria all sit near the bottom of Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index.
In political systems where public contracting is a principal means of distributing rents, mega-projects can create opportunities for political parties to potentially profit from contracts, often at the expense of their delivery.
Linked to this is the fragmentation of these states themselves. Infrastructure on this scale requires institutions capable of coordinating decisions over years, enforcing contracts, protecting assets and binding competing interests to a common project.
Yet authority in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon remains fragmented among political factions, competing institutions and armed actors. This leaves governments unable to guarantee the security or financing of projects, with multiple actors able to obstruct their completion or extract rents. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the scale of ambition and the capacity to deliver it.
Connectivity doesn’t guarantee sovereignty
The war has increased the strategic value of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon’s geographical position. As states and companies search for alternatives to Hormuz, the three countries offer potential alternative corridors connecting the Gulf to the Mediterranean and Europe.
Whether Iraq, Syria and Lebanon can take advantage of this opportunity will help determine whether they can shape the post-war regional order, or whether it is once again shaped around them.
But connectivity is not the same as sovereignty. New pipelines, railways and trade corridors can offer these states alternatives to the dependencies of the old order, but alone they cannot produce sovereignty. That requires institutions capable of delivering and protecting these projects.
If Iraq, Syria and Lebanon want to seize the opportunities of the changing regional order, they will need to do more than build new routes across their borders. They will need to build states capable of governing these new connections, while ensuring that their benefits extend to their populations, not just elites.
Why Should Delaware Care? Healthcare in Delaware is among some of the most expensive in the country. As cuts to federally funded programs like Medicaid are set to go into effect later this year, and commercial insurance rates rise, Delaware is looking to reinvent its healthcare ecosystem.
Three Delaware medical centers are poised to receive nearly $23 million this year as the state looks to invest hundreds of millions of federal dollars meant to bolster rural healthcare.
The money also comes as state officials look to invest deeply into primary care options for Delawareans and shift how the state pays for its medical services.
State officials met outside of La Red Health Center in Georgetown on Thursday to make the announcement, where they hope these funds will help to modernize the three federally qualified health centers and bolster their preventative care capabilities.
Federally qualified health centers, also known as FQHCs, are community-based clinics that typically offer primary care services in medically underserved areas.
The $22.7 million injection into the state’s three primary FQHCs represents Delaware’s effort to reframe its healthcare ecosystem: keep people healthier on the front end so they are able to avoid costly emergency room visits.
Delaware received $157 million in December in its first of five awards over the next several years. While the exact amount of funding the state will receive remains uncertain, it will be at least $500 million.
At Thursday’s press conference, leaders from Delaware’s primary FQHCs gathered to discuss how the awards would help to modernize their operations. Additionally, the health centers are slated to receive more funding in the coming years as part of the five-year federal grant program.
The CEO of Westside Family Health Care, Chris Fraser, said the FQHCs offer services to patients, regardless of their ability to pay.
Westside has locations in Kent and New Castle County, from Wilmington to Dover.
With the new funds, of which Westside is slated to receive $11.3 million, Fraser said the health center would be able to improve its medical records systems.
Fraser said his network would join Epic Systems, a leading electronic health records program behind the online patient portal “MyChart,” which he said would allow the center to better coordinate care for patients who may need additional follow-ups. After ChristianaCare transfers its records to Epic next month, all of Delaware’s hospital systems will be using the same system for the first time.
In an interview following the press conference, Fraser also said the funds would support modernization efforts that have often been out of reach for the smaller health centers.
“Some of us are doing well, and some of us are really challenged operationally to make ends meet,” Fraser said. “So the coming Medicaid cuts are going to, unfortunately, make that worse.”
Shay Scott is CEO of the Henrietta Johnson Medical Center, a community clinic in Wilmington’s Southbridge neighborhood. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NICK STONESIFER
Shay Scott, CEO of the Henrietta Johnson Medical Center in Wilmington, said the new funds would allow her team to expand different services to help manage chronic conditions, as well as improve follow-up care.
Henrietta Johnson is slated to receive $1.2 million this year, she said. With the funds, she hopes to prevent “avoidable readmissions” to her facility by offering more preventative care.
Following the press conference, Scott said the funds also would help to transition the health centers more deeply into value-based care, instead of the traditional fee-for-service model, which charges patients based on the amount of care they receive.
With value-based care, Scott said the systems would be incentivized to provide more care that keeps patients healthier and away from emergency room visits instead of being more “volume driven.”
Separately, La Red in Georgetown, which specializes in working with the area’s large Spanish-speaking population, is set to receive $10.1 million.
Federal changes
Delaware leaders touted the investment as a benefit to the FQHCs and their patients. And while he was glad to have the funds to improve healthcare in the state, Gov. Matt Meyer challenged the circumstances under which they were awarded.
The federal program from which Delaware received funding was created to court Republican senators hesitant to support more than $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid in the summer of 2025, which could disproportionately impact rural communities and their healthcare facilities. Those cuts could also lead to privately insured patients ultimately paying more for care.
Meyer said more Delawareans are poised to be without insurance in the coming years, as reductions to Medicaid and price increases on the Affordable Care Act marketplace force some people out.
“We desperately need our FQHCs to make sure that not a single Delawarean falls through the cracks,” Meyer said.
Shortly after the Thursday press conference, the federal government shared a press release celebrating the investments in the FQHCs.
In its release, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said the Trump administration is “delivering on its commitment to strengthen rural America,” by allowing states to create their own programs that improve health outcomes.
The release also outlined some of Delaware’s future proposals like its new medical school and other programs aimed at managing chronic disease in rural communities.
“Today’s investment was made possible through the Working Families Tax Cuts Act — passed by Republicans in Congress and unanimously opposed by Democrats — delivering a historic $50 billion investment to help states transform the way healthcare is delivered in America,” the release said, using an alternative names for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Trump in July 2025.
Earlier this week at a separate press conference, Meyer had lambasted the Trump administration for cuts and enrollment changes being applied to the federal health subsidies like Medicaid and Medicare.
Still, Meyer said he would do what he could in the coming years to ensure people have access to healthcare in the state.
“I hope people don’t lose their lives because of really stupid policies,” he said.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Financial disclosures show U.S. Sen. Jon Husted received gifts from JobsOhio during three consecutive years while serving as Ohio’s lieutenant governor, but neither Husted nor the powerful economic-development organization will disclose what the gifts were or how much they were worth.
Husted’s filings identify JobsOhio as a gift source in 2021, 2022 and 2023. His 2024 disclosure lists a gift from JobsOhio CEO J.P. Nauseef. Ohio law generally requires officials to identify the source of gifts worth more than $75, but not their exact nature or value.
That lack of detail matters because JobsOhio controls profits from Ohio’s state liquor franchise and has directed more than $2 billion toward private businesses. Husted’s office and JobsOhio declined to provide additional information about the gifts.
Ohio ethics rules prohibit public officials from accepting substantial things of value when the source has business before their agency or could improperly influence their official duties. The Ohio Ethics Commission has not concluded that Husted violated those rules, and its executive director said such a determination would require examining all the facts.
The disclosures are receiving additional attention because JobsOhio supported major projects during Husted’s tenure, including Intel’s heavily subsidized Ohio semiconductor development. Husted is currently running for a full Senate term against Democrat Sherrod Brown.
Mountain View Academy in Dandridge, Tennessee Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica
Across the country, states have been shuttering their youth prisons as juvenile crime has plummeted and research shows the facilities are not effective at keeping youth out of trouble after release. From 2000 to 2022, the number of the highest-security facilities for kids has dropped by more than 40%, the most recent federal data shows.
In contrast, Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services has budgeted $360 million to build two new facilities with a total of up to 256 new beds for youth. Construction is set to begin this fall, and they are expected to open in 2028 and 2029.
According to Tennessee officials, the state doesn’t have enough space for kids who courts have found committed crimes. In the last few years, it has held dozens of teens overnight in temporary places, including, at one point, office buildings. In an emailed response to WPLN and ProPublica, the agency attributed the lack of bed space to a number of factors, including teens’ needs for specific mental health services and temporary staffing issues in its facilities. And it said that national trends “do not determine” whether Tennessee has enough youth beds available.
But juvenile crime is down in Tennessee, too, and advocates and experts say the state’s push for more prisons does not line up with the needs of the kids in its care.
“The argument that’s made is that [juvenile crime is] worse than ever, right? Or the kids are out of control,” said Josh Rovner with the nonprofit research and advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which seeks to reduce incarceration across the country. “The data doesn’t back that up.”
Tennessee said youth are committing more violent crimes. But fewer are entering the juvenile justice system.
To explain its need for more youth prisons, Tennessee’s DCS points to a recent state-commissioned study. It shows that police reports of violent juvenile crimes in Tennessee — including murder, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft and crimes with firearms — have increased since 2013.
But not every report results in an arrest, for a number of reasons; multiple people might call police for the same crime, for example. Data from the same report shows that the number of kids arrested and entering the system, even for violent crime, has decreased over that time period. Murder was the only violent crime included in the report for which arrests increased, from 15 cases in 2013 to 26 in 2024. That number is still lower than it was at its peak in 2018.
“The argument that’s made is that [juvenile crime is] worse than ever, right? Or the kids are out of control. … The data doesn’t back that up.”
Josh Rovner, senior research analyst at The Sentencing Project
The state oversees different types of facilities for kids in the justice system, ranging in security level from group homes to prisons surrounded by barbed wire. DCS leaders said in a state hearing that the agency has reached maximum capacity and run out of beds in high-security facilities. DCS said in a recent statement that the number of youth needing space in a particular type of facility can remain high day to day even as overall arrests decline.
In a 2024 lawsuit over Tennessee’s juvenile justice system, advocates said the state is not appropriately utilizing the bed space it currently has, putting kids into the highest-security facilities without considering their need for mental health treatment and other services. Because of juvenile privacy laws, no publicly available data shows what charges land youth in which setting.
In response, DCS acknowledged that it sometimes places youth in facilities based on capacity, but denied that it improperly held youth in the highest-security facilities. The case is ongoing.
Tennessee promised its new prisons would be rehabilitative. Experts say they are too big to succeed at that mission.
Unlike the adult system, the juvenile justice system is set up to rehabilitate, not punish, based on decades of research showing that youth are more capable of change.
DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it is designing the new facilities to provide care that addresses the trauma youth have experienced, including behavioral health treatment tailored to their individual needs. The design includes dedicated spaces for education, job training and recreation. It also includes rooms for mental health staff to do their work, including “calming rooms” for youth.
The agency also describes its existing prisons as rehabilitative. All three of the state’s highest-security prisons are run by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews and his company, Wayne Halfway House. The company is required by its contract and state policy to provide mental health treatment, education and other services to imprisoned youth.
The 2024 juvenile justice lawsuit, which an advocacy group and multiple unnamed youth in the system filed against DCS, argued that the department places youth in facilities that are more punitive than rehabilitative. Some teens placed in prison, the lawsuit said, should not be there at all.
The lawsuit also claimed that Tennessee’s juvenile justice facilities keep youth from accessing education and mental health treatment. Two facilities run by Wayne Halfway House, according to the lawsuit, have had policies barring youth from attending school if they misbehave. One teen, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other mental health conditions, did not get needed individual therapy for months while in a Crews facility, the lawsuit stated, and only got a couple of hours of education each day. Several other contractors’ jails and treatment centers across the state are referenced by name in the lawsuit.
DCS said in a legal filing that it didn’t have enough information to respond to all of the specific allegations about youth mentioned in the suit, but it pushed back against many claims, including that youth were provided inadequate education or mental health treatment. It also denied that the teen in the Crews prison was kept from therapy or education, but did acknowledge that some youth in the juvenile justice system may temporarily “receive minimal educational services.”
Wayne Halfway House said in a statement that it disputes the allegations in the lawsuit and referred the newsrooms to “numerous state audits and/or reports” during that time that refute those claims. It declined to share the specific documents it was referencing. “Wayne Halfway House programs are compliant with state policies and law,” the company wrote in its statement.
Daniel Macallair is the executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to reduce society’s reliance on incarceration. “These institutions are not humane places,” he said, referring to large-scale youth facilities. “They’re not rehabilitative. They never have been.”
According to Macallair, who has been working on juvenile justice reform for more than 40 years, any facility with more than 10 kids becomes unwieldy, distracting from rehabilitation and becoming more correctional. Research shows that larger facilities often involve harsher treatment of youth, including higher rates of sexual abuse and practices such as solitary confinement. One of the prisons that DCS is planning would have up to 160 beds, making it the largest in the state.
“These institutions are not humane places. They’re not rehabilitative. They never have been.”
Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
By contrast, the programs that have proven to help youth avoid future crimes are small and based in the communities they are from, Macallair said.
Missouri, a nationally lauded example, has established small facilities throughout the state, keeping youth — even those who commit violent crimes — close to home for therapeutic programs. Research has shown that not only are these community-based programs more effective and affordable, but they lead to low rates of reoffending and high rates of high school graduation.
DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it provides community-based services for youth who can safely remain at home. But Tennessee data shows that the vast majority of youth in the system were not allowed to stay in their communities last year.
One way to assess the rehabilitative success of youth prisons is whether youth are rearrested after release. But Tennessee officials acknowledge that they cannot measure that in a comprehensive or accurate way because the state lacks a centralized way of tracking when a youth commits a new crime.
Tennessee has pushed against outside oversight of its youth prisons. Experts say this is a crucial reform.
The state says there will be a bid process to determine who will operate the new facilities. Right now, two providers run all of the state’s private youth prisons — Wayne Halfway House and Youth Opportunity Investments, a company that runs lower security facilities.
In response to questions about the new facilities, Wayne Halfway House said it would not comment about its business plans. It also noted that the facilities in which it holds youth in state custody for committing a crime are classified by the state as “residential treatment centers,” not youth prisons. Across the country, states use different terminology to refer to these facilities. By federal law they are supposed to provide treatment, but they also are secure facilities, often with barbed-wire fences and cells that lock, that hold youth long-term after a court finds them responsible for a crime — similar to adult prisons.
Experts say robust independent oversight is crucial to keep youth in juvenile justice facilities safe, but Tennessee does not have this. Instead, it has one agency that helps families navigate the system but lacks enforcement power and a new Juvenile Justice Review Commission tasked with releasing its first set of recommendations in 2028.
“The main goal is to bring more transparency to what’s going on inside these facilities, to make that information public, to make recommendations about ways it can improve,” said Michele Deitch, a criminal and juvenile justice expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “You really need the external body that is independent.”
In 2024, a bipartisan group of Tennessee lawmakers introduced a bill that would give oversight and enforcement power to an independent organization instead of just DCS. Under the bill, DCS would be required to suspend a facility’s license or stop placing youth there until it fixed violations.
Lawmakers felt that DCS had a conflict of interest — it is responsible for both finding beds for children in these institutions and sanctioning providers if they are not following the rules or regulations.
Wayne Halfway House, which pays a legislative lobbyist and also makes political donations in the state, opposed the bill. One of the bill’s sponsors said that a lobbyist for the company pushed to exempt privately run facilities from the bill, and the proposal made it into an amendment filed in the House.
A lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House said at the time that the company had concerns about how the bill would “affect accountability in the governance of youth corrections in Tennessee.” In a recent statement, the company said it supports the state’s policies and laws that “rigorously oversee organizations like ours and hold us to high standards for operational performance.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration is dismantling several long-standing federal tools used to address racial disparities in American schools, including moving to end more than 50 court-supervised desegregation cases.
