One person was killed in a shooting that stemmed from an altercation near a mosque in Columbus, Ohio, police said.

MOLLY PENHALE
Staff Writer

From “Twilight” to “The Batman,” Robert Pattinson has shown his ability to play highly contrasting roles over the course of his career. This time he takes on a real person: Chris Hansen from “To Catch a Predator,” an early 2000s reality show where Hansen confronts adults who try to meet up with teenagers online. 

Lance Oppenheim’s film “Primetime,” which was released on Sept. 25, covers many aspects of the show, such as how Hansen prepared before filming, the process of how they lured in predators and even reenacts scenes from the actual show, including many of Hansen’s iconic lines.

This was my most anticipated movie of 2026. Pattinson has recently become my favorite actor and I have seen nearly every movie he has been in, so I was really looking forward to seeing him portray Hansen. 

Not only is he an amazing actor, but he is especially talented in voice acting. He can change his voice to fit any type of character. When comparing his voice used in “The Batman,” a low-pitched, deep, growl-like tone, to that in “Primetime,” it is apparent how well he can do different voices, especially when reenacting Hansen’s.

Another lead performance by Merritt Wever, who plays producer Andie Bender, is overlooked. She is captivating while assisting Hansen with investigating and slowly watching him descend into madness all at the same time. In addition, both decoys — adult actors who portray teenagers who interact with the predators — played by Skylar Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers, did an excellent job.

Gisondo plays Dan Plumb, an aspiring young actor, who gets hired to play a 13-year-old boy who communicates with each adult to lure them in. Hansen then gives him the nickname, Decoy Dan, which has become one of the running jokes of the film. Gisondo does a great job of capturing the awkwardness and terrifying aspects of the job that comes with interacting with predators. 

Bridgers, notably known for her music career, makes her acting debut in this film as Del Harvey. She, along with Gisondo, plays a decoy as a young teenage girl to lure in the predators. I did not know she did not have acting experience prior to this. She is a natural when it comes to being on the big screen. 

The film touches on some aspects of Hansen’s personal life, such as an extramarital affair he was having.  

When reflecting on the film,“It was so bizarre and so in-and-out of reality,” Hansen said in an exclusive interview with Variety. “Obviously, I’m not objective because the character is, you know, me, but it was so detached from reality or anything I’ve experienced then or now doing the investigations.”

Since its release, this movie has taken pop culture by storm. Fans of the movie have made skits and parodies on platforms like TikTok of them reciting iconic quotes from Pattinson’s performance such as, “You see how this looks, right?” 

In addition, popular YouTuber Slushy Noobz got the opportunity to sit down and interview Pattinson and Gisondo, introducing the movie to their audience. As a huge fan of the members of Slushy Noobz, Martin Andrijasevic and Hamzah Al-Emad, seeing them take their humor and bring it to the interview was really entertaining to watch, making me want to see the film a second time.

If you like Pattinson as an actor and watching psychological thriller movies, give “Primetime” a chance. It has dark moments mixed with comedic aspects and great acting performances throughout the whole film. Although much of it is fictionalized, it gives a good glimpse into the reality of the famous show, “To Catch a Predator.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. [...] Researchers at Norforge uncovered the attacks through exposed work on Cairn, an open-source AI platform that describes itself as a "general-purpose problem-solving engine." With Cairn, users set a start and end point for the AI agents, which document their progress as they move forward with the task. However, as noted by Norforge, hackers can also use the tool to orchestrate cyberattacks using AI agents. The hacker who broke into more than 100 sites was the "most active" among the exposed Cairn instances discovered by Norforge, waging attacks on companies based in the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan, as reported by Reuters. This attacker laid out "preferred intrusion tactics" using fewer than 100 Chinese characters, with successful breaches taking about 23 hours, according to Reuters. Overall, Nordforge found more than 20 exposed Cairn instances that are "likely malicious." A John Deere spokesperson said there is "no indication that sensitive information was accessed" as a result of the attack, while Cummins said it's "investigating the report of a potential cyber-attack on a website operated by one of our third-party vendors." Meanwhile, SharkNinja says the breach impacted a standalone site with product support information, and that it has contained the threat.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A superconducting neural network chip that borrows tricks from quantum computers has successfully passed a battery of tests that involved processing data from a fusion reactor. The Genesis Mission project paves the way to the development of a bigger chip for more fusion testing next year, and showcases the potential for a new type of silicon that could leapfrog current energy and performance limits of GPUs in supercomputers.

Great Sky is a Boulder, Colorodo chip startup that was spun out of the National Institute of Standards and Technology by CEO Jeff Shainline and his co-founders in 2024 following nearly a decade of development at NIST. The company, which came out of stealth in March, is developing a chip that utilizes technologies often found in quantum computers, such as superconducting compute and optical connectivity, to implement an analog neural network in hardware, rather than just emulating one digitally.

Great Sky’s neuromorphic chip (Image courtesy Great Sky)

Great Sky says its approach, which it dubs superconducting optoelectronic network (SOEN), can process data at significantly higher rates than traditional chips, such as GPUs, given the same energy. The key to the high performance of Great Sky’s SOEN approach is the combination of superconducting Josephson junction circuits, which offer the highest speed-to-energy ratio of any known circuit element, along with integrated photonic waveguides for long-range, single-photon optical communication, the company says.

“We use many of the same devices as quantum technologies–superconducting circuits, single-photon detectors–but we use them for classical, analog computation in a parallel, distributed architecture, which is ideal for AI,” CEO Shainline said in a blog post earlier this year.

“By constructing new hardware that enables more sophisticated architectures and algorithms while performing operations near the physical limits of speed and energy efficiency, we can transition to a completely different roadmap for scaling that doesn’t require hundreds of billions in capex and gigawatt data centers,” he added.

Those claims were tested in a series of Genesis Mission-related challenges put together by Great Sky, Brookhaven National Lab, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility operated by General Atomics in San Diego, California. Brookhaven led the development of a specialized chip based on Great Sky’s technology that was used to manage the tokamak at the heart of the DIII-D fusion reactor, the largest operating tokamak in North America.

Brookhaven said the new chip had “no problem” processing data from the tokamak at rates up to one million data samples per second.

Great Sky CEO and Co-founder Jeffrey Shainline

“This chip took data straight from a tokamak at millions of samples every second and kept up,” said Steven Cowley, laboratory director of PPP, which was involved in the testing. “That’s a real step toward practical fusion power, and I can’t wait to see where we take it next.”

The neuromorphic chip also passed with flying colors a simulated test from a tokamak simulator developed by the Google DeepMind fusion team, dubbed TORAX, that checks how well a system can respond to rapidly changing plasma behavior in a fusion reaction.

Great Sky, which has completed four chip tapeouts for under $4 million, is planning to build another chip with neural network that’s 10x bigger. The goal is to have the chip completed by the end of the year and ready for testing at Brookhaven Lab in early 2027, followed by another onsite deployment at the DIII-D tokamak later in the year.

“It’s incredible to see the team processing data from our tokamak,” said Richard Buttery, the director of DIII-D. “The folks here at DIII-D are very excited to see how this chip can impact diagnostics and control for the fusion industry.”

Managing fusion reactors is one potential use case of Great Sky’s superconducting neural network chip, but there are others. Ultimately, the goal of Great Sky–which was awarded a phase one contract with the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission project–is to build supercomputers with more neurons and synapses than the human brain, operating a million times faster.

“This is our largest chip to date, and it’s great to see it processing high-speed data directly measured from a tokamak,” stated Shainline. “But this is just the beginning. This approach to AI hardware has so much to offer with regard to fusion, as well as other applications at the forefront of technology. Control and error correction of quantum systems, advanced cybersecurity, video intelligence with continual learning–these are all incredible opportunities as we scale up our systems.”

Generating tokens for AI is another use case. According to Great Sky, its neuromorphic chip could potentially generate 1 million output tokens for one penny, which is 300x less expensive than the best AI hardware can do today, or $3 per 1m tokens.

The post Superconducting Neuromorphic Chip Passes Fusion Test appeared first on HPCwire.

Following the EuroHPC User Days 2026, the EuroHPC JU welcomes new leadership of the User Forum Coordination Group, supporting stronger engagement across Europe’s HPC user community.

Oct. 19, 2026 — The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has announced the election of Sinéad Ryan, Dean of Research, Trinity College Dublin as Chair and the re-election of Maria Girone, Head of CERN openlab, as Vice-Chair of the EuroHPC User Forum Coordination Group (UFCG).

Members of the User Forum Coordination Group (L-R): Ivan Carnimeo, Andrius Popovas, Massimo Bocus, Sinéad Ryan, Maria Girone, Chris Richardson, Lara Peeters, Eleni Briola.

The elections took place in the context of the EuroHPC User Days 2026, following the completion of the two-year mandates of the outgoing Chair and Vice-Chair.

For the next two years, Sinéad Ryan and Maria Girone have chosen to act as co-chairs of the group. The UFCG will continue its work to foster dialogue, collaboration and exchange across the EuroHPC user community.

The EuroHPC JU would like to thank Chris Richardson for his commitment and contribution as the UFCG’s first Chair since its establishment in 2024, and for his role in supporting the development of the User Forum in the past two years.

More Details

The User Forum Coordination Group (UFCG) was initially established in October 2024.

The EuroHPC User Forum provides a platform for users to exchange experiences, identify common needs and provide feedback on the development of EuroHPC services and infrastructures.

In this context, the UFCG supports this dialogue, helping to strengthen connections between users and the EuroHPC JU and ensuring that the perspectives of the user community contribute to the continued development of the European HPC ecosystem.

The UFCG and its User Forum report directly to the EuroHPC JU Executive Director.

The UFCG is composed by:

• Sinéad Ryan (Chair), Trinity College Dublin
• Maria Girone (Vice-Chair), CERN openlab
• Ivan Carnimeo, Italian National Research Council (CNR)
• Zoe Cournia, Biomedical Research Foundation, Athens
• Andrius Popovas, University of Oslo
• Lara Peeters, Ghent University
• Alessio Roccon, University of Udine
• Eleni Briola, Danish Meteorological Institute
• Massimo Bocus, Ghent University
• Chris Richardson, University of Cambridge

Learn more about the EuroHPC User Forum Coordination Group here.

More from HPCwire: EuroHPC User Forum Coordination Group Set to Unite European HPC Users

Source: EuroHPC JU

The post EuroHPC User Forum Coordination Group Elects New Chair and Vice-Chair appeared first on HPCwire.

French leaders call for local curfews and say an "ultra-left movement" was behind widespread violence and vandalism amid anti-government protests.

Envelopes containing powder come weeks before midterms as federal agents try to identify who is behind campaign

More than three dozen members of US Congress have had their offices targeted with envelopes containing white powder, less than three weeks before the 3 November midterms, as federal agents try to identify who is behind the campaign.

The latest is the Virginia Democrat Suhas Subramanyam, whose Leesburg district office was evacuated on Monday after an envelope containing a suspicious substance arrived. He said the office was cleared quickly, adding that “acts of political intimidation have no place in our country”.

Latest action on alleged voter fraud comes as administration escalates its fight with state as midterms loom

• DoJ charges 28 green card holders in California over alleged illegal voting

• Sign up for US Breaking News email

A new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that Donald Trump’s approval rating has reached a new low – 33%.

This comes, just over two weeks away from the November midterms, as the president continues crisscrossing the country as part of his campaign blitz for embattled Republicans.

Curfews to apply to parts of cities including Paris, Nice and Lyon after days of violence on French streets

• Macron criticises ‘unbridled violence’ after 2,400 arrests across France

French PM Lecornu says he has asked prefects to implement “a number of partial curfews” in certain “localised” urban areas to stop further disorder, which he attributes to “the extreme-left” and some criminal elements.

We will no doubt hear more on this from local authorities, as in the example of Marseille (10:32).

BOULDER, Colo., Oct. 19, 2026 — Great Sky, Brookhaven National Lab, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have partnered to develop a new kind of AI chip with the speed necessary to sense and respond to searing plasmas present in fusion reactors. The chips differ from conventional silicon chips — such as CPUs and GPUs — in fundamental ways. Instead of processing digital information using silicon transistors, Great Sky’s chips implement analog neural networks using superconducting circuitry with optical communication.

Great Sky’s SOEN (superconducting optoelectronic network) wafer

The team designed and fabricated their latest superconducting neural-network chip and demonstrated the chip performing three tasks of relevance to fusion control. The tasks were selected due to their relevance to the operation of tokamaks — large reactors designed for producing fusion power.

Two of the tasks injected data collected at the DIII-D tokamak into the chip for anomaly classification and disruption prediction. The data was collected with a very high sample rate of a million samples per second, and the team showed the chip had no problem keeping up with that speed.

The third task processed simulated data generated by TORAX — a tokamak simulator developed by the Google DeepMind Fusion team. For this task, the chip was able to process simulated signals to predict sawtooth instabilities, an event that is critical to tokamak operation. This example illustrates the feasibility of using Great Sky’s chips as part of the real-time simulation of plasma state that is central to tokamak control and stabilization during operation.

“It’s incredible to see the team processing data from our tokamak,” said Richard Buttery, Director of DIII-D. “The folks here at DIII-D are very excited to see how this chip can impact diagnostics and control for the fusion industry.”

Superconducting neural networks sit at the intersection of several DOE priorities: advanced AI, quantum technologies, and transformative energy. This collaboration shows how expertise in scientific AI and advanced computing can help move promising hardware concepts toward real-time control challenges in fusion and other complex systems.

Fusion reactors demand control systems that can think at the speed of a rapidly evolving plasma. This demonstration showed a chip taking data straight from a tokamak at a million samples per second without missing a beat. It is a meaningful step toward the real-time control systems that practical fusion power will require.

The Great Sky team has been developing this technology for over a decade, first at the National Institute of Standards and Technology before spinning out to form Great Sky. Their approach to AI hardware brings significant advantages in speed and energy efficiency, directly addressing the problems that hinder the economic foundations of the AI and data-center industries. This demonstration represents a significant step forward for the field of superconducting neural networks. “This is our largest chip to date, and it’s great to see it processing high-speed data directly measured from a tokamak,” said Jeff Shainline, founder and CEO of Great Sky. “But this is just the beginning. This approach to AI hardware has so much to offer with regard to fusion, as well as other applications at the forefront of technology. Control and error correction of quantum systems, advanced cybersecurity, video intelligence with continual learning — these are all incredible opportunities as we scale up our systems.” The team will demonstrate their next-generation chip with a 10x larger neural network in December.

About Great Sky

Great Sky is building AI hardware, originally developed within the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, to enable intelligence at the boundaries of physics. The company was founded by a renowned team of PhDs and researchers with decades of experience in photonics, physics, semiconductors, and superconductors. It’s backed by marquee investors like Bison Ventures, Olive Tree Capital, Matchstick Ventures, Range Ventures and Access Venture Partners. Learn more at greatsky.ai.

Source: Great Sky

The post Great Sky, National Labs Explore Superconducting AI for Plasma Control appeared first on HPCwire.

Following its October 13 HomeView launch, Apple is gearing up for its second hardware event of the month. The event is scheduled for October 28 in Los Angeles and carries the tagline "Pro and tell." 9to5Mac reports: Rumors say Apple has a slew of new products to announce at its next event, headlining by its first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen and OLED. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, here's what's on the docket: - New 14-inch and 16-inch touchscreen MacBook Pro models with OLED displays. They will also have a Dynamic Island for the first time and will be "significantly lighter" than the current models. The new MacBook Pro models are expected to be powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. - A revamped iPad mini with an OLED screen, a "revamped speaker system," and a relocated FaceTime camera - New iMac and entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro models powered by the M6 chip, which will "look like their current versions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Florida governor has consistently opposed any legislation to curb planet-heating emissions, calling it a ‘radical climate agenda’

A life-sized statue of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, was unveiled and promptly began melting in front of an audience in Tallahassee in a symbolic protest at his rejection of action on the climate crisis.

The silvery statue, revealed to an audience of onlookers last week, melted away to show a skull under DeSantis’ face. The structure was cast from solid gallium, a metal that melts at 85.6F (29.8C), which is below summertime high temperatures frequently reached in Tallahassee, Florida’s capital.

Supercomputers often feel like distant, abstract machines housed in secure federal facilities. However, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is actively reshaping human safety, medicine, and energy. Behind its mind-boggling speed are real-world applications that directly protect your family, your health, and your planet.

1. Instant Tsunami Warnings for Coastal Communities

For anyone living near or visiting a coastline, an undersea earthquake starts a terrifying countdown. Traditional emergency models take minutes or hours to calculate wave impact, often leading to delayed warnings or costly false alarms.

Using El Capitan, scientists created a real-time tsunami “digital twin.” This framework connects ocean sensors with physics-based models to calculate precise, hyper-localized coastal risks in under 0.2 seconds—a 10-billion-fold acceleration over older methods. This breakthrough gives coastal residents clear, instantaneous evacuation instructions, fundamentally shifting how humanity survives natural disasters.

2. Designing Lifesaving Drugs in Days

Developing a new medicine traditionally takes a decade of slow laboratory trial-and-error. When a new virus or treatment-resistant superbug emerges, society cannot afford to wait.

El Capitan—along with its unclassified, open-science companion system, Tuolumne—uses advanced AI agents to reinvent medicine. Instead of guessing which chemical structures might neutralize a pathogen, researchers simulate structural biology at an atomic level and screen billions of molecular compounds simultaneously. This allows scientists to design safe, targeted therapeutics in days rather than years, turning medicine into a proactive shield against future health crises.

3. Unleashing Unlimited Clean Energy

In late 2022, LLNL’s National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition, proving we could recreate the power of the sun in a lab. To turn this into a clean, limitless source of electricity for your home, commercial reactors must repeat this process multiple times every second.

El Capitan acts as the engineering bridge to a zero-carbon grid. It runs the largest fluid dynamics simulations in history to map out how burning plasma behaves under extreme pressure. By solving these complex engineering bottlenecks, the system accelerates the arrival of safe, limitless fusion energy to replace fossil fuels.

Inside the Machine: The Hardware Driving the Breakthroughs

To deliver these life-changing results, El Capitan broke records on the global High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, achieving a verified 1.809 exaFLOPs of sustained performance. Built through a multi-year partnership between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, HPE and AMD, the machine represents a radical shift in computer architecture.

Unified Architecture: AMD Instinct MI300A APUs

Traditional supercomputers can spend valuable time moving data back and forth between separate CPUs and GPUs across slow internal buses. El Capitan reduces this bottleneck using AMD Instinct MI300A Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

AMD’s architecture unifies Zen 4 CPU cores, CDNA 3 GPU cores, and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) onto a single, 3D-chiplet silicon package. This shared memory space allows the chips to execute intense physics simulations and massive AI training loops simultaneously without wasting clock cycles.

Liquid Cooling and the Green500 Metrics

As scientific workloads grow, raw speed is no longer the only metric that matters; energy consumption is shaping how future leadership systems are built. Within the HPE Cray Supercomputing framework, El Capitan uses direct liquid-cooling.

A dual-loop system circulates treated water directly over the hottest components, pulling heat away far more efficiently than air. This extreme engineering delivers stunning environmental efficiency:

• The efficiency metric: El Capitan achieves an energy efficiency score of 60.94 gigaFLOPs per watt.
• The Green500 standing: This places the massive system at No. 28 on the Green500 list.

Securing a top efficiency rank is a great achievement for a leadership-class supercomputer, as massive systems typically face steep scaling penalties that degrade their power-to-performance ratio. El Capitan demonstrates that it is entirely possible to capture the industry-leading performance with an energy-conscious design.

Connecting the thousands of individual computing nodes is the HPE Slingshot network. This high-speed interconnect allows data to move between nodes with ultra-low latency. Furthermore, “Rabbit” near-node local storage modules stream data directly to the AMD processors, preventing data traffic jams and keeping the supercomputer running at maximum velocity.

The New Dawn of Computational Science

El Capitan serves a vital national security role in safeguarding the United States nuclear deterrent without underground testing. However, its ultimate legacy is much broader. By combining exascale raw power with generative AI, LLNL, HPE, and AMD have built a predictive engine that helps guard our coastlines, speed up medical cures, and pave the way toward clean energy. To learn more, visit hpc.llnl.gov/.

The post Saving Lives in 0.2 Seconds: How Exascale Computing Impacts You appeared first on HPCwire.

Just in time for the iPhone Duo, Verizon joins T-Mobile in supporting Apple’s clever feature for quickly switching between two phones.

As the Trump administration faces voter pushback over high gasoline prices, Vice President JD Vance tried to shift the blame to former President Joe Biden.

During a CBS News town hall Oct. 17, Vance said, “The biggest reason why gas prices are so high is because when Joe Biden was president, we had about 20% of American refining capacity that went offline. We’re slowly bringing that online. But it does take a little bit of time. And because we shut down so much refining capacity, we were more susceptible to the shocks that we’ve seen in the Middle Eastern energy crisis.”

Vance’s office did not respond to our questions for this article. But while California has lost 20%  of its gasoline refining capacity, national refinery capacity has remained relatively stable.

Twenty percent is “not a correct statistic in terms of national refinery capacity,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy, which tracks U.S. gasoline prices.

What’s more, presidential policy is one of many factors that shape U.S. refining capabilities, multiple oil industry experts told PolitiFact, and that the most obvious cause of today’s high gasoline prices is the Iran war, which was launched by Trump, not Biden.

“The biggest factor influencing high gasoline prices is the elevated cost of crude oil, caused by the reduction in ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and damage to export and pipeline facilities in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries,” said Hugh Daigle, a professor with the University of Texas at Austin’s petroleum and geosystems engineering department.

How could Biden’s policies have made a difference?

Energy market experts said that some of Biden’s policies — notably efforts to combat climate change, which involve transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner, renewable energy — likely contributed to some refiners’ decisions not to greenlight new refineries or to expand existing ones. 

In particular, California’s stringent environmental policies help explain why two refineries shuttered there. The timing is less clear than Vance made it sound: The closure of a Phillips 66 refinery in Los Angeles was announced two weeks before Trump won reelection in 2024. Valero announced the closure of its refinery in Benicia, California, in April 2025, when Trump was president. Both facilities closed during Trump’s second term.

How does the refining economy work?

Biden’s policies are not considered the prime culprit for today’s high gasoline prices, experts said.

The bigger factors shaping U.S. refining capacity are market-driven, experts said. They include:

The current and expected demand for fuel. The growth of electric cars — partially nudged by government policy but also driven by consumers’ decisions — has put some downward pressure on demand for gasoline, and thus the demand for refining. And as more people work from home, they have to drive less often. 

Foreign refining capacity. The more foreign refining capability there is, the less pressure for oil companies to rely exclusively on U.S. refiners. “Since 2019, global refining capacity has shrunk by about 1 million barrels a day while demand has grown by about 4.5 million barrels a day,” said Skip York, a fellow at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies.

U.S. refiners are busy right now because 3 million barrels a day are offline in Russia and the Middle East because of Ukrainian and Iranian attacks. Much of the Russian and Middle Eastern refinery capacity is geared toward producing diesel. As a result, York said, U.S. refiners have switched some of their production from gasoline to diesel — which has further hiked gasoline prices for U.S. drivers.

Refinery profitability. When Phillips 66 announced it was closing the Los Angeles refinery, the company said that in addition to concerns about California regulations, it made the decision despite the facility being profitable There were “more attractive projects in the company’s portfolio,” York said.

U.S. and world events. During recessions, there is less demand for gasoline, so refinery use tends to drop. “The big drop in U.S. refining capacity utilization happened in spring of 2020, during the initial wave of COVID shutdowns,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

How does U.S. refinery capacity today compare with the Biden era?

Despite disruption driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, wars and market factors, U.S. refinery usage has remained relatively stable under both Biden and Trump, data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency shows.

&&

In 2021 and 2022, deferred maintenance and supply-chain breakdowns during the pandemic undercut refinery capacity. U.S. refining capacity has been at historically normal levels ever since, Daigle said.

&&

Williams-Derry calculated how many refineries’ last date of operation fell during Trump’s two terms and compared it with how many shut down during Biden’s term. He found that the amount of refining capacity lost from shutdowns under Trump quadrupled the amount lost under Biden.

“Personally, I don’t think that politics had much to do with any of these closures,” Williams-Derry said. He cited a Phillips 66 facility in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, that was 50 years old in 2021 when it suffered hurricane damage. “Phillips tried to sell it but couldn’t find a buyer, so it turned it into a terminal and closed the refinery,” he said. 

Why are gasoline prices high now?

The most obvious cause of high gasoline prices today is the start of the Iran war. Prices spiked immediately after the war began Feb. 28 and have remained high since.

&&

“Reduced refinery capacity would contribute somewhat to higher gasoline and diesel prices today, but this is by no means the biggest reason why gasoline prices are so high today,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a Yale University economist who specializes in energy and environmental issues.

Our ruling

Vance said, “The biggest reason why gas prices are so high is because when Joe Biden was president, we had about 20% of American refining capacity that went offline.”

Vance’s statement is inaccurate on multiple levels.

California, not the U.S., lost 20% of its refining capacity. The national outlook has been largely stable. Market forces and global realities influence refinery production more than presidential policy does, and the most obvious cause of today’s high gasoline prices is the Iran war, which was launched by Trump, not Biden.

We rate the statement False.

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Washington, DC — Artificial intelligence is playing an unprecedented role in the 2026 midterms, with campaigns and political groups spending more than $137 million on advertisements created or enhanced using AI.

The Wesleyan Media Project has identified 220 AI-assisted political ads this cycle, compared with less than $50,000 in spending on such advertising during 2024. Researchers say the current total is almost certainly an undercount.

Republican candidates and aligned organizations produced 81% of the identified AI ads and accounted for 88% of the spending. Democratic sponsors produced about 12%.

Many advertisements create fictional scenes involving opposing candidates. One Republican ad depicts New York Gov. Kathy Hochul walking with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and saying, “don’t say affordable,” although Hochul never made the statement and the scene never occurred.

Only 27% of the AI-generated ads tracked by Wesleyan included a disclaimer alerting viewers to the technology’s use.

Democratic congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke has also demanded that Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden stop distributing AI videos depicting her making fabricated statements about corruption.

The rapid spread of synthetic political advertising comes as federal regulation remains limited, leaving disclosure requirements largely dependent on state laws and individual platforms.

Recent polling indicates broad bipartisan concern about AI oversight, particularly when synthetic material can make politicians appear to say or do things that never happened.

Sources:

• Truthout – MBFC Rating

The post GOP Groups Dominate $137 Million Surge in AI-Generated Political Advertising appeared first on News Facts Network.

As Cop17 kicks off, records since 1921 show more bee species declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alps

Most of Europe’s wild bee species and about half of its hover fly species have declined over the last century, a study has found, as a UN biodiversity summit begins in Armenia.

Records since 1921 show more bee species are declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alpine region. The richness of bee and hover fly species suffered a persistent drop in the Atlantic and Continental regions, the study found, though trends in other regions were mixed or even positive.

Amid broad privacy concerns, new apps such as Zuckoff help detect smart glasses in the wild.

Florida's DMV says a September 4 breach exposed driver's license and motor vehicle records after attackers obtained credentials that a local law-enforcement employee had "improperly stored on an electronic device." The ShinyHunters group has been linked to the intrusion. Ars Technica reports: In a notice posted Friday, [Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV)] confirmed that it took "immediate steps" after discovering that "a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials." There's "no evidence" that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement "determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information." [...] On a webpage describing the security incident, FLHSMV confirmed that an "international cybercriminal organization" was behind the breach but did not specify which group or how long they had access. Instead, officials claimed to have "promptly mitigated the breach, launched an investigation, and issued required notification to state authorities." Mitigations included "blocking unauthorized access, resetting relevant user credentials, engaging cybersecurity professionals, and implementing additional safeguards to protect sensitive information," FLHSMV said. Florida's investigation is "ongoing," officials said, but a cybercriminal group called ShinyHunters -- which recently claimed credit for hacking the FBI -- may have stolen the data. Florida residents affected by the breach will receive a letter offering one year of free credit monitoring through Sontiq, Inc. Those whose contact information is outdated can email the FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov to determine whether their data was compromised.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The release candidate brings Siri AI to more languages and updates a few apps, like FaceTime and Podcasts.

Ricardo Gonzalez, a US citizen, was detained and injured by ICE officers while being arrested in Long Beach, California on 17 October, officials said. The Department of Homeland Security has not commented publicly on why Gonzalez was detained. The Long Beach police department said in a statement that officers arrived to find 'a large group disturbance' involving the federal agents. The police later removed the handcuffs on Gonzalez and transported him to the hospital for treatment

• ICE agents broke US citizen’s arm as they detained him in California, officials say

Ndala was spotted with her newborn on Oct. 6 during routine monitoring of the Humba family in Virunga National Park

12-year-old mountain gorilla Ndala was spotted with her newborn during routine monitoring of the Humba family on October 6, 2026. // A 12-year-old mountain gorilla has become a first-time mother after giving birth to a male infant in Virunga National…

Paul Mackenzie is alleged to have incited his acolytes to starve to death in order to "meet Jesus."

Lots to do even for those with no the Trick-or-Treaters in their home! image created with AI on 10/19

From haunted theaters and Civil War ghost hunts to lantern-lit tours, Halloween dance parties and an overnight horror movie marathon, Delaware offers adults plenty of alternatives to the traditional haunted house.

WILMINGTON, Del. — For Delawareans who have outgrown trick-or-treating — and aren’t particularly interested in being chased through a cornfield by someone with a chainsaw — Halloween offers some decidedly different ways to celebrate.

From Wilmington’s historic theaters and underground speakeasies to the colonial streets of Dover, the beaches of Sussex County and an isolated Civil War fortress, the First State has plenty of unusual Halloween experiences.

Some lean heavily into Delaware’s history and mysterious past. Others offer theatrical entertainment, cocktails, dancing, live music and opportunities to socialize.

And for anyone who has had enough of ghosts, there’s even a Halloween party where the goal is to meet someone who is actually alive.

Here are 10 Halloween experiences across Delaware and what makes each one stand apart.

1. The Queen: Investigating the ghosts of a historic theater

The Queen Theatre in downtown Wilmington is opening its doors after hours for its first Paranormal Tour, offering guests an opportunity to explore parts of the historic entertainment venue normally closed to the public.

The tours, scheduled for Oct. 28 and 29, will be led by the Cecil Paranormal Group, whose investigators will introduce participants to equipment used to explore reported sightings, unusual noises and other unexplained activity.

The Queen’s history stretches back to the early 1900s, with the building serving different purposes before its restoration as a live entertainment venue.

Participants will have an opportunity to investigate the building’s reported paranormal activity and draw their own conclusions about whether the historic theater has any unseen residents.

What makes it different: There are no staged monsters or haunted-house actors. Guests explore a familiar Wilmington landmark from an entirely different perspective, combining local history with a paranormal investigation.

2. Simmer Down at The Quoin: Halloween cocktails in a hidden speakeasy

For those who prefer their Halloween spirits served in a glass, Simmer Down is hosting a Halloween Haunt Party on Saturday, Oct. 31, beginning at 6 p.m.

Located beneath The Quoin Hotel on North Market Street in Wilmington, the intimate speakeasy already offers a setting that seems made for Halloween.

With its dim lighting, sophisticated atmosphere and craft cocktails, the underground lounge provides a fitting backdrop for costumes, conversation and Halloween-themed drinks.

The celebration is free to attend, and guests who arrive in costume will receive a complimentary cocktail or mocktail.

What makes it different: This is Halloween as nightlife rather than a haunted attraction. Guests can enjoy the mystery of a hidden downtown bar without having to investigate strange noises or worry about what might be lurking around the next corner.

3. Theatre N: Horror movies until sunrise

For serious horror movie fans, Theatre N in downtown Wilmington is offering something of an endurance test.

The All-Nite Horrorthon begins Friday, Oct. 23, at 8 p.m., inviting moviegoers to spend the night watching five mystery horror films.

Rather than announcing every title in advance, organizers are keeping the lineup a surprise, adding another layer of suspense to the experience.

The marathon continues into Saturday morning, giving audiences an opportunity to experience horror movies in a dark theater surrounded by other fans.

What makes it different: The mystery isn’t just what’s happening on the screen. Guests won’t necessarily know which frightening film is coming next. And unlike most Halloween attractions, this one challenges participants to stay awake until morning.

4. Rockwood: A Victorian ghost story comes to life

At Rockwood Park & Museum near Wilmington, Halloween becomes an immersive theatrical experience.

The Revisionists: A Haunted Victorian Walk returns Oct. 23 and 24, combining storytelling, costumed performers and the atmosphere of one of Delaware’s most distinctive historic estates.

During the approximately 90-minute experience, visitors follow lamplit paths through the property, encountering five professionally acted scenes that gradually reveal an original Gothic ghost story.

This year’s production draws on a mystery set in 1930s Hollywood, blending supernatural storytelling with historical fiction and classic film noir.

Rather than relying on sudden scares, the experience uses the historic mansion, grounds and performers to immerse visitors in a developing mystery.

What makes it different: Rockwood transforms the historic estate into a theatrical setting, allowing visitors to become part of a ghost story rather than simply watch one unfold.

5. Boo Ball: Halloween takes a turn on the dance floor

For Delawareans who would rather dance with a partner than encounter a ghost, BlueBallRoom Dance Studio in Wilmington is offering a different kind of Halloween celebration.

The studio’s Boo Ball, scheduled for Friday, Oct. 30, from 7 to 9 p.m., combines ballroom and social dancing with costumes, refreshments and an evening of music.

Guests can enjoy a complimentary mini-group dance lesson, making the event accessible to people who might be new to ballroom dancing.

Costumes are encouraged, adding a Halloween twist to the festivities, while refreshments and a cash bar provide opportunities to socialize between dances.

The evening emphasizes having fun, learning new moves and connecting with other people in a relaxed atmosphere.

Unlike haunted attractions built around fear and suspense, Boo Ball focuses on entertainment that doesn’t require anyone to be frightened.

What makes it different: Instead of running from monsters or searching for ghosts, guests can spend Halloween learning a few dance steps, meeting new people and enjoying a night on the dance floor.

6. Historic New Castle: Ghosts of Delaware’s colonial past

Few Delaware towns offer a more authentic setting for ghost stories than Historic New Castle, where centuries-old buildings and narrow streets create a natural backdrop for Halloween.

The New Castle Historical Society’s Hauntings in History tours return Oct. 23, 24, 29 and 30, with evening departures at 7, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m.

Guides lead visitors through the historic district, sharing local legends, unexplained encounters and stories from the town’s darker past.

The experience draws on the history of New Castle, including its historic homes, colonial-era streets and stories passed down through generations.

Among the best-known local legends is the Lady in Blue, a mysterious apparition associated with the historic Amstel House.

What makes it different: Unlike attractions that construct a fictional haunted environment, New Castle already has centuries of history. Its streets, houses and stories provide the atmosphere, with local folklore adding a supernatural dimension.

7. Haunted Dover: Ghost stories by lanternlight on The Green

Delaware’s capital city offers its own ghostly encounter, with a setting that connects Halloween to some of the state’s earliest history.

First State Heritage Park will host Haunted Dover Lantern Tours on Friday, Oct. 23, and Friday, Oct. 30, beginning at 7:30 p.m.

During the hourlong experience, park interpreters lead visitors around historic Dover Green, sharing tales of supernatural encounters, hauntings and unexplained events associated with the capital city’s past.

The tours use lanternlight to recreate the atmosphere of an earlier era, when the streets surrounding The Green were at the center of Delaware’s political and community life.

Rather than relying on special effects, the experience combines local folklore, history and the natural atmosphere of Dover’s historic district.

Reservations are required, and space is limited. Tickets cost $15 per person.

What makes it different: This is a traditional ghost walk in one of Delaware’s most historically significant locations. The lantern-lit setting and stories of Dover’s past offer an atmospheric alternative to commercial haunted attractions.

8. Fort Delaware: Ghost hunting inside a Civil War prison

For visitors seeking a potentially unsettling experience, few Delaware locations can compete with Fort Delaware State Park.

The adventure begins with an evening ferry ride across the Delaware River to Pea Patch Island, where the 19th-century military fortress stands isolated from the mainland.

The park’s Paranormal Adventure Tours have offered visitors an opportunity to accompany experienced paranormal investigators into areas of the fort where unexplained activity has reportedly occurred.

Participants may use electromagnetic field detectors, temperature sensors and recording equipment while exploring portions of the fortress.

Fort Delaware served as a Civil War prison camp, where thousands of Confederate prisoners were held. More than 2,000 prisoners died there during the war, contributing to the site’s somber history and longstanding reputation for paranormal activity.

Stories associated with the fort include unexplained footsteps, mysterious shadows, doors opening and closing and sightings of an apparition sometimes described as the Blue Man.

For more dedicated ghost hunters, extended investigations have provided additional time to explore areas normally closed to visitors.

What makes it different: There are no actors waiting to jump out from behind a wall. Much of the suspense comes from the history, darkness and isolation of a Civil War fortress surrounded by the Delaware River.

Visitors should check with Delaware State Parks for remaining October tour dates and reservations.

9. Monster Mash: A Halloween party that gives back at the beach

Not every Halloween experience needs a ghost to make the evening memorable.

In Rehoboth Beach, Price Premier will host its inaugural Monster Mash fundraiser Thursday, Oct. 29, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., combining live music, costumes, food and entertainment with support for a Delaware nonprofit.

The celebration will benefit Children’s Beach House, an organization that helps children and young people with communication challenges develop confidence, resilience and meaningful connections.

The local band DECADE80 will provide live entertainment, bringing a collection of 1980s favorites to the Halloween celebration.

Guests are encouraged to dress for the occasion and participate in a costume contest featuring prizes for Best Overall, Best Duo, Most Creative and Scariest costumes.

The evening also includes food stations and a cash bar.

Tickets are $20 in advance through Oct. 28 and $25 at the door. The first 100 ticket purchasers will receive a complimentary Monster Mash T-shirt.

What makes it different: The evening trades paranormal investigations for live music, creative costumes and a good cause. Guests can enjoy a Halloween party while supporting an organization that serves children and families throughout Delaware.

10. Single & Spellbound: After all those ghosts, how about meeting someone who’s actually alive?

After exploring haunted theaters, historic mansions and Civil War prisons, Halloween offers another possibility: meeting someone who might actually call you back.

Single & Spellbound, scheduled for Friday, Oct. 30, from 8 to 11 p.m. at Grain Exchange in Newark, offers a refreshingly down-to-earth alternative to the season’s supernatural activities.

Organized by BeVisionary, the event is designed for singles ages 30 to 50 who would rather make a real connection than encounter another ghost.

The evening features music from a DJ, hosted introductions and social activities designed to make meeting new people easier.

Costumes add to the Halloween atmosphere, but the emphasis is on conversation, laughter and getting to know someone face-to-face.

Individual tickets are listed at $25, with a $40 option for two single friends, plus fees.

What makes it different: After a week of searching for spirits, this might be the most practical Halloween adventure of all — meeting someone with a pulse, a personality and perhaps the potential for a second date.

A different kind of Halloween across Delaware

What connects these experiences isn’t necessarily the promise of being frightened. It’s the opportunity to do something memorable in a setting that gives Halloween a different twist.

In New Castle County, historic theaters, colonial streets and Victorian estates provide plenty of mysterious encounters. Kent County adds ghost stories around Dover Green and paranormal investigations at Fort Delaware, while Sussex County offers a Halloween celebration that supports a worthy cause.

Movie fans can spend the night at Theatre N, while adults interested in a more social experience can enjoy cocktails beneath Market Street, dance the night away at Boo Ball or meet other singles in Newark.

From Wilmington to Dover to the Delaware beaches, the First State offers a Halloween season with more variety than the traditional haunted house.

And if nothing else, it’s a good excuse to get out of the house — haunted or otherwise.

TO GO: 10 Delaware Halloween experiences

1. The Queen Paranormal Tour

Oct. 28-29, 8 p.m. The Queen, Wilmington. After-hours paranormal investigations. Information: The Queen’s event listings.

2. Simmer Down Halloween Haunt Party

Saturday, Oct. 31, beginning at 6 p.m. Simmer Down at The Quoin Hotel, 519 N. Market St., Wilmington. Free admission. Complimentary cocktail or mocktail for guests in costume. Information: thequoinhotel.com.

3. Theatre N All-Nite Horrorthon

Friday, Oct. 23, beginning at 8 p.m. Theatre N, Wilmington. Overnight mystery horror movie marathon. Information: theatren.com.

4. Rockwood’s The Revisionists

Oct. 23-24, 6:30-9 p.m. Rockwood Park & Museum, 4651 Washington Street Extension, Wilmington. Approximately 90-minute theatrical ghost experience. Tickets: $30. Information: poplarhall.life.

5. Boo Ball Halloween Dance Party

Friday, Oct. 30, 7-9 p.m. BlueBallRoom Dance Studio, Wilmington. Ballroom and social dancing, complimentary mini-group lesson, refreshments and cash bar. Costumes encouraged. Contact the studio for admission and reservations.

6. Historic New Castle Hauntings in History

Oct. 23, 24, 29 and 30. Tours depart at 7, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. Historic New Castle. Guided ghost walks exploring colonial history and local legends. Information: newcastlehistory.org.

7. Haunted Dover Lantern Tour

Friday, Oct. 23, and Friday, Oct. 30, 7:30-8:30 p.m. First State Heritage Park, 43 The Green, Dover. Tickets: $15. Preregistration required. Information: 302-739-9194 or visitcentraldelaware.com.

8. Fort Delaware Paranormal Adventure Tours

Selected October evenings, subject to availability. Fort Delaware State Park, Pea Patch Island. Nighttime paranormal investigations with ferry transportation. Information: destateparks.com.

9. Monster Mash Fundraiser

Thursday, Oct. 29, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Price Premier, 17233 Hood Road, Rehoboth Beach. Live music by DECADE80, costumes and food. Tickets: $20 through Oct. 28; $25 at the door. Benefits Children’s Beach House. Information: cbhinc.org.

10. Single & Spellbound

Friday, Oct. 30, 8-11 p.m. Grain Exchange, 591 Collaboration Way, Newark. Halloween singles event for ages 30-50. Tickets: $25 individually, plus fees. Information: BeVisionary Events.

Crackdown marks latest escalation in the Trump justice department’s push to target alleged noncitizen voting

The US Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against 28 green card holders in California accused of fraudulently registering to vote and casting illegal ballots.

The crackdown marks another escalation in the federal government’s ongoing efforts against alleged noncitizen voting, efforts that Democrats and voting rights groups say are part of a strategy by the Trump administration to sow doubt in the results of the upcoming midterm elections.

NEW YORK, NY — High-performance computing has reached a new milestone in New York State. New York University (NYU) has announced the deployment of Torch, a supercomputer that serves as the highest-performing academic computational system in New York State and ranks within the top tier of higher education institutions in the United States.

Named after NYU’s logo, the system marks an expansion for the university’s research community. Clocking in at an official 10.79 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark, Torch delivers a fivefold increase in computational performance compared to NYU’s previous cluster, Greene. By bringing this capacity on-premises, NYU has established a localized computing environment to expand access to hardware for faculty members, researchers, and students.

Accelerating Research via Advanced Architecture

Architected to handle data-heavy workloads and multi-dimensional simulations, Torch utilizes a parallelized, hybrid architecture. To develop the infrastructure, NYU collaborated with HPE and NVIDIA to support the scale of the university’s research operations.

The system’s specifications include:

• The AI Engines: Core workloads are powered by more than 500 NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs. Utilizing HBM3e memory, these GPUs allow NYU researchers to train large language models (LLMs) and execute deep learning tasks.
• System Integration: The HPE Cray XD670 cluster was engineered, integrated, and deployed by HPE, leveraging their deployment experience in academic and enterprise supercomputing environments to maximize operational throughput.

By deploying this hardware ecosystem directly to its campus, NYU research teams can shorten the timeline required to convert theoretical formulations into scientific results.

Focus on Sustainable Innovation

NYU’s implementation of Torch balances computational speed with environmental considerations. Operating with the capacity to process over 10 quadrillion calculations per second, Torch entered the global computing index ranked No. 40 on the Green500 list of energy-efficient supercomputers.

To achieve this level of efficiency, the system utilizes liquid cooling technology designed to dissipate heat at the component level. This minimizes the data center’s reliance on traditional air conditioning methods. The resulting energy profile aligns with NYU’s institutional goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2040.

NYU leadership indicated that Torch balances academic computing power with energy efficiency. University officials noted it will support research across artificial intelligence, climate modeling, and biomedical sciences while contributing to international collaborations like the Global AI Frontier Lab.

Contextualizing the Fivefold Performance Leap

To understand the impact of Torch, let’s look at the capabilities of its predecessor, the Greene cluster. Greene provided approximately 4 quadrillion calculations per second. While Greene was considered a significant asset for the university—initially ranking No. 50 on the Green500 list—the exponential growth of machine learning, quantum mechanics simulations, and neural network training required an upgrade.

Greene relied on an array of 332 NVIDIA GPUs. While this configuration was optimized for general high-performance computing, it faced operational constraints when tasked with modern large language models containing hundreds of billions of parameters.

Torch alters this baseline. By incorporating NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs, the network handles matrix multiplications at speeds previously unattainable on campus. The inclusion of high-throughput host processing architecture prevents data delivery lag, so the execution pipelines of the GPUs are continuously supplied with data. The total computing capacity of Torch allows it to clear processing jobs that previously took weeks on the Greene cluster in a fraction of the time.

Eliminating Bottlenecks in the Research Pipeline

In academic computing environments, time-to-results is a critical metric. Previously, universities lacking on-premise infrastructure had to bid for compute time allocations at national laboratories, or rely on public cloud providers. Public cloud alternatives often introduce recurring operational costs, data egress fees, and privacy constraints that complicate institutional research grants.

By building an on-premise infrastructure, NYU changes how its departments handle active projects. Researchers can test models locally, debug network configurations instantly, and run continuous cycles without waiting in queues. This shift benefits fields like:

1. Artificial Intelligence and Embodied Intelligence: Training transformers and computer vision systems for real-world robotics applications.
2. Climate Modeling: Simulating localized weather patterns, oceanic heat distribution, and long-term carbon variations at a granular scale.
3. Biomedical Sciences: Accelerating protein folding computations, gene sequencing analysis, and molecular dynamics modeling for Alzheimer’s disease research.

Engineering for Sustainable Infrastructure

A core issue with data centers housing top-tier AI hardware is energy consumption. NVIDIA H200 GPUs demand significant power, which generates substantial thermal output. Without changes in environmental engineering, a cluster of this size would require massive, power-intensive traditional HVAC configurations.

Torch manages this footprint by integrating its technical deployment with modern environmental design. The cluster utilizes a liquid cooling design where coolant is distributed directly to the processors and memory components. This method removes heat more efficiently than air-based systems, lowering the overall Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of the facility.

This focus on efficiency allowed Torch to achieve its No. 40 ranking on the global Green500 index. This deployment supports the university’s initiative to minimize its overall environmental footprint, proving that academic research capacity can scale while remaining aligned with a carbon-neutral objective.

Long-Term Institutional Impact

The deployment of Torch is designed to establish NYU as a center for computational science. In higher education, access to computing resources is a differentiator for attractions like faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and graduate students.

Beyond hardware availability, the university intends to integrate Torch into its academic curricula. Graduate and undergraduate students working in data science, physics, engineering, and digital humanities will receive direct training on high-performance computing clusters. This provides students with hands-on experience using hardware configurations identical to those found in global research laboratories and advanced technology enterprises.

As part of its international strategy, Torch will act as the foundational computing engine behind the Global AI Frontier initiative. This network connects NYU’s campuses and global partners, facilitating multi-institutional research on global problems. With Torch operational, the university has established the technical infrastructure required to support data science developments for the coming decade.

Watch the Video Interview

To learn more about the technical architecture and engineering choices behind this system, watch the full video segment. Check out the HPE Video Interview with NYU’s Leadership Team to see how this on-premise hardware ecosystem is actively shrinking the time to science, and visit hpe.com to explore their full portfolio of enterprise and academic AI infrastructure.

The post Torch Lit: NYU Debuts Supercomputer to Power Academic Discovery appeared first on HPCwire.

• 28-year-old set to miss season after diagnosis

• Tanner McKee has taken over as Eagles starter

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is set to miss the rest of the season after further testing ⁠revealed blood clots had traveled from his leg to his lungs, the team announced on Monday.

Hurts’s condition is considered stable and ⁠he “has no significant ⁠functional limitations,” ​the team said. His treatment for a new diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis and bilateral pulmonary ⁠emboli will involve blood thinners, during which time he is unable to participate in contact activities.

Exclusive: Utility seen as ‘litmus test’ of PM’s promise to bring ‘essentials of life’ under public control

Andy Burnham has told officials to rip up their plans for how to fix Thames Water and present him with more radical options for what to do with the stricken company.

In an early test of his promise to bring “the essentials of life” under public control, the prime minister is urging his advisers to go back to the drawing board and create a new list of policies for the utility.

NASA contributed to this first-of-its-kind mission that may help us understand how our solar system formed.

Interior minister concedes police ‘lost control’ of weekend protests as PM vows to restore public order

• Europe live – latest updates

Partial curfews have been issued for a number of French cities, including parts of Paris, after the government admitted police had “lost control” during violent weekend protests around the country.

Sébastien Lecornu, the French prime minister, said after an emergency cabinet meeting on Monday he was “fully resolved to restore public order” and had called for “local and partial” curfews if needed. There was “no question” of imposing a full curfew on entire cities, he said.

A new analysis from Stanford economists cautions that enacting a billionaire tax could have unintended consequences.

Scalable performance and rugged packaging support mission-critical aerospace and defense systems in harsh environments

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 19, 2026 — Altera Corporation today announced the expansion of its Agilex FPGA and SoC FPGA portfolio to support a broader range of aerospace and defense programs. Altera’s defense-grade Agilex FPGAs help system developers meet stringent performance, reliability and environmental requirements while providing the flexibility to adapt to evolving mission needs.

Defense-grade Agilex devices are designed to operate across temperatures ranging from -55°C to 125°C, with leaded-ball and ruggedized packaging options designed to withstand temperature cycling, vibration and shock. These capabilities help maintain reliable operation in harsh environments where extreme temperatures and mechanical stress can compromise mission-critical electronics.

Agilex FPGAs are fabricated in the United States, providing a domestic source of wafer fabrication that supports supply resilience and helps customers plan for the long service lives and continuity requirements common to aerospace and defense programs. Together, these capabilities help defense system developers reduce design risk and build long-life platforms targeting challenging operating environments.

Extending Agilex FPGAs Leadership Architecture Across More Defense Applications

Defense-grade Agilex devices will be available across Altera’s entire Agilex portfolio, giving customers a scalable path from low-power, cost-optimized Agilex 3 FPGAs through mid-range Agilex 5 and high-performance Agilex 7 FPGAs to Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series FPGAs. Customers can select the right combination of performance, power efficiency and integration for applications ranging from edge systems and embedded processing to high-bandwidth communications, sensing and electronic warfare. Extending defense-grade support across this common architecture helps customers streamline platform decisions and adapt their designs as mission requirements evolve.

Underpinning this portfolio is Altera’s high-performance HyperFlex architecture, which enables higher clock frequencies and greater processing throughput by balancing pipeline delays and shortening critical logic and routing paths through Hyper-Retiming and Hyper-Pipelining.

“Tomorrow’s aerospace and defense systems will need to integrate more sensing, processing and AI capabilities within tightly constrained platforms,” said Farhad Shafai, head of business solutions and marketing at Altera. “Our focus is on giving customers a programmable foundation they can build on for years, adding capabilities as technology advances and mission priorities change.”

Availability

Initial shipments of defense-grade Agilex FPGAs will be available in Q1’27 with software support targeted for Quartus Prime Design Software 27.1. For additional information about Altera’s defense-grade FPGA solutions, contact your local Altera sales representative.

About Altera

Altera provides high-performance, programmable compute and connectivity solutions that enable the rapid adoption and continued advancement of transformative technologies across a wide range of advanced and AI-enabled systems. Altera is the largest pure-play FPGA provider with a full-spectrum portfolio serving applications ranging from data centers and communications networks to critical embedded systems.

Source: Altera

The post Altera Brings Defense-Grade Capabilities Across the Agilex FPGA Portfolio appeared first on HPCwire.

Move comes after US photojournalist and group of European diplomats and Palestinians were assaulted in separate attacks

Israeli police have detained 10 people in a rare raid against settlers, after a weekend of extreme violence in the occupied West Bank including an attack on US photojournalist Heidi Levine, which she described as an “attempted lynching”.

She was knocked down, kicked and beaten by a group of masked Israeli men as she covered the olive harvest in a Palestinian village on Friday. The militants broke four vertebrae and a rip, ripped open her finger so it required surgery and left her with lacerations across her body.

Kissimmee, FL — Scammers reportedly used artificial intelligence to clone the voice of a Florida sheriff as part of a fake arrest-warrant scheme, highlighting how increasingly accessible AI tools are making traditional impersonation scams harder to recognize.

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office said scammers cloned Sheriff Steve Moser’s voice and used his photograph while contacting a resident. Sheriff Chris Blackmon said the call was fraudulent despite appearing and sounding as though it came from Moser.

The incident follows similar reports across several states involving scammers impersonating law enforcement officers and claiming victims missed jury duty or face outstanding warrants. The schemes frequently pressure targets to make immediate payments to avoid arrest.

Authorities warn that legitimate law enforcement agencies do not demand payment over the phone to resolve warrants or missed jury service.

AI-generated voice cloning adds another layer of credibility because scammers can reproduce a recognizable person’s tone and speech using relatively small samples of recorded audio.

The technology has already been used in fraud targeting families, older adults and businesses. In some cases, criminals have impersonated executives to persuade employees or financial institutions to transfer large sums of money.

Florida law makes impersonating a law enforcement officer a felony.

Officials advise anyone receiving a threatening call claiming to be from police to hang up and independently contact the agency through a verified phone number.

Sources:

• 404 Media – MBFC Rating

The post Scammers Use AI Clone of Florida Sheriff to Threaten Residents With Arrest appeared first on News Facts Network.

Huang Foundation’s significant in-kind grant supports projects that include building a virtual human immune system and charting the ‘dark’ proteome, fast-tracking biomedical discovery and future treatments.

LA JOLLA, Calif., Oct. 19, 2026 — Artificial intelligence has already demonstrated great promise in many aspects of biomedical research, from accelerating scientific discovery to speeding the translation of biological insights into new therapies. Scripps Research today announced it has received a significant award of in-kind compute power from the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation to advance the adoption of AI into biomedicine and help realize its potential. The grant, totaling more than 14 million hours of compute time, is provided through the Huang Foundation’s partnership with CoreWeave using NVIDIA GPUs.

The Scripps Research scientists leading the Huang Foundation-supported projects. From left: Terrence Messmer, Sarah Burbach, Matthew Holcomb, Bryan Briney, Stefano Forli, Benjamin Cravatt, Christopher Parker, Andrew Ward and Charles Bowman. Credit: Scripps Research

“This philanthropic investment from the Huang Foundation, which brings leading computing expertise and infrastructure, represents a significant commitment to advancing human health,” says Scripps Research professor Andrew Ward, who is helping lead the research efforts with the foundation. “Paired with Scripps’ world-class scientists and unique combination of foundational and translational research, we aim to shorten the journey from scientific breakthrough to something that can make a real difference for patients.”

Artificial intelligence holds significant potential for biomedical research and healthcare, but insights alone do not improve patient outcomes. With this new support, multiple Scripps Research scientists are deploying state-of-the-art computational power to transform how vaccines, antibody therapies and small molecule drugs are discovered. Across these different projects, the overarching goal is to advance AI from its initial promising demonstrations to reliable, widely usable tools.

“Some of medicine’s greatest opportunities lie in biology we have never been able to see clearly: how antibodies evolve to fight disease, and how proteins move to reveal hidden targets for new drugs. Scientists at Scripps are using AI at scale to simulate both, building a virtual model of how our immune system creates antibodies and a dynamic map of the human proteome. The Huang Foundation is providing compute to model this extraordinary complexity, and the resulting tools will be openly available for scientists everywhere searching for new medicines,” says Jensen Huang, Co-President of the Huang Foundation.

By providing access to more than 14 million hours of compute power, this award not only significantly compresses scientific timelines, it also enables Scripps Research scientists to think at a magnitude unimaginable just a few years ago. The novel, large-scale datasets generated at Scripps Research, which are the lifeblood for training next generation AI models, can now be fully leveraged to make quantum leaps across different scientific disciplines.

This includes Antibodies for All, led by Professor Bryan Briney, which aims to build a “Virtual Germinal Center”: an AI system that models how human antibodies mutate, bind their targets and are selected during an immune response. Trained on millions of paired antibody sequences and detailed structural data, the system will allow researchers to test candidate vaccines and search for therapeutic antibodies computationally before advancing the most promising options to experimental testing. The project has the potential to replace years of trial and error with faster, more informed design, improving our ability to quickly respond to emerging pathogens and effectively target diseases that remain difficult to treat.

The award also supports Professor Stefano Forli’s team, which is working on the “dark” proteome: the thousands of human proteins whose dynamic behavior has resisted structural studies and kept them out of reach of drug development. By simulating them at scale under realistic physiological conditions, their system aims to capture how these molecules flex, breathe, fold and shift, revealing transient druggable pockets as they appear. Such an analysis at unprecedented scale can potentially unlock treatments for previously “undruggable” diseases.

Briney’s and Forli’s teams will also leverage additional experimental data inputs from the labs of Ward; Christopher Parker, professor and The Abide-Vividion Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology; and Benjamin Cravatt, professor and the Gilula Chair of Chemical Biology. Together, these projects help position Scripps Research at the leading edge of computational biomedicine.

“We’ve already seen how AI learned to predict 3D structures from amino acid sequences alone,” Ward continues. “The foundation’s generous support will help usher in the next wave of AI: one where models can anticipate function, reveal druggable sites, and link molecular patterns in cells and tissues to underlying health conditions, among other exciting frontiers in biomedical research.”

Source: Scripps Research

The post Scripps Research to Advance Biomedical AI with Huang Foundation Compute Grant appeared first on HPCwire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Elon Musk has said he will give every child in America a stake in SpaceX, his $2 trillion aerospace and artificial intelligence company, as tech firms face intensifying scrutiny over their impact on society. "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America," he wrote on X on Monday. "This will be the first of many." SpaceX only began trading publicly in June (and after the biggest initial public offering in history). The company's shares were trading for about $146 when the market closed on Friday. Musk's proposal was thin on detail. It is not clear how those shares would be distributed to the tens of millions of American children or whether all of them would even be eligible. According to the United States Census Bureau, there are roughly 73 million people under the age of 18, making Musk's potential giveaway worth about $10.7 billion at SpaceX's current share price. The move came in response to Anthropic's announcement on Sunday that it will commit at least 5% of its shares to a "Public Benefit Fund" that will donate money to social causes. "I recommend giving the shares directly to the public," Musk said in a reply to Anthropic's announcement. "This is what I will be doing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the party’s MPs went into hiding, it was left to its failed byelection candidate Matt Goodwin to defend it

It was the dog that didn’t bark in the night. After Sunday night’s ITV exposé of widespread racism and misogyny within Reform, you might have expected one of its MPs to have taken to the airwaves on Monday morning to defend the party’s honour. To try to persuade viewers that the real problem lay with the journalists who couldn’t stop themselves from investigating Reform rather than the fact that the party’s bigotry was endemic.

Instead, we got nothing. Every Reform MP was otherwise engaged. Were too busy having breakfast. Nothing from Nigel Farage. Nothing even from Robert Jenrick. Maybe he realised he had crashed and burned a few days earlier by suggesting it was just one of those things. One of life’s little mysteries. The BBC was riddled with paedophiles and Reform was awash with racists, said Honest Bob. No big deal. Every organisation had its crosses to bear.

Police said Shawn Oliver was arrested on suspicion of operating under influence of alcohol after a car crash

The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts announced the suspension of his campaign on Sunday hours after he was arrested in a suspected drunk-driving crash.

Shawn Oliver, a city councilor in New Bedford and a corrections officer, said in a post on X he was ending his campaign because “the election is too important to be overshadowed by personal matters”.

Guardian staff contributed

More than ⁠160 ​offshore rig workers plan walkout amid rising tensions between unions and oil companies

North Sea workers are preparing to strike at oil rigs across the ageing basin over the coming weeks in a sign of growing tensions between trade unions and oil companies.

The Unite union said on ⁠Monday that more than ⁠160 ​offshore rig workers would take part ⁠in a 24-hour ​strike from Wednesday that could “severely disrupt” UK fuel supplies.

In now-removed post, Miatta Fahnbulleh criticised home secretary’s proposal to extend qualifying period for settlement in UK

The energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, appears to have criticised Shabana Mahmood’s migration policy in a post on her constituency website, in which she suggested she had concerns that a longer settlement process could affect integration.

Fahnbulleh has since removed the critique, which appeared in a write-up of a community meeting in Peckham, her south London constituency, in September, saying it was not a true representation of her views.

Russia wants America and China to decide Ukraine’s future without Kyiv. Europe must challenge this dangerous return to diplomacy of the strong for the strong

Does Vladimir Putin know exactly how to play Donald Trump? The history of chummy phone calls, high-profile meetings and attempts to bring Russia in from the cold certainly suggests that Moscow’s thuggish ruler has a hold on this American president. If Mr Trump agrees to negotiate Ukraine’s future with Mr Putin and China’s Xi Jinping without Ukraine at the table, he will have handed the Russian leader a victory before talks begin. The message will be that strongmen are ruling the world and determining the fate of weaker nations.

Ukraine has the right to determine its future. That right cannot be waved away by a self-serving Russian proposal, however much it indulges Mr Trump’s belief that world affairs should be settled by powerful men. The scales are falling from European eyes. Trumpian America is raising doubts about whether it will help deter aggression or even honour its Nato commitments. If Washington now rewards Moscow and pressures Ukraine to accept a raw deal, it would be a betrayal. European governments would wonder where America might be in the future when their own security is threatened.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

A missed debt payment can have lasting consequences, but how quickly you respond could make a big difference.

• Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse crimes came to light 10 years ago

• Survivors gather at world championships to call for reform

The judge who sentenced the former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar to up to 175 years in jail in 2018 for the sexual abuse of more than 250 women and girls has condemned the lack of meaningful change in the decade since Nassar’s crimes were exposed.

With the World Gymnastics Championships taking place here this week, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said human rights must be prioritised over the desire for sporting success.

Anchor’s departure not thought to be linked to company’s recent acquisition by David Ellison’s Skydance Media

Christiane Amanpour, one of CNN’s most decorated and venerated journalists, is leaving the network after 43 years, she said in a statement on Monday.

Amanpour, who began working for the then-fledging network as an assistant on the international assignment desk in 1983 and is now its chief international anchor, will end her show Amanpour in May and leave the network at the end of June. She also hosts a show for PBS, Amanpour and Company, that will conclude at the end of this year.