The Justice Department said Thursday it is reviewing decades-old school desegregation orders and seeking dismissal when officials determine districts have eliminated the remnants of legally enforced segregation. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said prolonged federal oversight no longer reflects conditions in many classrooms.
At the same time, the Education Department has eliminated federal “disparate impact” regulations under Title VI. Those rules allowed investigators to examine policies that appeared race-neutral but produced sharply unequal outcomes, such as suspension rates or access to advanced classes. The administration argues that approach improperly encouraged racial balancing.
Civil rights advocates warn the combined changes could make discrimination harder to identify unless there is evidence of explicit intent. Former Justice Department attorney Johnathan Smith said the administration is also creating legal “roadblocks” that could make future reversals difficult.
The administration has already halted or narrowed investigations involving racial disparities in school discipline and successfully supported the termination of some longstanding desegregation orders. Critics, including Rep. Bobby Scott, argue that ending oversight too quickly risks allowing old inequities to reemerge.
So I was putting my XR back together and put the 1/2 in screws under the rear foot pad instead of the small 3/8. Ended up putting those 3/8 on the top of the footpads thinking they belonged. After a ride I figured I should probably check and sure enough I messed up. Just wondering if I should strip the board down again and check the battery box. I felt some resistance to the screw going in but I just figured it was the loctite There was a post just like this 7 years ago and couldn’t find an answer, thank you!
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Three-quarters of Americans say the rapid growth of artificial intelligence makes them feel fearful or concerned, while only one-quarter describe themselves as hopeful or excited, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
The survey found that 43% of respondents felt strong fear or concern about AI’s development, with another 32% somewhat concerned. Only 7% said they were strongly hopeful or excited. The concern crossed party lines: CNN reported that 85% of Democrats and about 62% of Republicans expressed fear or concern about AI.
The poll also found broad dissatisfaction with the federal response. Seventy-one percent said the government is not doing enough to regulate AI, compared with 18% who said current efforts are sufficient and 10% who said Washington is doing too much.
Those findings line up with a separate Reuters/Ipsos survey released this week in which 73% said AI companies are not doing enough to prevent potentially catastrophic consequences, while 55% supported slowing development.
The CNN survey was conducted Sept. 16-17 among 1,206 U.S. adults and carries a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. President Trump, meanwhile, has resisted broad federal AI regulation and argued that slowing development could allow China to gain ground.
TRENTON, New Jersey — Gov. Mikie Sherrill is demanding Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell resign after an independent investigation concluded he sexually harassed a woman and repeatedly violated state ethics rules.
The 61-page report, prepared by Lowenstein Sandler LLP, found “credible evidence” that Caldwell made a romantic advance toward a female staffer’s friend. After being rejected, investigators found he told the staffer, referring to the two women, “You young women are looking for young sperm.” The report concluded the sexually charged remark constituted workplace harassment and caused the employee to avoid interactions and travel with Caldwell.
Investigators also found Caldwell improperly sought a promotion for a state employee he was dating and repeatedly brought personal guests to ticketed events without paying admission, despite ethics training and warnings.
Sherrill said the findings showed “serious, repeated violations of state policy” and gave Caldwell until Friday to resign. She said the behavior represented a pattern that failed to meet her administration’s standards.
Caldwell’s attorney, Thomas Calcagni, disputed the conclusions, arguing the investigation denied Caldwell meaningful due process and that the evidence did not justify the findings. Caldwell is an elected lieutenant governor, meaning Sherrill cannot simply remove him from that office.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sen. Tommy Tuberville is doubling down on claims that airline pilots, flight attendants and air traffic controllers who participate in the furry community pose a potential safety risk, despite offering no evidence that furry interests have caused aviation incidents or impaired professional performance.
Tuberville told TMZ DC that some aviation workers belong to a furry “club” and called that “some part of mental illness that could be a catastrophe.” His evidence appears to be an “Aviation Furs Meet-Up” held at the Furry Migration convention in Minneapolis. The convention’s own schedule shows the meetup was open to pilots, mechanics, air traffic controllers, line operators and anyone simply interested in aviation.
That establishes that some furry convention attendees share an interest in aviation. It does not establish how many are licensed aviation professionals, whether they pose any safety risk, or that furry fandom itself is a mental disorder.
A 2026 review in Transcultural Psychiatry describes furry culture as a stigmatized fan community centered on anthropomorphic characters. Researchers specifically cautioned that available evidence does not consistently show higher rates of mental-health problems among furry fans compared with the general population.
Tuberville nevertheless said he would not want a qualified pilot flying him if that pilot privately identified with the fandom. TMZ’s reporter pressed him on whether professional competence should matter more; Tuberville maintained that the personal interest itself made him uncomfortable.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Tucker Carlson says President Donald Trump should have been removed from office under the 25th Amendment after what Carlson interpreted as a threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran, marking another sharp escalation in his break with the president over foreign policy.
“He should have been removed from office immediately when he threatened nuclear war,” Carlson told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. When Inskeep asked whether he meant removal through the 25th Amendment, Carlson answered, “That’s correct,” adding that Trump should have been “bundled up and taken out.”
There is an important distinction in Carlson’s accusation: Trump has not explicitly threatened a nuclear strike on Iran. Axios noted that Trump has instead threatened to “annihilate” Iran and previously warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Tehran rejected U.S. demands. Reuters confirmed Trump again used the word “annihilate” during his U.N. address this week.
Carlson, once one of Trump’s most influential media supporters, has increasingly opposed the administration’s Iran war and broader foreign policy. He left the Republican Party earlier this year amid those disagreements.
The 25th Amendment allows the vice president and a majority of Cabinet officials to declare a president unable to perform the duties of office. No president has ever been removed through that process.
CORRECTION, Sept. 25, 2026: We updated the fact-check to include additional information about SB 14 and James Talarico’s 2023 comments about it. The rating remains unchanged.
Republicans focusing on transgender issues in competitive midterm races leveled accusations against Texas Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico.
“Talarico supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children,” said the ad from Texas PAC, connected to the Senate Leadership Fund. Talarico is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican.
The ad ended with an echo to the last federal election cycle.
“Radical Liberal James Talarico, for they/them, not you,” the ad said, referencing President Donald Trump’s 2024 ad that used the phrase “Kamala Harris is for they-them, not you.”
Similar messaging has been used in midterm election ads across the country, an effort to tap into a strategy that was successful for Trump in 2024 — although experts told PolitiFact it’s unclear whether the attacks will benefit Republicans this year.
The Senate Leadership Fund did not respond to a request for comment.
Gender transition surgery for minors isexceedingly rare, and no medical guidelines support providing it for young children. Any medical care for transgender minors — which may include puberty blockers and hormone therapy — requires parental consent.
The attack centers on a 2023 vote by Talarico, who is a state representative, against SB 14, which banned gender-affirming medical interventions for children. The ad also cited Talarico saying in 2019 that it was “abusive” to deny a child’s gender identity and in March that protecting transgender Texans is something “we have to do every day.”
The claim rests on his vote against a bill that would have prohibited surgeries and other gender-affirming medical interventions for children and the use of public money for such procedures. Talarico said this month the legislation was overly broad and potentially harmful to medical care for people who aren’t transgender. In 2023, the year the bill passed, he called it one of the “three most dangerous LGBTQ attack bills” that year in Texas and said gender-affirming care is “important healthcare” for transgender children.
When contacted for comment, Talarico’s campaign called the ad a “lie.”
“As James has said, he opposes gender reassignment surgery for minors,” said campaign spokesperson JT Ennis.
Talarico made multiple comments in 2023 about leaving decisions regarding gender-affirming care to doctors and families, including during the Aug. 7, 2023, Pflugerville Pride Legislative Panel, when he said about SB 14, “The reason I oppose that bill is because I trust parents and doctors to make decisions for kids, and not politicians in Austin.”
Talarico’s 2023 vote
SB 14, which became law, “prohibits medical professionals from providing puberty-inhibiting drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions to children under 18 for the purpose of altering a child’s biological characteristics to align with their perceived gender identity.” It also bars the use of “public money or public assistance to provide those procedures and treatments.”
Talarico said this month that his aim in 2023 was to narrow the legislation’s scope.
“If you go back and check, I voted for a major amendment to limit the bill to banning surgeries for minors,” Talarico told Fox News earlier this month.
We checked: Talarico voted for all 18 unsuccessful Democratic amendments. Talarico also requested to add a provision that would have killed the legislation if the Health and Human Services Commission determined there were “high-quality, long-term studies demonstrating the efficacy and safety of” therapies, puberty blockers or surgery that helped children overcome gender dysphoria.
Talarico was one of the 56 lawmakers who voted against the bill May 15, 2023. It passed the Texas House with 87 yeas, was approved by the state Senate 31-0 two days later and became law Sept. 1, 2023.
Talarico’s campaign told PolitiFact that part of his rationale was that the bill would negatively affect Texans who aren’t transgender but need hormonal therapies as part of their medical care. That turned out to be true, according to a March 2026 story by The Texas Tribune chronicling one family’s struggle for endocrinology healthcare after the bill passed.
“It’s why I try to use amendments, to narrow the focus of the bill so that it does exactly what we intend it to do,” Talarico told Fox News on Sept. 9. “It’s what I tried to do with that piece of legislation, and unfortunately, the amendment I supported was unsuccessful.”
“As a lawmaker, my job is to try to sift through everything the bill does,” Talarico told Fox News. “And sometimes there’s stuff in it that’s really harmful, and I have no choice but to oppose the bill as a whole.”
The year SB 14 became law, Talarico talked about its potential harms to transgender children. He said during the Pflugerville Pride 2023 Legislative Panel that the legislation would deny “life-saving health care from our trans youth in Texas.”
In June, Talarico began moderating his stance about two weeks after he won the primary runoff. When asked on the podcast “Codgell Law Uncensored” if he was “pro sex surgery for minors,” Talarico said: “I oppose gender-reassignment surgeries for minors.” He recently said he’s in favor of a national ban on gender-reassignment surgery for minors.
Our ruling
An ad from Texas PAC says Talarico “supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.”
In 2023, Talarico voted against Texas’ SB 14, which prohibited gender-affirming medical interventions for children and the use of public money for such procedures. The ad singles out gender transition surgery, which is rare for minors and not recommended for young children.
Talarico said this month he voted against the bill because it was too broad and would take healthcare away from people who are not transgender. The year the bill passed, he expressed concern about the harm it could cause to transgender children.
Talarico did not vote in support of public funding for surgeries for young children.
CARSON CITY, Nevada — Nevada election officials say they found zero confirmed noncitizens among 185 voters recently flagged by the Trump administration, further undercutting an earlier federal claim that nearly 16,000 noncitizens could be registered in the state.
“Our records indicate that they were citizens,” Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote to Department of Homeland Security officials Wednesday, adding that DHS had provided “nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.” Nevada officials cautioned that DHS supplied only voter case numbers rather than names, birth dates and addresses, making exact matches uncertain because duplicate case numbers can exist in the state system.
The administration initially claimed as many as 15,903 noncitizens were registered in Nevada. Federal officials later acknowledged they had actually identified only 185 potential cases, describing the larger figure as a ceiling rather than a verified count.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said his office takes noncitizen voting seriously but has yet to receive evidence supporting DHS’s claims. Previous Nevada investigations have also found very few potential cases.
FactCheck.org has similarly found that federal data-matching systems can incorrectly flag U.S. citizens, including recently naturalized voters. It also reports no evidence that noncitizen voting occurs on a widespread scale.
The administration nevertheless continues a nationwide voter-fraud initiative, deploying federal investigators and attorneys ahead of the November election.
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — The Florida Supreme Court has ordered Circuit Judge J. Layne Smith to appear for a public reprimand after he told attorneys during a contentious hearing that he would like a deputy to “pull his gun and shoot all three of you.”
The court unanimously accepted the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission’s recommended discipline Thursday, saying Smith’s conduct “fell far below the standard of professionalism” expected of judges. Smith serves Florida’s Second Judicial Circuit and was appointed to the bench by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020.
The incident occurred during a September 2025 hearing in a long-running family dispute. Frustrated that attorneys could not confirm whether a party had been properly served, Smith made the shooting remark before immediately adding that he did not actually want the deputy to do so. He also mocked the lawyers as the “Keystone Cops” and “Apple Dumpling Gang.”
The Judicial Qualifications Commission found that Smith violated six judicial ethics provisions. Rather than contest the allegations, Smith acknowledged the misconduct, self-reported his behavior and agreed to the proposed punishment.
Smith recused himself from the underlying case about a week after the hearing and later issued a public apology. The Supreme Court did not suspend or fine him, but ordered him to appear personally for the reprimand at a date to be scheduled.
Ramsey’s may be the best example in the ranking of a genuine Delaware farm experience. The Wilmington-area farm combines hayrides with a large pumpkin field, corn maze, barnyard animals, a children’s Spookley trail, pumpkin painting and other activities. Image courtesy of Ramsey Farm.com.
From cider doughnuts and pumpkin fields to bonfires and serious scares, we ranked eight Delaware-area fall outings — then matched them to the kind of autumn adventure you’re looking for.
MIDDLETOWN, Del. — Not all hayrides are created equal.Some are old-fashioned tractor rides through pumpkin fields. Others come with corn mazes, cider doughnuts, bonfires and enough activities to keep a family busy for most of the day. And a few wait until dark before turning the wagon ride into a rolling Halloween nightmare.
So which one offers the best overall fall experience?
Delaware LIVE compared eight popular fall destinations in Delaware and nearby Pennsylvania, scoring the total experience based on the hayride itself, pumpkins, additional attractions, food and atmosphere, and — where appropriate — scare factor.
The result: Linvilla Orchards in Media, Pennsylvania, takes the No. 1 spot for the best total fall experience, while Delaware’s Ramsey’s Farm, Fifer Orchards, Filasky’s Produce and Frightland each offer reasons to stay closer to home.
The rankings are intended as a guide rather than a scientific rating. A low scare score, for example, can be a big advantage when the passengers are 5 years old. A spectacular haunted hayride can be perfect for a Saturday night with teenagers while being completely wrong for a Sunday afternoon with toddlers.
The real question may not be “What’s the best hayride?” but “What’s the best hayride for me?”
THE DELAWARE LIVE HAYRIDE RANKINGS
1. LINVILLA ORCHARDS — MEDIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Delaware LIVE score: 9.2
Linvilla wins by making the hayride only one part of a much bigger fall outing.
Its roughly 15-minute Harvest Hayride travels through the farm, but families can also explore Pumpkinland, tackle mazes, visit barnyard animals, pick apples, eat at the farm and shop the market and bakery.
There is no general admission charge to enter Pumpkinland; visitors pay for individual activities. Linvilla also offers evening Autumn Moon Hayrides and its family-oriented Hayride to the Witch’s House.
That combination makes Linvilla the strongest choice in the ranking for families looking to turn a hayride into a half-day or full-day fall excursion.
The downside may also be a consequence of its popularity: Expect crowds during prime October weekends, and buying timed hayride tickets in advance is a good idea.
2. RAMSEY’S FARM — WILMINGTON
Delaware LIVE score: 8.9
Ramsey’s may be the best example in the ranking of a genuine Delaware farm experience.
The Wilmington-area farm combines hayrides with a large pumpkin field, corn maze, barnyard animals, a children’s Spookley trail, pumpkin painting and other activities.
It also changes personality after dark.
Friday and Saturday bonfire nights beginning in October include an extended nighttime hayride, flashlight corn maze and bonfire.