More than 200 mostly young people said to be injured after ballistic missile attack on training camp for government forces

At least 53 people have been killed in a Houthi ballistic missile attack on a training camp for Yemeni government security forces, making it the largest single loss of life since the country’s civil war reignited in September.

The attack on al-Alam camp in the southern Shabwa province was said to have injured more than 200 others, mostly young recruits, and was described as a disaster by the country’s UN-recognised government. The injured were taken from the police and army training camp in the Jardan district to a hospital in the local capital, Ataq, where pleas for blood donations were made.

Wine has been successfully ported to OpenBSD, with developers reporting that dozens of 64-bit Windows applications now run on the operating system. "Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well," writes Thomas Frohwein, OpenBSD developer and ports maintainer. OSnews reports: The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won't work. Still, this is a massive milestone for OpenBSD, and makes especially gaming a somewhat viable option on OpenBSD.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bear wandered into Mono county free libraries branch ahead of opening, snacking before wandering new releases

A California library on Wednesday had a visitor worthy of a story book on the 100th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh: a black bear that wandered inside, reportedly raided the snacks and helped itself to a jar of honey.

On Wednesday, a black bear walked into the Mammoth Lakes branch of the Mono county free libraries at about 6.10am, more than four hours ahead of its 10am opening time, the library director, Josef Bopp, told local news outlet KMPH.

We could see new Macs and iPads at the event.

OXFORD, England, Oct. 19, 2026 — Infleqtion, a global leader in quantum computing and quantum sensing powered by neutral atom technology, will host the first Quantum Application Forum, an exclusive one-day event convening senior business and technology leaders on Nov. 3, 2026 at IET Savoy Place in London. Executives responsible for technology, innovation and investment decisions will explore how quantum technology can address critical challenges, unlock commercial value and drive national competitiveness and economic growth.

“The UK has an opportunity, alongside its European neighbors, to turn its strength in quantum research into a competitive advantage for its industries,” said Colin Sullivan MBE, Managing Director, at Infleqtion UK. “Business leaders are central to that. They understand which problems are worth solving, and their insight will shape how the technology is put to use. Our aim is that everyone who joins the forum leaves with a clearer view of where quantum could benefit their organization, and the confidence to take a practical next step.”

The forum’s theme is “Integrating Quantum into National & Economic Growth.” Leaders from financial services and fintech, healthcare and life sciences, pharmaceuticals, materials science, energy, telecommunications, government and the public sector will join.

Morning plenary sessions will lead into afternoon roundtables, with attendees joining discussions on topics including quantum–AI hybrid workloads, software and algorithm optimization, resilient infrastructure and supply chains, security readiness, and the standards and policies shaping adoption. Speakers will be announced ahead of the event.

Event Details

• Date and time: Nov. 3, 2026, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. GMT, with breakfast and networking beginning at 8 a.m. GMT
• Venue: IET Savoy Place, London
• Cost: Complimentary for confirmed guests
• Format: Plenary sessions and roundtable discussions
• Register: To preserve an environment for open dialogue, registration is by approval only and attendance is limited to invited and approved participants. To be considered, visit infleqtion.com/qaf and follow “Register Your Interest.”

Infleqtion has deep roots in Europe and delivered the UK’s first operational 100-physical-qubit quantum computer to the National Quantum Computing Centre at Harwell. Most recently, the company announced a £9 million Innovate UK award to continue development of a deployable quantum radio frequency (QRF) direction finding (DF) system as part of the Quantum Missions Primer program.

About Infleqtion

Infleqtion, Inc. (NYSE: INFQ) is a global leader in quantum technology, delivering neutral atom solutions for quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. With a product portfolio spanning quantum computers, quantum optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors, Infleqtion’s full-stack approach combines high-performance hardware with the company’s proprietary Superstaq quantum computing software platform. Infleqtion’s systems are already in use by the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the U.K. government, and in multiple collaborations with NVIDIA. Infleqtion, in collaboration with NVIDIA, published the world’s first demonstration of a materials science application using logical qubits. With operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Infleqtion meets the demands of government and commercial customers across the space, defense, energy, finance and telecommunications sectors.

Source: Infleqtion

The post Infleqtion Convenes Business Leaders in London to Chart Quantum Commercial Value appeared first on HPCwire.

Poll finds 66% of Americans think Trump is using position for monetary gain as his approval rating hits a new low

Most Americans think Donald Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, according to a new poll, as the US president’s approval rating falls to a new low ahead of November’s midterm elections.

A new Washington Post-ABC poll put Trump’s approval rating at 33% as he continues to crisscross the country as part of his campaign blitz for embattled Republicans.

Far-right activist is charged with two counts of harassment causing fear of violence to two MailOnline reporters

Journalists and their family members had to flee their homes after “bullyboy, intimidatory tactics” were deployed by the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson, a court has been told as his harassment trial got under way.

Robinson, 42, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was alleged to have targeted journalists from the Daily Mail and Mail Online by circulating images of their homes to millions of online followers and in effect encouraging them to join in making threats.

French president has compounded impression of arrogance with strategic errors – and consequences could be profound

• Europe live – latest updates

The near-universal chorus of condemnation that greeted Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation on Sunday, after one of the most violent days of rioting and looting in France’s recent history, was a stark reflection of just how weakened he now is.

Speaking from his office at the Élysée Palace, the president delivered an eight-minute speech expressing “anger and shame” after a weekend in which a town hall was set ablaze, 2,000-plus shops were looted, 2,300 people were arrested and 1,000 police injured.

A wave of anti-immigration populism is bringing new parties to the fore in many European nations, at the expense of the entrenched center-right.

A boy, six, and woman, 35, were killed and 10 were injured after a woman drove on to the field at a youth soccer game

New details have emerged about two people – including a child – killed when a woman drove a vehicle through a youth soccer game in Kansas, as officials on Monday continued to investigate the cause of the tragedy.

Chris Adrian, a middle school soccer coach, said his family was heartbroken over losing his six-year-old son, Cole, who died after the incident at Wichita’s Stryker Sports Complex in which 10 others were hurt, some seriously.

The wife and infant son of the ex-OpenAI engineer left the U.S. for Saudi Arabia in October with business-class tickets purchased by a Saudi military official, prosecutors allege.

Annual Friends of Delaware Hayride at Milburn Orchards invites supporters of its healing mission to enjoy family time while strengthening connections centered on recovery.

By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE

A hayride and a bonfire might seem like simple ingredients for an autumn outing. For Firm Foundation Recovery, they are also opportunities to bring families together around a mission that reaches far beyond a fall evening.

The nonprofit hosts its annual Friends of Delaware Hayride at Milburn Orchards each October, inviting supporters of its healing mission to enjoy family time while strengthening connections centered on recovery.

The gathering is one example of how the organization combines community activities, peer support and service to address substance addiction in Delaware.

Firm Foundation Recovery grew out of what its website describes as an enormous need for a long-term, God-centered recovery resource in the state. Its approach brings people and fellowships together around shared principles for healing, with an emphasis on addressing needs that can leave individuals and families struggling to find support.

“Together we can help to heal our communities one recovery at a time,” the organization states on its website.

That mission includes an ambitious undertaking: building a long-term, God-centered recovery facility with transitional living and a work program. The planned facility reflects the organization’s focus on sustained support and helping people establish a foundation for their lives in recovery.

Its broader vision extends throughout Delaware. Firm Foundation Recovery seeks to develop a recovery culture rooted in principles, service and community involvement, with people in recovery taking active roles in strengthening the communities around them.

Family events are one way it works toward that goal.

The organization reports hosting seven annual statewide family and community events focused on awareness, education, prevention and resources. Community donations help secure venues and allow those gatherings to grow.

In May, its Skating For Change events bring the mission to the rink. The owners of Christiana Skating Center and Dover Skating Center partner with the nonprofit to offer Delaware youth and families opportunities to skate while supporting its work.

October brings a different setting, with hayrides and bonfires at Milburn Orchards. The Friends of Delaware Hayride combines a familiar fall tradition with the organization’s efforts to unite people around healing and recovery.

Together, the activities reflect an approach that makes room for families and community members to participate through shared experiences.

Service is another central part of the organization’s work.

Firm Foundation Recovery reports carrying out three service projects annually in and around Delaware. Its service activities include improving housing, providing food and clothing to people experiencing homelessness, hosting speaker jams and creating supportive recovery environments.

These efforts connect recovery with practical ways to help others. They also give participants opportunities to contribute their experience and energy to needs within the wider community.

The nonprofit’s peer-driven initiatives reach children, families and people new to recovery. According to its website, lived experience helps those involved connect with others and respond to gaps in support.

“This ‘we’ concept of serving with our lived experience is life changing,” the website states.

Community partnerships help sustain the effort. Firm Foundation Recovery offers sponsorship and advertising opportunities for businesses and other supporters interested in contributing to its mission while building relationships within their communities.

For the organization, the larger goal is a Delaware where helping people affected by addiction becomes a shared commitment, and where those building lives in recovery have opportunities to serve others.

A skating rink, a service project or an evening beside a bonfire offers a different doorway into that work. Each creates space for people to gather, participate and support a mission built around healing.

Through those connections, Firm Foundation Recovery is working toward a future in which recovery has a place in everyday community life, one helping hand and one changed life at a time.

By John Riddle

A hayride and a bonfire might seem like simple ingredients for an autumn outing. For Firm Foundation Recovery, they are also opportunities to bring families together around a mission that reaches far beyond a fall evening.

The nonprofit hosts its annual Friends of Delaware Hayride at Milburn Orchards each October, inviting supporters of its healing mission to enjoy family time while strengthening connections centered on recovery.

The gathering is one example of how the organization combines community activities, peer support and service to address substance addiction in Delaware.

Firm Foundation Recovery grew out of what its website describes as an enormous need for a long-term, God-centered recovery resource in the state. Its approach brings people and fellowships together around shared principles for healing, with an emphasis on addressing needs that can leave individuals and families struggling to find support.

“Together we can help to heal our communities one recovery at a time,” the organization states on its website.

That mission includes an ambitious undertaking: building a long-term, God-centered recovery facility with transitional living and a work program. The planned facility reflects the organization’s focus on sustained support and helping people establish a foundation for their lives in recovery.

Its broader vision extends throughout Delaware. Firm Foundation Recovery seeks to develop a recovery culture rooted in principles, service and community involvement, with people in recovery taking active roles in strengthening the communities around them.

Family events are one way it works toward that goal.

The organization reports hosting seven annual statewide family and community events focused on awareness, education, prevention and resources. Community donations help secure venues and allow those gatherings to grow.

In May, its Skating For Change events bring the mission to the rink. The owners of Christiana Skating Center and Dover Skating Center partner with the nonprofit to offer Delaware youth and families opportunities to skate while supporting its work.

October brings a different setting, with hayrides and bonfires at Milburn Orchards. The Friends of Delaware Hayride combines a familiar fall tradition with the organization’s efforts to unite people around healing and recovery.

Together, the activities reflect an approach that makes room for families and community members to participate through shared experiences.

Service is another central part of the organization’s work.

Firm Foundation Recovery reports carrying out three service projects annually in and around Delaware. Its service activities include improving housing, providing food and clothing to people experiencing homelessness, hosting speaker jams and creating supportive recovery environments.

These efforts connect recovery with practical ways to help others. They also give participants opportunities to contribute their experience and energy to needs within the wider community.

The nonprofit’s peer-driven initiatives reach children, families and people new to recovery. According to its website, lived experience helps those involved connect with others and respond to gaps in support.

“This ‘we’ concept of serving with our lived experience is life changing,” the website states.

Community partnerships help sustain the effort. Firm Foundation Recovery offers sponsorship and advertising opportunities for businesses and other supporters interested in contributing to its mission while building relationships within their communities.

For the organization, the larger goal is a Delaware where helping people affected by addiction becomes a shared commitment, and where those building lives in recovery have opportunities to serve others.

A skating rink, a service project or an evening beside a bonfire offers a different doorway into that work. Each creates space for people to gather, participate and support a mission built around healing.

Through those connections, Firm Foundation Recovery is working toward a future in which recovery has a place in everyday community life, one helping hand and one changed life at a time.

Paul Mackenzie and his church set up sect that ordered followers to starve themselves and their children, say prosecutors

A Kenyan court has found the starvation cult leader Paul Mackenzie and about 30 others guilty of murder over the deaths of ⁠190 children and one adult in one of the world’s worst cult-related disasters in recent history.

Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 after police received a tipoff, and weeks later authorities began uncovering bodies in shallow graves in the Shakahola forest near the coast ⁠in south-eastern Kenya.

Looking forward to the iPhone 18, iPhone 18E or the iPhone Air 2? You might be waiting for a while.

Last weekend there were mass protests across France, with more than half a million people estimated to have been involved. The unrest included rioting, looting and violent clashes with outnumbered police in cities including Paris, Marseille and Limoges. The interior minister conceded that police ‘lost control’ in some cities, while President Emmanuel Macron demanded a full security review. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, Jon Henley – watch on YouTube

Miami, FL — Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Monday that the state has obtained an arrest warrant for former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, accusing him of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in connection with the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue.

The Miami-based exile group flew humanitarian missions over the Florida Straits searching for Cuban migrants in distress. On Feb. 24, 1996, Cuban military jets shot down two unarmed U.S.-registered Cessna aircraft over international waters, killing Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales.

Uthmeier said Florida investigators concluded the attack was intentional and part of a coordinated conspiracy involving Cuban intelligence and military officials. He said Castro, then Cuba’s defense minister, was involved in the chain of command that authorized the operation.

Castro, 94, already faces separate federal charges stemming from the same attack. The Justice Department unsealed an indictment in May charging him and five other former Cuban officials with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft and murder. All defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

Uthmeier acknowledged that Castro is unlikely to be taken into Florida custody immediately but said the warrant could have consequences if he travels to a country willing to extradite him.

Sources:

• The Washington Sun – MBFC Rating

The post Florida Seeks Raúl Castro’s Arrest 30 Years After Four Cuban Americans Were Killed appeared first on News Facts Network.

The time to prepare for "gradual disempowerment" is now, according to researchers. One calls it "a civilization-scale problem."

Washington, DC — The White House is investigating allegations that senior Trump adviser Ric Grenell offered a Turkish billionaire access to President Donald Trump and administration officials in connection with a multimillion-dollar Kennedy Center donation.

Axios reported that a May 2025 text allegedly sent by Grenell to businessman Turhan Mildon promised VIP events and proximity to Trump after money was transferred through a private company. Grenell has strongly denied sending the message or participating in any improper arrangement.

The dispute centers on a $17.6 million payment transferred from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s finance ministry to Houston-based defense company Texas Armament & Technology. Mildon alleges roughly $5.6 million was supposed to become a Kennedy Center donation, but officials found no record that the center received it.

Mildon, who recently married former Trump attorney Alina Habba, provided the disputed text, financial records and other correspondence to White House counsel Will Scharf. Trump ordered the internal investigation after Habba personally raised the allegations with him.

The circumstances surrounding the transaction remain unclear, including whose money was involved and how the Congo business arrangement related to the proposed donation.

Grenell called the accusations “absurd” and denied receiving money or directing funds away from the Kennedy Center.

White House officials say investigators are now attempting to authenticate the text and determine what happened to the money.

Sources:

• Axios – MBFC Rating

The post White House Investigates Alleged Scheme Promising ‘Access to POTUS’ for Millions appeared first on News Facts Network.

A new investigation offers a different account of what might have happened the night O.J. Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death.

"Who the hell wouldn't have a women's health division?" President Trump said Monday.

Agreement would have spared Mohammed risk of execution in exchange for guilty plea and life in prison

The supreme court on Monday rejected an effort to revive a plea deal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks on 11 September 2001.

The agreement would have spared Mohammed the risk of execution in exchange for his guilty plea and a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Ukraine's leader rejects Trump's accusations, says Putin is refusing peace, not him, and the U.S. military is delaying "vital supplies."

Difference between French and German borrowing costs widens after public buildings burned and shops looted

• Business live – latest updates

France has been hit by a fresh wave of selling in its bond and stock markets after violent protests over the weekend led to thousands of arrests and left public buildings burned and hundreds of shops looted across the country.

The chaos has spooked investors as analysts worried that it would undermine Paris’s efforts to cut spending and reduce its debt.

A look back at the esteemed personalities who've left us this year, who'd touched us with their innovation, creativity and humanity.

Concerns financial contracts known as derivatives were incorrectly logged, potentially boosting Barclays’ profits

The Bank of England is reportedly looking into Barclays’ handling of loans linked to the embattled private credit sector.

The Bank’s regulatory arm, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), started reviewing the matter this year after concerns were raised by a Barclays insider, according to the Financial Times.

Manchester, NH — California Gov. Gavin Newsom used a weekend swing through New Hampshire to sharpen his anti-Trump message and position his record as a possible model for Democrats looking toward 2028.

Newsom repeatedly highlighted his clashes with President Donald Trump while campaigning for Democratic candidates ahead of the midterms. At one stop, he argued that Democrats need to become “a little more ruthless,” saying Republicans and Trump have shown a willingness to fight aggressively over issues such as redistricting.

The trip was officially focused on boosting Democratic turnout, but it also gave Newsom valuable exposure in a state that remains important in presidential politics.

Newsom portrayed California as a testing ground for resistance to Trump, citing disputes over National Guard deployments, voting rules and federal investigations involving his family. He said Democrats need to respond more forcefully to what he described as Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions.

He also leaned into economic populism, calling for Democrats to address concentrated wealth and power while pointing to California policies on paid family leave, wages and other social programs.

Newsom has not formally launched a presidential campaign. He remains one of several nationally prominent Democrats being discussed as possible 2028 contenders, alongside figures such as Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.

Sources:

• Washington Examiner – MBFC Rating

The post Newsom Tells Democrats to Be ‘More Ruthless’ as 2028 Speculation Grows appeared first on News Facts Network.

Paying down debt shouldn't mean struggling to cover your bills. Here's how to find a repayment strategy that works.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's Elizabeth Holmes documentary "You Can See Everything" earned more than $15 million in its limited opening weekend, making it one of the biggest documentary launches in decades and the strongest opening for a film on fewer than 1,000 screens since Borat in 2006. It was also "the biggest non-music documentary since 'Fahrenheit 9/11' in 2004," adds CNN. From the report: Many weekend screenings in cities like New York and Los Angeles were sold out despite the three-hour running time. The film's distributor, A24, called it "one of the largest limited-release openings of the 21st century." "You Can See Everything" opened on fewer than 900 screens following a jaw-dropping surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month. Fielder and Oppenheim worked on the project in secret for years, filming with Holmes and her partner Billy Evans in the weeks before Holmes went to prison in 2023. Holmes was convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud Theranos investors, but she tried to convince the filmmakers of her innocence. Fielder, who appears on camera interviewing Holmes and Evans, takes the film in unexpected directions, thrilling critics and theatergoers. The film has an extraordinarily high 99% "fresh score" on Rotten Tomatoes and a record-high 4.8 rating on Letterboxd. Further reading: Will New Documentary Make Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes More Sympathetic?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Help us crown the most trusted anti virus, VPNs and security tools of 2026 in our People’s Picks survey.

Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz said he "was pretty shocked" by the version of Elizabeth Holmes he saw onscreen in the new documentary "You Can See Everything."

Military fighter jets intercepted a plane flying through restricted airspace over Cincinnati, Ohio, while President Trump was speaking at a nearby rally in Kentucky.

At least 15 vessels struck in waterway in past 10 days, with rumours that they were carrying valuable goods

People have been scouring the strait of Hormuz for spilt cargo after Iran attacked at least 15 container ships passing through the crucial waterway in the past 10 days.

Some ships have been hit by drones, others by mines. On Sunday, a ship was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade launched from a small boat 75 miles (120km) north-east of the Saudi port of Jubail.

Witness says drone struck twice at transport hub in al-Dibab, in one of deadliest single attacks of war

A drone strike near a market in southern Sudan on Sunday evening killed 80 people, mostly commuters catching rides home.

Ahmed Wadi, a witness, said the attack in the town of al-Dibab in West Kordofan state left “50 bodies who I helped bury, one of them my own brother Mohamed”.

Thomas Teepell, who worked for Republican senator, demanded El-Sayed disavow Muslim Brotherhood

A man who heckledthe Democratic candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed and demanded he disavow the Muslim Brotherhood at a Michigan town hall is a former aide to the Republican senator Josh Hawley, according to congressional staff records.

At the event on Saturday, an attender who gave his name only as “Tommy” shouted from the crowd, asking whether El-Sayed would disavow the movement. El-Sayed answered: “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” then turned the question around, asking whether the man assumed he wouldn’t.

The Supreme Court rebuffed an effort by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to revive a plea deal reached with military prosecutors and revoked by the Biden administration.

Pumpkin cheesecake is built on two ingredients that have carried the wrong names for generations. One name traces to a federal labeling policy issued in ... Read moreThe post Pumpkin cheesecake has been mislabeled for over a century, and the…

Want to get ahead of your expensive credit card debt? Your payment schedule may offer a solution.

Scottish university’s annual tradition once involved giving out raisins but fancy dress and shaving cream now in vogue

Nobody at the University of St Andrews in Scotland seems to remember how Raisin Monday became a giant foam fight. For 600 years, first-year students have taken part in the ritual of thanking older students for mentoring them through their first few weeks of university life.

Traditionally, freshers would give their elders a pound of raisins – hence the name. This Monday however, hundreds wore fancy dress as they streamed on to St Salvator’s lower college lawn at 11am armed with cans of shaving foam, covering one another in soapy clouds as they have for the past few decades. Groups of students dress as Smurfs, mice, bananas, grandmas, sunflowers and chefs to participate in the annual rite of passage.

POLICE LOG – October 19, 2026

WILMINGTON, Del. — Delaware State Police are investigating a strong-arm robbery that left two employees injured early Sunday morning in Wilmington.

Troopers responded at approximately 3:20 a.m. on October 18 to a business in the 3300 block of Old Capitol Trail.

Police said two employees were walking to their vehicles after work when they were approached by two male suspects wearing pink masks. The suspects allegedly assaulted both employees, stole personal property and fled in a vehicle.

Both victims were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

The Delaware State Police Criminal Investigations Unit is investigating. Anyone with information is asked to contact Detective M. Kerrigan at 302-365-8487 or Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333.

Downing Street emphasises sacrifices of UK troops and reasserts ‘unwavering’ support for Ukraine amid softening US policy towards Russia

• UK politics live – latest updates

Downing Street has criticised Pete Hegseth for downplaying the role of Nato allies in helping the US with combat operations in Afghanistan, saying Donald Trump’s defence secretary had been wrong to do so.

The direct condemnation came as No 10 more carefully distanced itself from Trump’s increasing willingness to engage with Russia, saying the UK’s backing for Ukraine was “unwavering”.

Opposition to US-led quarantine center in Kenya follows sweeping funding cuts and withdrawal from WHO

An eighth person in Kenya has tested positive for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola in the country’s first-ever cluster of cases of the virus, as the second-largest outbreak in history has killed more than 4,300 and sickened more than 9,000 people in the region.

It highlights the diminished role the US has played in the worsening Ebola outbreak by building a controversial quarantine center in Kenya, pulling back health support globally, and banning travelers from certain countries. All of this has also reduced the ability to identify and respond to the outbreak and exacerbated mistrust.

A person receiving a suspicious text message.

Monitoring tools common in a range of workplaces, including factories, office jobs, delivery work and in retail – often without employees being informed

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Employers are increasingly using technology, from CCTV to keystroke monitoring, to track workers’ moves and it is being accelerated by the use of AI, the Human Technology Institute has warned.

Examples provided to Guardian Australia by the institute include a fast-food restaurant using surveillance cameras to stop workers using their phones, and AI tracking leading to a cashier warned over making a mistake once every 533 scans.

Grenada rewards travelers who choose a destination for its food. The small Caribbean nation and its sister island, Carriacou, pack an unlikely range of cooking ... Read moreThe post From beach shacks to superyacht marinas, Grenada has the food for…

Israeli police say they arrested 10 people over alleged Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and a U.S. journalist as more attacks on Palestinians are reported.

Dutch MEP says government is trying to avoid EU environmental rules as protests over luxury development turn violent

MEPs have accused Albania of deploying “sneaky” practices to fast-track a proposed Trump-linked luxury resort in the country amid protests that have turned increasingly violent.

As the prime minister, Edi Rama, pledged to “listen to the voices of young people” taking to the streets, there was mounting criticism of his failure to address demonstrators who had long opposed the controversial project peacefully.

Leftwing outlet said it had faced ‘multiple attacks’ and ‘malicious lies’ which made its situation unsustainable

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The leftwing news site the Canary has announced that it is closing indefinitely. Earlier this year the media outlet was blocked from accessing funds and has faced allegations of internal turmoil.

The outlet, founded in 2015 at the height of support for the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said in a social media post it would be closing “for the foreseeable future”.

The Supreme Court on Monday said it will consider the constitutionality of a nearly 160-year-old federal ban on distilling liquor at home.

Delaware Inspector General Robert Storch launched his office's inaugural website in October where users can submit reports of government waste. | PHOTO COURTESY STATE OF DELAWARE

Farm drones can potentially reduce labor costs, increase yields and reduce chemical use and human exposure to chemicals. But those benefits vary by crop and ... Read moreThe post Farm drones may lower costs for growers, but will shoppers save…

(The Center Square) – White House border czar Tom Homan said over the weekend that federal investigators have a “strong case” against U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.

(The Center Square) – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a case over whether home whiskey distilleries are constitutional.

More than three-quarters of parents report family travel brings everyone closer together and enriches their children’s education. Families looking for a beach getaway that doubles ... Read moreThe post North Myrtle Beach leads the way in family eco-adventures appeared first…

Ricardo Gonzalez was injured and taken to hospital after confrontation in Long Beach, according to officials

Federal immigration agents broke the arm of a US citizen in what a Democratic congressman said was a “brutal attack” during a confrontation with protesters in California.

Video of Saturday’s encounter in Long Beach shows Ricardo Gonzalez, identified as a former city employee, handcuffed and face down in a gutter, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers kneeling on his back.

Schmidt Sciences–backed project will reassemble fragments of stone tools, pottery and bones that have sat unmatched in collections, and release the tools free to archaeologists

Oct. 19, 2026 — A team of NYU engineers and archaeologists is working on open-source AI tools that piece together broken stone tools, pottery and bones and fill in what’s missing, so that fragments sitting unmatched in collections can become evidence about how people in the past lived.

The project, “Fragmented Legacy: Turning Broken 3D Materials into Archaeological Interpretations,” includes partners at the University of Tübingen and is supported by a three-year grant from Schmidt Sciences. It is one of 19 projects selected for this year’s Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) awards.

Jing Zhang presenting CRAG at the 2nd International Workshop on Spatial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage in June 2026. Photo courtesy of Jing Zhang

The problem it targets is basic to archaeology. Stone tools, pottery, animal bones and human skeletal remains are often excavated broken, and putting the fragments back together, a process called refitting, is slow enough that most collections are never systematically refitted. Reported success rates run from about 1 percent for ceramics to between 4 and 26 percent for bones.

Chen Feng, Institute Associate Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and founding co-director of the NYU Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence (CREO), leads the project with Jing Zhang, a CREO Faculty Fellow.

They are joined by Radu Iovita and Scott Williams, professors in NYU’s Department of Anthropology, and Raiko Krauß, professor of Central and Southeast European Prehistory at the University of Tübingen.

Collaborators include Leiden University, Arizona State University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“My lab teaches machines to understand 3D shapes in the real world, where things are messy and incomplete,” said Feng. “Broken archaeological material is one of the hardest versions of that problem. The pieces are worn, many are missing, and there’s no picture on the box. Our job is to build AI that can reason through that uncertainty, and our archaeology colleagues tell us whether the answers make sense.”

Refitting matters because a single match between two fragments can carry a lot of information.

If a stone flake found in one part of a site fits back onto a core found in another, researchers learn how people moved through that space, how tools were made step by step, or whether the site’s layers were disturbed after the fact. Animal bones that refit can show how an animal was butchered and how meat was shared, and human fossil refits can reveal important anatomical features.

Without refits, many of those questions go unanswered.

The team will start by building a collection of at least 100,000 real and digitally simulated broken objects, pairing 3D models with photographs, descriptions and catalog data, with simulated breaks that follow how stone, clay and bone actually fracture.

The researchers will then develop AI models that work out where each fragment belongs while generating a plausible version of the complete object, and that reason across shape, images and text so archaeological knowledge can rule out unlikely reconstructions.

Archaeologists will stay in the loop throughout, comparing competing reconstructions and teaching the system which ones hold up.

“Refitting is fun, but we rarely have time to do it right. In museums, one can often only look at one drawer at a time, so it’s impossible to lay out an entire collection at once,” said Iovita. “Refitting objects between sites to show direct relationships between them has only ever been done twice. My dream is to use AI to do this on a large scale – it will revolutionize the field!”

The project grew out of a collaboration between Feng’s AI4CE Lab and Iovita’s lab that began about four years ago with LUWA, which used AI to classify microscopic wear on stone tools. Zhang, then a postdoctoral researcher working in both labs, connected the two groups.

In 2024, Zhang asked Iovita about archaeology’s most pressing technical problem, and Iovita pointed to refitting. That led to GARF, which reassembles broken objects, and CRAG, which also fills in missing pieces, and laid the groundwork for the HAVI award.

“Archaeologists are like Sherlock Holmes, piecing together clues to understand the past,” said Zhang. “We want Fragmented Legacy to be their Watson. It can match fragments and suggest possible reconstructions, so researchers have more time to interpret the evidence and ask new questions.”

All datasets, model weights and benchmarks from the project will be released under permissive open-source licenses, so university researchers and cultural resource management (CRM) firms, which carry out much of the archaeological work required ahead of construction in the U.S. and abroad, can use them directly. The team expects the methods to be useful beyond archaeology, in other scientific fields and in practical repair and restoration.

Source: New York University

The post NYU Engineers and Archaeologists Use AI to Piece Together the Past appeared first on HPCwire.

Singer ‘mortified’ about wearing diamonds from Argyle mine at centre of environmental concerns about Indigenous land

The singer Ellie Goulding has admitted her error at having promoted diamonds at the centre of environmental concerns about Indigenous land in Australia, despite having spent years campaigning on environmental issues – including the effects of mining on ancestral lands.

She appeared at a event in London earlier this month for the jewellery brand Boodles, modelling some of its newly acquired pink diamonds, some of which came from a controversial mine in Western Australia.

TORONTO, Oct. 19, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Limited, a leading photonic quantum computing company, today announced that it has received provisional approval for project funding worth up to USD $10 million under DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI). This one-year contract extension reflects DARPA’s ongoing support and investment in Xanadu’s R&D, and builds on the company’s work in Stage B.

DARPA’s QBI program evaluates leading quantum computing architectures to determine which approaches can deliver utility-scale performance within realistic budgets and real-world timelines. Under this contract, Xanadu expects to execute a dual-purpose strategy over the next 12 months; providing regular progress reports to DARPA for continued evaluation, while directly allocating the majority of the funding to accelerate the advancement of critical components in its R&D roadmap.

Xanadu believes that its photonic quantum computing architecture offers distinct advantages over traditional quantum systems. Most notably, it has minimal cooling requirements due to room-temperature compute operations, a modular, networkable design, and fast clock speeds. The company’s latest photonic quantum computer, Aurora, not only validates the scalability and viability of Xanadu’s photonic approach by demonstrating networkability, but the Company believes it also establishes a foundation for all future fault-tolerant quantum systems—systems built to tackle the world’s most intractable problems.

“Ongoing participation in QBI reinforces Xanadu’s goal of developing quantum computing solutions that deliver practical value across industries, including drug discovery, advanced chemistry, aerospace, defense, and AI,” said Dr. Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu.