Ramsey’s does not try to become a giant amusement park. That may be part of its appeal for families who want pumpkins, a wagon ride and some farm dirt on their shoes.
Bates Motel turns the hayride into a Halloween production built around actors, elaborate sets and special effects.
Located at Arasapha Farms in Glen Mills, Bates combines its Haunted Hayride with other nighttime haunted attractions. By day, however, the same farm becomes a much different destination with family-oriented harvest activities.
For people in northern New Castle County and the Chadds Ford area who want their hayride to be scary, Bates earns one of the highest scores in the comparison.
It is not the choice for small children.4. FRIGHTLAND — MIDDLETOWN
Delaware LIVE score: 8.7 — scare-night ranking
4. Frightland is Delaware’s answer to Bates, but on a larger scream-park scale.
The Horror Hayride is part of a series of haunted attractions visitors encounter during the night, making Frightland less of a simple hayride destination and more of a complete Halloween entertainment complex.
Its advantage is variety. If the goal is to spend an evening being scared rather than picking pumpkins, Frightland delivers multiple attractions at one location.
For New Castle County residents south of Wilmington and for Kent County visitors, it also avoids the drive into Pennsylvania.
This may be the hayride that looks most like the one people imagine when they hear the word.
The daytime Harvest Hayride takes visitors through the farm to the pumpkin area, combining the ride with the ritual of choosing a pumpkin. Other activities include a corn maze and a collection of outdoor attractions for children.
For Chadds Ford and Brandywine Valley families, it is also one of the most convenient full-scale pumpkin hayrides.
And there is an unusual twist: The same Arasapha Farms property that provides this traditional daytime outing becomes the home of Bates Motel after dark.
6. FIFER ORCHARDS FALL FEST — CAMDEN-WYOMING
Delaware LIVE score: 7.6
Fifer’s strength is the total orchard experience: pumpkin and apple picking, a large corn maze, outdoor play, cider doughnuts, food and additional seasonal activities.
That makes Fifer’s less about the wagon itself and more about spending a fall day on a Kent County orchard.
For families in central and southern Delaware, it can provide much of the big fall-festival experience without making the trip north into New Castle County or Pennsylvania.
7. FILASKY’S PRODUCE — MIDDLETOWN AREA
Delaware LIVE score: 7.0
Filasky’s is smaller and simpler, which may be exactly what some families want.
The fall season includes pick-your-own pumpkins, a soybean maze designed for children and hayrides through the fields. The farm also offers nighttime hayride and bonfire options, along with pumpkin doughnuts and Woodside Farm Creamery ice cream.
This is less of a destination theme park and more of a local farm outing.
8. DELAWARE STATE PARKS WAGON RIDES
Delaware LIVE score: 6.2
Do not let the lower score fool you. State park rides lose points in this ranking because there generally isn’t a pumpkin patch, bakery, giant maze or collection of attractions waiting when the wagon stops.
But that is also the point. Delaware State Parks offers seasonal wagon rides at several parks, providing a different kind of fall outing built around scenery, the outdoors and, at some locations, time around a campfire.
For someone who wants fall colors and a relaxing ride rather than a festival, the state parks could move straight to the top of the personal list.
SO WHICH HAYRIDE IS RIGHT FOR YOU?
Best total fall experience: Linvilla Orchards
Go here if the hayride is just the beginning. Pumpkinland, apples, mazes, animals, food and the bakery make it the easiest place on the list to spend several hours without running out of things to do.
Best traditional hayride: Arasapha Farms
A tractor, wagon, farm fields and pumpkins. For families looking for the classic harvest experience rather than an amusement park, Arasapha gets closest to the picture on the apple cider jug.
Best New Castle County family outing: Ramsey’s Farm
For Wilmington-area families who do not want to cross the state line, Ramsey’s combines the ingredients that matter most: hayride, pumpkins, corn maze, animals and plenty for younger children.
Best Kent County fall day: Fifer Orchards
Come for the pumpkins and maze, stay for the cider doughnuts and orchard atmosphere. Fifer’s is one of the strongest total fall farm experiences in central Delaware.
Best haunted hayride: Bates Motel
If the wagon itself is what you want to be scary, Bates gets the edge. The ride is the attraction rather than simply transportation to something else.
Best full night of Halloween scares: Frightland
If one haunted hayride isn’t enough, Frightland’s collection of attractions makes it a better fit for people looking to devote an evening to Halloween.
Best for little kids: Arasapha or Ramsey’s
Both deliver the farm-and-pumpkin experience without requiring children to navigate a giant Halloween production. Linvilla’s Witch’s House is another option for children ready for something a little spooky without the intensity of a full haunted attraction.
Best quiet ride: Delaware State Parks
No scream park. No giant midway. No need to drag a 25-pound pumpkin back to the car. Just climb aboard and enjoy Delaware in the fall.
Best small-farm experience: Filasky’s
For Middletown-area families who would rather visit a smaller farm than a major regional attraction, Filasky’s offers pumpkins, a children’s maze, hayrides and seasonal treats.
Best food-and-orchard day: Fifer or Linvilla
Fifer gets the Delaware nod for cider doughnuts and a traditional orchard atmosphere. Linvilla offers an even larger combination of bakery, market, food and attractions.
ONE CHADDS FORD TRADITION — BUT NO HAYRIDE
The Great Pumpkin Carve remains one of the Brandywine Valley’s signature October traditions, returning Oct. 15-17 in Chadds Ford.
But visitors should not arrive expecting a hayride.
Organizers have discontinued hayrides because of wet conditions in the meadow. The centerpiece remains the giant pumpkins carved by artists and illuminated after dark.
TO GO BOX
What: Delaware LIVE’s guide to eight fall hayride, farm and Halloween experiences in Delaware and nearby Pennsylvania.
Who: Families, couples, teenagers and anyone looking for a fall farm, pumpkin or Halloween outing.
When: Most attractions operate from September through late October or early November. Days and hours vary considerably.
Where: Wilmington, Middletown and Camden-Wyoming in Delaware; Glen Mills and Media in nearby Pennsylvania; and participating Delaware State Parks.
Best overall: Linvilla Orchards for the total fall experience.
Best Delaware family choice: Ramsey’s Farm in the Wilmington area.
Best for scares: Bates Motel in Glen Mills for the haunted hayride itself; Frightland in Middletown for a full night of haunted attractions.
Before you go: Fall farm schedules are particularly dependent on weather and field conditions. Peak October weekends can sell out, and some attractions use timed tickets. Check the farm or attraction’s current schedule, ticket availability and weather policy before leaving home.
Delaware LIVE is introducing a French Bread Total to help readers decide whether a storm calls for a run on bread, milk, eggs and the other essentials for surviving a weekend indoors. On our seven-point French Toast Scale, this storm earns a 1 out of 7 for most Delaware households.
The storm’s effects will vary across the state, with the greatest threat coming from tidal flooding and dangerous surf
DOVER, Del. — A nor’easter drawing attention from Philadelphia and national news outlets can sound like a single storm with a single forecast. For Delaware residents, the more useful question is where they live — and how close they are to tidal water.
The National Weather Service expects the greatest impacts along Delaware’s ocean beaches, bays and tidal waterways. Coastal flooding is already a concern Thursday, Sept. 24, and could recur with successive high tides. Stronger winds are possible at the beaches Friday night into Saturday. Farther inland, residents are more likely to encounter gusty winds than flooding.
Editor’s note: Delaware LIVE is introducing a French Bread Total to help readers decide whether a storm calls for a run on bread, milk, eggs and the other essentials for surviving a weekend indoors. On our seven-point French Toast Scale, this storm earns a 1 out of 7 for most Delaware households. The rating does not discount the serious flooding risk for people in low-lying coastal and tidal communities.
What is a nor’easter?
A nor’easter is an East Coast storm named for the northeast winds it typically brings to coastal areas. It can occur at any time of year and does not have to bring snow.
This storm is developing offshore. Its persistent winds are pushing water into Delaware’s bays and tidal waterways, where elevated water levels can cause flooding at more than one high tide. The storm’s exact track remains uncertain, particularly for how strong coastal winds become Friday night and Saturday.
What should Delaware expect?
Sussex County: The beaches and Inland Bays face the greatest combination of hazards. A coastal flood warning covers the Delaware beaches and inland Sussex until 2 a.m. Saturday. Forecasters expect 1 to 2 feet of water above ground level in low-lying areas near shorelines and tidal waterways. Some roads in coastal and bayside communities could become impassable. The Weather Service says more serious flooding remains possible around Rehoboth Bay and Indian River, depending on the storm’s track.
At the ocean beaches, breaking waves could reach 12 feet in the surf zone. Dangerous rip currents, beach erosion and possible dune breaches are also concerns. A high surf advisory and high rip current risk continue through Saturday evening.
Kent County: A coastal flood warning also remains in effect until 2 a.m. Saturday. Low-lying roads and communities near Delaware Bay and tidal waterways face the greatest risk. The warning does not mean all of Dover or Milford will flood.
New Castle County: A coastal flood advisory covers vulnerable areas along tidal shorelines and waterways until 1 a.m. Saturday. Away from the water, the main effect is expected to be gusty weather. The Weather Service says excessive rainfall and freshwater flooding appear unlikely at this time.
When will it end?
The current coastal flood warnings expire early Saturday, but that is not necessarily the end of the effects. Dangerous surf continues through Saturday evening, and the Weather Service says tidal flooding could persist into the weekend. Winds and conditions on the water are expected to improve Sunday. Residents near the coast should check updated alerts as the storm’s path becomes clearer.
To Go Box | Delaware’s nor’easter
When: Coastal impacts are underway Thursday. Stronger beach winds are possible Friday night into Saturday.
Where: The greatest risk is along the beaches, bays and low-lying tidal waterways of Sussex and Kent counties.
What: Repeated high-tide flooding, possible road closures, dangerous surf and beach erosion. Inland areas can expect gusty winds.
French Toast Scale:1 out of 7 for most households. Coastal residents should take local flood warnings seriously.
What to do: Check alerts before traveling near tidal roads, never drive through floodwater and stay out of the surf while the high rip current risk is in effect.
An inaugural Oct. 2 Summit in Dewey Beach will bring caregivers, clinicians, advocates and other professionals together to recognize exploitation and improve support for survivors.
DEWEY BEACH, Del. — A person being trafficked may still go to work, attend school or see a doctor. What those around them may not see is the person controlling their pay, housing, access to drugs or ability to leave.
That is the challenge at the center of Delaware’s inaugural Human Trafficking Awareness, Prevention and Action Summit on Friday, Oct. 2, at Hyatt Place Dewey Beach. The Delaware Coalition for Human Trafficking Survivors is bringing survivors, national experts and Delaware professionals together to improve how the state recognizes exploitation and responds to people affected by it.
Two ways exploitation can stay hidden
Imagine Elena, an adult who cleans homes. She depends on the person who hired her for a place to sleep and a ride to work. Her promised pay never arrives, but she fears losing her housing if she leaves. Someone meeting Elena might see a hard-working employee, without knowing how little control she has over her work or money. Elena is fictional, but her situation illustrates a recognized pattern of forced labor.
Now imagine Jay, a 16-year-old who accepts a place to stay from someone he trusts. That person then expects commercial sex in exchange. Jay may be frightened to tell a teacher or caregiver, or may not describe what happened as trafficking. Jay is also fictional. Jennifer Cooper, a registered nurse and forensic coordinator at Nemours Children’s Health, told Delaware LIVE that young people may not recognize food, housing or other things of value as part of commercial sexual exploitation. Under federal law, a minor induced into commercial sex is a trafficking victim even without proof of force, fraud or coercion.
Victims do not fit one age, gender or background. Trafficking also does not require kidnapping or crossing a border. The common issue is exploitation: force, fraud or coercion used to compel an adult to provide labor or commercial sex, or the commercial sexual exploitation of a minor.
What Delaware’s numbers show
The National Human Trafficking Hotline identified 29 Delaware cases involving 32 victims in 2025. In 2024, it identified 32 cases involving 61 victims. The hotline cautions that reports made to it do not measure how often trafficking actually occurs; people who never contact the hotline are outside its count.
Another measure comes from Delaware’s Office of the Child Advocate. Its contribution to the Delaware Anti-Trafficking Action Council’s 2025 report says the office screened 65 juvenile trafficking referrals, including 40 classified as suspected trafficking and 25 involving young people assessed as at risk. Those are referrals, not 65 confirmed crimes, and they cannot simply be added to the hotline total.
Together, the figures show why professionals who encounter vulnerable people need to know what questions to ask, how to respond safely and where to turn for help.
Bringing the people who respond into one room
Cooper said she helped pursue a Delaware summit after traveling out of state for advanced training. The Oct. 2 program includes tracks for mental health professionals, medical providers, direct-service workers, law enforcement and survivors. Sessions are expected to address family-related trafficking, trauma, survivor care and coordinated responses.
“I want to bring together the people who are doing the work,” Cooper told Delaware LIVE. She said organizations serving vulnerable people can benefit from knowing what others nearby are doing and where services are missing.
The summit is an opportunity for psychologists and other mental health clinicians, advocates, health care workers, educators, caregivers and community leaders to learn from survivors and from one another. It is also open to residents who want a better understanding of trafficking in Delaware. A private, invitation-only executive roundtable will take place Oct. 1; the public summit follows Oct. 2.
To Go Box
What: Human Trafficking Awareness, Prevention and Action Summit
When: Friday, Oct. 2, 2026
Where: Hyatt Place Dewey Beach, 1301 Coastal Highway
Who: Professionals, advocates, caregivers, organizational leaders and interested residents
Admission: $75 regular admission, listed as available through Sept. 30
What can DRC’s national dialogue achieve?Expert commentjon.wallace
President Tshisekedi and the opposition both want national dialogue. But it remains to be seen whether they can agree on the nature of the DRC’s problems, let alone their solutions.
When President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) Félix Tshisekedi finally announced a ‘national dialogue’ on 27 August, he evoked the country’s long history of previous negotiations. Too often, he said, they had been about elite power sharing, had not meaningfully included the Congolese people, and had legitimized armed insurrection. This time will be different, he promised.
Tshisekedi appealed directly to the Congolese people by proposing a series of public consultations in all 26 provinces, culminating in a convention in Kinshasa. Unlike previous dialogues, this process has a more ambitious aim. It not only seeks to address the causes of insecurity and inequality in DRC and identify reforms. It also seeks to reconstruct or re-found the state.
The opposition immediately denounced the project. The C64, a coalition made up of opposition heavyweights including Moïse Katumbi, Martin Fayulu, Delly Sesanga and Jean-Marc Kabund, rejected Tshisekedi’s proposal. So too did the ‘Sauvons le Congo’ platform created by exiled former president Joseph Kabila.
Tshisekedi’s plan, they claim, is intended above all to legitimize his attempt to change the constitution, possibly allowing the president to extend his rule beyond his two-term limit, which ends in 2028. They point to a controversial bill that would pave the way for a referendum allowing the modification of article 220 of the constitution, which forbids changing the number or duration of presidential terms.
Points of (dis)agreement
There is much that the DRC’s government and opposition disagree on. But there are two points of convergence. One, publicly acknowledged, is the need for a national dialogue to address the country’s serious challenges. However, apart from the need to bring peace to the eastern provinces, there is no consensus on what these challenges are.
The other point of convergence, acknowledged only behind closed doors, is that elections probably cannot be held by the end of Tshisekedi’s second term in 2028. There are three main reasons: First, little progress has been made in organizing them. Technically there is still time to do so, but the quality of elections held in 2028 would be in question.
For Tshisekedi, the national dialogue is an opportunity to create a ‘united front’ – under his control – aligned against Rwanda.
Second, important territories in eastern DRC remain captured by the M23 armed group. Any attempt to exclude these provinces from elections could be interpreted as an implicit endorsement of their secession, raising fears of the break-up of the country. Third, some members of the opposition may see a dialogue as a way to gain power without going to the polls.
There is therefore broad, albeit tacit, agreement on the need to delay elections in favour of ‘dialogue’. But consensus falls apart when talk of detail begins. Indeed, it raises the question: what dialogue is needed to resolve which crisis?
For Tshisekedi, the national dialogue is an opportunity to create a ‘united front’ – under his control – aligned against Rwanda. In the president’s telling, the DRC’s problems stem mainly from Rwanda’s support for the M23 in North and South Kivu provinces. Since late 2021, M23 fighters have seized large swathes of territory, including the provincial capitals of Goma and Bukavu. Tshisekedi has dismissed opposition calls to integrate M23 in the national dialogue, saying the Doha Process – Qatar-led talks hosted in Switzerland – is the only appropriate venue for negotiating with them.
But for many in the opposition, as well as the Catholic and Protestant churches, the conflict is more a symptom of the political crisis than its cause. In their view, the M23’s success has been fuelled by dissatisfaction with bad governance and corruption under Tshisekedi’s government.
Many want a neutral convenor for a dialogue, such as the churches, and a venue outside of the DRC that would allow exiled politicians to participate. But Tshisekedi has ruled out an external location. And he has made clear that religious denominations will play a secondary or even symbolic role.
What a post-2028 transition might look like, if elections are not held, is still open for debate. The concept recalls the two-year ‘glissement’ (literally, ‘sliding’) that former president Joseph Kabila negotiated to remain in power beyond the end of this second term, in 2016-17.
For those close to President Tshisekedi, there is hope of getting broad agreement on a transition that could last three to five years. That would be a de facto extension of the president’s tenure beyond constitutional limits, if he remained in office for the duration. Some in the opposition would like to see a shorter transition, even without Tshisekedi. This would see a power-sharing agreement that would pave the way for a new electoral commission and fresh elections.
However, for now the country’s opposition seems fragmented and unable to shape the terms of the dialogue. Crucially, they lack the leverage of significant popular mobilization: a long-postponed opposition rally on 15 September saw relatively little participation on the streets of the capital. And the US, which recently signed a critical minerals deal with the DRC, is seen to be backing Tshisekedi. The president therefore seems likely to move forward with his plan. A recent presidential ordinance laid the groundwork for the dialogue proceeding under Tshisekedi’s control.
The position of the Catholic and Protestant churches may yet prove influential. For the moment, they have not commented publicly, preferring to try to negotiate for a stronger role. However, should their position change and church leaders choose to actively boycott the dialogue, it could diminish the legitimacy of the process. The Catholic church is an important political actor in the DRC: it was instrumental in organizing against a Kabila third term. For now, however, Tshisekedi appears to have the stronger hand.
It may be that Tshisekedi’s stated goal of going beyond past national dialogues to ‘re-found’ the state is just political rhetoric. The risk is that he intends to use talks as a way of co-opting part of the opposition, just as Kabila did in 2016-17.
Meanwhile the opposition wants to wrest power from Tshisekedi but also does not necessarily favour elections to resolve the political crisis. It may therefore view dialogue as the best means of unseating the president and taking power. Either way, the two sides’ framings are fundamentally at odds. It remains to be seen whether all parties can agree on the nature of the nation’s problems, let alone their solutions.
The debate over the dialogue is a reminder that the security situation in the east cannot be neatly separated from national politics. Talk of changing the constitution by Tshisekedi’s camp waned in early 2025, after the M23 seized Goma and Bukavu. It resurged once the threat was contained.
Fundamentally linked
The current assemblage of processes – Washington for DRC–Rwanda negotiations, the Doha process for DRC–M23 talks and now, the national dialogue – draw lines between phenomena and actors that are fundamentally linked.
The relatively limited objectives of the Washington and Doha processes are at least clearer than the national dialogue’s ambiguous aim of ‘re-founding’ the Congolese state or ‘creating peace’. But each process’s success is linked to the other. No agreement with the M23 can exist without an accord with Rwanda. And peace in the east will require progress on transitional justice and community reconciliation – issues which should be part of any national dialogue.
Can a national dialogue deliver the reforms DRC desperately needs? Currently, the greatest risk is that it is limited in exactly the way Tshisekedi said it must not be: to an exercise in which political elites agree how and when power will change hands.
Weekend Spotlight is a round-up of the five best events to check out in Delaware over the coming weekend, curated by Arts + Culture Editor Cannon Taylor. This edition covers Sept. 25-27, 2026. What should be on our radar for future editions? Let us know!
Hot Jams
Music festival fundraises for Center for the Creative Arts
Saturday, Sept. 26. Center for the Creative Arts. 410 Upper Snuff Mill Road, Hockessin. 5-10:40 p.m. Tickets: $15, free for kids 12 and under.
If the annual Hot Jam Music Festival proves anything, it’s that local bands sure know how to name themselves. This year’s festival features many acts, including self-described emo girl alexisbaldwin.mp3; Jimmy Eat World’s post-punk brother, Joe Eats the Sun; and the debut of the mysteriously-named Jenna L. and the Denizens of Scary Tales.
Ticket proceeds will help ensure the Center for the Creative Arts can continue its mission of providing programming and scholarships for local artists.
The Milton Theatre is staging “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” Sept. 26 through Oct. 3. | PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MILTON THEATRE
Saturday, Sept. 26 through Oct. 11. The Milton Theatre. 110 Union St., Milton. Times vary. Tickets: $44-53.
What better way to kickstart the spooky season than to revive a character from the most demented recesses of Victorian fiction? The Milton Theatre is staging 17 productions of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” over the next month, featuring a blood-splattered set and live orchestrations of Stephen Sondheim’s haunting score.
Two words of advice: Don’t eat the pies, and don’t get a haircut — the barber may take a little more off the top than you bargained for.
The Delaware Taco Festival returns for its 10th anniversary Sept. 26-27. | PHOTO COURTESY OF DELAWARE TACO FESTIVAL
Saturday, Sept. 26 and Sunday, Sept. 27. Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park. 80 Rosa Parks Drive, Wilmington. 1-7 p.m. Tickets: $14-20, free for kids 12 and under.
UPDATE: The Delaware Taco Festival has been postponed to Nov. 14-15 due to inclement weather. All previously purchased tickets for the original date will be honored for the new date.
The 10th annual Delaware Taco Festival is bringing the pain — well, at least for the luchadores and the brave souls competing in the hot chili pepper eating contest. For most attendees, the festival should be a more pleasant experience as they wander through Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park munching on tacos and sipping on margaritas.
There will be over 30 food vendors offering $4 tacos, along with carnival games, piñatas, live music and more.
The Air Mobility Command Museum is celebrating its 40th anniversary with special programming Sept. 26-27. | PHOTO COURTESY OF AIR MOBILITY COMMAND MUSEUM
Saturday, Sept. 26 and Sunday, Sept. 27. Air Mobility Command Museum. 1301 Heritage Road, Dover. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free.
UPDATE: The open cockpit showings have been cancelled for this weekend due to inclement weather, but the programming indoors will continue.
Plane nerds, rejoice: You’ll have full access to many of the over 35 aircraft on display at the Air Mobility Command Museum during the organization’s 40th anniversary bash. The museum’s planes include some that flew during D-Day operations and the Berlin Airlift.
Tour guides — many of them Air Force veterans — will bring these mechanical beasts to life with both personal and historical stories. Not immersive enough for you? Give the flight simulator a try and see if you have what it takes to be an Air Force pilot.
Fall in love with Delaware during First State Fun Day
Spotlight Delaware’s First State Fun Day offers free admission and special programming at attractions statewide on Sept. 26. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE GRAPHIC BY ELSA KEGELMAN
Saturday, Sept. 26. Multiple locations statewide. Times vary. Free.
Spotlight Delaware’s First State Fun Day is an opportunity to cross some peculiar items off your bucket list. What other opportunity are you going to get to take your toddler to a rave at New Castle Library, then introduce them to the half-fish, half-monkey “merman” at the Zwaandael Museum?
If that’s not your speed, take in the sunset at the Prime Hook Wildlife Refuge, learn some history at the Mitchell Center for African American Heritage or gorge yourself on oysters at Matt’s Fish Camp Lewes.
With over 15 statewide attractions opening their doors for free and offering special programming, First State Fun Day is set to be a “Choose Your Own Adventure” of Delaware’s best cultural offerings.
EVANSTON, Illinois — A U.S. citizen was hospitalized after federal immigration agents mistakenly detained him Sunday in Evanston while searching for another man, according to local police and witnesses.
Evanston police said officers responding near Howard Street and Dodge Avenue found the man on the ground with injuries to his head, neck and teeth. Witness Miguel Olivares said he heard the man repeatedly saying, “I’m a U.S. citizen,” and recorded federal agents pinning him down. Olivares told ABC7 Chicago that the agents appeared to use significant force and that one seemed to strike the man in the face.
A federal agent later told Evanston police that officers had approached the man because he resembled a fugitive they were seeking. According to police, agents detained him for fingerprinting after he refused to provide identification, then released him after determining he was not their target and was a U.S. citizen.
The Department of Homeland Security said the man was uncooperative and that officers acted according to their training. DHS also maintained that its operations are “highly targeted.” However, in this case, agents detained and injured someone who was not the person they were seeking.
Evanston police are investigating and collecting body-camera, dash-camera and witness video. Police Chief Schenita Stewart later met with the injured man at the hospital and offered department support.
DES MOINES, Iowa — An Iowa judge has dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register, ruling that an inaccurate pre-election poll did not amount to consumer fraud and was protected political speech.
The disputed November 2024 poll showed Kamala Harris leading Trump by 3 percentage points in Iowa. Trump ultimately won the state by more than 13 points. He argued that the poll was deceptive and violated Iowa’s consumer-fraud and misrepresentation laws.
Iowa District Court Judge Scott Beattie rejected that argument Wednesday, writing that Trump’s complaint attempted to stretch state law far beyond its existing limits and impose liability on speech receiving the highest level of First Amendment protection. The case was dismissed with prejudice, preventing Trump from simply refiling the same claims in state court.
Trump originally filed the case in December 2024, later dropped a federal version and refiled a substantially similar complaint in Iowa state court.
Selzer welcomed the ruling, saying polling is “a social science, not clairvoyance” and that pollsters cannot guarantee election results. She has consistently denied manipulating the survey or acting with political intent.
The ruling distinguishes between a poll that proved substantially wrong and evidence of deliberate fraud. Trump’s attorneys had not immediately announced whether they would pursue an appeal.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — ProPublica says records from an FBI anti-corruption investigation contradict several public statements Sen. Susan Collins has made while defending her relationship with former Navatek CEO Martin Kao, a major political donor convicted of campaign-finance and loan fraud.
Collins has said the Biden Justice Department and FBI “totally cleared” her, her office and her campaign years ago. But ProPublica reports that the investigation at issue involved allegations Kao provided between 2022 and 2024, with agents still examining his relationship with Collins, her aides and a pro-Collins super PAC in early 2025.
An FBI spokesperson said an earlier investigation “ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign.” No one associated with Collins was charged. However, ProPublica says that earlier inquiry is separate from the later corruption review that ended after personnel assigned to the case were removed during the Trump administration.
Collins’ deputy chief of staff also argued that investigators did not believe Kao. ProPublica reports FBI documents said emails and other records corroborated portions of his account, though Kao’s criminal history presented obvious credibility concerns.
Collins has called the allegations false and politically motivated. AP reported that the dispute is now a major issue in Maine’s Senate campaign.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disclosed more than $4 million in book advances and roughly $270,000 in gifts from longtime allies, financial relationships that are drawing scrutiny because several benefactors are also involved in the Make America Healthy Again movement.
The largest payments were two $2 million advances from Skyhorse Publishing for Unsettled Science and A Defense for Israel. Skyhorse owner Tony Lyons is a longtime Kennedy associate who also leads organizations promoting MAHA-related causes and accepting political contributions and corporate sponsorships.
Kennedy also disclosed about $126,000 in Washington lodging and nearly $150,000 in airfare provided by security consultant Gavin de Becker, including trips to Greece and Fiji. De Becker has been a major Kennedy political donor and described the gifts as part of their longstanding friendship.
The book payments raise a specific ethics question because federal rules generally prohibit government employees from receiving compensation for writing related to their official duties when that writing occurs during government service. Whether Kennedy’s advances violate those rules would depend on when the writing was performed and whether the books relate to his HHS responsibilities.
Kennedy’s representatives say he has complied with federal ethics requirements and worked with HHS ethics officials on his disclosures. No violation has been formally established.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump personally welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, offering the Chinese leader a rare planeside greeting as Xi began a three-day state visit focused on trade, technology and security.
Trump and first lady Melania Trump met Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, on the tarmac after Air China One arrived outside Washington. The greeting broke with usual presidential protocol, under which visiting leaders typically receive their formal welcome at the White House.
Xi’s visit is the first U.S. state visit by a Chinese leader in more than a decade. The main events are scheduled for Thursday, including a formal White House arrival ceremony, military review, Oval Office talks and state dinner. A military flyover featuring a B-2 Spirit bomber and four F-22 Raptors is also planned.
The visit comes as Washington and Beijing seek to stabilize relations after prolonged disputes over tariffs, rare-earth minerals and technology. Reuters reported that the two countries agreed to extend an existing trade truce, while major breakthroughs during the summit are not expected.
Trump and Xi are expected to discuss artificial intelligence, trade, Taiwan and other geopolitical disputes. Trump previously visited Beijing in May and invited Xi to Washington during that trip.
This week, Republicans unveiled their ‘2026 Contract with Delaware Voters’
DOVER, Del. — State Sen. Bryant Richardson, R-Seaford, and Delaware Republicans are pitching voters on a 10-bill platform ahead of November’s general election. It promises no state tax on overtime or tips, help for first-time homebuyers, deferred property taxes for seniors, and new rules on school sports and civics education.
Richardson unveiled the “2026 Contract with Delaware Voters” Tuesday at an event at the Delaware State Police Museum in Dover. It is modeled on the 1994 “Republican Contract with America,” the national platform U.S. House Republicans released weeks before the 1994 midterm elections, when they won control of the U.S. House for the first time in 40 years.
Delaware Republican Party Chairman Gene Truono said the Contract is important for the people of the state. “Like the Contract with America in the 1990s, the Contract with Delaware will help drive bipartisan conservative policy for generations to come,” Truono told Delaware LIVE.
What’s in the ‘2026 Contract with Delaware Voters’
1.) Affordability Acts: Creates a tax-advantaged savings account for a first-time home down payment; lets homeowners 65 and older defer property taxes until the home is sold; eliminates state income taxes on overtime pay and tips.
2.) Good Governance: Ensures police presence to prioritize neighborhood safety and keep repeat offenders off the streets; adds “informed choice” requirements for abortion; returns local control over issues such as right-to-work ordinances and offshore wind siting.
3.) Our Youth: Requires student athletes to compete in sports matching their biological sex; requires students to learn what it’s like to live under communism, totalitarianism, and other political ideologies, alongside the principles of freedom, democracy, and individual liberty; creates Education Empowerment Accounts for tutoring, special education services, and instruction at public or private schools.