Successful completion of Stage B evaluations maintains Xanadu’s path through the DARPA QBI program, where quantum computer concepts will undergo formal verification and validation to ensure they can be constructed as designed and operated as intended.

More from HPCwire: Atom Computing, Diraq, IBM and IonQ Advance to DARPA QBI Stage C

About Xanadu

Founded in 2016, Xanadu is a Canadian photonic quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Xanadu is building fault-tolerant quantum computers using light, with systems designed to compute at room temperature. Xanadu develops both hardware and software, including PennyLane, its open-source quantum computing platform. Xanadu is the first pure-play photonic quantum computing company to list on public markets (Nasdaq/TSX: XNDU) and is recognized globally for its breakthroughs in scalable quantum technologies.

Source: Xanadu

The post Xanadu Plans Photonic Quantum R&D Push with up to $10M Pending from DARPA appeared first on HPCwire.

D.C. police said the National Guardsman suffered a non-life-threatening injury, and the suspect was also shot.

The $48bn giveaway comes amid concerns about the tech and as the company prepares for a stock market listing

Anthropic has said it will commit 5% of its shares to a fund for the “public good”, as the AI developer behind the Claude chatbot seeks to bolster its appeal before its stock market listing.

The company announced it would commit the shares, worth around $48bn (£36bn) at its latest valuation in May, subject to shareholder approval. It will add a further 2% of its stock to the fund for every 50% increase in its value above an undisclosed baseline.

US military says Tech Sgt Ian Patterson was killed after he fell from rafters at University of Texas at San Antonio game

The US military has identified the air force service member who died after he fell from the rafters of the Alamodome during a rappelling demonstration before the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA)’s home game against Navy on Saturday.

He was Tech Sgt Ian Patterson, a tactical air control party instructor assigned to the sixth combat training squadron, detachment two, at Joint Base San Antonio.

BROOMFIELD, Colo., Oct. 19, 2026 — Quantinuum, a leading full-stack quantum computing company, today announced a world-record quantum error-correction result, achieving a logical fidelity of 99.9995% on its Helios commercial computer using the company’s error-correction architecture. This marks Quantinuum’s second breakthrough in two months, demonstrating how its highly accurate trapped-ion hardware and flexible architecture work together to deliver rapid improvements in accuracy.

The achievement reinforces Quantinuum’s error-correction leadership and validates that its accuracy performance is now within the target range for Apollo, the company’s planned universal fault-tolerant quantum computer expected to be available by 2029.

Quantinuum’s architecture is an end-to-end framework programmable through the company’s developer platform. It integrates tailored AI decoders, all-to-all qubit connectivity, high-fidelity physical operations, and hardware-level error correction. This architecture also allows the company to test, refine, and combine different error-correction codes and optimize between accuracy and efficiency.

In the latest study, Quantinuum used a well-known ‘color code’ within this architecture to achieve the world-record logical fidelity result, which is equivalent to just five errors per million operations. The error rate is 10 times lower than Quantinuum’s own world record achieved last month and 100 times lower than the best published result across all other hardware modalities, which was reported by Google Quantum AI on a superconducting system.

“With this result, we’ve proven that we have the error-correction architecture and trapped-ion technology required to achieve universal fault-tolerance,” said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, CEO of Quantinuum. “We have reduced error rates tenfold in rapid succession using a different code on the same commercial hardware, demonstrating the flexibility of our error-correction architecture. We’ve crossed the threshold necessary for exponential improvements in accuracy, reinforcing our path to Apollo and how we can help users unlock commercial value from quantum at scale.”

The study also showed that logical errors fell exponentially as Quantinuum increased the ‘code distance,’ a technique used to understand how many physical qubits are needed to protect quantum information as the error correction scales. Each tested increase reduced the remaining logical errors by a record factor of 12, demonstrating increasingly effective error suppression as the code grows—a critical capability for scaling fault-tolerant quantum computing. Quantinuum believes this result suggests it can deliver fault-tolerance with significantly fewer qubits than are required for other modalities.

“This is a significant milestone that quantum computing researchers have been working toward for many years,” said Robin Blume-Kohout, Co-director of Sandia National Laboratories’ Quantum Performance Lab, who was not involved in the study. “The paper demonstrates real, serious performance gains from quantum error correction—a logical qubit nearly 100x better than its component physical qubits. A scaled-up version of this system could reach the reliability required for useful fault-tolerant computation at a feasible size—less than a million physical qubits—which improves the outlook for practical quantum computing. These findings go a long way to retire one of the field’s central technical risks.”

In September 2026, Quantinuum used the same error-correction architecture with its Helix code to demonstrate record-setting logical memory and computation. Both studies ran on the same Helios hardware.

The two demonstrations illustrate how Quantinuum can rapidly prototype different error-correction codes within the same architecture to optimize for relative strengths in accuracy, efficiency, and speed. On Helios, Helix used 10 physical qubits per logical qubit, compared with up to 37 for the color code, while the color code delivered lower logical error rates. This provides insight into which applications pair best with each code as systems advance toward fault-tolerance.

Quantinuum’s error-correction architecture is flexible, allowing for adaptive syndrome extraction, which adjusts error-checking measurements during computation, and chain-mapping, which connects codes suited to different computational tasks. Together with efficient code structures and real-time decoding, these techniques provide multiple ways to reduce errors and resource requirements.

Quantinuum is combining its hardware, error-correction architecture, and full-stack software platform into an integrated system for fault-tolerant quantum computing. As customers prepare for this next era of computing, Quantinuum is providing the tools needed to develop and scale quantum applications capable of addressing challenges across materials science, chemistry, finance, logistics, and other critical sectors.

Read the full research here: quantinuum.com/fault-tolerance-by-2029

About Quantinuum

Quantinuum (NASDAQ: QNT) is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of trapped-ion based quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity. Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets, as well as academic and research institutions globally. The company has a global workforce of approximately 800 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team holds PhDs or Master’s degrees. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Qatar, and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.quantinuum.com.

Source: Quantinuum

The post Quantinuum Reports 99.9995% Logical Fidelity on Helios Quantum Computer appeared first on HPCwire.

Downing Street delivered a rare rebuke to a senior member of Donald Trump’s administration

Asked why the Lib Dems were opposed to a third runway at Heathrow when they professed to be in favour of growth, Cooper said she did not accept that a third runway would produce all the benefits its supporters claimed.

She explained:

On Heathrow, it is clear from looking at all of the economic analysis of airport growth over the last few years that many of the promises made by all sorts of different airport companies simply haven’t come to bear.

The promise of higher wage jobs hasn’t been substantiated. Often it’s lower paid jobs, and often not as many as they’ve claimed.

The researchers said what they had hoped was the plane was "likely a collection of large trees" that had washed away, leaving a "single Y-shaped segment."

"Father, Father! Call an ambulance!" people at the church could be heard shouting just before a livestreamed broadcast cuts out.

The SpaceX CEO wrote on social media on Monday that the gift "will be the first of many."

Russia's top diplomat is visiting Tehran for the first time since the U.S. launched its war with Iran, aiming, he says, to avert a return to major hostilities.

TEL AVIV, Israel, Oct. 19, 2026 — Quantum X Labs Inc. has announced a technological milestone achieved by its quantum cybersecurity operation, QuantumQ Security, through the experimental validation of its LayerQake technology on three operational IBM quantum processors.

The Company completed a pre-registered, reproducible experimental test of LayerQake’s quantum calibration methodology on three IBM quantum processors: ibm_fez, ibm_kingston and ibm_marrakesh. The Company believes the experiment demonstrated substantial improvements in computational accuracy and reductions in cumulative errors caused by quantum hardware noise, and the results met both of the Company’s predefined success criteria on all three processors.

According to the Company’s results, prior to applying LayerQake’s calibration methodology, hardware-induced noise introduced measurement bias ranging from approximately 11% to 15%. Following the application of LayerQake, the observed bias was reduced to below 6% on each of the three processors.

In addition, the experiments demonstrated a 15- to 21-fold reduction in maximum cumulative error, representing a substantial improvement in the reliability of the tested quantum computational results.

Importantly, these improvements were achieved using LayerQake’s problem-independent calibration approach, which is designed to mitigate hardware-induced inaccuracies without requiring a calibration methodology tailored to each individual computational problem.

Experimental Results Demonstrate Consistent Performance Across Multiple Quantum Processors

The experimental program was designed to assess whether LayerQake could systematically reduce the effects of quantum hardware noise across different physical quantum computing devices.

Before conducting the experiments, the Company established two predefined success criteria: (i) a reduction in measurement bias and (ii) a reduction in maximum cumulative error.

The Company believes these findings provide initial experimental evidence that LayerQake’s calibration methodology can improve the accuracy and consistency of results obtained from existing quantum computing hardware.

Addressing One of Quantum Computing’s Fundamental Challenges

Hardware noise and computational inaccuracies remain among the principal challenges limiting the practical performance of today’s quantum computers.

Quantum processors are inherently sensitive to environmental interference, imperfect control operations and measurement errors. These factors can introduce inaccuracies into computational results, limiting their reliability and the complexity of problems that can be addressed.

Technologies capable of identifying, calibrating and mitigating these inaccuracies are therefore an important component of the broader effort to advance practical quantum computing.

Quantum X Labs believes that LayerQake’s demonstrated ability to reduce measurement bias and cumulative errors across multiple processors highlights the potential of its technology to contribute to improved reliability in quantum computing environments.

The Company views this milestone as an important step in the development of its broader quantum cybersecurity and quantum computing software portfolio, which includes technologies addressing quantum channel diagnostics, information security, verification and quantum computational reliability.

Following the successful completion of this initial experimental validation, Quantum X Labs intends to continue evaluating LayerQake’s performance across additional quantum workloads, experimental conditions and hardware environments.

The Company believes that calibration technologies capable of improving the reliability of existing quantum processors may play an important role in supporting the development and eventual commercialization of quantum computing applications.

About Quantum X Labs Inc.

Quantum X Labs Inc. (NASDAQ: QXL) and its subsidiaries are focused on quantum technology, digital advertising and computing and enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Quantum X Labs Ltd. is focused on developing and promoting quantum algorithms for the transportation, drug discovery and security segments as well as developing quantum- based GPS replacement and quantum atom accuracy solutions. Gix Media develops a variety of technological software solutions, which perform automation, optimization and monetization of internet campaigns, for the purposes of acquiring and routing internet user traffic to its customers. Metagramm is a developer of grammatical error correction software and offers tools for writing and reviewing, grammar, spelling, punctuation and style features, as well as translation and multilingual dictionaries, using artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.

Source: Quantum X Labs

The post Quantum X Labs Reports Reduced Errors in Tests on 3 IBM Quantum Processors appeared first on HPCwire.

Exclusive: Basketball venues are facing increasing broadcaster and fan demands, so the NBA, WNBA and AT&T are upgrading arenas with all-new communications equipment.

America is "making an unprecedented attempt to revive three shuttered nuclear plants to meet rising energy demand," reports the Los Angeles Times, "Two of the plants have contracts with Big Tech companies that will pay a premium to get large amounts of carbon-free energy for data centers..." No commercial nuclear reactor is known to have resumed generating electricity after beginning the decommissioning process that takes one out of service, though some reactors have restarted after long outages. The Department of Energy is lending as much as $4.4 billion to restart the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center on Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island and the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa to restore a combined 2.25 gigawatts of electricity, which can power roughly 2 million homes and businesses. All three of the plants closed before their licenses expired, largely because the electricity they produced was considered too expensive... Restarting a reactor is a fairly quick way to get a lot of electricity, and it's cheaper than building a new, large reactor, said nuclear engineering expert Todd Allen... Edwin Lyman, at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the taxpayer money being used should go toward addressing safety risks. For example, most U.S. plants were built between 1970 and 1990 and were designed to withstand natural disasters of that era, said Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at UCS. But climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. "It's possible, if they set the right level of safety and spend the necessary funds to meet that, they could restore these plants to operable condition," he said. "That's not happening at this point...." NextEra Energy and Google are collaborating to restart Duane Arnold by early 2029... Microsoft has a contract with the Crane Clean Energy Center on Three Mile Island just outside Harrisburg. The plant was the site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear power accident in 1979. The accident destroyed one reactor, leaving the plant with one functioning. In 2019, Constellation Energy's then-parent company Exelon shut down the functioning reactor, saying it was losing money and that Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to subsidize it. Constellation Energy announced in 2024 that it would spend $1.6 billion to restart the reactor under a 20-year agreement with Microsoft. It hopes to bring the plant back online in 2027... Palisades is expected to be the first nuclear plant in the world to resume generating power after beginning the decommissioning process.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Magnifique’s new cooker combines two of my favorite kitchen appliances in one nontoxic, easy-to-use machine.

Mike Huckabee condemns attack on Washington Post photojournalist that has drawn lukewarm response from Israeli authorities. Plus, Japan is attempting to boldly go where no space mission has gone before

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Good morning. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has denounced a settler attack that left the Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine badly beaten and needing surgery as a “despicable act of terror”.

Levine, 63, an award-winning journalist who lives in Israel, was set upon last Friday by masked Israeli settlers who used clubs and other weapons to attack Palestinians attempting to harvest their olives. The photographer, who is in hospital recovering from hand surgery, broken ribs and other injuries, said she was beaten for more than 10 minutes.

What else has Heidi Levine said about the attack? She said: “I was attacked, pushed to the ground. Luckily, I had my flak jacket and helmet, otherwise I probably wouldn’t even be here, because they just kept kicking and kicking me. I’ve been covering this region for over 40 years and I have never seen this country in such a state as it is today. I’ve invested decades of blood, sweat and tears into this. They cracked my bones, they haven’t cracked my spirit.”

How have Israeli authorities responded? In a move Levine said left her “shocked and insulted”, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been ambiguous in addressing the assault. He said he condemned “violence against anyone” but referred to the attack as “alleged” and said its circumstances remained unclear.

What is causing the wave of protests across Europe? School conditions, housing costs and the cost of living have brought demonstrators on to the streets in several countries including Spain, France and Portugal. Protests in Albania against the prime minister, Edi Rama, entered their sixth day on Sunday. Demonstrators there have said they are unhappy with perceived corruption, a lack of jobs and poor education standards.

Los Angeles were tipped as a Super Bowl contender after assembling a star studded lineup. Now they’ve lost three of their last four games

The Rams were supposed to be the closest thing the NFL had seen to a superteam in some time. Instead, they’re 2-4, have lost three of their last four games and are last in the NFC West. So much has gone awry, so quickly.

Sunday was rock bottom (for now). The Rams lost to the division’s ugly stepchild, the Cardinals – a team they had beaten in 16 of their last 19 meetings – on a day when Arizona didn’t manage to score a touchdown. They didn’t need to, because Arizona kicker Chad Ryland connected on six field goal attempts, the last one a 43-yarder as time expired. The game was a tale of two kickers, in that the Cardinals had a superb one and the Rams didn’t have one at all. Days after releasing Harrison Mevis following a league-worst four misses in the season’s first five weeks, the Rams came into this game with Blake Grupe, whom they’d plucked off the Jets practice squad. Grupe got hurt covering a kickoff return in the first quarter, leaving the Rams literally kickerless for the duration. (Mevis, a big fella whose nickname is the Thick Kicker, or “Thiccer,” has about 80lbs on the 5ft 7in Grupe.)

Washington, DC — Republican senators are increasingly pushing back against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his sweeping changes to Pentagon leadership, warning that repeated firings and forced departures could weaken military readiness and leave experienced officers sidelined.

The tensions have intensified since Hegseth announced plans to reduce the number of generals and admirals by 20%, part of a broader effort he says will streamline the military and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy.

Several senior Republicans have complained that Congress was given little warning about the cuts. Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker and other GOP members have also questioned whether some personnel decisions are being driven by political or ideological considerations rather than performance.

Sen. Thom Tillis has gone further, repeatedly calling on President Donald Trump to replace Hegseth. Tillis has described the Pentagon’s management as “inept” and accused Hegseth of driving out capable military leaders while focusing heavily on culture-war issues.

The Pentagon maintains that its personnel decisions are merit-based and necessary to reshape the military for future threats.

Hegseth has already forced out or sidelined numerous senior officers, while the Army has experienced particularly significant turnover, including the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll after months of reported clashes with Hegseth.

Trump has continued to publicly support his defense secretary despite the growing criticism from within his own party.

Sources:

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post GOP Senators Warn Hegseth’s Military Firings Are Undermining Pentagon Leadership appeared first on News Facts Network.

After Houthis escalated their attacks on Saudi Arabia, the US turned down calls from MBS for help

For years, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, cultivated a close relationship with Donald Trump and his son-in-law and former top adviser, Jared Kushner. The prince understood the president’s transactional approach to power: he signed deals to buy billions of dollars’ worth of US weapons and invested billions more in American companies.

Days after Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Prince Mohammed pledged to expand investment and trade with the US by $600bn over four years. He later promised to increase that investment to nearly $1tn, although it wasn’t entirely clear how Saudi Arabia would manage to plough a sum close to the kingdom’s entire annual GDP into a foreign economy over a few years.

Mohamad Bazzi is a Guardian US columnist. He is also director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University

Republicans delay major action on abortion until after midterm elections, and Democrats focus on affordability

Exactly 1,255 volunteers fanned out across Idaho’s rural 35 legislative districts to collect signatures, knocking on 66,000 doors and ultimately gathering more than 110,000. Not a single one was paid – a rarity in today’s politics.

This effort was in service of Proposition 1, which asks voters a single question: Should abortion be legal in Idaho? A “yes” vote would lift one of the most restrictive abortions bans in the nation.

The meal kit delivery service denies the allegations, saying it found claims to be ‘entirely without merit’

Workers at a HelloFresh facility in Newark, New Jersey, have claimed in court documents that they were verbally and physically abused and denied regular bathroom breaks, with one former worker telling the Guardian he experienced incontinence issues as a result.

The newly proposed amended complaint comes in a class-action lawsuit first filed in August 2024 against the food prep service giant and staffing agencies. A New Jersey state court judge is expected to review the amended complaint in a hearing scheduled for 23 October.

The bodies of the 10 men, two of whom were engineers and one a geologist, were later found buried in clandestine graves.

Officer in stable condition after incident in city centre in early hours of Sunday

Four people have been arrested after a police officer was shot in the foot in Nottingham city centre.

The officer was struck by a projectile believed to have been fired from a shotgun after approaching two suspects in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Trudy weakens to tropical storm after warnings of strong winds and heavy rain, while one person killed in Greece

In contrast to the quiet Atlantic hurricane season, there has been ongoing activity in the Pacific, with Trudy being the 22nd and latest named system. The category 2 hurricane remained roughly 100 miles (160km) south-west of the coast of Mexico, meaning the worst of the conditions stayed offshore. However, the US National Hurricane Center put coastal parts of the states of Jalisco, Michoacán and Colima under hurricane warnings, with sustained winds of up to 60-90mph forecast on Sunday.

Rainfall totals of 100-150mm were likely for these areas, prompting warnings of flooding and landslides. Warnings also covered the risk of a dangerous storm surge accompanied by damaging waves in areas of onshore winds across the coast of south-western Mexico. By Monday morning, Trudy had weakened and been downgraded to a tropical storm, with coastal warnings being lifted.

Exclusive: Using test accounts acting as 13-year-olds, Tech Transparency Project downloaded 135 apps with features to generate nonconsensual nude imagery

In December 2025, Morgan Dorfman received distressing news: a student at her daughter’s Pennsylvania high school was making AI-generated pornographic material using the daughter’s image.

He was using an artificial intelligence image-editing app called Movely to create sexual videos from pictures of her daughter and five other girls.

Will California stand with the working class or the oligarchs in the vote this November?

The Democratic party has a choice to make. Are we going to be New Deal Democrats or corporate Democrats? Are we standing with the working class or the tech oligarchs?

Proposition 40, California’s billionaire tax, is the most important ballot initiative in America and a fight for the soul of our party.

Rohit Khanna is aUS congressman and attorney serving as the US representative from California’s 17th congressional district

The last long-term federal recovery funds allocated for a major disaster were for Hurricane Milton, which hit in late 2024

Survivors of extreme weather disasters across the US are facing long waits for government assistance funds to rebuild their lives, with the last long-term recovery funds allocated for Hurricane Milton that hit Florida two years ago. Government officials estimate more than $10bn is needed in long-term disaster recovery funding to rebuild affected communities in Los Angeles county and St Louis, Missouri, alone.

Demetrice Davis’s home in north St Louis still has damage from the EF3 tornado that tore through the area in May 2025. “The insurance didn’t cover much of anything. And the Fema just kind of backed you up for a little while, but didn’t get you back on track,” he said. “The government agencies are not really doing what they’re supposed to do.”

Anthony Constantino wants to fill Elise Stefanik’s seat in New York. But his lead in the formerly Trump-loving district is narrowing

The boss of a New York-based sticker company, whose staunch support for Donald Trump prompted him to record a Maga-themed rap album and call for an extension of Mount Rushmore to add the president’s face, is running for Congress.

Anthony Constantino, who began a brief pro boxing career at age 40, is the Republican candidate for GOP congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s seat in New York’s 21st district.

On a cold February morning at West Virginia’s Capitol, children in winter jackets, holding signs and their homework, clogged the hallways outside the House Finance Committee room. Delegate Vernon Criss, the committee’s chairperson, popped outside his office, then promptly walked back in. 

Five days earlier, the Republican lawmaker had proposed to limit payouts from a voucher program that diverts public tax dollars to private education. Since then, families had shown up each morning, and with them lobbyists and organizers posting inflammatory assertions that the proposal would kill the program.

Criss didn’t want that. Five years earlier, he voted to create the Hope Scholarship program, the nation’s first educational savings account program to have no income requirements. Since then, 11 other states have passed similar legislation. 

In the first year of the Hope program in West Virginia, it cost the state $9 million. Now, as 2026 was beginning, it was set to expand, with estimates that it could cost $200 million or more a year. And Criss was concerned that unchecked growth of the program, coupled with a spree of tax cuts, could put the state budget into a tailspin. The state and its lawmakers needed “to face the music,” as Criss would later say.

On that February day in Charleston, a staffer unlocked the committee door. Parents and media filed in, taking seats along the narrow benches lining the committee room’s walls. Kids lay on the floor. A delegate asked if the Hope Scholarship bill would be discussed. When Criss said no, the parents and their kids stood up and filed out. 

Within the next few days, lawmakers would stop the effort to curtail spending on vouchers. And Criss would soon be fighting for his political life.

The money and organizing behind the demise of the bill, as well as the targeting of Criss, can be traced to “school choice” advocates at the local and national levels and their ability to spend huge sums to have their way.

When Republicans assumed control of the West Virginia Legislature in 2015, school choice — their preferred terminology for voucher-style programs — became a rallying point for an array of political nonprofits. Through lobbying and supporting sympathetic lawmakers, they helped establish the Hope Scholarship six years later. 

The first year, a little more than 2,300 students enrolled in the program, which was designed to permit more students over time. Today, 26,000 students are taking part, more than the enrollment in the state’s largest public school district.

West Virginia has been part of a nationwide push, partially funded by billionaire-backed political groups, to use taxpayer dollars to fund private schools.

Among the proponents of these programs are the influential Koch family network and Pennsylvania billionaire Jeffrey Yass, who has spent more than $350 million since 2015 on political campaigns, including a push for public funding for private education.

In West Virginia, Arkansas and Texas, proponents have been eager to challenge anyone who got in the way, including fellow Republicans who voiced concerns. Basic guardrails or efforts to cap spending have been met with intense resistance.

During the 2026 West Virginia primary, three political action committees spent heavily on independent advertisements, targeting 10 incumbent Republicans. They succeeded in ousting four, all of whom had disagreements with the governor; most expressed reservations about the Hope Scholarship.

Their biggest victory was unseating Criss, the long-serving incumbent and high-ranking Republican.

One of the three PACs working to defeat Criss is affiliated with the Koch family. Yass has contributed to the two others: School Freedom Fund and the Sugar Maple PAC. David McIntosh, president of School Freedom Fund and the affiliated Club for Growth, was jubilant afterward.

“These elections are a warning to Republican leaders like Vernon Criss — if you oppose school freedom, expect to be held accountable,” he wrote in a press announcement at the time.

Criss had been unopposed in his 2024 primary. In 2026, the three PACs spent more than $145,000 to help a 23-year-old defeat him.

Criss’ proposal to put financial limits on the Hope Scholarship program came as West Virginia public schools arrived at a dangerous crossroads. The program directs dollars away from public schools, adding to funding shortfalls created by enrollment drops.

Since 2019, 70 public schools have closed throughout the state, with the system losing more than 30,000 students. By the end of this school year, up to 20 more schools could close. 

During the same legislative session this year, when lawmakers passed emergency legislation to help one school district stay open, there was little drama — no crowds in the hallways or the galleries. 

The Rise of Hope 

In 2021, as West Virginia lawmakers worked on the bill that would create the Hope Scholarship, they got some help from the outside: a lobbyist and political operative named Jason Huffman. 

Huffman has been the director of Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia since the mid-2010s. The group is part of the larger Americans for Prosperity, which was set up by the billionaire industrialist David Koch and supported by his brother Charles, longtime donors to conservative causes. Americans for Prosperity advocates for low taxes, school choice and loosened environmental regulations throughout the country. 

In shaping the West Virginia legislation, Huffman said, one goal was to create a school voucher program that other states could model. While other states had already passed voucher-style programs, they hadn’t made them open to all residents regardless of income.

Among those advocating in West Virginia were members of Cardinal Institute, a homegrown conservative think tank. Founded in 2015, the group made public funding for private schooling one of its first policy planks. Over the last decade, Cardinal has received significant donations from organizations that also have received funding from Koch entities and Yass. 

To support the Hope legislation, Cardinal’s leaders distributed research, published columns in newspapers and linked up with other groups, like Americans for Prosperity and the Institute for Justice, which litigates libertarian causes, to push the issue. They also found allies in parents who wanted the financial flexibility to send their children to private schools or teach them at home or in small clusters of like-minded families. 

Katie Switzer, a mother of six, became one of Cardinal’s most reliable advocates. She had started looking into schooling options after her second child was diagnosed with a learning disability. 

“I just felt like this doesn’t feel good to send my nonverbal child to a school that you know isn’t really collaborative, and I don’t know what’s going on when she’s there because she can’t tell me when she gets home,” she said. The experience made her a proponent of alternatives to public school.

Her story appeared in some of Cardinal’s promotional copy for the bill. She sat in on a video call presentation featuring state Sen. Patrcia Rucker, a Hope Scholarship proponent. She took to Facebook to tout the program. 

And she stepped up when the Hope Scholarship was challenged in court by other parents who argued the program would undermine funding for public schools. 

Hope’s opponents in the case gained support from the state Board of Education, which argued the program siphoned money away from public schools. On the other side was the West Virginia attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, defending the law and the state.

The Institute for Justice was looking to get involved, but it needed to find somebody with standing in the case. Switzer and another parent signed up, giving the firm the ability to file motions and argue in court. The Institute for Justice has received $8.5 million from charities controlled by Yass over nearly a decade. 

The case went to the West Virginia Supreme Court, where the justices ruled 4-1 in favor of the program. 

The ruling meant the Hope program had survived. It was good timing for Morrisey. He was about to make a run for governor. When Morrisey waded into a tough four-way primary battle, the Club for Growth Action, a super PAC Yass has donated heavily to over the years, was ready to help.

“Our goal in all of this is to elect people who will be champions for school freedom, lower taxes, less regulation, so businesses can thrive,” McIntosh, the group’s president, said in an interview. 

The Club for Growth Action pumped $10.8 million into that race. Morrisey won the plurality in the Republican primary and went on to trounce his Democratic opponent in the general election. 

On a cold morning in January 2025, Morrisey stood bundled up in a black wool coat on the stairs of Capitol, its gold dome towering above him. He took the oath of office and gave his address. 

“We will expand the Hope Scholarship, putting more control in the hands of parents to choose the best educational path for their children,” he said.

Runaway Train

Hours before Morrisey gave his State of the State address earlier this year, the House Education Committee called a meeting to hear about a report from the Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank. 

Rand called on the state to fix what was becoming abundantly clear: Education in West Virginia wasn’t just in transition; it was in crisis. 

Initially the Hope Scholarship was limited to students attending public school or children who would enter kindergarten. Participation grew over time. And as the 2026-27 school year began, the program opened to any student in West Virginia, including those who had spent their entire academic careers in private school or in homeschooling.

That translated into tens of millions of additional state dollars to private schools and homeschooling. Estimates for the 2026-27 school year ranged from $230 million to more than $300 million in the months leading up to the legislative session. The program costs for the year are still being tallied but are currently projected at an unprecedented $150 million. 

The Rand report suggested placing an income cap on the Hope Scholarship and increasing funding for public schools. 

While the Education Committee would work on public school funding, Criss’ Finance Committee would tackle the ballooning costs of the Hope Scholarship. He was not interested in Rand’s solutions but found his own. By capping the scholarship amount and limiting certain expenses, Criss was hoping he could help prolong the program for families well into the future. But families would soon be rallying against him.

In the time since the Hope Scholarship had withstood the court challenge, Switzer’s reach had only grown. On Facebook, she administered a group that offers practical advice to hundreds of parents, or “Hope Schoolers” as she called them, on questions like what items counted as qualifying expenses and how to properly file for the program. 

Before Criss’ plan rolled out, Switzer said she received word from a member of the Finance Committee — though she did not disclose who — that the Hope Scholarship would be discussed.

Writing a lengthy Facebook post, she warned that the move would severely damage the program. “The bill takes away 19,000 children’s access to online education, tutoring, private schools across state borders, and many other beneficial academic programs,” she wrote. 

Huffman, the Americans for Prosperity state director, took to radio and social media to decry what he described as an existential threat to the program. Parents with kids in tow echoed those fears.

Criss’ proposal would’ve capped the award amount for the Hope Scholarship at a little more than $5,000 a year. He said his intent was to prolong the program for the long run, not kill it.

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Huffman countered that by capping the award amount, inflation would eventually erode families’ abilities to use the program for private education or homeschooling. 

Looking back, Criss said he anticipated some pushback, because the Hope Scholarship is a “giveaway program.” He blamed political forces for riling people up. 

At a caucus meeting with the Republican supermajority — which holds 91 of the 100 seats in the lower chamber — Criss said he couldn’t muster the votes. A bill to fix public schools that came out of the Education Committee died entirely.

Election season was right around the corner, and Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia and other groups hadn’t forgotten the Hope Scholarship battle. Criss had failed what Huffman called “a litmus test” in trying to restrict public money for parents looking for an alternative to public school.

Meanwhile, McIntosh, the president for Club for Growth, said he received word from his allies in the Morrisey administration. Morrisey was concerned about lawmakers who had opposed him on budget issues and school choice. The governor was looking to replace those he saw as not aligned.

While the legislative backlash had been about one issue, the campaign against Morrisey’s foes went well beyond education issues. 

Ads depicted Criss as a liberal who wanted to open borders for illegal immigration. That was based on a no vote Criss had cast against a piece of legislation that would’ve mandated employers run a citizenship check on every employee. 

Fliers mailed by the School Freedom Fund, a PAC affiliated with Club for Growth, depicted candidates as supporters of drag queens. Americans for Prosperity-West Virginia sent volunteers door to door to rally for their candidates, including in Criss’ district. 

The newly created Sugar Maple PAC — headed by a former state delegate and Morrisey ally — ran ads accusing opponents of being Republicans in Name Only. 

One mailer, depicting Criss driving a garbage truck, accused him of taking “West Virginia’s values to the dump.” On the back, it reiterated his vote against the citizenship check for employees and his vote against West Virginia’s abortion ban. 

“Vernon Criss’ liberal trash,” the flier read, with an image of black trash bags.

“I think that the fact that they called me a liberal, it just stuck out,” Criss said. “You know, as the chairman of finance, I know that it’s a targeted job, obviously, that’s part of the deal. Those types of things happen, that’s just part of the politics involved here.” 

The School Freedom Fund poured nearly $1 million into statehouse races across West Virginia to both retain Morrissey’s supporters and oust detractors, like Criss. Americans for Prosperity did the same, again targeting Criss, and spending around $700,000 across the state. 

A spokesperson for Morrisey said in an email that the governor is a supporter of both public schools and the Hope Scholarship and “is also grateful that organizations that share his worldview of helping West Virginia children having the best educational opportunities in the country weigh in.”

Sugar Maple PAC and Yass did not respond to requests for comment. Yass contributed $450,000 to Sugar Maple in the lead-up to the 2026 primary. Among the three PACs, Sugar Maple spent the most on the Criss race: $86,000 to attack Criss and $15,000 to back his opponent, Charles Hartzog, a 23-year-old gas station cashier. 

Criss didn’t just lose the primary; Hartzog beat him with 61% of the vote. Criss is now running a long-shot campaign as a write-in for his district in the general election.

The post He Tried to Set Limits on His State’s School Vouchers. Billionaires Helped Bankroll a Campaign to Unseat Him. appeared first on ProPublica.

As global governments and tech giants reckon with widespread of revelations of autonomous AI agents unexpectedly breaking into computer systems, documents obtained by The Intercept show the U.S. Army is looking to harness that exact technology to seek and destroy.

Army Cyber Command is developing a platform to turn AI agents into autonomous weapons that can navigate and “neutralize” the computer systems of adversaries, the documents show.

Since 2010, Army Cyber Command, or ARCYBER, has led the U.S. Army’s cyber operations. This includes the defensive effort of protecting domestic computer systems and the secretive offensive work of hacking military targets. So far, this has largely been the work of human soldiers operating computers, like those of the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade. But as the government races to adopt artificial intelligence technology, ARCYBER is looking to offload some of its attacks to AI.

The nascent program, codenamed “ECHOTRIBBLE,” is based on one of the leading trends of the AI boom: agents. AI agents are essentially software programs that leverage machine learning technology, often large language models like Anthropic’s Claude, to autonomously accomplish tasks provided by their user. Consumers can deploy AI agents to schedule meetings, generate itineraries, make online purchases, or book tickets. Through ECHOTRIBBLE, the Pentagon plans to turn AI agents into tools of war “designed to autonomously navigate infrastructures” and capable of “identifying and neutralizing identified threats/targets,” according to an ARCYBER document reviewed by The Intercept circulated to potential contractors.

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The military’s adoption of cutting-edge technologies is unsurprising, especially considering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fervent embrace of AI. But amid constant revelations of rogue behavior by agents, the potential for serious mishaps is immense, experts warn.

“Given the known failure modes of the current AI paradigm, making autonomous AI systems with a mandate to ‘neutralize threats’ is incredibly dangerous,” David Krueger, a professor of machine learning at the University of Montreal who founded Evitable, an organization that advocates for a moratorium on AI development. “We’ve seen AI systems knowingly attack systems that were not intended targets. In simulations, AIs have even proven willing to kill to achieve their goals.”

A Q&A document answering questions from potential contractors offers more details about the initiative. It explains that ECHOTRIBBLE is “primarily focused” on offensive missions, and explains that “neutralizing” a target could include “disabling the threat completely or temporarily, deleting the threat from the target.” ECHOTRIBBLE would function almost like a computer worm, silently navigating a foreign network and hopping from device to device until it finds the Army’s quarry, hitting targets in the cloud as well as those on “air-gapped” systems that are disconnected from networks entirely.

Once its task is complete, ECHOTRIBBLE’s agents would effectively self-destruct, ideally without having been noticed by the target at all. The agents themselves will be designed for stealth, minimally reporting back to the Army and concealing whatever outside transmissions are necessary.

Although documents say the Army will be able to program ECHOTRIBBLE agents with some initial “predefined triggers” — dictating what and where to attack — the software “must operate with minimal human oversight” and be capable of “Self-Directed Behavior.”

A PowerPoint presentation to interested vendors at a June 24 ARCYBER event provided a hypothetical example of this self-direction. Once ECHOTRIBBLE is uploaded to a laptop, the software on its own “identifies other potential targets” on the same network and then “produces a replica of itself tailored specifically for the iPad, Apple desktop, and Windows 11 PC.”

The Army’s move toward autonomous self-propagating comes after a flurry of revelations about agentic systems taking unintended disturbing actions while attempting to accomplish their goals, including breaking into computers of the Australian government, breaching the infrastructure of the AI firm Hugging Face, uploading malicious software into online platform RubyGems, and attempted to hack into the U.S. Education Department.

These attacks occurred during scenarios in which agents had been given no commands to attack anything. Experts say militarized versions given explicitly destructive objectives could cause a threat to the public, even with nominal rules set in place by the military. Just as the Army of old might consider the destruction of civilian infrastructure an acceptable means to an end, a self-directed AI agent dispatched by the Pentagon might make similar determinations about collateral damage.

Governmental intelligence agencies frequently route their offensive operations through civilian devices. Volt Typhoon, a Chinese state hacking group, has directed its attacks through homes and small businesses, and preemptively hacks American IT systems for later use. A hack of a Chinese university attributed to the National Security Agency made use of the school’s internet routers. What happens if ECHOTRIBBLE decides these kinds of stepping stones are part of the problem?

“The target may well be hit. But what path will it take?” asked Hyrum Anderson, co-founder and CEO of the AI security firm Abundant. “Will it go through a US water utility on its way, because that’s where the adversary has staged its command and control, and take that down too?”

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Anderson, who previously worked in cybersecurity at Microsoft and for the U.S. government, said that a vast amount of the internet is vulnerable to agentic attacks.

“There’s a huge class of public and private organizations that fall below the security poverty line,” he said. “They include critical national infrastructure, small businesses, mom-and-pop shops, dentist offices and law firms, and whoever else doesn’t have a single cybersecurity professional on staff.” With their networks wide open to infiltration, Hyrum worries about “these organizations getting hit directly, or getting caught in the blast radius of a target that gets hit along the way.”

Given the impressive ability of AI agents to overcome obstacles placed in their path — even by their creators — it follows that the Pentagon would want to leverage that power for military purposes. But agentic software has proven unpredictable and prone to executing its commands in ways those ostensibly in control did not want, akin to a drone that get its target but hits a hospital on the way. It’s critical to remember that agents are a piece of software lacking human judgment.

“One of the reasons that we trust 19-year-old Marine corporals in Ramadi with live rounds and a weapon is because they have both the compute substrate — the brain and the eyes — but the deep world knowledge to understand, ‘Yeah, I probably shouldn’t do that,’” said William Marcellino, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation whose research has focused on military AI applications. “That is not something that current public AI technology has.”

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The risk presented by ECHOTRIBBLE will likely depend on the ability — and willingness — of the Army to impose guardrails upon it. ARCYBER did not respond to questions from The Intercept, including queries about the measures it would take to prevent ECHOTRIBBLE from causing inadvertent damage.

Placing constraints on the actions an agent can take might impede its ability to ultimately neutralize a target. But even with strict safeguards in place, genuinely restricting the behavior of an autonomous agent, as Anthropic and OpenAI have learned recently, is easier said than done. When presented with obstacles, AI agents have proven an ability to bypass them with unpredictable and potentially dangerous consequences.

“If I give powerful machines that have no judgment — and no context for judgment — a goal, unless you’ve done a really good job building scaffolding around them, there’s a real chance that they’ll go sideways on you and decide, ‘Well, I’ll do what you asked me to do, but I’ll do it this way,’” Marcellino said.

It only gets more dangerous when this technology is deployed for the purposes of war, Anderson said.

“Under pressure, they’ll often treat guardrails as obstacles,” said Anderson. “Once you add context that says break it, destroy it, shut it down, it stands to reason that the blast radius widens dramatically unless it’s properly controlled for.”

The post The Army Wants to Sic AI Agents on Its Enemies. What Could Go Wrong? appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware’s foster children are among some of the most vulnerable in the state. A new report from the state auditor said a lack of services has led some children within the Department of Services for Children, Youth and their Families (DSCYF) to sleep in government offices. 

Delaware’s Auditor of Accounts Lydia York released a report last week that says some children in the state’s foster system have had to sleep in bureaucratic offices due to a shortage of in-state foster placements.

In her report, she said the use of offices for overnight stays combined with the cost of sending Delaware children in the foster system out of state for care has cost the state close to $13 million since the 2023 fiscal year. 

York’s report stems from allegations her department received about the situation in late 2024. 

The use of out-of-state services alone has cost the state more than $8 million since 2023, according to the report. Still, York’s office also did an analysis of other states around the country with available data on their placements, and found Delaware’s struggles are not “uncommon nor unique.”

“Make no mistake – this is a nationwide issue, and not one that any state has resolved entirely,” York wrote. “However, I believe that this is an opportunity for Delaware to lead.” 

In her office’s report, she recommended the Department of Services for Children, Youth and their Families (DSCYF) strengthen its oversight of costly out-of-state placements, document and monitor the amount of times children sleep in offices, as well as utilize already existing space for short-term stays.

York pointed to a statewide shortage of options for children, as well as a dearth of foster families able to take children in as part of why some children end up sleeping in the offices. The report also called on DSCYF and state legislators to “to build a holistic system” that supports the small, but vulnerable population. 

The report said out-of-state placements would not stop entirely, as services in Delaware may not always be able to accommodate every child’s needs.

Sarah Azevedo, the director of the Division of Family Services for DSCYF, said work is already being done to improve placements for children and offer safer temporary housing. She added children would sleep in the agency’s offices “under very limited circumstances.” 

Azevedo also said solutions take “a lot of time to mobilize,” and the agency has been working for years to address the in-state shortfalls. She also requested community support in looking for solutions to improve services in the state, and said the agency was looking to rethink how it offers foster care to entice more families. 

Azevedo said the cost is important to the department and its goal is to keep kids in state, but if it’s in a child’s best interest to go out of state, the department will send them. 

“At the end of the day, the kids need what they need, and so we’re not going to make a decision based purely on financial reasons,” she said. 

Along with the $8 million spent on out-of-state placements, staffing the overtime shifts needed to to watch children who slept in state offices has cost the state $4.5 million since 2023, the report said. 

The report also points to multiple concerns within the government buildings, which were not designed to house children for overnight stays and lack security staff and metal detectors. 

The offices also lack showers and access to nutritional meals, meaning children will often have to leave, something the report said poses a safety risk.

Additionally, the report warns of safety concerns not only for the children, but staff members as well, who told York’s office they feared for their safety at times. 

“[Division of Family Services] staff interviewed by AOA expressed significant concerns regarding their personal safety,” the report said. “These staff noted past altercations between employees and youths staying in-office resulting in police contact and medical care needed for DFS staff.”

In a response letter to York’s office, DSCYF said it had relocated some children across the state to repurposed residential facilities. 

Leaders at DSCYF also pointed to a recent $6 million appropriation the agency had received to renovate a space at the Stockley Center in Georgetown for children who may not meet the clinical requirements to be put into specific residential treatment facilities. 

Azevedo said in an interview on Friday this new facility would help to better serve those children who fall under that gray zone, and would build up the state’s ability to prevent some out-of-state placements. 

According to the report, though, that renovated space is not scheduled to be complete until July 2027 and would offer 12 beds. 

Azevedo also said the state has put out bids for private vendors to operate more youth facilities in Delaware, however, the agency struggles to attract vendors. Part of the reason, she said, is it is difficult for those providers to find insurance for their programs.

Still, she said the state will continue its pursuit of bringing services to Delaware.

“We haven’t given up the fight and the effort to try to bring some service providers into Delaware who can provide these services to our kids,” Azevedo said.

The post Auditor: Delaware foster children sleep in government offices as placements lag appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

After three hours in the makeup chair, model Carmela Mireles was no longer human. 

Faux monarch butterflies flitted around her body, sprouting from wires attached to a harness she wore around a sheer black dress. Her body was insectine, adorned with the butterfly’s orange and black patterns. Her lips and fingers were skeletal, painted to resemble La Catrina, the iconic skeleton woman associated with Día de Los Muertos.

The artist behind Mireles’ transformation was Adaysela Reyes from Newark, better known by her moniker Dayesla Ixtli. 

Ixtli uses makeup, body paint, costumes and headdresses to transform her subjects into living, breathing artwork. Mireles and Ixtli have collaborated several times throughout the past few years, most recently at the opening reception of Ixtli’s exhibition “Diosas & Guerreras: The Living Canvas” at The Mezzanine Gallery in Wilmington earlier this month.

Though the gallery was full of costumes and photography to marvel at, Mireles was undoubtedly the center of attention. 

Mireles’ ensemble was inspired by the monarch butterflies that migrate to the forests of Michoacán in early November, around Día de Los Muertos — Ixtli’s favorite time of year. 

Ixtli was born in Tenancingo, Mexico, and moved to Delaware with her mother when she was 7. She wasn’t very familiar with Mexican culture, customs and folklore until she moved back to Mexico to live with her grandparents during high school and her first two years of college. 

“When I was here, I never felt fully Mexican. But I was not American either. It’s kind of like you’re in limbo,” she said.

Living in Mexico, Ixtli finally reconnected with the culture of the country she’d been born in. Her grandmother taught her about ofrendas — offerings to deceased loved ones placed at an altar during Día de Los Muertos — and now, Ixtli carries on the tradition with her own children. 

Those formative years in Mexico were what inspired her to pick the name Ixtli — the word for “face” in the indigenous Nahuatl language— when she began her artistic practice six years ago.

At the time, she was reeling from the stressful birth of her youngest daughter, which had involved a C-section. Postpartum depression quickly followed.

Ixtli found a remedy in makeup. She would spend hours in her room watching video tutorials to turn herself into her favorite Tim Burton characters.

“I could accomplish something other than having a baby and just being there, stuck,” she said. “I started going out. I started doing exercise. And then, boom, COVID hit.”

The silver lining of the lockdown was that it gave Ixtli time to refine her artistic practice.

“In that moment, I was like, ‘This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.’ But now, obviously, I look at it, and I’m like, ‘No, that’s actually the best thing that happened to me,’” she said. “I love makeup, and I love everything art, but I never actually gave myself the time … to fully experience creating something.”

Ixtli began using body paint and making headdresses to transform herself into characters of her own. Eventually, she started posting online, recruiting models, participating in art and fashion shows and hosting pop-up events where her characters would interact with the public.

Ixtli refers to her characters as diosas (goddesses) and guerreras (warriors) because she hopes to empower women through her artwork. 

For example, Ixtli’s “Mictecacíhuatl: Lady of the Dead” is based on the Aztec goddess of death. She wears a headdress topped with a bejeweled skull and carries chains of purple crosses — a symbol used to protest femicides in Mexico. 

Femicide, or the intentional killing of women because of their gender, has been a longstanding problem in the country, with 852 victims in 2024, according to UN Women. 

“There are big protests, and nothing is changing,” Ixtli said. “You’re living in a country where you have to always watch your back, because you never know if somebody’s going to come and sexually assault you and then kill you. And it still goes unpunished. It’s a fear that every woman has to live (with) in Mexico.”

In creating her version of Mictecacíhuatl, Ixtil instructed the model to “carry sorrow” for lives taken before their time. 

Though the piece was created with a specific message in mind, Ixtli said one viewer assumed the crosses were a nod to the forced religious conversion of Indigenous peoples by Spanish colonizers. 

Ixtli’s messaging is subtle enough that it often flies under the radar. 

For example, Ixtli placed a hummingbird — which has significance in many Indigenous cultures — on the torch of her version of Lady Liberty. She also intentionally chose a model with Dominican and Puerto Rican heritage.

“In America, there’s all colors, all shapes. Lady Liberty should also represent that,” she said.

In this way, Ixtli reinterprets iconic women from folklore and mythology.

Her “Nymph,” painted in teal body paint and covered in flowers, satirizes the societal expectation that women be gentle and beautiful — seen, not heard. 

Meanwhile, her “Medusa,” wearing a headdress of snakes, pulls from Greek myth to comment on the demonization of women for their sexuality. 

For her “Lilith,” Ixtli turned the model into an actual demon, with hellfire red skin and pitch black wings. Ixtli based the character on Biblical Adam’s first wife from Jewish folklore, who was kicked out of the Garden of Eden for refusing to be subservient to her husband. 

Ixtli chose bodybuilder Cris Gutierrez to bring Lilith to life.

“I want(ed) someone that is going to break the standards of beauty. She’s beautiful, but she’s strong. She’s so muscley,” Ixtli said. “She says some guys are intimidated by her. So, I said, ‘That’s what I need.’”

Ixtli is always grateful to her models for enduring the long hours of applying the makeup and wearing heavy costumes. 

“I feel like they’re gonna be like, ‘You know what? I never want to do this again!’ They end up saying, ‘That was so much fun. Whenever you need, call me. I’ll model for you,’” she said. “The way that they transform, even the way they carry themselves, changes.”

Ixtli, too, has been transformed by her work.

“I feel like I did save myself, but I became something else. I became a lot more daring. My fear is there, but it doesn’t take over. I question a lot of the things that I do, but I still do them. Before, it would just stop me,” she said. 

Receiving a Delaware Division of the Arts fellowship this year bolstered Ixtli’s self-confidence even more. She opened her own studio in April, where you’ll find her whenever she isn’t roaming the aisles of the hardware store, trying to suss out how to bring her next goddess to life.

Ixtli’s motto is, “Art saves lives.”

“It might save the artist, and sometimes, it might save the spectator,” she said. “But it always saves somebody.”

The post Dayesla Ixtli uses a living canvas to revive, reinterpret mythic women appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The Department of Homeland Security has planned a surge of immigrant detentions, leaving some parents living in Delaware with the uncertainty of where their American-born children will be placed should they be deported. If they choose to leave them here, they could enter an already strained foster care system.

For Julienne, a Haitian mother living in Seaford, fears about being deported are not centered around her own future, but that of her 6-year-old son, Junior. 

The mother of four has been living in Seaford since 2023, but anxiety about what would happen to her children if she gets deported has only grown stronger since her humanitarian parole program — which allowed her to legally live in the U.S. — ended last year.

“My main concern is the kids and what’s going to happen to them,” Julienne said in Haitian Creole. “I’m the mom, I have to take care of them.”

Junior is the only one of Julienne’s four children currently living in the U.S. He holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and Haiti, but Julienne said she does not want Junior to return to her home country.

The Caribbean island country, which has been wracked by gang violence, civil war and food scarcity for several years, is not a safe or prosperous place to raise a young child, she said. More than half of Haiti’s 12 million people are experiencing “acute food insecurity,” or the sudden lack of food that puts their lives at risk, according to the United Nations.

Julienne already worries about her other three older children who currently live on the island.

But should Julienne be deported, a fear that grows with the Trump administration’s renewed promises to increase immigration enforcement in states like Delaware, options for Junior’s care are slim. His father travels frequently for work, and Julienne’s family members in Seaford are already strapped with other caretaking responsibilities, she said.

She fears Junior would end up in the foster care system. And she is not alone. 

Immigration lawyers and experts working in Delaware’s foster care system said uncertainty and fear is on the rise among Delaware’s undocumented immigrants over what will happen to their U.S.-born children should they be deported. 

The answer, experts said, is complicated.

What happens to a child if their parent is deported? 

When a parent gets deported, there are two main options for the child’s future care, said Emily Houde, supervising attorney for Community Legal Aid Society Inc.’s (CLASI) immigration unit.

If children are present when Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains a parent, Houde said, ICE agents are supposed to coordinate with state officials for the children to be placed with a proper caregiver, whether that be a nearby relative or into the foster care system.

But many parents do not have anyone else who can take care of their children, Houde said,  opening the possibility of the state stepping in.

But ICE processes, however, are not foolproof. 

If no children are present when ICE detains a parent, agents do not necessarily have the duty to ask the person being detained if they have kids, Houde said.

That means the Department of Services for Children, Youth & Their Families (DSCYF), the Delaware agency responsible for administering foster care services, may not know a child has been left behind if no one reports or alerts the agency, Houde said.

Even after children of deported parents are under DSCYF’s care, the reunification process can be a long and arduous one. 

“It can be really complicated depending on the individual circumstances of these cases,” Houde said. “How long they’ve [been] separated, if they ever can get back [to the U.S.], or eventually, if the parent sends for them from abroad to join them.”

The situation is further complicated, one advocate said, by a lack of accurate data.

Maria Theresa Beauchamp Balan, co-founder of advocacy organization Network Delaware, said she is concerned Delaware does not adequately track children affected by immigration-related family separation or foster care placement.

Federal data showed a 49% increase in immigration enforcement-related foster care entries in 2025, but that number is likely an undercount.

How are foster care providers preparing?

​Sarah Azevedo, director of the Division of Family Services, the arm of DSCYF responsible for administering foster care services, said the agency does not ask legal status when providing services, nor does it report families to ICE. 

DSCYF’s main mission, she said, is to be able to give children a stable home.

Any child who is currently in foster care is under the custody of the state of Delaware, Azevedo added, and is therefore not at risk of being deported themselves.

DSCYF’s current main concerns are overcoming a shortage of foster parents and difficulties in placing children with high needs in homes with adequate support.

ChaTanya Lankford, executive director of multi-state foster care service provider Pressley Ridge, echoed these challenges. She said her organization has seen an influx of referrals for children from families impacted by immigration laws and changes.

Fear of the legal and immigration systems may discourage people in small or shrinking communities from identifying themselves as kinship caregivers, Lankford said, particularly if they fear becoming vulnerable themselves. 

In Delaware, Azevedo said it is DSCYF’s policy to look for caregivers that children may be familiar with before resorting to a foster home.

“It’s still a traumatic experience for a child to have to live with someone who is not their own family,” Azevedo said. 

Delaware has approximately 400 children in foster or kinship care placements as of this year, Azevedo said, a lower number than in many other jurisdictions across the United States.

How can immigrant parents prepare?

Houde, the CLASI attorney, said Delaware does not have a standby guardianship process that specifically allows parents to designate a caregiver in anticipation of immigration detention. 

Parents can instead establish a childcare power of attorney to authorize another adult to care for their children, she said.

Families can prepare a notarized document naming a trusted adult and providing information about the child, such as medications, allergies, school information and their Social Security number.

This type of document is temporary, Houde said, and it does not provide full legal authority. It may cover a short amount of time until the new caretaker goes to family court to file for legal guardianship of the child, which can offer the child a long-term solution.

Azevedo, from the Division of Family Services, similarly said she encourages families to create informal caretaking plans such as identifying specific relatives or friends to ensure children are not left alone if parents are detained.

With the concern of family separation remaining high, Houde said CLASI’s outreach focused on family preparedness for Hispanic and Haitian communities has increased.

In the meantime, Julienne’s future remains unclear. She said she tries not to let her fear for her son’s future overtake her daily life, but it has become a constant presence in her mind. 

“At this point, you don’t know the future,” Julienne said. “Anything can happen, and it’s very, very hard.”

The post Delaware immigrant parents face uncertainty amid ongoing deportations appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

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 you will find information about the most important or interesting public meetings happening in Delaware this week. 

• Hospital cost review board to discuss charity care   
• State opioid commission to review grants for approval
• Wilmington to host an early season budget town hall
• Sussex County to consider a slate of new solar fields
• Harrington to discuss a data center ban

Will hospitals become more charitable? 

Delaware’s controversial hospital oversight board will meet Tuesday morning to discuss a new law that goes into effect early next year, compelling hospitals to widen the net of patients eligible for free or discounted care. 

The Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board is set to discuss regulations that will guide how hospitals will be held accountable for the new codified standards in the years to come. The law requires hospitals to expand eligibility for free and discounted care, usually called charity care.

In order to qualify for their tax-exempt nonprofit status, hospitals must offer a “community benefit,” according to the IRS. Historically, that benefit has been charity care.

Earlier this month, financial leaders from Delaware’s hospital systems flooded a small government meeting room to voice concerns with the drafted regulations. 

The regulations are also being crafted with input from the state’s hospital lobbying group, the Delaware Healthcare Association, which expressed support for the legislation but asked state leaders to target other healthcare sectors that also earn money from patients, such as insurers and pharmaceutical companies.

📍 The Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board is set to meet at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at the Herman M. Holloway Sr. Campus – DHSS Chapel, located at 1901 N. Dupont Highway in New Castle. More information, including about virtual attendance, can be found here.

State to approve new opioid dollars 

The Delaware commission charged with appropriating dollars secured from state settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors will meet Monday to review grant applications submitted by local governments and nonprofits. 

The meeting comes a year after lawmakers reformed how the commission grants dollars to organizations. Those reforms followed reports of mismanagement and potential fraud within the program that emerged the previous year. 

The Delaware Opioid Settlement Commission is expected to receive $250 million from opioid settlements through 2038. 

Spotlight Delaware previously reported that Delaware has the only state government that directly distributes money from opioid settlements to various organizations, rather than leaving it up to counties, cities, and towns.  

📍 The Delaware Opioid Settlement Commission will meet Monday from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Springer Building, located at 203 Mitchell Lane, in New Castle. For information about virtual attendance and other meeting details, click here.

Wilmington to get a head start on its budget 

The Wilmington City Council on Tuesday will host its first budget town hall as part of an early start to next year’s budget negotiations. 

Last week, the council announced plans to hold four town halls covering the city’s eight districts, giving residents an opportunity to learn about the budget process, discuss financial priorities or concerns and raise questions.

The town halls come after a budget season earlier this year that was marked by debate between the mayor and City Council over how to address housing needs in the city. The city did not hold similar public meetings early in the process last year.

📍 Wilmington’s first-of-four budget town halls is scheduled for Tuesday from 6 to 7 p.m. at the NOMA Library, located at 3905 N. Market St. in Wilmington. For more information, click here.

Solar fields in Sussex County 

The Sussex County Council on Tuesday will consider plans for four solar fields – two in Seaford, one in Laurel and one in Delmar. Together they would cover almost 170 acres of farmland, equal to over 100 football fields. 

They would also have the capacity to produce 11 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 9,000 homes. 

The proposals come as Gov. Matt Meyer has encouraged solar development as a way to produce more power in the state. 

Earlier this year, he fast-tracked permits for some solar projects. He also signed a bill that guarantees power bill discounts for those who sign up for community solar projects.  

At the same time, some residents feel the arrays are covering too much farmland and could harm local ecosystems.  

The county’s Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval for all the proposals. 

📍 The Sussex County Council will meet Tuesday at 1 p.m. at the Sussex County Administrative Office Building, located at 2 The Circle in Georgetown. The public hearings for the solar projects will begin at 1:30 p.m. For additional details, including information about virtual attendance, click here. 

Harrington considers data center ban

Harrington on Monday will do a first reading of an ordinance that would ban any data center projects within its borders. 

The city council recently rejected a proposal to build a data center on the site of a former cold storage warehouse. Residents packed into the meeting room for the vote, overwhelmingly in opposition to the plan.  

That opposition came despite the developer behind the proposal offering the city of about 4,000 people contributions totaling $1 million. 

The council will hold its official hearing for the ordinance at a later date, but Monday’s meeting will be the first time the ordinance will be publicly discussed. 

📍 Harrington City Council will meet Monday at 6 p.m. at the Harrington Public Library, located at 101 Little Mastens Corner Road. There does not appear to be a virtual option for attending the meeting. For additional information, click here.

Delaware port board intervening in lawsuit

The state board charged with overseeing the Port of Wilmington will meet Monday to discuss several items related to the politically resonant facility, including litigation challenging its expansion in Edgemoor.

On the agenda for the meeting is the reading onto the record of the board’s authorization “to intervene in litigation.”

The resolution pertains to a federal lawsuit filed by the Holt family — owners of competing port facilities in Philadelphia and New Jersey — that challenges the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to grant permits to Delaware for construction of a $669 million container terminal at Edgemoor.

Last month, the Holts lost a parallel lawsuit in Delaware court challenging state permits needed by the facility.

📍 The Diamond State Port Corporation board of directors is scheduled to meet Monday from 9 to 11 a.m. at the state’s Buena Vista building, located at 661 S. DuPont Highway, near New Castle. For details about virtual attendance, click here.

The post Get Involved: Hospital costs, Harrington data center ban, solar in Sussex, more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Two-thirds of population face crisis levels of food insecurity and 200,000 people are in danger of famine

This winter is likely to deepen hunger for Palestinians in Gaza, after sweeping aid cuts forced the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to end support for more than half a million people each month, the agency’s director for Palestine said.

More than a year after a Trump-brokered ceasefire came into force, promised reconstruction has not begun, there are few jobs and the vast majority in Gaza still rely on aid to eat.

Shawn Oliver, a New Bedford City Councilor and Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, suspended his campaign after he was arrested early Sunday morning.

Early in his tenure as Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton issued a statement commemorating what he believed was a national tragedy.

“It’s impossible to fill the void of more than 50 million missing human beings,” he said in 2016. He was marking the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that protected abortion rights — and had long stood in the way of efforts to ban terminations in early pregnancy, when most abortions occur.

Paxton spent the years that followed testing Roe’s limits and ultimately prevailed where others had failed: In 2021, he defended a near-total abortion ban that Texas legislators had designed to evade conventional legal challenges. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed it to take effect while Roe remained in force.

After the justices overturned Roe the following year, Paxton kept pushing, pursuing new ways to extend the reach of Texas’ restrictions. He prevailed against the Biden administration, picked fights with states that protect abortion access and pioneered strategies that his peers later adopted or expanded.

While Paxton’s tenure as attorney general has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum for his personal scandals and alleged misuse of the office, detractors and allies alike agree that his signal achievement as the state’s top legal official has been advancing restrictions on abortion.

A close look at his record shows a clear pattern in his successes: He relentlessly tests the limits of the law and employs novel legal strategies to advance his goals.

Paxton’s national role as an anti-abortion warrior would change if he wins his U.S. Senate race. As Texas attorney general, he has been able to act largely on his own authority. If he prevails in November, he would become one of 100 senators in a chamber where most legislation needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

But allies who have witnessed his victories see an opening.

“He’ll have the ability to use some of the laws that he’s defended in Texas as influence to draft legislation in the U.S. Senate,” said Mary Elizabeth Castle, director of government relations at Texas Values, a Christian advocacy group that supports a national abortion ban.

Legal experts and advocates on both sides expect he could join colleagues who are pressuring the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the abortion drug mifepristone.

Anti-abortion activists at the state and federal level are also trying to secure legal rights for fetuses, which could have implications for reproductive care like birth control and in vitro fertilization. Paxton, who has called himself a strong supporter of IVF, recently said he was open to restrictions intended to prevent the loss of fertilized eggs.

His litigation has also raised questions that experts expect the Supreme Court to confront, including whether a federal law, which mandates hospitals provide stabilizing care to patients having an emergency, overrides state abortion bans; whether to treat a fetus as a separate patient that has its own emergency care rights; and how far states can go in pursuing out-of-state doctors who prescribe abortion medication to patients in states where it’s banned.

During the current race, abortion has played a far smaller role than questions about Paxton’s ethics. His Democratic opponent, James Talarico, has said that he supports restoring a federal right to abortion and that his Christian faith calls for an end to “extreme” laws that Paxton has defended and that have forced women to flee the state for emergency abortion care.

Lately, Paxton has said little about abortion — an issue on which he has defended restrictions more stringent than many Texans say they want.

But those who have watched Paxton extend the reach of Texas law beyond its borders are paying close attention to his Senate bid.