Why Republicans say their bills get stuck
Richardson’s central argument is that many of these ideas never get a vote. In Delaware, a bill needs signatures from a majority of a committee’s members before the full Senate or House can vote on it. Democrats hold 15 of 21 Senate seats and 27 of 41 House seats, and they control every committee.
His Fairness in Girls’ Sports Act is one example. Richardson has introduced a version in each of the last three General Assemblies, most recently as Senate Bill 215 in January, and none has been released from committee. The bill would have schools label each team boys’, girls’ or coed based on students’ sex as recorded at or near birth, while letting girls play on a boys’ team when no girls’ team exists.
Richardson says it protects fairness and privacy for female athletes; opponents have argued such bills discriminate against transgender students. Richardson said keeping it in committee lets lawmakers avoid taking a public stand.
Richardson says the “deeper problem” is that “when one side holds the votes to pass anything it wants, it no longer has to listen to the voices of those who disagree.” That’s a line from his self-published booklet, “Citizen’s Guide to Delaware Public Policy,” which he had available on a table at the event and told attendees to take.
“Eleven Republican senators could make a huge difference,” Richardson told supporters. “We would be the heads of the committee. We would get things out of committee for a full vote on the Senate floor.”
What it would take for Republicans to win a majority
Richardson acknowledged the climb is steep. With supermajorities in both chambers, Democrats can pass certain measures, like tax increases, without a single Republican vote.
To take the majority, Republicans need five more Senate seats and seven more House seats. Only 11 Senate seats are on the Nov. 3 ballot. Republicans hold three of them and have candidates in six of the eight held by Democrats, according to the Delaware Department of Elections’ candidate list, so a Senate majority would mean winning most of those races outright.
Two of those Republican candidates were at the event: Brent Burdge, running in the 5th Senate District, and Chris Rowe, running in the 7th. Rowe said voter education should extend to candidates themselves: “We just started electing people to office that don’t know the Constitution.”
State Rep. Lyndon Yearick, R-Magnolia, thanked Richardson: “You’re the tip of the spear, but it’s gonna take everybody.”
Sen. Dave Lawson, R-Marydel, who is not seeking reelection, closed with a direct appeal to the room: “Delaware needs this. Every one of you has a Facebook, and has friends. If you’re not handing this out, you’re not helping your grandchildren.”
Judge rejects USDA’s timetable and clarifies immigrant eligibility, but federal rules aimed at improving state payment accuracy remain in place
DOVER, Del. — Delaware has won a court ruling that prevents the Trump administration from counting certain food assistance errors against states under a deadline a federal judge found unlawful. The victory protects the state from potential future costs tied to that deadline, but it does not resolve a separate problem: Delaware’s SNAP payment error rate was 16% in fiscal 2025, well above the national average.
The Sept. 17 ruling also confirmed that certain lawful permanent residents, including people who were previously refugees or granted asylum, remain eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program without waiting five years. It did not overturn the 2025 federal law requiring states with high payment error rates to pay a share of SNAP benefit costs.
The case for state accountability
Congress changed SNAP last year to give states a stronger financial reason to determine eligibility and benefit amounts accurately. Under the law, states with error rates of at least 6% can be required to cover 5%, 10% or 15% of benefit costs, depending on their rate. The requirement generally begins Oct. 1, 2027.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported a national payment error rate of 10.62% for fiscal 2025, representing $10.1 billion in improper payments. The measure includes benefits paid above and below the correct amount. It is not a fraud rate.
“These payment error rates are further proof that state accountability is severely lacking in SNAP,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said when USDA released the figures. She said the department wanted states to curb waste while serving needy families and protecting taxpayers.
Delaware’s error rate
Delaware’s fiscal 2025 rate was 16%, compared with the 10.62% national rate and the law’s 6% cost-sharing threshold. That makes payment accuracy a substantial issue for the state, independent of its dispute with USDA over the new law’s implementation. The figure does not mean 16% of Delaware recipients committed fraud; it includes overpayments and underpayments.
Delaware’s rate is high enough to qualify it for a delay in the new benefit cost-sharing requirement. That gives the state more time to improve accuracy before it must begin paying a share of benefits under that provision. The delay comes from the law itself, separate from the court ruling.
Why the judge rejected USDA’s deadline
The lawsuit focused on how USDA put the 2025 law into effect. SNAP rules provide a 120-day adjustment period during which certain errors arising from a policy change are excluded from a state’s payment error rate. USDA said the period began July 4, 2025, when the law was enacted, and ended Nov. 1.
But USDA did not issue its guidance on noncitizen eligibility until Oct. 31, leaving states one day under that timetable. Other instructions arrived weeks or months after USDA said the clock had started. U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai ruled that the department had not given states adequate notice. He set aside its deadline and required a full adjustment period following proper implementation instructions.
The judge also found that USDA’s October guidance wrongly indicated that some lawful permanent residents were ineligible for SNAP or subject to a five-year waiting period. USDA issued a clarification in December. The ruling confirms that lawful permanent residents who were previously in specified humanitarian categories retain their exemption from the waiting period, provided they meet other SNAP requirements.
What Jennings’ criticism means
“This entire ordeal was a blatant attempt by the Trump Administration to take food away from families in need, to destroy a plank of the social safety net, and to degrade our state’s financial standing,” Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in announcing the decision.
Jennings’ accusation goes beyond what the judge decided about the administration’s intent. USDA says it is seeking to reduce improper payments, save federal money and hold states accountable for administering SNAP accurately. The court nevertheless found that USDA’s initial guidance misstated eligibility for some lawful permanent residents and that its deadline unfairly exposed states to future costs.
The distinction does not erase the effects of the broader 2025 law. The Congressional Budget Office expects its tighter eligibility and work rules to reduce the number of people receiving SNAP. Its projected $187 billion in federal savings over 10 years includes those changes; it is not an estimate of fraud eliminated. The court ruling establishes that USDA went beyond a lawful implementation of the changes at issue, but it does not establish that denying food to needy families was the administration’s purpose.
For Delaware, the ruling means USDA cannot use the deadline the judge rejected to count implementation errors against the state. Delaware must still follow the new law and address its high payment error rate. Both facts matter to understanding what the state won — and the work that remains.
TO GO BOX | The SNAP ruling
Who: Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings joined other states in suing the Trump administration over USDA’s SNAP guidance and deadline.
What: A federal judge set aside USDA’s deadline for counting certain implementation errors and clarified eligibility for some lawful permanent residents.
When: The ruling was issued Sept. 17, 2026.
Where: The decision came from the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and addresses USDA guidance to states.
Why it matters: Delaware avoids errors being counted under the rejected deadline, but its 16% fiscal 2025 payment error rate remains high. The federal law requiring states with high error rates to share SNAP benefit costs remains in effect.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican Sen. Rand Paul says the Department of Homeland Security still has not provided Congress with investigative findings on the fatal January shootings of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.
Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told Politico that his panel continues seeking the information. “We’ve asked for information. We’re still asking,” he said, according to the Washington Examiner. The shootings occurred during the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge and triggered national scrutiny of ICE tactics and DHS’s public accounts of enforcement encounters.
Paul previously withheld action on an ICE director nominee while demanding updates on civilian deaths involving immigration officers. AP reported last week that Paul said he remained “still waiting” for DHS to provide the requested internal-investigation information.
The demand comes amid broader concerns about transparency in Minneapolis enforcement cases. In a separate January shooting, ICE officer Christian Castro has been charged federally with lying to the FBI after prosecutors said video contradicted his claim that he was attacked before firing through a residence door. Castro has pleaded not guilty.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem, told senators during his confirmation process that he wanted to restore confidence in the department and acknowledged that he had previously made an inappropriate characterization of Pretti.
Kristoffer Polaha, actor in 21 Hallmark movies, will be at UNITED Church’s Milford Campus on Friday, Oct. 23
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
Hallmark fans will have a chance to see one of the network’s familiar leading men in Delaware this fall when actor Kristoffer Polaha visits Milford for a special evening celebrating an upcoming film and the real-life mission that inspired it.
Polaha, who has appeared in 21 Hallmark movies along with numerous television, film and stage productions, will be at UNITED Church’s Milford Campus on Friday, Oct. 23, for the CUPS Comedy Cast Party.
The event celebrates the completion of the production phase of Rescued, the working title of a film starring Polaha and based on the story of comedian Mike Williams.
Williams moved with his wife and three children to the Dominican Republic in 2010. While there, he became involved in an effort to rescue a Haitian refugee from Russian human traffickers. That experience ultimately led to the establishment of CUPS Mission, which now works in three countries on two continents to fight poverty and provide children with education, training and opportunities that can help them avoid trafficking.
“When I heard Mike’s story, I knew I had to be a part of it,” said writer and director Trey Reynolds. “This film is for every person who has ever felt the pull to do something greater than themselves and wasn’t sure if they were brave enough to do it.”
The movie was filmed on location in the Dominican Republic during March and April and is currently in post-production, with a projected release in late 2027. Reynolds’ previous credits include Blue Miracle, The Forge and Family Camp.
For Polaha, making the film became about more than simply playing a role.
“To make a movie is a blessing. To make this kind of movie is life-changing,” Polaha said.
During production, Polaha described how the cast and crew worked to leave a lasting impact on the community where they were filming. Their efforts included cleaning a river, stuccoing and painting the village church and painting nearby homes. The word “HOPE” was also painted on the church wall.
“We’re leaving this community better than how we found it,” Polaha said.
Children from the community spent six days with the film crew, playing games, becoming comfortable around the cameras and eventually appearing in the movie.
The Bridge, a Christian radio network with stations in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and New Jersey, is hosting the Milford event. The network has supported CUPS Mission for years, and its listeners sponsor La Union Abajo, a village near Puerto Plata. Bridge staff members and listeners
have contributed funding, equipment and volunteer labor to CUPS Mission projects for nearly a decade.
Williams, whose credits include Dry Bar Comedy and Dove Award Comedian of the Year, will also appear at the Delaware event. He and his family have helped thousands of children during the past 15 years.
Polaha and Williams will be joined by Reynolds, Executive Producer Jack Eason, Associate Producer Benjamin Weeks and others involved with the film. The evening will include a question-and-answer session, exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and a first look at a clip from the movie.
“This is exactly the kind of story that reminds us what is possible when ordinary people choose to live for something bigger than themselves,” said producer Darren Moorman. “Mike Williams stepped away from personal success to answer a deeper calling, and the ripple effect of that decision is still being felt today.”
Polaha is well known to Hallmark audiences, but his acting credits extend far beyond the network. He has appeared in North Shore, Life Unexpected, Wonder Woman 1984, Jurassic World Dominion, Mad Men and CSI: Miami. He also stars alongside Jon Hamm in the upcoming MGM+ psychological thriller American Hostage.
The CUPS Comedy Cast Party begins at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 23, at UNITED Church, Milford Campus, 985 N. Dupont Blvd. The event is open to the public. Early bird tickets are $20 through Aug. 31, with prices increasing Sept. 1. A limited number of $100 VIP Red Carpet Reception tickets are also available and include a private reception with Polaha, Reynolds and others involved with the film.
Nominations are now being accepted for five awards that will be presented during a ceremony in December. Delaware residents have until Friday, Oct. 9, to recommend an individual, program or organization for recognition.
The Maternal Mental Health and Family Wellness Award will recognize work that advances maternal health for women and families throughout Delaware.
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
Delawareans have an opportunity to recognize the people and organizations working to improve mental health, support recovery and strengthen the well-being of families and communities across the First State.
The Office of Lieutenant Governor Kyle Evans Gay has announced the return of the annual Lt. Governor’s Challenge, featuring a refreshed vision that focuses on contributions to behavioral health and mental health outcomes throughout Delaware.
Nominations are now being accepted for five awards that will be presented during a ceremony in December. Delaware residents have until Friday, Oct. 9, to recommend an individual, program or organization for recognition.
“I’m thrilled to bring back the Lt. Governor’s Challenge to celebrate individuals and organizations in our state who go above and beyond in prioritizing mental health and raising awareness,” Gay said.
“As Chair of the Behavioral Health Consortium, it is my honor to celebrate individuals and organizations across our state whose work has changed lives and reduced stigma in Delaware and beyond,” she added. “In honoring this year’s awardees, we are first and foremost saying ‘thank you’ and, as we continue to learn more about what is working in the First State, we hope that opportunities for connection and care continue to grow statewide.”
Nominees may include Delaware residents as well as programs and organizations that serve or operate in the state. Regional and national organizations may also be considered when a nomination specifically recognizes their work and impact in Delaware.
The five award categories reflect a range of efforts to improve behavioral health and well-being.
The Youth Mental Health Champion Award will recognize leadership, advocacy or service that advances the mental health and well-being of young people in a school or community.
The Community Mental Health Innovation Award will honor an individual, program or organization that has developed creative approaches to improving access to mental health services and support.
The Workplace Mental Health Leadership Award will recognize efforts to create a workplace culture that prioritizes employee mental health and well-being.
The Recovery Champion Award will honor someone who serves as an inspiration or advocate for others. This category highlights the importance of recovery support, and the role individuals can play in encouraging and guiding people facing behavioral health or substance use challenges.
The Maternal Mental Health and Family Wellness Award will recognize work that advances maternal mental health, perinatal well-being, reproductive justice or equitable access to care for women and families throughout Delaware.
Following the Oct. 9 nomination deadline, an extensive review process will begin to select this year’s award recipients. Reviewers may include people with experience in behavioral health, health care, education, public service, recovery, community engagement and related fields.
The winners will be announced during the Lt. Governor’s Challenge ceremony on Tuesday, Dec. 8, at Delaware State University’s Schwartz Center for the Arts in Dover.
By inviting the public to submit nominations, the initiative gives Delawareans a direct role in identifying people and programs whose work may not always receive widespread attention. It also provides an opportunity to share successful approaches, raise awareness of available support and encourage stronger connections among those working to improve behavioral health across the state. Nominations may be submitted online at de.gov/ltgovchallenge.
Anyone who requires language or disability access, technology assistance or another reasonable accommodation to complete the nomination process may contact Fiona Pando at fiona.c.pando@delaware.gov.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration is dramatically expanding its search for noncitizen voter fraud ahead of the November midterms, assigning hundreds of federal investigators and attorneys to a problem that repeated studies and state reviews have found occurs only rarely.
Homeland Security Investigations says it now has about 1,600 open voter-fraud cases and has made 160 arrests. The Justice Department says 24 immigrants have been charged this year, with officials promising prosecutions will increase before Election Day. Axios reported that agents normally assigned to smuggling, trafficking, financial fraud and sexual exploitation have been redirected to the effort.
The scale of the operation stands in sharp contrast to the available evidence. Reuters reviewed state and independent investigations and found noncitizen voting to be exceedingly uncommon. One Brennan Center review identified just 30 suspected cases among 23.5 million ballots, while the conservative Heritage Foundation documented 24 cases over two decades.
AP has likewise reported that noncitizen voting is illegal under federal law and rarely occurs, with state audits repeatedly finding only isolated cases.
Even some recent registration problems cited by officials involved software or administrative errors rather than deliberate illegal voting. Despite that record, the administration is treating the issue as a “tier one priority,” continuing Trump’s years-long claims that noncitizen voting represents a major threat to U.S. elections.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Families of people killed by federal immigration agents told Democratic lawmakers Tuesday that government officials repeatedly released misleading or false accounts after fatal encounters, then provided little information about what actually happened.
At the congressional forum, relatives and attorneys described what one lawyer called “dual assassinations” — first the killing of a person, then attacks on that person’s character. The hearing included cases from Texas, Minnesota and Maine and focused heavily on discrepancies between early Department of Homeland Security statements and evidence that emerged later.
One of the clearest examples involved Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was fatally shot by immigration agents in Houston in July. DHS initially said he tried to strike an agent with his vehicle. Three passengers disputed that account, saying Salgado Araujo had stopped and no agent was positioned in front of the van when shots were fired.
Federal officials also raised suspicions that bags found in the van contained methamphetamine. Testing later established that the substance was not meth, U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed.
Similar concerns were raised about other cases, including the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, where the government’s explanation changed from claims that he had “weaponized” his vehicle to a later assertion that an agent fired because he was attempting to flee. Families told lawmakers that shifting narratives, delayed disclosures and limited transparency have made independent scrutiny more difficult.
The Trump administration announced it would stop publishing complaint narratives submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Every year, millions of complaints flow to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from people across the country. The complaints, which range in focus from debt collection to credit reporting to payday loans and more, long served as a window into Americans’ gripes and struggles with various companies.
For over a decade, consumers could opt in to have what they wrote published as public information in a CFPB database. But last month, the Trump administration announced that it would stop publishing those complaint narratives, a decision that aligns the agency with corporations that have critiqued the system for years.
“Publishing such narratives in the Database provides a less-than-representative sample of one-sided experiences,” the CFPB said in a press release.
In the big picture, the move is part of a trend of the administration taking a friendlier approach with businesses — even at the federal agency tasked with guarding consumers from unfair and deceptive practices.
The complaint system helps consumers get responses from companies about their problems, and sometimes even fixes. It has also given the public — as well as federal investigators and regulators— access to information that serves as a warning or to help spot problems.
As a ProPublica data reporter, I’ve used the complaints time and time again as a tool for accountability-driven reporting. I appreciated reading about people’s raw frustration, written in their own words, which can often point to larger trends. It was a rare federal dataset that captured human emotions. Some were grievances like being unable to get help after spending far too much time calling or emailing customer service. Sometimes complaints had more urgency: desperation to fix crushing high-interest debt, a frozen bank account or a credit score tanked from a reporting error.
With the recent loss of a crucial piece of the public database, I wanted to share with you some of ProPublica’s reporting using those complaints. And, while these stories about financial harm have often led to some accountability, revisiting the complaints also offers a taste of what we’ll be missing.
I’ve used the complaints to report on high-interest tribal loans that skirt state interest rate caps to charge 600% interest or more. CFPB complaints helped point me and my colleague Megan O’Matz to an opaque but massive lending operation based in Wisconsin, which we estimated to be involved in thousands of bankruptcies nationwide each year.
“THIS IS THE TEXTBOOK DEFINITION ON LOANSHARKING.”
Consumer complaint about a tribal loan company, June 2023
The borrower also argued that “no one should be expected to pay over $11,000 for a $1,200 loan,” calling the 790% rate “beyond predatory.”
In emails to ProPublica, the tribe’s president, John Johnson Sr., defended the tribe’s lending business as legal and said the loans help people “without access to traditional financial services.” He added that many borrowers have had positive experiences.
A few months after ProPublica reported on the operation, the tribe settled a civil suit filed by Minnesota’s attorney general. The tribe denied the allegations but agreed to stop lending to Minnesotans and forgive outstanding loans to the state’s residents.
In March, I reported that two of the big three credit bureaus, Experian and TransUnion, provided relief to a substantially smaller portion of consumers last year. The credit bureaus are by far the most common subject of consumers’ woes in the database, with over 4 million complaints filed about them in 2025.
A Texan filed a complaint to each of the three credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, writing that a fraudulent account remained on their credit report despite their disputes:
“I have an important deal that I need to complete that is important for the safety and survival of my family, and this issue has damaged my credit score.”
Consumer complaint, August 2025
In response to the story, four Democratic senators wrote letters to the credit bureaus demanding answers on how they handle disputes and complaints. The CFPB’s acting director at the time, Russell Vought, also tacitly acknowledged the reporting during his congressional testimony in July, saying that “with credit reporting agencies we saw things in the news that were concerning to us. We reached out to them.”
The credit bureaus did not comment on specific complaints, but told ProPublica that many complaints are illegitimate, including a large volume filed by credit repair organizations that charge customers to challenge negative information on their reports. (CFPB records show that Equifax provided relief in response to the Texan’s complaint, while TransUnion and Experian did not.)
Last month, my colleague Andy Kroll reported on the Trump CFPB’s light-touch approach to oversight, focusing on its ask-nicely strategy of holding the fintech startup Bilt accountable after it threw users’ accounts into chaos twice in quick succession. The story included complaints about how Bilt’s artificial intelligence support system gave information that was:
Consumer complaints about Bilt, March and April 2026
(In a statement at the time, Bilt said its new card had “attracted unexpectedly high demand, and some of our members experienced gaps in service that are simply unacceptable to us.” The company told ProPublica it resolved all problems related to the new cards “months ago.” The CFPB did not respond to any questions or requests for comment.)
Kroll’s recent story also examined how the agency has changed under the Trump administration. Under Vought’s leadership, the CFPB attempted to fire roughly 90% of its staff in April 2025 before a federal court ruling stymied the move. When the efforts to dismantle the agency failed, Vought and his allies instead refashioned it into an industry-friendly regulator.
The loss of the public complaint narratives is another example of that. And it is a win for groups such as the Consumer Data Industry Association, which represents the credit bureaus and has argued that publishing complaint narratives would “harm the brands of legitimate, law-abiding companies” by presenting unverified, self-selected negative anecdotes. More recently, the group argued in a January public comment letter that the complaint portal has become “a sort of ‘Yelp for Financial Services,’” and that the CFPB doesn’t have the authority to publish complaint data in the first place.
Although the CFPB has been subject to partisan fights, the complaint system has been used by Americans across the country. GOP lawmakers even referred thousands of constituents to the CFPB’s complaint system to get help. Still, those same lawmakers voted last year to slash the agency’s budget by nearly half.
While the complaint system is required by law, the agency isn’t mandated to make it public. In theory, a future administration could go back to publishing the complaint narratives, but the agency has removed the option for consumers to consent to making public what they wrote. That means that any complaints filed in the near term cannot be retroactively published. The complaint narratives will still be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, but getting them could be time-consuming and challenging.
As the CFPB turns away from its watchdog role, it’s making it harder for all of us to watch as well.
NEW YORK CITY, New York — President Donald Trump said the federal government will begin referring to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” or “SI,” arguing during his United Nations General Assembly address Tuesday that the term “artificial” incorrectly suggests the technology is fake.
“From this point forward, all of United States documents” will use the new terminology, Trump said, while expressing hope other countries follow. Reuters confirmed the announcement and reported that Trump also reiterated his opposition to international efforts to regulate AI.
The terminology could create confusion because “superintelligence” already has a distinct meaning in the technology industry. It generally describes a hypothetical AI system whose capabilities surpass human intelligence across most or all fields, rather than artificial intelligence broadly. AP noted that Trump’s proposal came as world leaders offered sharply different assessments of AI’s potential benefits and risks.
Trump said the United States would reject what he called a global scheme for controlling the technology. His administration has generally favored limiting regulatory barriers while promoting American AI development and competition with China.
The announcement does not itself establish how or when federal agencies will alter existing regulations, websites or documents. Trump presented the change during a broader UN address covering Iran, Ukraine, international institutions and U.S. foreign policy.
SAN FRANCISCO, California — San Francisco is suing Trump Media & Technology Group, alleging its $100,000-per-month Truth Social data service creates an unfair trading advantage by allowing paying investors to receive President Donald Trump’s potentially market-moving posts before the general public.
City Attorney David Chiu filed the lawsuit in California Superior Court against Trump Media, which operates Truth Social. The complaint alleges the company’s “Truth API” violates California’s Unfair Competition Law and facilitates conduct that could violate federal insider-trading rules by monetizing advance access to government information.
Truth API, launched in August, offers financial firms rapid access to posts from Trump and other prominent accounts for up to $100,000 monthly, or about $60,000 per month under a multiyear agreement. In modern algorithmic trading, even a brief informational advantage can potentially be valuable.
The lawsuit cites Trump’s April 9, 2025, post saying, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!,” which appeared before he announced a 90-day tariff pause that was followed by a market rally. The complaint argues that paying firms could potentially trade on similar government announcements before ordinary investors see them.
Trump Media disputes the allegations and has characterized Truth API as a conventional financial-data product. A separate federal lawsuit filed by The Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation also challenges the service, while 53 former federal prosecutors and agents recently argued in a court filing that the arrangement may violate federal law.
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds has removed several prominent references to President Donald Trump from his campaign website while shifting the page’s emphasis toward affordability, insurance costs and government transparency.
An archived version of Donalds’ website featured a banner reading “Chip in to Support Trump-Endorsed Byron Donalds” and repeatedly highlighted him as “TRUMP-ENDORSED.” The redesigned site still includes Trump’s endorsement, but places it alongside endorsements from Elon Musk, Sen. Ted Cruz and House Speaker Mike Johnson rather than making it the central branding message.
The campaign also changed the order of its policy priorities. “Affordability” now appears first, replacing “Enact the Trump Agenda” as the top issue. A Donalds campaign spokesperson told The Hill that the website reflects his focus on “the issues that matter most to Floridians,” including affordability, insurance costs and government transparency.
The spokesperson emphasized that Donalds remains “proud to have President Trump’s endorsement” and said the endorsement remains prominently featured.
The changes come during the general election campaign against Democrat David Jolly, a former Republican congressman. Donalds secured Trump’s endorsement early in the governor’s race and has remained a close political ally of the president.
Trump’s approval has declined in several recent national surveys, while economic concerns, including higher fuel and household costs, have become increasingly prominent in Republican campaigns. The website revisions themselves do not establish why the campaign reduced Trump’s prominence.
DETROIT, Michigan — Former Vice President Kamala Harris criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke White House access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico, calling the move “absolutely abhorrent” and saying it shows “the man is afraid.”
Harris made the remarks Tuesday after appearing in Michigan with Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. She argued that restricting journalists limits the public’s ability to learn what the government is doing. Her comments came as the three affected news organizations challenge the administration’s action in federal court.
Trump announced the bans Friday, accusing the outlets of publishing false information. Reporters from all three organizations were subsequently denied entry to White House grounds, and CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed suit alleging violations of their First and Fifth Amendment rights.
Reuters reported that legal experts see significant obstacles for the administration because previous court decisions have limited the government’s ability to revoke press access in retaliation for unfavorable coverage. Trump said Tuesday he would “probably” restore access if a court rules against him.
Harris was in Michigan campaigning for El-Sayed and participating in an event focused on Black maternal health.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Hunter Biden said Tuesday that he is willing to testify before Congress alongside Donald Trump Jr. after Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah called for subpoenas examining both presidential sons’ foreign relationships, business dealings and gifts.
“Sen. Curtis of Utah has suggested that Don Jr. and I should testify before Congress,” Biden wrote on X. “I say bring it on.” He added that he has already provided more than seven hours of sworn testimony and said he would “sit next to Don Jr. and testify any time, any place.”
Curtis asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate whether either man benefited financially from access tied to their fathers. CBS News reported that Curtis specifically requested subpoenas covering business dealings, relationships with foreign individuals or entities and gifts received.
The request followed ProPublica reporting that Russian boxing official Umar Kremlev, who has ties to Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on post-wedding celebrations for Trump Jr. and Bettina Trump in the Bahamas. President Donald Trump has said his son intends to reimburse Kremlev.
Hunter Biden maintained Tuesday that he had no foreign business dealings while his father was president. Curtis has argued that congressional scrutiny should be applied consistently to both presidential families.
The court drew a distinction between receiving a ballot and being legally entitled to cast it. Today, permanent absentee voting procedures rely in part on voters reporting changes and affirming that they remain eligible. Hocker and Washington argued the checks are insufficient. The court said the Constitution leaves the choice of election safeguards to the General Assembly.
Justices say voters must qualify for each election; challengers question how the state checks whether they still do
DOVER, Del. — The Delaware Supreme Court upheld the state’s permanent absentee voting law Monday, clearing the way for qualified voters on the permanent absentee list to receive ballots for the Nov. 3 general election. The ruling leaves lawmakers with a policy question: How much should election officials do to verify that a voter’s reason for voting absentee still applies?
In a unanimous decision, the justices said the law does not expand absentee voting beyond the categories allowed by the Delaware Constitution. Permanent absentee status allows a voter to receive a ballot automatically, but it does not allow someone whose circumstances have changed to cast that ballot, the court said.
Why the law was challenged
State Sen. Gerald Hocker and fellow Senate candidate Steven Washington argued that a voter who qualified for one election could continue receiving ballots years later without election officials adequately confirming that the original reason still applied.
The Constitution permits absentee voting when a registered voter cannot appear at a polling place for a specified reason, including illness, physical disability, certain work or public service obligations, vacation or religious observance. The permanent absentee law applies to a narrower group, including voters with qualifying illnesses or disabilities, military service obligations or jobs that require constant care for a relative.
Must voters qualify again?
Hocker and Washington focused on the Constitution’s language about a voter’s inability to appear at a particular election. An illness can end, a caregiving responsibility can change and public service can conclude. They argued that automatically sending another ballot places too much weight on an earlier application and on the voter’s willingness to report a change.
The justices agreed that a voter must qualify to vote absentee in each election. They rejected the argument that the Constitution requires the state to recertify each permanent absentee voter before every election.
How the state checks eligibility
The court drew a distinction between receiving a ballot and being legally entitled to cast it. The law requires permanent absentee voters to report changes affecting their eligibility. The Department of Elections sends reminders before election cycles, removes voters from the permanent absentee list in specified circumstances and requires voters to affirm their eligibility when returning each ballot.
Those procedures rely in part on voters reporting changes and affirming that they remain eligible. Hocker and Washington argued the checks are insufficient. The court said the Constitution leaves the choice of election safeguards to the General Assembly.
The challengers sought to invalidate the law in all its applications. To prevail, they had to show it could not operate constitutionally. Imperfect procedures do not meet that standard when eligible voters can use the law, the justices said.
What the ruling means for voters
Voting rights advocates emphasized the law’s value to people whose qualifying circumstances persist. In a statement after the ruling, the Delaware Voting Rights Coalition said permanent absentee voting helps eligible voters with disabilities, illnesses, caregiving duties and other qualifying obligations participate without submitting a new application for every election.
The ruling differs from the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision striking down Delaware’s no-excuse vote-by-mail law. That law allowed people outside the Constitution’s absentee voting categories to vote by mail. The permanent absentee law, the justices found, serves only a subset of voters within those categories.
A Superior Court judge ruled against permanent absentee voting in 2024, but the Supreme Court vacated that decision because the plaintiffs lacked standing. Monday’s decision reached the constitutional issue and upheld the law. The Department of Elections says it is sending permanent absentee voters their general election ballots.
TO GO
Who: Delaware voters who qualify for permanent absentee voting.
What: Voters already on the permanent absentee list will automatically receive a ballot for the Nov. 3 general election. They must still qualify to vote absentee when they cast it.
Check your status: Visit iVote.de.gov. “Indefinite” means you are on the permanent absentee list.
Request a ballot: Eligible voters can apply through iVote.de.gov or contact their county elections office.
Deadline: Completed absentee ballots must reach the county elections office by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Thursday’s gathering will show how food, conservation and education come together at Coverdale Farm Preserve. Online ticket registration is closed.