Dr. Jennifer Villavicencio, an abortion provider, said she has felt compelled to move her family twice to states with strong laws shielding doctors from out-of-state litigation, partly out of concern that Paxton is creating a blueprint for targeting providers like her.

“It’s very disheartening and scary to think that it’s maybe coming to the U.S. Senate,” she said.

Paxton successfully defended a near-total abortion ban before Roe v. Wade was struck down.

When Paxton became Texas attorney general in 2015, there was no ambiguity about where he stood on abortion.

Raised by an anti-abortion activist, he married his sweetheart from a Christian college, who spoke proudly about the fact that she was adopted, saying her birth mother “chose life.” She campaigned for Paxton, but he had his own bona fides. A law he’d co-sponsored as a state senator banned almost all abortions after 20 weeks.

Similar 20-week bans had taken root across the country as decades of court rulings chipped away at Roe, but no state had managed to enforce a ban as early as six weeks. More than a dozen tried, passing laws that prohibited abortion when cardiac activity could be detected. One after another, they were blocked by judges.

Then, in 2021, a Texas lawyer named Jonathan Mitchell worked with legislators to craft a law that would withstand similar challenges. Instead of having state officials enforce their “heartbeat law,” the new act, referred to as Senate Bill 8, allowed citizens to sue physicians they suspected were providing abortions. The law offered up to $10,000 if they won.

When abortion providers and President Joe Biden’s administration separately challenged the law in federal court, Paxton’s office argued that state officials couldn’t be ordered to stop enforcing it because they had no power to do so in the first place. Only private citizens could.

“Because the executive officials are expressly prohibited from enforcing SB 8,” his office wrote to the Supreme Court, “there is nothing for a federal court to enjoin.”

The Supreme Court agreed that Paxton couldn’t be sued because “the petitioners have not identified any enforcement authority the attorney general possesses in connection with S. B. 8 that a federal court might enjoin him from exercising.”

The law remained in effect, becoming the first enforceable six-week ban under Roe.

Legislators in Idaho and Oklahoma subsequently passed similar laws.

For Dr. Sam Dickman, who worked at a San Antonio Planned Parenthood, the implications were clear: “I was going to need to either entirely change the type of medicine I was providing or leave the state,” he said. He opted for the latter, moving to Montana, where abortion is legal until viability, or roughly 24 weeks.

Days after the Texas ban took effect, Josseli Barnica arrived at a Houston hospital in the midst of a miscarriage. She was 17 weeks pregnant and her fetus’s head was pressed up against her dilated cervix. Because the situation put her at high risk of developing an infection, medical experts said doctors should have offered to speed up delivery or empty her uterus; the fetus was not viable, and losing the pregnancy was inevitable.

But the fetus’s heart was still beating.

Barnica relayed to her husband what she said her medical providers had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, Barnica waited, her uterus exposed to bacteria.

She died days later of sepsis. Medical experts told ProPublica her doctors did not follow the proper standard of care and that Barnica’s death was preventable.

In a statement, HCA Healthcare, the hospital chain that treated her, said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment.

Paxton blocked federal guidance for emergency abortion care, with consequences far beyond Texas.

When the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion on June 24, 2022, Paxton dismissed his staff at noon to celebrate. He would later designate the date as a paid office holiday, Sanctity of Life Day.

The Texas Legislature had prepared for the occasion, passing a law that went into effect shortly after the overturning of Roe. The ban threatened doctors with up to 99 years in prison if they performed an abortion. But soon came what Paxton framed as a federal attempt to thwart the state law.

The Biden administration issued a memo to doctors in states with abortion bans saying that a federal emergency care law protected their medical judgment, “regardless of the restrictions in the state.”

The federal Health and Human Services secretary at the time said doctors had an obligation to follow the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, better known as EMTALA. The law requires hospitals that accept federal funding to screen and stabilize every patient who arrives.

For those with complications such as severe preeclampsia, a potentially fatal, pregnancy-related blood pressure disorder, stabilizing a patient might require performing an abortion, even if the state forbids it, the guidance said. “The physician must provide that treatment,” it said, bolding the word “must.”

Paxton sued, accusing the administration of an attempt to use federal law “to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

He argued EMTALA was created to make sure hospitals didn’t dump uninsured patients back on the street without treatment, not to override state laws. He took the argument a step further, suggesting that under EMTALA, doctors might need to consider “the life of the unborn child.”

The argument was novel, six legal experts told ProPublica.

“He’s basically suing the federal government to protect Texas’ right to force pregnant women to not get abortions, even when their health is threatened,” said Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s radical.’”

Medical groups warned patients would die.

But a federal judge sided with Paxton that August, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision in January 2024.

The ruling did more than keep the administration from enforcing its EMTALA interpretation in Texas.

It barred the federal government from pursuing cases against members of two anti-abortion medical organizations that had joined Paxton’s suit as plaintiffs, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations. This effectively exempted them from having to follow the federal guidance, regardless of where they worked.

It also served as immediate litigation fodder for another state fighting to enforce its own abortion ban.

Idaho had not had the same success in court as Texas. After the Biden administration sued, arguing the state’s ban conflicted with EMTALA, Idaho lost in lower and appellate courts, leaving its ban effectively frozen in emergency cases, with doctors instructed to follow the federal guidance.

But Paxton’s 5th Circuit win on Jan. 2, 2024, gave Idaho’s ban a lifeline. The ruling conflicted with the 9th Circuit’s decision in Idaho, creating the kind of disagreement between federal appeals courts that the Supreme Court often steps in to resolve.

The following day, attorneys representing Idaho asked the high court to do just that, saying Paxton’s success showed they were “likely to prevail.” In the meantime, they asked the court to unfreeze the ban.

On Jan. 5, the Supreme Court allowed Idaho to fully enforce its ban while the case proceeded.

Emergency doctors began hesitating over when they could legally provide abortions, Dr. Jim Souza, chief physician at St. Luke’s Health System, said on a press call at the time, according to NPR. “Is she septic enough for me to do this abortion and not risk going to jail and losing my license?”

In the three months that followed, St. Luke’s, the state’s largest hospital system, said it had to airlift six patients out of the state for abortions.

In Texas, ProPublica has documented the consequences for women experiencing pregnancy emergencies.

When Tierra Walker sought care later that year in San Antonio, she developed preeclampsia and ultimately died from it, ProPublica previously reported. None of the 90 physicians involved in her care offered her the option of terminating her pregnancy, even after she asked if doing so might keep her safe.

Her family sued Paxton in September, along with state medical officials and several healthcare providers, alleging that Texas’ abortion restrictions and the care Walker received led to her death. Paxton has not responded to the suit and did not respond to a request seeking comment.

ProPublica has identified at least two other pregnant Texas women who died without what experts said was appropriate emergency care. Paxton has not publicly commented on any of their deaths and did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about them. Our analysis also found worsening outcomes across the state for patients experiencing pregnancy complications.

The reach of Paxton’s legal victory may not end there.

The Supreme Court still hasn’t resolved the conflict between the circuit rulings. It declined to do so in the Idaho case, and after President Donald Trump took office, his administration dropped the suit and rescinded the EMTALA guidance.

But legal experts told ProPublica the Supreme Court has yet to resolve core questions that Paxton’s litigation raised: whether EMTALA preempts state abortion laws and whether a fetus also has a right to emergency treatment that could conflict with the mother’s interests in cases where her health is at risk.

To guard against future rulings, a reproductive rights advocacy group called All* Above All is pushing state-level legislation to safeguard emergency care. “We’re seeing the chaos right now and the confusion,” said its president, Nourbese Flint.

Paxton tested expansive new ways to pursue abortion providers. Other states are following his lead.

On Dec. 7, 2023, a state judge in Austin issued a ruling that Paxton immediately moved to stop.

A 31-year-old mother named Kate Cox wanted permission to get an abortion. She was 20 weeks pregnant and carrying a fetus diagnosed with trisomy 18, a genetic condition that kills the vast majority of babies born with it.

Texas doesn’t allow abortions for fatal fetal anomalies, but Cox’s doctor argued that if she was forced to give birth, it could imperil her ability to get pregnant again. It was also medically risky: Cox had already had two children by cesarean section, and the chances of complications increase with each procedure.

The day a Travis County district court judge granted her request, Paxton took a step legal experts told ProPublica they had not seen another state attorney general take:

He sent letters to three hospitals where Cox’s doctor had admitting privileges, threatening legal action if the doctor performed the abortion a judge said she could have. The court order, he wrote, did not insulate hospitals, doctors or anyone else from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws.

At the same time, he appealed the case to the Texas Supreme Court, saying that Cox did not face the kind of threat to her life that fell under the law’s exception. If legislators had wanted to write an exception for fatal fetal anomalies, he said, they would have done so.

“The Texas Legislature did not intend for courts to become revolving doors of permission slips to obtain abortions,” he said.

The Texas Supreme Court agreed with Paxton and reversed the lower court’s ruling. By that time, Cox had sought an abortion out of state.

“It was incredibly scary,” Cox told ProPublica. “We saw in my case that Texas will go after doctors.”

Paxton was also the first — and, so far, the only — attorney general to criminally prosecute a provider in his state for violating an abortion ban.

According to court documents, investigators got an anonymous tip alleging that abortions were being performed at a medical clinic that catered to low-income, Spanish-speaking patients, managed by Maria Rojas, a licensed midwife.

Rojas was arrested and charged with practicing medicine without a license and violating the state’s abortion ban. Paxton also moved to temporarily shut down the clinic and others she ran while the case progressed through court. Months after her arrest, Paxton announced he had arrested and indicted eight other clinic staffers for practicing medicine without a license.

Rojas has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Her attorneys have accused Paxton’s office of a shoddy investigation and argued that at least one case prosecutors were treating as an abortion was actually the management of a patient’s miscarriage.

A trial has not yet been scheduled, but an appeals court this summer overturned the order shuttering the clinics, finding the state had not presented sufficient admissible evidence to justify a temporary injunction. Paxton said he is appealing the ruling. The court did not rule on whether Rojas had actually performed illegal abortions.

Paxton has not stopped at the state border in his pursuit of doctors.

In December 2024, he sued Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York-based physician, accusing her of violating multiple Texas laws when she treated a patient via telehealth who lived in Plano, a suburb north of Dallas, and prescribed her abortion medication.

Because the patient was based in Texas, he argued, Carpenter was subject to laws there that banned abortion and required a license to practice in the state.

Carpenter didn’t respond to the suit, so Paxton won by default. But Texas was unable to collect on more than $100,000 in civil fines and court fees that resulted; a New York county clerk refused to register the judgment, invoking a “shield law” that protects providers of abortion care that is legal in New York from certain out-of-state investigations, prosecutions and judgments. At least 22 states have passed shield laws since Roe was overturned, and New York’s is among the strongest. Carpenter did not respond to a request seeking comment and has not publicly responded to the case.

A New York judge dismissed Paxton’s case seeking to enforce the judgment, but Paxton didn’t give up, filing two more civil suits this year against practitioners and organizations in Delaware and California that mail abortion medication to Texas. 

Three other state attorneys general have now expanded on the strategy. Last month, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill — who brought criminal charges against Carpenter after Paxton sued her (and has faced similar obstacles in New York) — joined the attorneys general of Arkansas and Alabama in filing a sweeping federal civil suit against out-of-state providers of abortion pills. The case names some of the same providers Paxton pursued; they have challenged the suits. The three attorneys general filed a separate action directly with the Supreme Court asking it to strike down shield laws in New York, Massachusetts and California. 

Paxton has moved beyond doctors to target other entities that help patients obtain abortions. Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and professor of law at University of California, Davis, called him “an innovator in terms of broadening the network of people who were seen as culprits or aiders or abettors.”

He sent cease-and-desist letters to organizations that ship abortion medication into Texas; the attorney general of Alabama subsequently used similar tactics. And Paxton sued cities in his state to stop them from disbursing funds to help women travel for abortions — a move the Legislature followed with a law banning such funding.

Following his legal victory against the city of San Antonio early this year, in which it was forced to end the $100,000 program, Paxton made a vow:

“I will always do everything in my power to prevent radicals from manipulating the system to murder innocent babies.”

The post Ken Paxton’s Anti-Abortion Influence Already Extended Beyond Texas. He Could Take It Further in the Senate. appeared first on ProPublica.

Third-quarter GDP up by 4.5% compared with last year as industrial output is buoyed by electronics demand

Roaring exports lifted China’s economic growth in the third quarter of this year, with factory output growing much faster than consumer spending.

China’s GDP grew by 4.5% year-on-year between July and September, the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported on Monday. The figures were better than economists had expected and up from the second quarter’s growth rate of 4.3%.

Hamptons says figure of 56% is highest in at least a decade, with mortgage rates rising since start of Iran war

A majority of first-time UK buyers now pay more towards their monthly mortgage bills than they used to pay in rent, the estate agent Hamptons has found.

Last month 56% of first-time buyers said their monthly mortgage bills exceeded their previous rent, the highest proportion in at least a decade, according to Hamptons. They paid £39 more on average.

Deputy mayor of Saijo died after becoming trapped under float, days after two similar incidents elsewhere

There is mounting concern over the safety of Japan’s traditional festivals after the death of a senior local official who was reportedly crushed beneath a float at the weekend, days after two men died in similar incidents in another part of the country.

Akihiro Nabae, the deputy mayor of Saijo, in western Japan, was carrying a giant float with other participants in a festival on Saturday when he became trapped beneath the structure, Agence France-Presse reported. Nabae, 62, was taken to hospital and later pronounced dead, local media said, adding that no one else was injured.

Washington, DC — President Donald Trump defended his decision to waive newly approved sanctions and tariffs on Russia, arguing the move is intended to keep Moscow engaged in negotiations aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.

Trump said imposing the measures immediately could drive Russia away from talks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration wants up to 60 days to evaluate the economic effects of the sanctions before deciding whether to restore them.

The decision has drawn unusually sharp criticism from Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis called the waiver “beyond irresponsible,” while Rep. Michael McCaul urged Trump to reverse course and return to stronger economic pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The sanctions were included in legislation Trump signed in September and were designed to punish Russia and countries that continue purchasing Russian energy.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also criticized the waiver, warning that easing economic pressure provides Moscow additional resources while Russian forces continue attacking Ukraine. He said the decision “definitely helps only the Russians.”

Trump has separately struck a deal allowing increased Russian diesel exports, another move criticized by Republican lawmakers who argue that energy revenue could help finance Russia’s war effort.

The administration maintains that temporary economic concessions could provide incentives for Moscow to remain at the negotiating table.

Sources:

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Trump Says Russia Sanctions Pause Protects Negotiations as GOP Backlash Grows appeared first on News Facts Network.

Ukrainian president accuses Washington of ‘denial of reality’ in ongoing row with Trump over apparent support for Moscow

Ukraine did not receive a warning from the US about an impending Russian missile attack on Sunday evening, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, reviving concerns that Washington is withholding intelligence in order to bully Kyiv into capitulating to Moscow.

Yuri Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force, said on television on Monday morning that Ukraine had not received a warning before a Russian missile barrage hit power plants in Kyiv at about 11pm. Earlier, a Ukrainian government official had told the Guardian the US had not warned the capital about the impending missile strike.

The reunion between one of the best players of his generation and the team he helped make an NBA champion is an opportunity to change narratives

When Kawhi Leonard became a Toronto Raptor for the first time in the summer of 2018, he looked shellshocked. “There’s just more questions you have to ask me in order for me to tell you about myself,” he said, introducing himself to an organization and city he reportedly had no interest in joining.

Leonard had fallen out with his former team, the San Antonio Spurs – one of the most respected franchises in professional sports – due to differences in opinion about an injury that had limited him to just nine games in the 2017-18 season. The Los Angeles native had hoped to end up in southern California, but instead the Raptors risked it all by swapping franchise cornerstone DeMar DeRozan for one year of an injured, malcontent Leonard. It worked: Leonard led the Raptors to their maiden championship on the back of a historic playoff run, averaging 30.5 points, 9.1 rebounds, 3.9 assists and 1.7 steals en route. Leonard won his second finals MVP to go alongside the one he had claimed with the Spurs when he helped them to the title in 2014.

Scott Peyton joined the Anglicans after the crime against his son. Then the Catholic church officially expelled him

The Roman Catholic church has upheld the excommunication of a Louisiana deacon who resigned from the clergy after a priest molested his son.

Scott Peyton learned of the decision by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) – the Vatican entity in charge of Catholic clerical discipline – on Friday in a meeting with the bishop of the diocese of Lafayette, J Douglas Deshotel. The DDF cited technical grounds in rejecting Peyton’s appeal, saying he had joined an Anglican congregation, “published [that] fact … on social media” and therefore refused to submit to the Catholic pope, who since May 2025 has been Leo XIV.

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request. 

The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.

Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems. 

In Trump’s second term, his administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. The president’s 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which could necessitate 900 additional layoffs. 

In response, Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into CISA’s ability to do its job and demanded answers as to why federal funds are not being used to support election security as directed by Congress.

Since Trump signed the CISA Act in 2018, the agency has worked with state authorities and voting machine vendors to help protect election infrastructure from cyberattacks. During Trump’s second term, though, CISA has abandoned much of this work. Several state election authorities said the agency provided them no assistance — and no explanation for its absence — during the most critical planning stages for the upcoming midterms.

“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who has worked as a consultant for CISA. In 2025 and through mid-September 2026 — when the bulk of preparations for the election typically would have been completed — “they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”

While Trump has repeatedly warned that America’s elections are vulnerable to hacking, in some cases repeating disproven claims, experts said his administration is undermining the federal government’s role in helping secure them.

Though CISA re-emerged in September with a last-minute security plan for the election, some state officials told ProPublica they fear that what is left of the agency has been compromised by a conspiracy-obsessed presidential administration. In recent months, in reviving debunked theories about the 2020 election, the Trump administration has declassified troves of records, including sensitive material that state officials provided to CISA. Some state authorities said they no longer trusted the administration enough to share information with CISA, a key to the agency’s success in past elections.

“They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship,” said one former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official who now advises state governments on national security. “There’s no fucking way they’re ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.” 

A spokesperson for the White House declined an interview request but defended Trump’s handling of election security in an emailed statement. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections,” said Lauren Bis. 

Bis referred specific questions about CISA’s handling of elections to DHS. DHS and CISA did not respond to interview requests or to a detailed list of questions.

Current and former CISA employees and state election officials describe an agency that has become significantly less equipped to help states fight legitimate cyber threats. State leaders say they have used their own resources to shore up gaps left by CISA, such as paying for sensor technology that can detect unusual activity in election networks. But some services, like intel on foreign actors, can’t be replicated. Some people interviewed said they were worried that Trump and his allies continue to ratchet up rhetoric about voting security, particularly about threats to voting machines. Officials in one large voting jurisdiction said they have met privately with machine vendors to come up with a contingency plan if the federal government seizes their machines or declares them unusable.

“I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.”

Defending elections from hackers wasn’t always part of DHS’s remit.

Throughout the mid-1990s and 2000s, a series of cyberattacks rocked the federal government, demonstrating the emerging threat. In 2007, hackers broke into the Pentagon and stole terabytes of sensitive data. The digital heist, by an unknown foreign adversary, was so damaging that one intelligence leader later described it as an “espionage Pearl Harbor.”

Under George W. Bush, DHS underwent a reorganization to more effectively combat terrorism and respond to disasters like Hurricane Katrina. The department dedicated resources under an office called the National Protection and Programs Directorate to help fortify advanced cyber defense systems and important infrastructure. The office’s work ranged from helping secure events like the Super Bowl to protecting chemical plants to issuing cybersecurity warnings to the private sector and the public. In 2018, Trump signed a bill making the office a stand-alone agency, allowing for more federal funding and transforming it into, essentially, the ultimate tech support desk for anything DHS designated “critical infrastructure.” The bill renamed the agency CISA.

Though Trump helped create CISA, he didn’t much appreciate the work the agency did under its old name to expose the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Russian agents had unleashed a massive disinformation campaign, with a Kremlin-backed troll farm creating thousands of social media accounts posing as Americans and promoting Trump, according to bipartisan reports from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released before the 2020 election. A dozen Russian military agents were indicted for what the Justice Department described as “a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.”

Trump publicly downplayed this interference, but DHS leadership saw the Russia attack as an escalation. In January 2017, before Trump took office, DHS upgraded America’s elections to the status of critical infrastructure. This placed the polls and all voting technology used in federal elections under the watch of what would soon become CISA. 

To carry out this function, CISA needed help. But states and voting machine vendors were wary about sharing data on weaknesses in voting systems, fearing it could be exploited if certain details were to become public. State officials were also reluctant to cede any role in election preparation to the federal government.

Gradually, though, CISA and state election officials negotiated a fragile trust. At its center was a commitment: The sensitive information states and vendors shared with CISA would be kept confidential.

“It took years and years of building trust, of talking to election officials, of hiring people with elections experience who could be validators for the work that CISA wanted to do, before they finally built strong working relationships,” said Derek Tisler, who specializes in election security as counsel for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan institute based out of New York University School of Law.

Under Director Chris Krebs, CISA hosted penetration testing in which its agents would try to hack into a state’s system to locate weaknesses that could then be patched, along with tabletop exercises simulating a series of potential catastrophes around elections. CISA also offered regular secret-level briefings to secretaries of state to share federal intelligence. And CISA paid for sensor technology that looked for potential malicious online activity on election networks, notifying officials about emerging threats.

“The staffing was there, the expertise was there, the visibility was there, the funding was there,” Macias said.

The consortium shared data as run of the mill as spambots as well as more serious threats. If Virginia caught unusual activity in its system, it could let other states know to be vigilant. 

While CISA had prepared for attacks from the Chinese and Russian governments, or lone wolf hackers, few there had expected the threat to elections would come from inside the White House. But when Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden in 2020, claiming the vote had been rigged, CISA became a key component of the guardrails that ultimately led to the election results being certified.

The agency, in a statement co-signed by secretaries of state and voting machine vendors, vouched for the election’s integrity, calling it “the most secure in American history.” When Krebs publicly rebutted claims amplified by the White House as “unsubstantiated” or “technically incoherent,” Trump fired him over Twitter.

As Congress prepared to vote on certifying the election results, it was members of CISA, along with the FBI, who convinced then-Attorney General Bill Barr that the conspiracy theories embraced by the president could be explained by human error, not systemic fraud or hacking.

When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration immediately started to dismantle CISA. The administrative notices were sent out just a couple of weeks after the inauguration and included the team in charge of dispelling disinformation.

For the employees under the DOGE microscope, work became impossible, said one former senior CISA employee. “Those groups couldn’t even order a pizza.” 

DOGE laid off people critical to the agency’s election work, including those who’d worked closely with states. The Trump administration cut funding for the technology that monitored web and election servers, blinding the federal government to breaches it had detected.

When it came time for states to prepare for the 2026 midterms, CISA had disappeared.

On the evening of July 16, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, dozens of election officials and their staffs gathered for a reception near Mount Rushmore. It was the third night of an annual conference for secretaries of state, drawing participants from red and blue states. They’d spent the week discussing state voter roll maintenance and voter ID — issues that at times made for disagreements. 

At about 8 p.m., a wave of discomfort swept through the crowd, visible on attendees’ faces as they glanced frequently at their phones, according to people at the event. Any minute now, Trump was going to address the nation on election security. Some at the reception worried he would declare a national emergency, as his allies had urged him to do months earlier, and use it as a pretext to direct the government to seize voting machines.

Then reports on the speech began rolling in, and the mood shifted. The claims Trump was making were unsubstantiated and outlandish. Many had been examined ad nauseam, including by those at the reception, and roundly debunked. The collective anxiety that was palpable moments earlier melted away, as many saw the speech as another attempt to revive disproved theories unlikely to be taken seriously by most voters. 

“Everyone just sort of guffawed and put their phones away and went to the bar,” recalled Quinn Raymond, co-founder of VoteShield, a nonprofit that works with states to help monitor voter registration data, who was at the event. 

Still, if the speech made little impact, records published by the Trump administration to support the president’s claims damaged the already eroding relationship between CISA and state election officials. The material included raw information states had shared with the agency that was supposed to remain private, such as a log of communications from Election Day 2020 detailing activity being monitored in several states. 

“It betrayed the trust of all partners who were willing to share information at the time,” said Geoff Hale, who worked on CISA’s elections team from the agency’s inception until last year. Now he specializes in election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital and civil rights. 

Bis, the White House spokesperson, denied that the Trump administration broke any agreements in releasing the information. “The release of such information is exactly the sort of transparency news organizations should applaud,” she said. Bis also defended Trump’s speech, saying it had been fact-checked “by the agencies whose evidence was released and did not mischaracterize any information.”

Hale and others said the speech was one of several instances demonstrating the Trump administration’s reckless attitude toward sensitive data collected by CISA. Earlier this year, Politico reported that acting CISA Director Madhu Gottumukkala had uploaded records to ChatGPT, even though DHS had barred its employees from using the unsecure program. A CISA spokesperson told Politico that Gottumukkala had been permitted to use the technology for a “short-term and limited” basis.

Last May, an independent journalist named Brian Krebs exposed that CISA published private data, including passwords, cloud keys and other information, on its public GitHub page, in a folder labeled “Private-CISA.” A CISA spokesperson told the journalist there was no indication that sensitive data was compromised. 

Some state election authorities were also alarmed to see the lengths to which the Trump administration went to legitimize the president’s fixation on the 2020 race. 

In fall 2025, Missouri election officials produced a memo stating Andrew McCoy Warner, a Department of Justice official and prominent 2020 election conspiracy theorist, had called several clerks asking for access to voting machines. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, had also led an operation in Puerto Rico to seize election machines. When the private cybersecurity contractor hired to examine the machines, Mojave Research Inc., failed to find evidence supporting claims about 2020, the federal government became “dissastified” with its services and stopped renewing its contract, its CEO later told reporters.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in August that Mojave’s work ceased because it had completed its contract. Testifying before Congress in March, Gabbard said the seizing of voting machines came at the request of an assistant U.S. attorney in Puerto Rico.

“What happened in the second Trump administration is from almost day one — I mean, literally the first two months — they took all that was built up by Trump 1 and just decimated it,” said David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that works with state election authorities. “Election officials lost trust in the federal government.”

It didn’t help that, in his speech, the president mocked CISA’s defense of the 2020 election, calling the statement about it being the most secure in history a “very pat line” concocted as part of a deep-state cover-up. One former career CISA employee described being crestfallen at the Trump administration’s erosion of all they’d accomplished.

“We worked so hard to build that trusted relationship,” said Caitlin Durkovich, former DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection and co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Civira Partners. “I don’t know how you put it back together.”

A few weeks after Trump’s speech, the state election officials gathered once more, this time for a video call with Nick Andersen, who had replaced Gottumukkala as CISA’s acting director.

Though the primaries were already under way, this was the first time many had met Andersen, a former cybersecurity adviser to Trump’s White House who had joined CISA a year earlier. Andersen is also a district representative for the Republican Party in Virginia, according to the party’s website. In March, he gave a speech to the Fairfax GOP chapter titled “Fighting Democrat Redistricting.”

Speaking over video in August, the boyish-faced former Marine Corps engineer announced that DHS was preparing to release a plan on how it would work together with state officials to secure the election, according to five people who were present at the video meeting, some of whom shared notes with ProPublica.

Many on the call were stunned at what they perceived as a lack of understanding of election planning. Early voting for the general election was just around the corner. They had spent over a year preparing for the midterms, and there was no more time for ambitious work.

Some peppered Andersen with questions: Where had CISA been when there was still time to make improvements?

Andersen blamed any lapses or perceived breaches in trust on the federal government shutdown in fall 2025, twirling his pen uncomfortably and sipping from a Monster energy drink.

Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, was blunt about his feelings regarding working with Andersen and CISA, according to several of the people on the call.

“I told him I didn’t trust him,” Fontes recalled in an interview. “I did raise my voice a little bit, because I’m frustrated — very frustrated — that they would have the temerity to come in, clear the entire deck of competent professionals, stop supporting the states, eviscerate the coordination efforts that they had and then suddenly come in and say: ‘Oh, we’re from the federal government. We’re here to help.’”

Indeed, one recently departed CISA official said attempting to do the agency’s typical election work now would be futile. In previous years, CISA had finished almost all its preparations with the states by Labor Day. 

“That ship has sailed,” the official said.  

CISA published its security plan for the 2026 election on Sept. 24. The 13-page document describes how, over the past two years, CISA has “recommitted to its statutory mission and remains resolute in strengthening the security of elections.” 

State officials said their planning will ensure a secure election, even without help from CISA. Yet they and cybersecurity experts worry that Trump will say the election was hacked if Republicans don’t win in November.

The security plan calls for “leveraging collaborative partnerships” with states the agency has abandoned since Trump took office. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said she’d welcome that but was skeptical of the agency’s motivations. 

“For CISA to promise election officials now, at this point in time, that they are going to be a resource for the 2026 election is too little, too late,” she said.

The post This Cybersecurity Agency Is Supposed to Protect U.S. Elections. Officials Fear It’s Been Compromised by Trump. appeared first on ProPublica.

The Trump administration has tied billions in rural health funding for states partly to the policy commitments they make, including ending their certificate of need, or CON, laws governing the construction of new hospitals.

A goal against PSG is proof on the scoresheet of what can be seen on the teamsheet: at long last, Reyna is getting consistent minutes

For an entire four-year cycle, to write about Gio Reyna was to write about his potential – especially the nagging feeling that it was going unfulfilled. Once hyped as possibly the greatest prospect in US men’s history, a series of injuries kept him from simply taking the field, much less making his mark on it.

Since his emergent 2020-21 season, when he logged nearly 2,000 Bundesliga minutes running alongside Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham, and Jadon Sancho, Reyna finished each of the ensuing five seasons without even cresting 630 league minutes. “Rotational” became a generous descriptor for his role at Nottingham Forest on loan, and then last season with Borussia Mönchengladbach. Still, Gregg Berhalter and Mauricio Pochettino kept involving Reyna with the US squad based on that pesky potential – betting that, on his day, he still had the raw talent to do what few compatriots could.

As Ukraine and Russia continue trading strikes, Trump accuses Zelenskyy of not wanting to end the war sparked by Putin's ongoing full-scale invasion.

Charles Kupchan, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, argues that many aspects of Trump's foreign policy are worth keeping and align with changes in the international system. He explains how the next president can marry the good impulses of "America first" with the best of liberal internationalism. 

Ngaire Woods, Dean of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, Claas Mertens, also at Oxford, have written a piece arguing that Europe, despite its attempts at self-sufficiency, remains dependent on an unpredictable United States. The continent needs to address this vulnerability so that it can convince other countries, many of which find themselves similarly vulnerable to great-power coercion, that it is a worthy partner.

"Mozilla reps tell me they've met with Microsoft about their concerns," reports PC Magazine, "but that the company wasn't responsive." "They'll do the minimum the law requires to respect user choice," explains Kush Amlani, Mozilla's counsel overseeing global competition and regulatory work... Mozilla recently marked 100 days since it released an 87-page report detailing the ways in which Microsoft pushes Edge on Windows PCs.... One example is how Windows often displays a "Let's finish setting up your PC" pop-up after an OS update. This screen has an enabled-by-default option to "use recommended browser settings," which makes Edge the default web browser. However, that screen doesn't appear in Europe. European laws now force Microsoft to make Windows more respectful of user choices. For instance, in European countries, the Start menu opens links in your default web browser rather than in Edge, as it does everywhere else. Amlani says Mozilla wants Microsoft to release the European version of Windows to the rest of the world. However, he thinks this will require government action. As he puts it, "Microsoft can do better when it's forced." The last line of the article sums up Mozilla's main point. "No one should have to fight their OS this hard on something as simple as a browser preference."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite recent progress, almost a fifth of air travellers with disabilities are still dissatisfied with their experience

Disabled passengers will have better safeguards when flying, the government has pledged, including protection from damaged wheelchairs and support from trained staff.

A report from an industry-led accessibility group said there was “much more to be done” but progress was being made, a year after a review led by Tanni Grey-Thompson demanded action to improve air travel in response to numerous incidents in which passengers had been left stranded without assistance.

In what is quite a major achievement, Wine has been ported and made to work on OpenBSD.

We have since tested several dozens of 64-bit Windows software, mostly successfully. See screenshots, livestream recordings for example. Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well (requires adding in vkd3d-proton; see README; livestream which looks less fluent than it is due to the on-system recording with ffmpeg).

↫ Thomas Frohwein

The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won’t work. Still, this is a massive milestone for OpenBSD, and makes especially gaming a somewhat viable option on OpenBSD.

What if a regular, normal NetBSD installation is too plebeian for you?

This is a quick overview which attempts to synthesize DW Armstrong’s tutorial on NetBSD encryption with the cgdroot page from the NetBSD wiki in a single MBR partition, divided into multiple disklabel slices to preserve MBR entries.

↫ indigoparadox Web Zone

What if you need this?

Significant changes in this release include some significant binfmt_misc extensions, some group-scheduling work aimed at improving performance on large systems, the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature, working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternative data-stream support in the ntfs3 filesystem, a long list of SMB server improvements, and much more.

↫ “corbet” at LWN.net

It’ll make it way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

I’d become obsessed with appealing to my invisible audience. But since I ditched the app a year ago, my quieter moments have taken on brilliant new meaning

I first downloaded Instagram when I was 17 and became hooked on it the way most people fall in love: slowly, and then all at once. For a long time, I never considered myself a social media addict. I self-righteously refused to download TikTok, declared Snapchat to be for “children”, and posted less regularly on Instagram than half of the people I followed.

As I went through my university years, however, certain changes crept up on me. I began to swap reading – or essay-writing – for hours spent curating new posts. On my way home from lectures (or later, from my work as a journalist), I would spend ages trying to take the artsiest, most perfect picture of that evening’s sunset for my story – as if the people who followed me were eagerly awaiting yet another photo of one of the Earth’s rotations. What usually followed was a night of reloading my feed to see how many people had reacted to my post – or worse, hadn’t reacted at all.

In today’s newsletter: Violent riots and looting have dominated the headlines, but the unrest gripping the country and beyond reflects deeper public anger over everyday issues

Good morning. I bet your weekend was better than Emmanuel Macron’s. On Friday, the evening before mass protests that were planned across France, he attended a Céline Dion concert in Paris with his wife, Brigitte, prompting comparisons to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. On Sunday evening, he was forced to give a televised speech condemning the “unbridled violence” and riots that erupted in French cities over the weekend.

The rioters that burned makeshift barricades of bicycles in Paris, destroyed the steeple of Limoges’ town hall and set fire to Lyon’s tourism office were described as “LE CHAOS” on the front page of La Tribune Dimanche, and “SCENES D’INSURRECTION” on Le Parisien Dimanche. By Sunday, protests had also taken place in Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The Vatican | Pope Leo told a crowd gathered in St Peter’s Square on Sunday that he would “gradually resume” his activities, at his first appearance before the faithful since undergoing an operation to remove a cancerous tumour from his lung.

UK news | A “well-known individual” is trying to secure a permanent injunction against the Guardian and ITN to prevent them from publishing details of serious allegations made against him.

US politics | Donald Trump fired his immediately embattled new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, on Friday evening after just five days in the job. The conservative commentator becomes the shortest serving occupant of the role in US history.

Reform | A Reform UK mayor is under police investigation for allegedly showing “naked and sexualised” images of himself to a female member of staff. Luke Campbell, a former Olympic boxing champion, is understood to have been questioned under caution by Humberside police.

Energy | The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.

Monday | The two-week biodiversity summit, Cop17, begins in Yerevan, Armenia, as countries come together to seek to protect nature.

Tuesday | The Covid-19 inquiry publishes its report on the adult social care sector.

Sunday | Incumbent Lula da Silva takes on Flavio Bolsonaro in the run-off of the Brazil general election.

Voters to be asked whether province should remain part of Canada or hold a second, binding independence vote

Albertans are going to the polls to decide their place in Canada, in a referendum that has exposed deep divisions within the province, not least in the separatist movement itself.

On Monday, voters will respond to the question of whether Alberta should remain in Canada, or hold a second, binding independence referendum.

Expedition was drawn to Nikumaroro after spotting what was described as a metallic glint in waters off uninhabited island

A US expedition that voyaged to a remote Pacific island in the hope of solving the mystery of what happened to pioneering pilot Amelia Earhart has said an object they suspected to be her plane was a clump of washed-up trees.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find that smoking gun,” said Steve Schultz of Purdue University, standing on the sand in front of a blue lagoon on the atoll of Nikumaroro, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

"Anthropic says it's committing 5% of its shares to a 'public benefit fund'," reports TechCrunch, "structured as a wholly-owned entity within the company — with the option to contribute an additional 2% for every 50% increase in Anthropic's value." Important context from CNBC: The timing of Anthropic's public fund announcement is both mandatory to prepare for an initial public offering, and "beneficial from an image perspective," especially as AI reshapes the jobs market, Lise Buyer, partner at IPO advisory firm Class V Group, told CNBC... Anthropic said it will share more about the fund structure and governance in the coming months, including valuation milestones that may increase the stake. It said it will also share progress on the fund in an upcoming public benefit report. In response to Anthropic's announcement, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X that he "recommend[s] giving the shares directly to the public." Anthropic's announcement hints the fund could address job-market displacements. It says the fund "might" explore "large donations to traditional nonprofits" — or, that it "might" explore "direct distributions to specific populations. One example is labor market impacts." It then argues AI could "cause instability" for many workers. And while Anthropic has already committed $200 million for "studying and addressing" this issue, Sunday's announcement says "bolder" approaches may be needed, and that the Fund "will have the versatility to pursue them." "Combined with its co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity and an employee donation matching program, roughly 20% of Anthropic's shares will be dedicated to public purposes," reports Reuters, "excluding any additional shares added later."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Backlash against content creators includes restricted hours for filming and even outright bans

Stand in any vaguely photogenic spot these days on holiday and the chances are you will come across people posing with raised phones and even ring lights. Some may be influencers with huge audiences on social media, others just overkeen Instagram users. With hotels and beauty spots now so overrun, however, bans on photography are coming into place.

The five-star Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, known for its glamorous clientele, views of the Côte d’Azur and a stunning infinity pool, has brought in rules against photoshoots: no longer allowed without prior permission.

Cindy Crawford, Rande Gerber and their daughter, Kaia, have broken their silence for the first time since Presley Gerber's death​ last month.

Trudy was expected to turn toward the west-northwest Sunday night into Monday, taking it away from Mexico's coast and south of the Baja California Peninsula on Monday and Tuesday.

Of the dozens of countries approached to water down their laws, Australia appears to be the only one considering it, publishers’ group says

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AI has already been trained on the works of Australian artists including Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave without compensation, the peak global body for music rights has claimed, as the Australian government has been warned against giving in to “strong-arming” from tech companies seeking to weaken copyright law.

The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) – which represents Sony, Warner and Universal as well as thousands of independent publishers on six continents – has warned that of the dozens of countries approached to water down copyright laws, Australia appears to be the only to consider doing so.

"A human defeated two of the three robots he faced in a cage fight recently held in San Francisco," reports the Los Angeles Times, noting that videos of the event drew more than 10 million views on YouTube. But "the humans behind that fight could face a battle of their own — the legal type — if they want to hold another event like 'Human Vs. Robot,' the Sept. 18 competition that placed influencer Frankie LaPenna inside an octagon to battle three humanoid robots that were controlled remotely by a human operator in separate MMA-style fights..." Wearing spiked gloves, a helmet and protective padding, the 5-foot-6, 205-pound LaPenna held his own against all three bots. He dominated his first opponent, referred to at the fight as "the child robot." Next came an imposing "Terminator"-inspired humanoid, which was listed on the fight video as 6-feet and 200 pounds with a kick force of 850 pounds. The robot landed several hard kicks, including one that knocked LaPenna across the mat and another with an impact that brought the humanoid to the ground and caused its head to come off — but the human seemed to gain strength as the match went on and eventually stood triumphantly with his foot on the machine's crumpled body. LaPenna was dominant early in his final match, in which he faced a robot that resembled a "Predator" from the movies of the same name. After landing several punches and kicks and taking his opponent to the ground multiple times, LaPenna eventually became fatigued and called for the match to be ended. "He doesn't get tired. He doesn't stay down," LaPenna said in a postmatch interview. "The crowd of about 100 (humans, not humanoids) was thrilled," writes the New York Times. (After beating his first robot opponent, LaPenna told his interviewer, "Clankers zero, humans one.") But the New York Times adds that "Those who know humanoid robots best highly recommend against fighting them." "It's very unfair to put a human in with a heavily motorized system that's only going to dominate," said Ken Goldberg, a professor who oversees the automation lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's nothing surprising about that...." He said he understood the appeal of the fights that Robot Entertainment Kombat (REK) was staging, noting that it tapped "into some of the fear and frustration with robots that people feel.... I mean, they love to see the human kick the robot's gearbox," he said. But the odds of that human fighter getting his gearbox kicked are much greater, Dr. Goldberg said, given that REK's humanoid robots can weigh several hundred pounds and are made of steel. To be fair, it looked like sometimes the robot just fell over. (And the robots were human-controlled, not programmed with split-second reactions...) But "Not everyone is a fan," adds the Los Angeles Times: On Sept. 23, the California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist order to REK, its CEO Cix Liv and "all persons holding, promoting, advertising or sponsoring unsanctioned human versus humanoid robot cage fight." The letter states that "any boxing or mixed martial arts contest, match, or exhibition, involving any human in the State of California" requires the prior approval of the commission and that it is a misdemeanor to hold such an event without obtaining a license or permit from the state. A spokesperson for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the CSAC, said in a statement emailed to The Times that the commission is "committed to protecting the safety of the public and integrity of combat sports." "Unsanctioned activity puts the physical and financial well-being of all those involved at risk and such activity will not be tolerated," the statement said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Authorities said masked groups on Saturday set fires and attacked public buildings, including city halls, in several cities.

With early voting for the midterms underway, federal actions around the U.S. voting system are expanding. Election officials explain their response, and the Justice Department says "there should be no interruption" with the results.

• Sacramento guard to undergo surgery and will miss entire season

• Former No 1 draft pick has been attempting to revive his career

Ben Simmons faces a monumental task to revive his NBA career after another devastating injury setback put his comeback attempt with the Sacramento Kings on hold. The Australian will undergo surgery after scans revealed he tore his right achilles tendon during a live drill at practice, just three days out from Sacramento’s season opener against the Los Angeles Clippers.

The 30-year-old signed a one-year deal with the Kings in an attempt to revive his career, but will now miss the entire season. It is another massive setback for the three-time All-Star, after five years battling a series of significant injuries and mental health concerns.

Prime minister Mark Carney describes blaze as ‘one of the worst tragedies for the forces on Canadian soil in peacetime’

Four people have been killed and dozens more seriously injured after a “violent, fast-moving” fire tore through one of Canada’s busiest military training bases in Alberta, the country’s prime minister said on Sunday.

Mark Carney called the incident “one of the worst tragedies for the forces on Canadian soil in peacetime”.

‘Meta owes us an explanation,’ group says as organizers fear censorship after account goes dark for several hours

The coalition leaders behind nationwide pro-democracy protests that have drawn millions of Americans to the streets in recent years were frustrated when its Instagram account was temporarily shut down during its latest demonstration on Saturday.

The No Kings movement’s account went dark for several hours while protests focused on increasing early voter turnout were under way, sparking censorship fears.

Ex-president urges Americans to defend congresswoman, saying ‘there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her’

Former US president Barack Obama condemned comments by Donald Trump’s “border czar” that the Republican presidential administration could “of course” strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of her citizenship and deport her.

Obama wrote Sunday morning, on X, that “the full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president.”

The war in Iran is threatening the world's supply of helium, a natural resource crucial for a range of industries.

Helium, most closely associated with party balloons, but critical for far more, is facing supply chain issues due to the war with Iran. The shortage has left American industry desperate for answers.

Actor Sacha Baron Cohen breaks down his iconic characters: Ali G, Bruno and Borat. He also explains the complexities behind his brand of undercover comedy.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor behind iconic characters, including Ali G, Borat and Bruno, is a rare mix of public intellectual and adrenaline junkie. He uses comedy in the hopes of making us laugh and waking us up.

Election officials respond to allegations from the Justice Department about noncitizen voting as new polling shows that only half of Americans believe the upcoming elections will be free and fair.

Report reveals that a shady mobser-turned-informant may have been involved in helping cover up murder

An in-depth investigation by the New York Times is raising further questions about the high-profile OJ Simpson case, in which the former football player was accused in the 1990s of killing his ex-wife – and whether a shady mobser-turned-informant may have been involved in helping cover up the murder.

The Times’s investigation revealed that California prosecutors were unable to fully investigate whether Simpson, who was accused but not convicted of his ex-wife’s murder, may have had an accomplice at the scene of the crime.

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more. In this article, I examine the 8087’s microcode and circuitry to explain exactly how floating-point addition and subtraction are implemented, including numerous special cases for infinities and other special values.

↫ Ken Shirriff

Shirriff took an actual chisel to the 8087 coprocessor to gain access to the insides for highly detailed photographs, taken with a microscope. They look amazing.

Only a few day ago I linked to a massive collection of original Palm OS development resources, and today we can take a look at what it was like to put all of those resources into practice: the original source code for the Palm OS port of Lemmings. With these resources combined, there’s no excuse to not building any Palm OS applications. I’d really like a modern email client, a Fediverse client, and a slightly more modern browser surely wouldn’t hurt.

Get on it!

"When you pay for a game, you should own it," says U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY), introducing a new bill to fight the practice of "a rental disguised as a sale". Kotaku reports: The fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the U.S. was NBA 2K25. Every year, fans dump hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into the grindy NBA basketball sim. But just a little over two years after its release, 2K Games confirmed it's already pulling the plug on it. The game will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30. By January 1, 2027, online servers will go offline as well, making it impossible to play the most popular modes. A game millions paid $70 for will become mostly useless. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres wants to change that. "I think there should be a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it," Torres told Kotaku in a phone interview this week. To make that the law of the land, the U.S. representative for New York's 15th congressional district since 2021 plans to introduce legislation in Congress called the Power To The Players Act. The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to create regulations protecting ownership rights for video games. Companies selling digital games would need to grant players more than just a license that can expire at any time, and games with online features would need to provide offline modes that still work even when servers eventually shut down... The Power To The Players Act noticeably leaves out other types of digital media like movies and music, though Terminator 2 and a bunch of other movie purchases were ripped from people's digital libraries earlier this year. Representative Torres "did not confirm if the bill will have any cosponsors," the article acknowledges, "or whether any of his Republican colleagues will sign on to support it." But players will see the bill's importance next month, the article points out, "when Grand Theft Auto 6 releases as just a download code in a box, giving fans no control over a purchase that starts at $80.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Passengers urged to ‘share the carriage, not the noise’ as guidance sets out £100 penalties for nuisance behaviour

Andy Burnham has announced a crackdown on “headphone dodgers” who play loud music on public transport, as he extends his promise to give voters “breathing space” in the confines of a train carriage.

The prime minister will unveil a campaign against nuisance behaviour on public transport on Monday, alongside guidance allowing local transport authorities to levy fines of up to £100 for non-compliance.

Premium paid over French counterparts has risen to almost £30 a megawatt hour, analysis by lobby group finds

British steelmakers have been pushed further behind European rivals on electricity costs after the US-Israeli war on Iran caused a surge in global gas prices.

The premium paid by the British industry over its French counterpart has risen to almost £30 a megawatt hour (MWh), its highest level in three years, according to analysis by the lobby group UK Steel.

Agency changes wording on website as Texas-based firm continues manufacture of plastic container barriers

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly backtracked on a claim that the US has phased out two of the most dangerous Pfas compounds – Pfoa and Pfos.

The EPA has found that virtually no level of exposure to either in drinking water is safe, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies Pfoa as “carcinogenic to humans” and Pfos as “possibly carcinogenic”. Still, the EPA is allowing Houston-based Inhance to produce containers from which Pfoa has been found to leach at high levels into the containers’ contents. The company makes up to 200m barriers annually for plastic containers used across the US economy.

This article was amended on 18 October 2026 to correct Patricia van Ee’s title, and the story previously stated that Inhance manufactures plastic containers. They make the containers’ barriers.

Family post emotional statements to Instagram a month after their son and brother died at a rehab facility

Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber have said they are “beyond heartbroken” in a tribute to their “sweet beautiful” son, Presley.

Their eldest child died aged 27 at a rehab facility on 20 September, according to Los Angeles county medical examiner records. The cause of his death has not been disclosed.

July: Nvidia-backed Nscale is building a £2bn data centre at Loughton in Essex, with Microsoft signed up as its anchor tenant. But it can't get the electricity to switch on, reported The Next Web: Nscale's problem is not really Nscale's. It is Britain's. Grid-connection times have become the single biggest brake on new data centres. Some UK projects face waits stretching close to a decade for enough power. One estimate found more than a quarter of data-centre capacity slipped in 2025 alone. "The data centre was due to receive its power supply at the end of the year," reports the BBC. "But as first reported by the Telegraph on Sunday, Nscale has been told this will not happen until the 2030s." (Though Nscale and Microsoft are still working together on other projects in Norway, Portugal and America.) But now anchor-tenant Microsoft has pulled out of the Essex deal, reports the Telegraph, adding that Microsoft's move "leaves the site in apparent limbo. The company was its only announced customer, having agreed to rent 23,000 Nvidia AI chips at the facility..." Microsoft's decision threatens to undermine Nscale's attempts to push ahead with a Wall Street flotation worth up to $35bn (£26bn), despite a brutal sell-off in AI computing stocks. Rival data centre developers have seen their share prices plunge over the last week on concerns that they will struggle to repay their debts as interest rates and inflation continue to rise.... Tech analyst Gartner said last week that $3.5 trillion could be written off by 2030 if the AI boom fails to deliver on its promises. And "our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period," Gartner wrote: "In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030," said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.... Failure to achieve sustainable return on investment capital (ROIC) on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest... Gartner estimates AI-optimized IaaS spending will grow from $66 billion in 2027 to $174 billion in 2030. "The growth in spending on AI-optimized IaaS will be too low for most AI compute providers to recover their AI investments before the current generation of AI semiconductors is replaced," said Sommer. By 2030, Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud [AI-specialized infrastructure] providers to cease independent operations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Antibody patterns in the blood may help doctors identify people at risk so they can be treated earlier, research shows

Patterns of antibodies in people’s blood could predict the onset of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) a decade before diagnosis, according to research that raises hopes for catching the condition early.

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the two main forms of IBD, are typically treated only after symptoms appear, when the gut has already been damaged. But scientists found that the immune system sends warning signals up to a decade before diagnosis, paving the way for potentially earlier detection and even prevention.

Judge orders government to notify her by 8pm ET Sunday whether its position changed from Friday’s court filing

Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday that “restoration work will begin” on 15 November to a historic public golf course in Washington DC despite a federal judge’s court order to pause his plans over environmental and historic preservation concerns.

US district judge Ana Reyes had ruled earlier this year that the federal government must give notice before any substantive construction work on the East Potomac golf course could proceed, and last week issued an order halting the removal of trees at the site, which she called “inexcusable”.

Dozens of cows fled the crash scene, resulting in other crashes and more calls to the police from the public, Kansas City police said.

Jan Crawford had praised man who asked Democratic candidate whether he would disavow Muslim Brotherhood

CBS’s chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford has apologized for and deleted a social media post praising a man who questioned Democratic Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood during a town hall on Saturday.

On Sunday, Crawford, who initially joined CBS in 2009, wrote on X: “Earlier, I tweeted a video from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall. I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize.”

• Injury-riddled Philadelphia fall to defeat

• Chicago hold off Atlanta comeback in QB’s return

• Cardinals beat Rams with final play of game

Bryce Young threw for 281 yards and two touchdowns to Tommy Tremble, and Chuba Hubbard ran for 120 yards and a score to lead the Carolina Panthers (3-2) past the injury-riddled Philadelphia Eagles (2-4). The Panthers had little trouble in the second half picking apart the Eagles, who were missing quarterback Jalen Hurts and running back Saquon Barkley. Hurts is on injured reserve and will miss at least four games with a blood clot in his calf. Tanner McKee started for Philadelphia and finished 26 of 45 for 215 yards and a touchdown.

• Texans beat Jaguars 34-31 in thriller at Wembley

• Week six: Seahawks 14-17 Broncos

Speaking to how good they are against the run, the Jaguars have gone 22 games without allowing a rusher to go for more than 75 yards. Good luck, Woody.

Texans 0-0 Jaguars 11:08, 1st quarter

Gizmodo reports: Roughly 84.4% of the world's coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s... But there's some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances: Marine ecologists at Stanford have discovered that bleached corals can be revived via contact with a healthy coral neighbor, who (like a good neighbor) shares their photosynthetic, symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae) with their peers. "This incredible new result — that fast and full recovery is possible in bleached coral — can inspire solutions that eventually may be scalable," [Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist with Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions and study co-author, told the journal Nature]... Unlike their controls, bleached coral in contact with healthy coral recovered in just eight weeks... [T]he surprise discovery of this method alongside the other techniques that marine conservationists are now actively pursuing — including the successful deep-freezing and revival of at-risk coral sampled from Hawaii — could offer threatened reefs the lifeline they need. Coral contact could super-charge other efforts, like the selective breeding of heat-tolerant corals and the cultivation of protected coral nurseries

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada's defense minister said four service members were killed, and dozens of others were wounded, in an incident at a military base that caused a major fire.

On the way off the field, Kendal Daniels made a fist with his left hand.

Wichita police awaiting toxicology results and mechanical exam of pickup truck driven by the 34-year-old woman

A woman who was arrested on Saturday after she drove a truck through a youth soccer game in Wichita, Kansas – killing a boy and a man – has been released from custody without charges pending further investigation, according to authorities.

In a statement on Sunday, the Wichita police department said investigators were awaiting the results of toxicology testing on the driver, whom the agency would only describe as a 34-year-old woman. Police said they were also waiting for “a mechanical examination” of the pickup truck that the woman was driving at the time she struck and killed six-year-old Cole Adrian and Nicholas Schafer, 35.

The Verge reports: OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice? In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they're blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them.... Muse, Meta's deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its "continued access" violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI's Grok, Instinct's AI agent, and OpenAI's Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he "should start a competitor to Amazon." The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are.... Instead of trying to fight Amazon, [Meta] has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ministers, officials and police under pressure over response to protests as government holds crisis talks amid ‘colossal failure of the state’

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has criticised “unbridled violence” after one of the most violent days of unrest in years left public buildings burned, hundreds of shops destroyed and looted and at least 2,400 people arrested in cities across the country.

“Watching these images, we have all asked ourselves how could French people do this to France?” he said in a televised address.

Turnout will be key as Texans voice cost of living concerns in Senate race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico.

GOP Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio called for a congressional investigation into disruptions in Ukraine to satellite communications with Starlink, the technology owned by SpaceX's Elon Musk.

New video footage of Israeli settler assault on European delegation as Netanyahu attempts to raise doubt

Hours after Israeli militants attacked a delegation of European diplomats, French clerics and a visiting mayor in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by questioning the delegation’s account of the assault.

“Serious accusations require serious evidence” was the all-caps headline of a social media post from the office of the prime minister. As news of the attack spread globally there was no pledge to find those accountable and bring them to justice.

Israelis are set to vote Oct. 27, in the first national elections since the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

Exclusive: Former health secretary says upfront investment in support is needed ‘if we are going to end the Neet crisis’

Ministers should cut welfare spending to fund more employment support if it wants to end the youth Neet crisis, the author of a government-led review has said.

Alan Milburn, the Tony Blair-era health secretary, told the Guardian he believed ministers should reduce benefits payments to help pay for more employment support, opening a potentially contentious debate within the Labour party over welfare cuts.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Oct. 18, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Oct. 18, 2026.

UK home secretary’s meeting comes after PM said he wanted to rejoin European law enforcement databases

The UK home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, will meet the EU’s home affairs commissioner on Monday for further talks just days after Andy Burnham said he wanted to rejoin European law enforcement databases from which the UK has been locked out of since Brexit.

According to the European Commission, they will discuss “migration, border management, law enforcement cooperation and counter-terrorism”, with the latest Frontex data published on Monday showing a 43% decline in small boats crossing the Channel.

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso join Margaret Brennan.

Washington, DC — Former President Barack Obama sharply condemned the Trump administration’s investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar on Sunday, arguing that the federal government is being used to punish a prominent political critic.

Obama called the Oct. 12 search of Omar’s Washington home “appalling” and said Americans should be alarmed regardless of their opinions about the Minnesota Democrat. Federal agents executed a court-authorized warrant as part of an investigation examining decades-old immigration and citizenship records involving Omar and her late father.

Obama said the investigation rests on an “unsubstantiated theory” that Omar improperly obtained citizenship because of a discrepancy involving her recorded birth year. Omar has denied wrongdoing, and a previous federal review during Trump’s first administration reportedly found insufficient evidence of citizenship fraud.

“The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president,” Obama said.

He compared the case with previous prosecutions and investigations involving Trump critics and warned that normalizing politically motivated law enforcement could create a precedent future presidents of either party could exploit.

Trump has denied directing the Omar investigation while continuing to publicly attack her. No criminal charges have been filed against Omar, and the government has not publicly produced evidence proving she committed immigration fraud.

Sources:

• Washington Examiner – MBFC Rating

The post Obama Condemns Ilhan Omar Raid as ‘Appalling’ Abuse of Federal Power appeared first on News Facts Network.

Eligible recipients in the class action settlement can now sign up for payouts over Apple’s AI lawsuit.

The TPS protections of tens of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of Sudanese immigrants were officially slated to terminate on Monday.

More details are emerging about Saudi OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan, who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly planting a recording device in an executive conference room. Previously Alfozan "was an engineer at Meta," notes the New York Times, "before joining a start-up that went through Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator. He gained permanent residency status in the United States in 2020, according to court documents, and was hired by OpenAI in July 2025." 14 months later the conference room recording device was inserted in a USB port on the back of a television, and then concealed in toilet paper, according to a statement from America's Justice Department. (There's even a photo of a device — and a photo of Alfozan entering the executive conference room and appearing to look behind the television where the device was inserted.) The FBI's says a chatbot account associated with Alfozan's spouse showed prompts asking about installing and obfuscating a recording device. And the complaint alleges that OpenAI security personnel also found a bag Alfozan left in a different room which contained his wallet, his ID, and another recording device. Discussions in that room included "highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research," according to the FBI, "as well as nonpublic information about Open AI's technical progress and strategic decisions..." "If convicted, Alfozan faces a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by 3 years of supervised release." Friday Alfozan's lawyersrequested his release from custody, saying Alfozan agrees to wear an ankle monitor, remain at home, surrender his passport and "not possess any covert audio or video recording or surveillance device." They argue that the one-way ticket he'd purchased to Saudi Arabia just continues a long-standing habit of buying one-way tickets over the years for air travel, since his tech career often involves last-minute changes to meeting schedules, and "70% of the airline bookings in his email since January 2021 (96 of 138) were one-way tickets." His lawyers also presented 46 letters of support, including letters from former Meta colleagues, ten company founders and chief executives, and more than a dozen engineers and engineering managers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Capt Smit Machchhar said he screamed for help as he reached to open the cockpit door on flight FZ1073

The captain of a flydubai flight who was attacked by a co-pilot who intended to crash the plane has described ⁠blocking axe blows to his head and screaming for help as he reached to open the cockpit door.

Capt Smit ⁠Machchhar has been hailed ⁠as a ​hero for his role in averting disaster on the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv last month, helping to thwart what the UAE ⁠attorney general has said was an attempted suicide attack by the co-pilot who had intended to crash the plane into Ben Gurion airport.

From the attorney general stumping for Republican candidates to federal agents raiding the home of a Democratic congresswoman up for re-election, the department is violating longstanding norms

Donald Trump’s justice department has aggressively inserted itself into the midterm elections in the contest’s final weeks, shattering the department’s longstanding practice of political neutrality and leaving little doubt about the department’s willingness to help should the president attempt to subvert elections where his party is forecasted to lose seats and ultimately control of Congress.

In the last few weeks, federal agents have raided the home of a Democratic congresswoman up for re-election. It has touted criminal charges and arrests of non-citizens charged with voter fraud. The attorney general has hit the campaign trail to stump for Republican candidates. And the department gave California election officials 48 hours to investigate the citizenship of 20,000 people, and then sued the state when it refused to comply. The FBI also recently published a video criticizing Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats, drawing an immediate rebuke from one watchdog, who said the video “has no place in a democratic society”.

Mike Huckabee calls for arrest and prosecution of those responsible as Heidi Levine, 63, recovers in hospital in Israel

The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has denounced the settler attack that left the Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine badly beaten and needing surgery as a “despicable act of terror” and called for the arrest and prosecution of those responsible.

Levine, 63, an award-winning journalist who lives in Israel, was set upon last Friday by masked Israeli settlers who used clubs and other weapons to attack Palestinian people attempting to harvest their olives in occupied West Bank towns.

President Trump said Sunday that construction at the historic East Potomac Golf Links course will begin Nov. 15.

Two people killed and at least 17 injured as Russia and Ukraine continue to trade strikes on power infrastructure

Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday thanked the Trump administration for resuming intelligence sharing between the two countries, but maintained the US had intentionally throttled its Starlink satellite internet access so that Donald Trump could send a “message” in his ongoing feud with the Ukrainian president.

In an interview on NBC, Zelenskyy said the US had “unblocked” intelligence on impending Russian ballistic missile strikes, which have pounded the country’s energy infrastructure as winter draws in.

"Even LinkedIn is getting tired of your AI-written posts," writes CNN, reporting that the Microsoft-owned, job-oriented social media site "is upping its fight against slop." A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X and Medium and a smaller percentage on Reddit and Substack.... LinkedIn previously offered AI tools to edit or rewrite posts, although it recently scaled the offerings back. But low-quality AI posts are a business problem for LinkedIn. They all start to sound the same, [according to LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth Roth]. If users see too many generic AI posts, instead of content that really teaches them something or gives them a deeper understanding of a professional connection, LinkedIn risks losing them to other platforms. In August, LinkedIn rolled out a button letting users flag when a post "seems like AI slop," which was clicked more than 1 million times within its first two weeks. Now, the company is trying to use its own AI systems to help weed out AI slop on the platform and to remind LinkedIn users how to post like humans. The company built a team largely made up of former journalists and social media experts who have an eye for recognizing generic, sloppy content. These experts help train LinkedIn's AI model on what authentic, useful posts look like. If the model flags a post as low-quality, AI-generated content, it'll be less likely to be distributed beyond that user's direct connections. Also key to the strategy is a creator management team that acts as "content therapists" for executives, subject matter experts and other LinkedIn users, many of whom have gotten accustomed to the convenience of using AI to write what, on the surface, appear to be polished posts, Roth said. "A lot of times now today, they'll run it through Claude or Gemini or wherever, they'll post it on LinkedIn and it will perform poorly. And then they come to the team and they're like, 'Why did this do badly?'" Roth said. "And the best thing you can do is give it back to them and be like, 'Did you enjoy reading this? Do you see yourself in this?" The efforts are showing early signs of success. Improvements to LinkedIn's detection systems have resulted in a 40% decline in views of content classified as AI slop, the platform said last month. That's not to say LinkedIn is entirely opposed to AI, Roth said, adding that "not everyone is a born communicator." But failing to edit or personalize content means it's less likely to reach a wide audience on the platform.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NPR health and science correspondent and "Sunday Morning" contributor Allison Aubrey writes about the steps Gen Xers may take to foster a sense of purpose as they enter this next stage of life.