GREENVILLE, Del. — The setting for Thursday’s dinner is also its purpose. At A Taste of Coverdale, guests will eat locally grown food at a working farm where Delaware Nature Society demonstrates how food production and care for the land can go together.
The Sept. 24 event runs from 4:30 to 8 p.m. at Coverdale Farm Preserve. Optional guided nature strolls begin at 4:30 p.m., followed by a cocktail hour at 5 and dinner at 6. A silent auction will include items from local vendors and experiences led by Delaware Nature Society experts. Proceeds will support conservation and education programs at Coverdale. Online ticket registration is closed.
A working farm and a nature preserve
Coverdale’s 377 acres include a 177-acre working farm and 200 acres managed as a nature preserve. Delaware Nature Society uses the property to show how farming practices can support healthy soil and wildlife habitat while producing food for the community. Visitors can walk the farm trail, see animals and shop for seasonal produce at the market.
That makes the dinner more than an evening outdoors. The food, guided walks and views give guests a chance to see the connection between the farm’s harvest and the landscape Delaware Nature Society works to protect.
Delaware Nature Society connects people with nature!
Founded in 1964, Delaware Nature Society describes its mission as connecting people and nature to create a healthy environment for all through education, conservation and advocacy. Coverdale is one place where those three parts of its work come together.
Its education programs bring children and adults outside to learn through experience. Preschoolers explore nature through stories and play; school groups visit forests, wetlands, streams and farms; and adults can join guided walks and other programs. In Wilmington, the organization’s RENEW initiative connects young people with outdoor learning, water quality projects, habitat care and opportunities to build leadership skills.
Its conservation work extends beyond Coverdale. Delaware Nature Society says it manages nearly 2,000 acres for ecosystem health and biodiversity, including efforts to restore forests and meadows, control invasive plants and protect habitat for birds and pollinators. At Coverdale, it applies those principles to both the preserve and the working farm.
The organization also advocates for environmental policies. It describes its approach as nonpartisan and science-based, with priorities that include protecting open space and natural areas and improving water quality. It works to help residents understand those issues and take part in decisions affecting their communities.
A fall tradition with a purpose
This year’s dinner is part of Delaware Nature Society’s 50th anniversary celebration of the Harvest Moon Festival. The organization has spread the celebration across four fall events and calls A Taste of Coverdale its premier annual fundraiser. The money raised helps sustain the places and programs that visitors encounter throughout the year.
Community members who are not attending Thursday’s dinner can still experience Coverdale. The farm is open for regular visits Fridays through Sundays through November. Admission is free, and donations are welcome.
To Go Box
Who: Delaware Nature Society hosts A Taste of Coverdale.
What: A farm dinner with optional guided nature strolls and a silent auction. Online ticket registration is closed.
When: Thursday, Sept. 24, from 4:30 to 8 p.m. Strolls begin at 4:30 p.m.; dinner begins at 6 p.m.
Where: Coverdale Farm Preserve, 543 Way Road, Greenville.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump has formally appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as national security adviser, making permanent a dual role Rubio has held on an acting basis since May 2025.
A White House official confirmed Tuesday that Trump signed a commission making Rubio the permanent national security adviser. Rubio becomes the first person since Henry Kissinger to simultaneously serve as secretary of state and national security adviser, concentrating two of the administration’s most influential foreign-policy positions under one official.
Rubio assumed the national security adviser duties after Mike Waltz left the White House position in May 2025. Trump subsequently nominated Waltz to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations following controversy over a Signal group chat in which senior officials discussed military operations against Houthi militants in Yemen.
Rubio has since reshaped parts of the National Security Council while continuing to run the State Department. Associated Press reporting this summer noted that several of Rubio’s former State Department aides moved into senior NSC positions, giving him substantial influence over the administration’s foreign-policy structure.
Trump has repeatedly praised Rubio’s ability to handle multiple responsibilities, saying last year that when problems arise, “I call up Marco. He gets it solved.” Rubio has said he remains focused on his current responsibilities rather than a possible 2028 presidential campaign.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah is calling for a Senate investigation into Donald Trump Jr.’s foreign relationships and gifts after reporting that a Russian oligarch helped finance celebrations surrounding his May wedding.
Curtis asked Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dick Durbin to subpoena both Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden as part of a broader inquiry into whether presidential relatives have benefited financially from their family connections.
The request follows a ProPublica investigation reporting that Umar Kremlev, a Russian boxing official with ties to President Vladimir Putin, helped pay for a private-island venue and fireworks connected to Trump Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas. President Donald Trump has said his son told him the money would be reimbursed.
Curtis argued that Republicans should apply the same scrutiny to Trump Jr. that they previously applied to Hunter Biden. “A toaster is a wedding gift,” Curtis wrote on social media. “A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else.”
Curtis is seeking testimony about business dealings, foreign relationships, gifts and any instances in which access to a president was understood to provide value. He has not alleged that Trump Jr. committed a crime.
NEW YORK CITY, New York — Mayor Zohran Mamdani renewed his criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, calling him a “war criminal” and an “architect of a horrific genocide” as the Israeli leader prepares to address the United Nations General Assembly.
Mamdani said the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu should be respected, although he acknowledged New York City lacks legal authority to execute it. The ICC issued warrants in 2024 accusing Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to the Gaza conflict. Israel rejects the allegations and disputes the court’s jurisdiction.
Netanyahu is expected to arrive Thursday for a brief visit and deliver his UN address on Sept. 24. The Associated Press reported that his trip is expected to last roughly 24 hours amid anticipated demonstrations in New York.
Mamdani previously campaigned on arresting Netanyahu if he visited the city, but later said municipal authorities do not have the power to enforce the ICC warrant. He has instead called on the federal government to act.
The United States and Israel are not members of the ICC, and the Trump administration has opposed the court’s actions against Israeli officials while preparing broader sanctions against the institution.
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Immigration detentions involving Haitian residents have increased sharply in Ohio since Temporary Protected Status for Haitians ended July 27, according to a new report from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.
Springfield ICE Watch documented 74 Haitian detainees from Aug. 7 through Sept. 17, representing a 142.3% increase compared with bookings before TPS expired. The report reviewed rosters from four Ohio facilities that contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Two other detention centers were excluded because they do not publicly release rosters.
The increase follows a June Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to terminate TPS protections for roughly 330,000 Haitians nationwide. TPS had allowed eligible Haitians to live and work legally in the United States while conditions in Haiti remained unsafe.
About 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield under a mix of immigration statuses. Local advocates say ICE has increasingly conducted traffic stops and enforcement actions near apartment complexes, stores and workplaces. Springfield ICE Watch said only 8% of detained Haitians it tracked had existing removal orders.
ICE has also expanded electronic monitoring in the community through ankle monitors and the SmartLINK phone application. DHS says those supervision decisions are made individually based on immigration status, criminal history and compliance considerations.
NEW YORK CITY, New York — President Donald Trump’s unexpectedly cordial meeting with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani drew backlash from some of Trump’s most outspoken supporters, including political activist Laura Loomer.
Trump met with Mamdani at Gracie Mansion on Monday ahead of events surrounding the United Nations General Assembly. Despite months of political attacks between the two, Trump publicly praised Mamdani afterward and said the mayor has the “potential” to be “a great mayor.” Associated Press reported that the meeting focused in part on housing affordability and other New York City issues.
Loomer responded angrily on X, writing that she was “pissed off” and complaining that people she described as “anti-American Islamic jihadists” were being “rewarded.” She did not name Mamdani directly in the post, but Mediaite reported the comments were in response to Trump’s meeting with him.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist and New York’s first Muslim mayor, has sharply criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza. There is no evidence supporting Loomer’s characterization of him as an “Islamic jihadist.”
Loomer was not alone in objecting. New York radio host Sid Rosenberg also criticized Trump for meeting Mamdani and argued the appearance could hurt Republicans politically.
SACRAMENTO, California — Support for California’s proposed billionaire tax has fallen below 50% as voters prepare to decide Proposition 40 in November, according to a new UC Berkeley Citrin Center-POLITICO poll.
The survey found 45% support the measure, 43% oppose it and 12% remain undecided. That represents a decline from a February survey in which 50% supported Proposition 40 and 28% opposed it. The Sept. 8-14 poll included 2,418 respondents and has a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points.
Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of Californians with assets exceeding $1 billion. State election officials have qualified the measure for the Nov. 3 ballot.
Democrats remain substantially more supportive, while Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes the proposal and has instead advocated a national approach to taxing billionaires. Labor unions, including SEIU-UHW, support Proposition 40, arguing the revenue would help finance health care and other programs.
The campaign is attracting substantial spending. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has contributed more than $100 million to groups opposing the measure.
Polling remains mixed. A separate September Public Policy Institute of California survey found 52% of likely voters supporting Proposition 40 and 46% opposing it after respondents were read the official ballot description.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has fallen to 32%, the lowest level recorded across his first and second presidencies in Reuters/Ipsos polling, as dissatisfaction over living costs and the economy grows.
The Reuters/Ipsos survey, conducted Sept. 17-20 among 1,277 U.S. adults, found Trump’s overall approval down from 47% when he began his second term. Among Republicans, approval fell to 73%, compared with 86% in January. The poll has a margin of error of about 3 percentage points.
Economic concerns were particularly damaging. Only 17% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the cost of living. Among Republicans, 44% approved of his performance on that issue while 51% disapproved, marking a significant deterioration within his own party.
The poll also found registered voters preferred Democratic congressional candidates over Republicans, 43% to 35%, ahead of November’s midterm elections. That represents the largest Democratic advantage measured by Reuters/Ipsos this year.
Trump performed better among Republicans on immigration, while his handling of the Iran war and rising fuel costs drew broader dissatisfaction.
Four amendments involve voting rules, while others address marriage, the death penalty and vacancies in the lieutenant governor’s office
DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s next General Assembly will inherit eight proposed amendments to the state Constitution, including four that could change voting rights and election procedures.
Vil Ramunno, a public policy researcher and Delaware LIVE contributing journalist, outlined the proposals during an appearance on “A Better Discussion,” hosted by former Delaware Attorney General Jane Brady for A Better Delaware.
The amendments already received the required approval from two-thirds of the members elected to each chamber of the 153rd General Assembly. However, none is part of the Constitution yet.
Under Delaware’s amendment process, the same proposed changes must receive two-thirds support in the House and Senate again after a general election. Unlike most states, Delaware does not routinely place individual constitutional amendments before voters for ratification. The governor also has no power to sign or veto them.
That means the lawmakers elected in November will decide whether the eight proposals become part of Delaware’s foundational legal document.
Four voting amendments
Ramunno said four of the pending amendments involve elections or voting rights:
• Senate Substitute 1 for Senate Bill 2 would authorize 10 days of early, in-person voting before general, primary and certain special elections.
• Senate Substitute 1 for Senate Bill 3 would create a constitutional right to vote by absentee ballot without providing an excuse. Voters generally would still have to request a ballot for each election cycle unless they qualify for permanent absentee status.
• House Bill 180 would generally restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies after they are released from incarceration. It would prohibit making restoration contingent upon restitution or another monetary payment and remove obsolete residency and literacy provisions.
• House Bill 430 would specify that only natural persons may vote in Delaware elections, preventing corporations and other artificial entities from being granted voting rights.
Ramunno said her initial impression was that the four voting measures weren’t a major concern, though she offered a clarification after the interview.
Brady disagreed with that initial assessment, raising concerns about the details lawmakers could later establish through statute. She particularly questioned the no-excuse absentee proposal.
Ramunno said she wanted to clarify her position on the felon voting rights amendment: on reflection, she agreed with Brady’s concern that restitution should be addressed before voting rights are restored, since the amendment as written would prevent the state from ever requiring that.
Their exchange demonstrated why the second round of legislative consideration could produce significant debate, even though each proposal secured the supermajority needed to clear its first constitutional hurdle.
Marriage, death penalty and state offices
The four remaining amendments would address other parts of the Constitution:
• Senate Substitute 2 for Senate Bill 100 would establish marriage as a fundamental right that cannot be denied based on gender or another characteristic protected by the Constitution. It also contains language protecting religious freedom.
• House Substitute 1 for House Bill 35 would constitutionally prohibit the death penalty. Delaware currently has no enforceable death penalty statute, but the amendment would prevent a future General Assembly from restoring capital punishment without another constitutional change.
• Senate Bill 264 would establish a special-election process for filling most vacancies in the lieutenant governor’s office.
• House Substitute 1 for House Bill 320 would make a series of technical corrections to the Constitution, including removing duplicated words, correcting punctuation and clarifying several provisions.
Brady cautioned against treating the Constitution like ordinary legislation, saying it should remain a foundational document that is changed carefully and infrequently.
Making legislation easier to follow: CivicDelaware.com
Ramunno’s analysis is informed by nearly a decade in public policy. She previously served as a senior editor at the Caesar Rodney Institute, where she worked to make policy reports clear and accessible to general readers.
She now covers government and politics for Delaware LIVE and also works as a public policy researcher.
Ramunno also created Civic Delaware, an informational platform designed to help residents follow bills moving through Legislative Hall. Its primary tool, Dover Dash, tracks legislation from introduction through committee hearings, floor consideration and final action.
She said she developed the platform after watching complex bills move from introduction to passage in a matter of days during the final weeks of a legislative session.
Dover Dash uses automated updates from the General Assembly’s website and organizes bills according to the people most likely to be affected. Users can select profiles such as homeowner, parent, young professional, retiree, senior or veteran.
Instead of displaying only bill numbers, the platform gives proposals descriptive names, plain-language summaries, their official legislative synopses and current status. Users can also browse bills by subjects such as taxes, energy, alcohol and cannabis, and the state Constitution.
“You want to only know the ones that affect you, and it helps you to be more engaged,” Ramunno said. “And it makes it a little personal, too.”
She said Civic Delaware will archive legislation from the outgoing General Assembly when the new session begins in January. The eight proposed constitutional amendments will remain active because they must be considered again by the incoming lawmakers.
Ramunno said the goal is to help residents learn about proposals before they become law, ask informed questions and engage directly with their elected representatives.
TO GO: Track legislation with Civic Delaware
• What: Civic Delaware’s Dover Dash tracks legislation moving through the Delaware General Assembly.
• How it works: Choose a profile, homeowner, parent, young professional, retiree, senior or veteran, to surface bills that affect you, or browse by subject instead.
• What you’ll find: Plain-English summaries, official legislative synopses and real-time status for every bill in the pipeline.
• Why it matters: Bills can move from introduction to passage in days, especially late in a session. Dover Dash gives residents time to catch a proposal and ask their legislator about it before the vote.
New research connects two of the Wilmington museum’s most important collections and offers fresh insight into the development of American illustration
WILMINGTON — A new Delaware Art Museum exhibition is challenging the long-held view that two of the institution’s most important collections tell separate stories.
“Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites,” which opened Sept. 5, brings together works by Wilmington illustrator Howard Pyle and British Pre-Raphaelite artists whose detailed, romantic style helped influence his approach to visual storytelling.
The exhibition’s larger significance lies in new research showing that Pyle and Wilmington textile manufacturer and art collector Samuel Bancroft were more closely connected than historians previously understood.
Bancroft assembled what became one of the museum’s signature collections of British Pre-Raphaelite art. Pyle’s work formed the foundation of another.
Although the two men were related by marriage, questions remained about whether Pyle influenced Bancroft’s collecting, whether Bancroft introduced Pyle to the British artists or whether their interests developed independently.
The museum’s research indicates that Pyle was already studying and drawing inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites before Bancroft began acquiring their work in 1890.
Two collections become one story
The Pre-Raphaelite movement began in England during the 19th century. Its artists rejected some conventional academic approaches to painting in favor of vivid colors, close attention to detail, symbolism and stories drawn from literature, medieval history and Arthurian legend.
Those qualities are also visible in many of Pyle’s best-known illustrations.
The exhibition places Pyle’s medieval and Early Renaissance scenes beside works by Pre-Raphaelite artists and their followers, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.
Among the works displayed are Pyle’s illustrations for stories about the Knights of the Round Table and Rossetti’s “Water Willow,” Burne-Jones’ “Cupid’s Hunting Fields” and a Rossetti study depicting Lancelot and the Lady of Shalott.
The side-by-side presentation allows visitors to compare the artists’ compositions, subjects and storytelling techniques instead of simply being told that a connection existed.
A Delaware link to American illustration
The exhibit matters locally because Howard Pyle’s legacy is closely tied to Wilmington and the Brandywine Valley. His illustrations appeared in prominent books and magazines, and his teaching influenced a generation of artists who helped establish American illustration as a distinct art form.
The Delaware Art Museum itself traces its origins to the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, founded in 1912 to preserve Pyle’s work following his death.
By demonstrating that Pyle encountered Pre-Raphaelite ideas early in his career, the exhibition adds a new chapter to the story of how American illustration developed. It suggests that the dramatic, story-driven images associated with Pyle and his students had meaningful roots in an earlier British art movement.
The result is more than a comparison of artistic styles. It is an examination of how artistic ideas crossed the Atlantic, took hold in Wilmington and helped shape images seen by American readers across the country.
The exhibition also gives the museum an opportunity to connect two collections central to its identity: its founding collection of Pyle’s work and the Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art.
“Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites” was curated by Katherine Feldkamp, the museum’s curatorial associate. It will remain on view in Galleries 11 and 12 through Jan. 24, 2027.
Feldkamp will lead a gallery talk from noon to 1 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, examining how Pyle incorporated Pre-Raphaelite art into his teaching and how his students also found inspiration in the movement. The program is free for museum members and included with general admission for other visitors.
To Go Box
What: “Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites”
Where: Delaware Art Museum, Galleries 11 and 12, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington
When: On view through Jan. 24, 2027
Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The museum remains open until 8 p.m. Thursdays from April through December.
Admission: $18 for adults, $16 for seniors, $7 for students with identification and $6 for youth ages 7 to 18. Admission is free for members and children 6 and younger. General admission is free from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursdays through December.
Special program: Curator Katherine Feldkamp will lead a gallery talk from noon to 1 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25.
Parking: Free on-site parking is available behind the museum.
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Jolly says he will not debate Republican Byron Donalds before Florida’s Nov. 3 election after the campaigns failed to agree on a shared debate.
Jolly announced the decision Sunday, accusing Donalds of “repeated lies and bad faith” and arguing that debates under those circumstances would increase division rather than provide voters with a constructive discussion. He said his campaign previously accepted invitations from Tampa Bay Tiger Bay and CBS Miami.
Donalds separately accepted three proposed debates involving Telemundo and NBC 6, Spectrum News and News4Jax. Because the candidates accepted different events, none produced an agreement for both candidates to appear. Earlier this month, the campaigns were publicly blaming each other for the scheduling impasse.
Donalds criticized Jolly’s decision Sunday, pointing to the Democrat’s earlier statements that he was willing to debate repeatedly. Jolly responded by noting Donalds declined requests to debate several Republican primary opponents before winning the GOP nomination in August.
Jolly, a former Republican congressman who later became a Democrat, is seeking to succeed term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis. Donalds, currently a Republican congressman representing Southwest Florida, won his party’s August primary. If no agreement is reached, the Tampa Bay Times reports this would be Florida’s first gubernatorial election without a debate since 1974.
Can Gulf Arab countries help break the deadlock over Trump’s Gaza peace plan?Expert commentLToremark
Gulf Arab states increasingly view Israel as the main obstacle to progress on the peace plan – and may hope for an opening after Israel’s October elections.
Almost a year after US President Donald Trump unveiled his 20-point peace plan for Gaza, which was adopted by both Israel and Hamas and paved the way for the release of all Israeli hostages, the peace process appears to have hit a wall.
The two sides remain fundamentally divided over the sequencing of demilitarization and Israeli withdrawal. So far, Hamas has refused to give up its heavy weapons unless Israel halts all military operations and withdraws its forces from the parts of Gaza it currently controls – approximately 60 per cent of the strip – while Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms.
Although President Trump continues to argue that the situation in Gaza is under control, his envoy Jared Kushner, who recently visited Israel, and the director-general of his Board of Peace, Nikolay Mladenov, have so far been unable to launch the second phase of the process.
In September, Kushner acknowledged that the task of demilitarizing Gaza was proving far more difficult than initially expected: ‘We are starting to understand the scope of the militarization of Gaza. It is beyond your comprehension’. In August, he had told Fox News that he expected Hamas to begin handing over its weapons in ‘as few as 30 days’.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains critical according to an August report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – and there is little hope for reconstruction given the current stalemate. According to the OCHA report, 58 per cent of Gaza’s population is facing ‘severe deficiencies in shelter conditions or access to essential services and non-food items’, while a severely strained health system and lack of medical supplies could put lifesaving services at risk.
Arab Gulf countries like UAE (which is also a member of the Board of Peace) are key providers of humanitarian aid to Gaza. In fact, UAE aid accounts for 46 per cent of global assistance. But what is their position on the current stalemate in Gaza and could they help find a way to break the deadlock?
In August, eight Arab and Islamic countries – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey and Qatar – condemned Israel’s unwillingness to proceed with the implementation of Trump’s plan for Gaza, saying its stance threatens international efforts to end the war.
In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of these countries denounced Israel’s stated opposition to a roadmap for completing Trump’s broader Gaza plan, which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2803. The group also called for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups to disarm; an Israeli military withdrawal; the deployment of an international stabilization force; the transfer of administrative authority to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza; and the reconstruction of Gaza.
In May, it was reported that the UAE had contributed $100 million for training of new Gaza police force – an important feature that will help provide security in post-war Gaza. However, Israeli officials reportedly barred the already vetted new recruits from leaving the strip for training in Cairo, and for now it is unclear when permission to leave and return to Gaza will be granted – if at all.
Although the UAE and other Arab members of the Board of Peace did not comment on this report, it is clear that their frustration with the Israeli government over Gaza and the West Bank is mounting. In August, the inaugural ‘Emirates loves Palestine’ event was held in Dubai, celebrating the connection between the UAE and the Palestinian people, while a delegation from a UAE future leaders programme were sent to Egypt to learn about – and take part in – UAE efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Indeed, the UAE is particularly important in this context as it is one of the signatories of the Abraham Accords and one of Israel’s closest partners in the Gulf and the Arab world. But other Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia, have also sharpened their condemnation of recent radical statements by Israeli officials on the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, as well as increasing settler violence in the West Bank. Trump, meanwhile, has insisted that a controversial nuclear deal signed with Saudi Arabia this summer hinges on Saudi normalization with Israel. But despite US pressure, it seems the Saudis will not divert significantly from their demand to establish a clear path for Palestinian statehood.
Due to the Iran war and its fallout, Gulf Arab states are more preoccupied with their own domestic security and economic challenges than at any point in recent memory. And with only weeks to go until Israel’s pivotal October elections, they also retain a measure of hope that a change of government could open the way to more constructive engagement.
Leading opposition candidates in Israel have been critical of Netanyahu’s policies on both Gaza and the West Bank. Many of them believe that Israel needs to involve the Arab states, and in particular Saudi Arabia, in future dealings with the Palestinians. A new Israeli government could also prove significantly tougher on settler violence in the West Bank and more flexible on alternative Palestinian governance in Gaza to unseat Hamas.
However, if the current governing coalition remains in power, more drastic and radical steps might follow. This could include construction in the E1 strategic perimeter, which would drive a wedge through the West Bank and undermine prospects of a future Palestinian state, as well as a possible escalation in Gaza.
For now, Gulf states are focusing on two key diplomatic instruments in their response to the ongoing stalemate in Gaza. One is humanitarian assistance, the other is pointed condemnations of Israel, which is increasingly perceived in Arab capitals as the primary obstacle to the implementation of Trump’s peace plan.
At present, it seems unlikely that Gulf states will change tactics. Even less likely that they will withdraw support for Trump’s peace plan and the Board of Peace, or press for urgent, extraordinary measures, such as sanctions on Israel or an intervention by Trump himself. But this calculus may well be revised in the aftermath of the Israeli elections, depending on the outcome. It will also remain contingent on the broader strategic environment in the Gulf, not least the risk of renewed hostilities.
Until something breaks the stalemate, the population of Gaza will continue to be caught between Hamas and the Israeli government – both waiting for the other to make the first move.
CARSON CITY, Nevada — Gov. Joe Lombardo’s office has declined, for now, to meet with certified firearms instructors who say Nevada’s regulatory system for armed security guards has serious public-safety and oversight problems.
The Nevada Association of Certified Firearms Instructors says it has sought a meeting with Lombardo since March. Association President Andrew Cowie has raised concerns about the Private Investigators Licensing Board, whose members are appointed by the governor. Lombardo’s office said it would review the material but would not schedule a personal meeting in the short term.
Former PILB member Rick Brown resigned in June, saying the board was not adequately addressing alleged violations involving firearms instructor Stephanie Costello. The board later fined Costello $5,000 and temporarily suspended her instructor certification after determining she violated training regulations.
Separate concerns emerged this summer when Nevada lawmakers learned that security guards had been carrying rifles and shotguns even though state law contains no provision authorizing the practice. Lawmakers subsequently questioned the board’s oversight and training requirements.
Nevada’s Department of Business and Industry has publicly supported an independent review of PILB operations, saying questions involving public safety and statutory authority should be fully examined.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States has deported more than 25,000 migrants to countries other than their own since President Donald Trump returned to office, according to a multinational investigation examining the administration’s expanding third-country deportation program.
Forbidden Stories reported that the administration has reached agreements with 35 countries, including nations in Africa, Latin America and the Pacific, to accept migrants who often have no previous connection to those destinations. The State Department’s Office of Remigration, created in 2025, has played a central role in negotiating the arrangements.
Internal records reviewed by investigators show at least $410 million was planned for governments and humanitarian organizations connected to the program. About $81 million was designated for participating governments, while more than $178 million was directed toward the International Organization for Migration and $123 million toward UNHCR.
The findings come days after a federal appeals court rejected a Trump administration policy allowing rapid third-country deportations without giving migrants a meaningful opportunity to raise concerns about persecution or torture. Reuters reported that more than 25,000 migrants have been affected, with removals involving countries including Mexico, Uganda, Liberia and Equatorial Guinea.
The administration argues third-country removals help execute valid deportation orders when migrants cannot be returned to their home countries.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration is preparing sanctions against the International Criminal Court that could sharply restrict the Hague-based tribunal’s access to the U.S. financial system and American companies.
The proposed measures would prohibit most U.S. citizens and businesses from providing funds, goods or services to the ICC without a Treasury Department license, according to officials familiar with the plans. The Wall Street Journal reported that the restrictions would take effect after a six- to seven-month grace period and could be finalized around this week’s United Nations General Assembly.
Washington has already sanctioned more than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, including court President Tomoko Akane. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued that the court improperly asserts jurisdiction over officials from countries that never joined it, including the United States and Israel.
The dispute intensified after the ICC issued 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israel rejects the allegations and the court’s jurisdiction.
Organization-wide sanctions could affect the ICC’s banking, information technology, insurance, investigations and employee payments. European governments have discussed measures intended to shield companies from U.S. restrictions.
Chatham House fellow gives evidence at UK parliament committee on global AI governance and risksNews releasethilton.drupal
Senior Research Fellow Isabella Wilkinson spoke to the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee at a time when many are calling for greater regulation of AI in the light of emerging risks.
Isabella Wilkinson, Senior Research Fellow with Chatham House’s Digital Society Programme, gave evidence on the global governance of AI to the UK House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee on 16 September.
Wilkinson outlined the main types of risk from AI: malicious risks, loss-of-control risks and systemic risks. Addressing the governance challenge posed by these risks, she said:
‘We’re facing a governance challenge because all of these risks are interlinked, so we have to be very strategic about how we design governance at multiple different levels. This is a multilateral challenge.’
Wilkinson said that interlinked governance challenges, including a dearth of trusted information about AI and ‘the lack of a crisis toolbox’ to deploy in the event of a crisis, had led to ‘quite a severe state of gridlock in multilateral AI governance.’
The committee was meeting in a week in which debates over the risks associated with AI featured prominently in public debate, following calls by tech leaders to slow the pace of the technology’s development.
‘We are in a moment of intense crisis and turbulence in multilateral AI governance. But as we’ve learned [from other areas of governance] … these conditions create a window of opportunity for dealing with the gridlock,’ said Wilkinson.
AUSTIN, Texas — An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and seriously wounded a 28-year-old Venezuelan man Sunday during an immigration enforcement operation, prompting demands from Austin officials for an independent investigation.
Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was shot in the torso following what Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis described as a brief foot pursuit. He was taken to a hospital in serious but stable condition before being transferred to federal custody. ICE says Garces Perez has a final removal order, while an attorney representing his family disputes parts of the government’s account and says he entered the United States legally.
Accounts of the encounter remain disputed. Austin City Council Member Mike Siegel said the ICE agent rammed Garces Perez’s Toyota Corolla before opening fire. Photographs from the scene showed bullet damage to the vehicle, but federal authorities have not publicly released a detailed account establishing exactly what preceded the shooting.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson and Democratic Rep. Greg Casar called for Austin police and the Texas Rangers to participate in the investigation. Homeland Security Investigations is leading the federal inquiry with FBI assistance.
The shooting comes amid increased ICE activity nationwide, with the agency recording nearly 51,000 arrests in August.
JACKSON, Wisconsin — A Texas man hired by a political consulting firm conducting canvassing work supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany faces multiple felony charges after authorities say he struck a bicyclist while intoxicated and fled from police.
Duane Maiden, 32, was working for Phoenix-based Echo Canyon Consulting, which received $2.5 million from Restoration of America PAC for canvassing operations supporting Tiffany, according to reporting by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The PAC is heavily funded by Wisconsin billionaire Richard Uihlein.
Authorities say the Sept. 3 crash occurred in Washington County after Maiden’s vehicle ran a stop sign and struck a bicyclist, leaving the victim with fractures to his leg, pelvis and spine. A coworker told investigators Maiden had purchased vodka earlier and had been drinking while the two were between canvassing assignments.
The coworker asked to leave the vehicle after the collision and called 911 and his supervisor. Deputies later spotted Maiden’s car and pursued him into neighboring Ozaukee County, where he was arrested. Maiden reportedly told investigators he had been drinking while waiting between assignments but denied realizing he struck the bicyclist.
Maiden faces felony charges including hit-and-run causing great bodily harm, intoxicated use of a vehicle and fleeing an officer. Tiffany’s campaign denied having any connection to Maiden.
Performance on Lenovo ThinkSystem
Distilled spirits are alcoholic beverages produced by heating and condensing a fermented liquid to increase its alcohol percentage, as compared with beer and wine, which is produced using fermentation with a lower alcohol content.
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/4qiwt5qlg2sh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/2wbcn1ax2zrh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/gshymyf28xrh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/5inq3tubcprh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/bf07t2469mrh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/tg3yr6h0elrh1.jpeg){kind=link}