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A service member was injured and later died after falling while rappelling from the ceiling of the University of Texas at San Antonio football stadium on Saturday.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Oct. 18, 2026.

The game’s exclusivity is leading to greater demand for the high-end console.

TechRepublic reports: The TIOBE Index is a monthly indicator of programming-language popularity based on factors including skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. The October 2026 rankings show a largely stable top 10, with R overtaking SQL and Julia returning to the top 20 for the first time in three years. [SQL has risen to #9 from #10 in October of 2025 — back when R ranked only #13.] Python remains No. 1, followed by C, C++, Java, C#, and JavaScript, while Rust holds its No. 10 position. [A year ago Rust ranked only #16.] Outside the top 10, Julia climbs from No. 21 to No. 18, and TIOBE introduces Mandarin Chinese search terms into its methodology to broaden the index's geographic representation. Dropping out of the top ten is Go, which fell from #8 in October of 2025 to #11. And Delphi/Object Pascal has plummeted from #9 to #19. TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen argues that Julia's growing popularity "is largely driven by the demand for modern programming languages that combine high performance with ease of learning, particularly for numerical computing." Python offers an accessible, high-level approach to numerical computing, but performance can become a bottleneck. C++, on the other hand, delivers excellent performance but comes with a steeper learning curve and a lower level of abstraction. Julia aims to bridge this gap by combining the best of both worlds... Apart from Julia, two other languages are knocking on the door of the TIOBE top 20: Dart and OCaml. Dart jumps from #41 to #27 this month. Thanks to its popular UI toolkit Flutter, Dart has been hovering around the edge of the top 20 for quite some time. OCaml, on the other hand, might come as a surprise. It jumps from #38 to #26 this month, driven in part by its growing use in real-time trading systems and parsing technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Protesters held rallies across the US as part of the 'No Kings' movement, voicing opposition to the Trump administration and calling for early voting ahead of November's midterm elections. The rallies coincide with heightened legal battles surrounding voting rules, including a recent federal lawsuit filed against California regarding mail-in ballots and warnings from the justice department concerning ballot processing. Current opinion polls suggest Democrats will win the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterms, while the Senate remains too close to call

Female colleague says she was forced out shortly after incident with Luke Campbell, Hull and East Yorkshire mayor

A Reform UK mayor is under police investigation for allegedly showing “naked and sexualised” images of himself to a female member of staff.

Luke Campbell, a former Olympic boxing champion and the mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire, is understood to have been questioned under caution by Humberside police earlier this month.

Exclusive: Play anonymously published in 1596 was collaboration between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, according to computer analysis

Dramatic new evidence concludes that the play Edward III should be added to William Shakespeare’s canon, and also that it was a major collaboration with his contemporary rival Christopher Marlowe.

The history was published anonymously in 1596, and it has long been thought that Shakespeare wrote at least a few scenes. However, Dr Rory Loughnane, a leading scholar and co-author of the research, told the Guardian that computerised textual analysis pushed the case “beyond any reasonable doubt” that the Stratford-born playwright was the principal writer.

White dwarf stars, it turns out, come in a variety of hues. Says one astronomer: “Some of them genuinely surprised me.”

Scrutiny committee looks into financing of Manchester Life project as PM promises ‘full transparency’

A £55m loan to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owner will be investigated as part of a review into a fund for housing projects while Andy Burnham was mayor.

The prime minister has faced weeks of scrutiny over his links to Manchester City’s super-rich owners after the club was found guilty of boosting its income by £900m in a nine-year breach of financial rules.

Long-time Slashdot reader ardiri remembers his days writing applications for the Palm OS. And he's now released approximately 1.5 GB of historical Palm OS development resources, "accumulated during the early days of handheld computing and preserved on hard drive backups for more than 25 years... to preserve the tools and knowledge that helped define an important era of personal computing." The collection includes historical SDKs, developer conference presentations, technical documentation, programming examples, limited source code, and development utilities. (ROM images, commercial applications, and simulator binaries have deliberately been excluded....) Making a broader collection of development resources available to the retrocomputing community, the archive is available at GitHub.com/ardiri/dev-palmos and is intended for historical preservation, education, and research, particularly as enthusiasts continue working to maintain, emulate, and revive the platform... Ardiri has also written an auto-biography and has started explored the engineering principles behind these systems in his books. And somewhere along the way, Ardiri rediscovered the original source code for "The Palm OS Virus That Never Was — Lost for 25 Years, Found in 2026." Lurking on a CompactFlash card containing files dated June 2001, he found the self-replicating Palm OS virus that he'd developed and tested in June 2001, months before the planned PalmSource developer conference in San Jose. Named 'Virii,' the virus intercepted Palm OS system calls to progressively infect legitimate applications while preserving their original functionality. Infected applications could then spread between handheld devices through infrared beaming, potentially allowing an infection to propagate among hundreds of developers exchanging software at the conference. The virus also included a date-triggered payload designed to interfere with system time reporting between October 23 and 27, 2001, potentially causing erratic clocks, unreliable alarms, and missed appointments. He promises the functional source code and binaries will remain private.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NPR health and science correspondent Allison Aubrey, author of the new book, "Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love," talks about facing all the possibilities of life's third chapter.

The Spanish singer continues to defy convention with her fourth album, "Lux," a mix of classical, opera and pop that tells the stories of female saints and mystics through history.

Due to high fuel and housing costs, and wages that aren't keeping pace with inflation, consumer sentiment is lower than at almost any other time in modern history. CBS News spoke with Michiganders to find out how the economy is playing on the minds of voters.

• Officer fell from rafters during pregame display

• Man treated on field before being taken to hospital

An Air Force officer has died after he fell from the rafters of the Alamodome before the University of Texas at San Antonio’s home game against Navy on Saturday.

The officer, who has not been named, was taking part in an event to celebrate UTSA’s Salute to Armed Forces and Veterans night. He fell on to the field while rappelling down from the stadium rafters. He was treated on the field before being taken away on a stretcher. He later died from his injuries at a local hospital. Nellis Air Force Base said he was part of the 6th Combat Training Squadron. The unit helps train military members to rappel down from helicopters.

Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago

A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.

Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was “for the factcheckers”, though there aren’t any – not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions – and even looks – much the same as it did 20 years ago.

He's gifted audiences with memorable appearances in more than 100 films and TV shows. Now, John Turturro, one of the great character actors, is playing a rare lead role in a charming and moving crime drama, "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York."

(The Center Square) – Illegal border crossings at the southwest border reached their lowest level in U.S. history over the past fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection preliminary fiscal 2026 data.

Lee Krasner has long been eclipsed by the shadow of her husband, Jackson Pollock. Now, a landmark show in New York City rewrites the story of the artists whose work and legacies were – aesthetically and personally – bound together.

The tech company says successful AI worms need more capability on less powerful devices, but current trends make that feasible by the end of the year

Warnings about what artificial intelligence might do in the future – together with alarming reports of what it has gotten up to already – are being issued so quickly that even security experts have difficulty triaging what to worry about.

Yet a report this week from Anthropic’s offensive research team grabbed attention by describing a new, practical threat, one devoid of human characteristics or apocalyptic musings. The red team, as such internal testers are called, said it created a malicious AI program that spread autonomously through internet-connected “smart” televisions and could do the same inside other ordinary devices. While machines running AI usually need a fair amount of computing power, the researchers said that their program split parts of itself among 15 televisions and was still able to function by using a bit of power from each.

ONS data for England and Wales shows 26% of heterosexual divorces in 2025 followed 20 years or more of marriage

Most couples are aware of the dreaded “seven-year itch”, when the honeymoon period wears off and real life starts to bite.

Now official data has shown that couples in England and Wales are more likely to split after 20 years. According to Office for National Statistics figures, more than a quarter of all divorces between opposite-sex couples happened after 20 years or longer of marriage.

California voters will decide whether to adopt Proposition 40, which would impose a new tax on billionaires' wealth. "Sunday Morning" examines whether the measure would deliver the benefits its backers promise — and why some progressives oppose it.

Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant

The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.

The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year.

Eligible recipients can now file claims for payouts from Apple’s AI class-action settlement.

Green leader in England and Wales calls ‘debates about words’ unhelpful and denies recent motion was controversial

Zack Polanski has said Zionism in its current form is racist, that no country has a right to exist, and that the Green party motion on the issue was not controversial.

The leader of the Green party in England and Wales gave an unapologetic interview to the BBC on Sunday two weeks after his party approved a motion equating Zionism with racism.

Interior minister says ‘the Republic will not yield’ to France’s worst protests in years

A dispatch here from Sam Jones, our reporter in Madrid, as protests have spread to Italy and Portugal

The angry protests that have convulsed Spain and France in recent weeks have spilled over to Italy and Portugal, with rioters clashing with police and setting property on fire in Milan, and a tent encampment springing up in Lisbon over the weekend.

Iran's foreign minister said the U.S. could see the strategic waterway open within days if it abided by the conditions presented in the seven-day ceasefire plan.

Pope Leo XIV​ thanked thousands of faithful in St. Peter's Square on Sunday, one day after being discharged from the hospital for cancer surgery.

A 6-year-old boy and a 35-year-old man were killed during a soccer game at Stryker Soccer Complex in Wichita, Kansas, according to police.

Overall, economic sentiment for Trump is poor, but small businesses seem fairly confident, according to several surveys

There are 34m small businesses in the United States. They employ approximately half of the country’s workers and generate about half of the country’s GDP. They’re an important voting block. So how are they feeling about the economy as we head into November’s midterm elections? Overall, economic sentiment for Donald Trump is poor but small business – admittedly a diverse demographic that’s hard to poll – seems fairly confident. A number of recently published surveys and reports can help understand their mood.

Confidence is generally stable.

States like Missouri and Iowa are choosing to not take up exemption designed to help low-income people keep coverage during hardship

Some conservative states that have rejected hardship exemptions for the new Medicaid requirements may be choosing not to due to political reasons, experts say.

New federal work requirements for Medicaid, slated to come into effect on 1 January, mean that adults enrolled through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion will have to work, attend school, volunteer, or take part in another qualifying activity at least 80 hours a month to maintain their coverage.

Beerus is awake, and you should be tuning in to keep up with all the action each week.

Halloween supper has to work around costumes and candy runs. These 15 dinners include fast skillet meals, pasta, soup, make-ahead casseroles, and sides to keep everyone fed before or after trick-or-treating.The post 15 trick-or-treat night dinners that fill the gaps…

The Free Software Foundation "has never supported Raspberry Pi," writes their deputy directory Sean O'Brien, "as it depends on nonfree software for the boot process, leaving an important part of the computer outside the user's control." But they're now decrying "an even more intrusive restriction on user freedom" — the binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM: The restriction is not new: the relevant checks were introduced in the device firmware around 2024. However, these hardware handcuffs have only recently received wider attention. Though a user can desolder the original memory and install electrically compatible RAM, the nonfree firmware may refuse to recognize the additional memory, or simply decide not to boot the computer at all. Even replacement RAM of the same capacity can be rejected. This is worse than Raspberry Pi's longstanding dependence on nonfree firmware in an important way. It is not only nonfree software, but it is Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), used in this case to prevent the owner of the computer from making a modification that the hardware is otherwise capable of supporting. That distinction matters. Soldered RAM is difficult for most people to replace since it is a physical characteristic of the hardware. In the case of Raspberry Pi boards, users have demonstrated that the hardware itself can be modified successfully.... Raspberry Pi justifies the use of DRM on the basis of being able to identify altered computers. There may be legitimate reasons for wanting to identify such altered computers. Unscrupulous sellers have reportedly replaced memory on lower-capacity boards and resold them as more expensive models, sometimes using unreliable or defective components. But preventing fraud and maintaining quality does not require taking control away from users. A Raspberry Pi could record its original factory configuration in a cryptographically verifiable form. Raspberry Pi could use free software that warns the user when the installed RAM differs from original factory configuration. Raspberry Pi could provide tools allowing buyers to verify what hardware originally shipped with a board. None of those measures requires a software-enforced limit on what an owner may do with the computer... If compatible hardware can be installed successfully, the manufacturer should not create restrictions to prevent the owner from using it. Restrictions on hardware upgrades are deeply troubling from an organization like Raspberry Pi that has stated their commitment to longevity as a guiding principle. Free software is ultimately about who controls the computer. The user should control it, not the manufacturer that sold it.... The people who own these computers must also have the freedom to modify, repair, and upgrade them, without restrictions imposed by nonfree software limiting their potential. Hackaday recently argued the restriction was "no big deal." noting there's ways to bypass the restriction" The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far... If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader... My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online... Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Large cordon in place around Angel Row area of city centre after ‘shocking incident’ in the early hours of Sunday

A police officer is in hospital after being shot in the foot in Nottingham in the early hours of Sunday.

Nottinghamshire police said the officer had approached two suspects in the city centre when he was struck by a bullet. The force said the two suspects, a woman and a man, had fled the scene and were being sought by police.

When the clocks change, a little dinner prep helps the shorter evenings run smoothly. These 17 recipes include freezer-friendly casseroles, batch soups, slow cooker mains, and quick skillet meals for the week ahead.The post 17 meal prep recipes to keep…

Hundreds at Lisbon tent camp demand action, as Giorgia Meloni says march in Italy was exploited by ‘hooligans’

The angry protests that have convulsed Spain and France in recent weeks have spilled over to Italy and Portugal, with rioters clashing with police and setting property on fire in Milan, and a tent encampment springing up in Lisbon over the weekend.

A march in central Milan on Saturday to protest against rising living costs began peacefully but ended with masked rioters throwing stones, paving blocks and other objects at riot police and setting fire to barricades made from bar tables.

Washington, DC — Republican lawmakers are threatening to withhold support for major Pentagon funding and other pieces of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda as anger grows inside the GOP over his recent moves benefiting Russia.

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a retired Air Force brigadier general, said Republicans who support Ukraine may refuse to fund Trump’s priorities after the president eased sanctions on Moscow, opened the door to Russian diesel imports and pressured Ukraine to halt attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

“Many of us won’t fund these things knowing he is propping up a dictator’s invasion and throwing an ally under the bus,” Bacon wrote.

The warning is significant because Trump is seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in additional Pentagon funding through budget reconciliation, along with other priorities lawmakers are expected to consider after the midterm elections.

Republican criticism has expanded beyond Bacon. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina has accused the administration of capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, while other GOP lawmakers have raised concerns about restrictions placed on Ukraine’s access to intelligence and the Starshield satellite network.

Trump has defended his approach as serving U.S. interests and lowering energy costs.

The dispute gives congressional Republicans considerable leverage: Trump cannot secure the additional defense spending he wants without lawmakers approving the money.

Sources:

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post GOP Revolt Grows as Lawmakers Threaten to Block Trump Agenda Over Russia appeared first on News Facts Network.

Lengthy meeting heard grumbles about ‘blue wall’ policies and ‘Ming vase’ tactics but no real rancour

As political showdowns go, this week’s gathering of Liberal Democrat MPs, billed by some as a crunch moment for Ed Davey, was a touch underwhelming. “I had expected a damp squib,” one attender put it. “It was damper than I thought.”

Far from generating a mass of opposition to Davey’s leadership, let alone a formal challenge to his position, the lengthy gathering in a Commons committee room on Tuesday evening brought a few minor grumbles, but little else.

From science kits to karaoke machines, shower sets to brain-boosting games, here are the presents our mini testers loved the most

• The best gifts for seven-year-olds

Eight is such a wonderful age. Kids are old enough to have their own interests and hobbies, but still young enough to get swept up in play and be absorbed for hours if you find the right toy for them.

By eight, children’s interests and skills are taking shape. They’re more confident readers, more strategic thinkers and curious about how things work. And while they think they’re extremely grown up, eight-year-olds still need plenty of time to play for their overall wellbeing.

Rapid coastal erosion threatens coastal homes and economies, and as Super El Niño rounds the corner, a town is reckoning with the reality of climate crisis

San Clemente is one of southern California’s most picture-perfect beach towns – a capital of American surf culture since the 1950s. In two years, 2028 Olympic surfers will compete at Lower Trestles, a world-class surfing beach.

But the town’s longtime cultural and economic driver, its beaches, are now under threat. As pounding waves driven by late-summer storms in the Pacific devour chunks of the California coastline, some of San Clemente’s beaches are growing narrower, the sand increasingly eaten away.

Set up dinner before a long week starts with 13 casseroles, from beefy skillet bakes and chicken pasta to enchiladas, shrimp and grits, and sweet potato sides. Several can be assembled or frozen ahead.The post 13 loaded casserole picks worth…

A Winner on a Losing Planet

Do I even faintly believe the times I’m living in?  The simple answer is: no.

Every now and then, I try to imagine going back in time to tell my long-dead parents about the world of President Donald Trump, which just happens to still be mine as well. Of course, they simply wouldn’t have believed it, not for a single second.

To put it in the context of their time on this planet, the only equivalent I can imagine would be if Sen. Joseph McCarthy, that anticommunist nightmare-and-a-half of the 1950s, hadn’t flamed out, been censured by the Senate, and died young but somehow had made it to the White House. But even he undoubtedly would have fallen short in terms of chaos and cruelty, if judged by the standards of Trump World. A President McCarthy might have been catastrophic for America, but Trump is on another level, an apocalyptic one.

Related

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

Trump’s capacity for ushering in world-wrecking havoc is made possible by a character constructed almost entirely of flaws. His second term has been defined by global aggression and hostility. Yet he recently complained bitterly — and in a fashion it’s hard to imagine any other politician ever doing — because he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. As he put it, “The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel peace prize, but didn’t. And this is an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision.” 

This is not only a petty man, but also a delusional one. As president, Trump has presided over more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and outright wars who nonetheless swears that he “settled” eight conflicts and should have “won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1.” This includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia that, of course, never happened and a failing war with Iran that drags on to this day.

If you’re going to “end” a war with bombs and missiles, then there are, of course, going to be casualties. A few thousand or more Iranians killed, obviously, and tens of thousands injured, not to mention ever-rising American casualties.

Frighteningly, the Iran war may not even be enough for him. He’s already starting to hint (if there even is such a thing as “hinting” in the all-too-blunt world of Donald Trump) that he might join Saudi Arabia in taking on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. “We’re going to look at it” was how he put it. I should really have added “again” there, since he essentially began his second term in office by attacking those same Houthis — killing large numbers of civilians in the process. But after the U.S. burned through $1 billion and failed to even achieve air superiority in Yemen, Trump ended the stalemate. Despite having vowed the Houthis would be “completely annihilated,” he announced a cessation of hostilities last May, leaving the group in control of most of Yemen’s populated areas.

Related

Donald Trump and Wars of Choice

Given American history — think the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other places — there’s nothing faintly strange about endless American military operations thousands and thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C., even for a president who said, upon taking office in 2025, that he would measure success by “the wars we never get into.”

A Grim Presidency

You would hardly know it from the mainstream press but one of those 20 Trumpian conflicts is the forever war in Somalia. And that war has an increasing domestic component. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar in the Washington, D.C., area, aiming in some fashion or other to discover information that might help denaturalize her and so make it possible to eject her from this country.

Related

DHS Was Designed as a Weapon

As the president put it on Truth Social, Omar “left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars.” Of course, who would know better about such things than the president of the United States who, in these years, is estimated to have made literally billions of dollars while in office?

And yet, the never-ending war in Somalia, the nearby conflict we may reenter against the Houthis, and the failed war in Iran should be considered the lesser of the potential disasters that will sooner or later be associated with Trump. After all, he clearly has the urge to do nothing less than end this very world of ours, at least as we’ve known it, even if in a distinctly slow-motion fashion.

I’m not even thinking about nuclear weapons (although he admittedly still is). No, I’m thinking about the president who, at the United Nations in 2025, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” And since then, he has indeed done everything he could think of to ensure that this planet would get hotter yet. His Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has recently repealed “rules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas.” And that’s just to start down a long list of what should truly be considered Donald Trump’s ultimate war on this planet of ours — including blocking wind power development and doing the same with solar power. 

All of this is happening as global warming reaches unprecedented levels, sea level rise is accelerating, northern forests and tundra are releasing more carbon dioxide than they absorb, the Greenland ice sheet has lost about 129 gigatons of ice (or roughly 129 billion metric tons), and other major ecological systems like tropical coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, and Antarctica’s ice sheet are being pushed toward catastrophic tipping points.

While Trump campaigns for eight Nobel Peace Prizes, his war on humanity’s only home continues unabated, a slow-motion destruction that threatens us all. My parents couldn’t have imagined a leader in the White House who would put McCarthy to shame and push the country — and the world — to the precipice of doom: a commander-in-chief worthy of the name President Apocalypse.

The post President Apocalypse appeared first on The Intercept.

Bank’s chief knowledge officer says the tech could speed up economic development from centuries to decades

The World Bank is urging developing countries to kickstart the creation of “small AI” models, which can run on a mobile phone with low connectivity, to reap the full benefits of artificial intelligence.

While Silicon Valley big tech firms are focused on ever more sophisticated consumer products, Paschal Donohoe, the World Bank’s chief knowledge officer, said AI could also accelerate development for emerging economies – but only if it was adapted to local needs.

In attempting to turn a public space in DC into an enclave for elites, Trump is moving the US capital closer to Graceland

When is a tree not a tree? When it’s an obstacle to a par-3. If a tree falls in the middle of a golf course, does it make a sound? Yeah, probably. I wasn’t there, but I have to assume, based on my limited knowledge of the laws of physics.

What I do know is that Donald Trump’s crusade to clear more than 400 trees for the purposes of redeveloping East Potomac Golf Links into a championship-level course isn’t happening. For now.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Health secretary says it is ‘total disgrace’ if staff looked up William Chapman, who died at Yorkshire Wildlife Park

NHS staff who inappropriately accessed the medical records of a man mauled to death by a tiger should be sacked, Yvette Cooper said.

The health secretary said the incident – which followed reports earlier this year that staff had unnecessarily viewed details about the Southport attack victims and those murdered by Valdo Calocane in Nottingham in 2023 – was a “total disgrace”.

Style of emceeing based on high-octane, ad-libbed vocals has flourished thanks to its unique way of captivating crowds

For the 2015 freshmen cohort of the history degree programme at the University of Lagos, their classmate’s first-semester presentation was so captivating that they began calling him Toby Shang, after the 16th-century Chinese dynasty he had focused on.

His crowd engagement that day had been harnessed from his high school days as a ginger-man (energiser) in a three-man band and as a private tutor. By his final year at university, his viral catchphrases and infectious energy had resulted in a hit song, Shedibalabala. Today, he is one of the self-acclaimed “evangelists and pioneers” in the Afrobeats sub-genre some are now calling Afrohype or lamba.

Clip it to the back of your phone, and it’ll convert your voice on the fly for fun, privacy and accessibility.

The Republican state attorney general appears uniquely ill-chosen as a candidate – but he is a political survivor who could yet frustrate Democratic dreams

Depending how you look at the situation, it is either predictable that Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general and Republican candidate for US Senate, is struggling in the polls – or impressive that he is not doing worse. Beloved by hardcore Maga voters and regarded with skepticism by the broader voting public, Paxton is also puzzlingly bland. Recently, Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters that the 63-year-old Paxton “may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen”. The president was endorsing him.

Yet it is Paxton’s ability to attract – and somehow scrape through – scandal that makes him a less charismatic, perhaps, but still kindred spirit of “Teflon Don”: nothing sticks. He has survived state prosecution (on securities-related charges that he settled without admitting guilt), impeachment by the Republican-led Texas legislature (on abuse-of-office charges of which he was later acquitted), and so many controversies that it can be difficult to pin down the most outrageous.

BoingBoing reports: Mark Stephens, better known under the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. Stephens chronicled the tech industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the age of Bill Gates' rise, Steve Jobs' repose, the dawn of the world wide web — and produced the famed documetary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his own bestselling Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date. Though not the first InfoWorld columnist to write under the Cringely name, he was responsible for its persona and fought successfully to keep it after he left the magazine in 1995. "I loved the man," writes Darth Technoid (Slashdot reader #83,199): I first met him in the 1990s, while he was still working at InfoWorld, and we became friends immediately. He helped me get a job or two, and he was always filled with crazy (meaning really good) ideas. I'll miss him and his creativity greatly. Cringely answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2000. And Cringely led an interesting life, as you can tell from Slashdot's January, 2020 story Robert Cringely Attempts an Air-Launching Space Startup: "How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?" That crowd still wants long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely to deliver on his Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. So in a new blog post this week, Cringely writes that "I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund my eventual retirement. I am not making this up..." He's now found a Beverly Hills patron who wants to be a co-investor in the Minecraft servers, but "I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space." Slashdot has often linked to Cringely's commentary over the years, as far back as 1998 and as recently as this summer. ("Tech Pundit Cringely Co-Founds Startup '2Brains Inc' to Solve LLM Hallucinations.") July, 1999: Cringely's take on "Pirates of Silicon Valley" April, 2009: Three Mile Island Memories June, 2011: IBM Did Not Invent the Personal ComputerMarch, 2019: Cringely's Final Predictions: Apple Becomes a Financial Service and Hedge Fund June, 2019: Cringely Predicts The End Of Broadcast TV Within A Decade April, 2020: Not Just 'The Death of IT'. Cringely Also Predicts Layoffs For Many IT Contractors January, 2021: Robert Cringley Predicted 'The Death of IT' in 2020. Was He Right? June, 2023: Cringely Predicts Moore's Law Will Continue — Because of AI But my favorite Cringely memory is Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, the full 70-minute interview from 1995 that a 40-year-old Jobs gave to Cringely during filming for Triumph of the Nerds. ("And they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope....") There's various pirated copies on YouTube and an online transcript, but only 10 minutes made the broadcast — at the time Jobs was still at NeXT after his departure from Apple. But when Cringely rediscovered the videotape, the entirety of the interview was released to theaters in 2012 six months after Steve Jobs' death. Share your own memories of Robert Cringely in the comments...

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Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief secures second place, while Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe rounds out podium dominated by men

Cloudstreet, Tim Winton’s sprawling Australian family epic, has been voted Australia’s favourite book in a poll run by ABC Radio National.

The broadcaster announced over the weekend the results of a nationwide poll to determine a list of readers’ top 100 Australian books.

Magazine group points to restructuring bill but says it ‘remains profitable in the UK for another year’

Profits at Condé Nast’s UK arm slumped by more than a third last year, according to figures published shortly after the billionaire family that owns the luxury magazine group and titles from Vogue to GQ ruled out a sale.

The publisher, which enjoyed a bumper 2024 after booking £64m in proceeds from the sale of its UK headquarters Vogue House in London, saw pre-tax profits excluding exceptional items tumble 36% from £28m that year to nearly £18m last year.

For more than three decades, Michael Gove has been a leading figure in British Conservatism. As a journalist, government minister and now editor of the Tory bible the Spectator, he has helped shape the right even as it has moved further rightwards. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking, Gove joins Aditya Chakrabortty to discuss the future of the right, his record on Brexit and austerity, and the Spectator’s position on Islam

Watch the full episode with Michael Gove here.

Aditya’s suggested reading:

To read the fruits of Michael Gove’s dalliance with the Marxism Today gang, look up his essay in a 1998 collection called The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair

For a slalom ride through Michael Gove’s years in power, read The Demented Dalek by the historian Richard J Evans in the London Review of Books

To learn more on what’s become of the British right, there’s a Guardian column by Aditya

Phil Burton-Cartledge analyses in depth why the most successful political party is now failing in his book The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak

Phil also writes a very good blog on British politics, which keeps a close eye on how each party is trying to marshall a coalition of voters. Here he is on Kemi Badenoch

Geoffrey Wheatcroft does an entertaining short narrative in Bloody Panico!:

or, Whatever Happened to The Tory Party

For more on the economics of the Cameron years, this paper is acute on how the Tories failed to move the UK away from being a country of renters towards a country of makers. Two of its authors will join us for a podcast later in the series.

And if you want to read how Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP, there’s this paper based on data from the Bank of England

Finally, on the Spectator, read Nesrine Malik’s recent Guardian column

Why has Britain’s oldest political magazine become such a rabid cheerleader for Islamophobia?

A girl called Àìná was captured by an African king and later taken to England to become Sarah Forbes Bonetta, protege of the imperial monarch

When she was seven years old, Bayo Randle’s great-great-grandmother Sarah Forbes Bonetta was presented to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle as a “diplomatic gift” from an African king.

Victoria would go on to pay for Bonetta’s education, approve her marriage to one of west Africa’s wealthiest men, and become godmother to her eldest daughter.

A detective from Everett, Washington, linked two cold case killings to a known predator. Needing fresh DNA to charge him, she helped devise a clever undercover sting using chewing gum to crack the case.

• Di Guglielmo scores first NWSL goal in 1-0 victory

• Gotham denied chance to clinch NWSL Shield

• San Diego secure top-four seed as Angel City rally

Lucia Di Guglielmo scored her first National Women’s Soccer League goal and the Washington Spirit clinched a playoff spot with a 1-0 victory over Gotham FC on Saturday.

In other NWSL action, the San Diego Wave beat the North Carolina Courage 2-1, Angel City FC defeated the Denver Summit 3-2 and the Kansas City Current shut out the Utah Royals 2-0.

• Fundora lands decisive blow at 2:59 of final round

• Champion makes fourth successful title defense

• 6ft 5in fighter targets undisputed crown at 154lb

Sebastian Fundora kept his pursuit of an undisputed championship on track with a second to spare.

Fundora stopped Ermal Hadribeaj with a left hand at 2:59 of the 12th round on Saturday night at the Chelsea at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas to retain his WBC super welterweight title.

Trysten Mullis was 13 when he found his mother Amy Mullis impaled with a corn rake at the family's Iowa farm. In an exclusive interview, the now 21-year-old is speaking out about what he says he witnessed, determined to overturn his father Todd's murder conviction.

The US condemned the genocide and military rule there, but now that Trump craves its rare earths, that’s all changed. For democracy activists, that’s a disaster

Marco Rubio was once adamant that the US had to do everything in its power to end what he described as the “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya in Myanmar. In a 2017 letter he signed along with 20 other US senators, Rubio called for “strong multilateral sanctions against specific senior Burmese military officials associated with the gross human rights abuses”. Those responsible for the atrocities should be prosecuted, he argued.

In the years since, the Myanmar military’s crimes have only increased. What was then deemed ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is now widely viewed, including by the US, as genocide. What little democracy existed in Myanmar was eradicated in 2021 when Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and imprisoned and her party’s election victory overturned, and the military took full control.

That Saudi national working at OpenAI and arrested by the FBI "has not been charged with foreign espionage," writes the Washington Post, "and the U.S. government has not said whether he was acting alone or as an agent of a foreign government." But "there are signs that the U.S. government is exploring the latter possibility," they add, citing comments from Chris McGuire, a member of the National Security Council during the Biden administration: The Department of Justice's press release about the incident says that the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control section, whose responsibility includes prosecuting spies, is assisting with the case... A Washington-based Middle East expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid incurring wrath from Saudi Arabia, said he believed the Saudi government was almost certainly involved in some way. "No one does this, not even for patriotism, without getting paid," said the person. And money would not be distributed without agreement by the Saudi royal court, he said. The Saudis lag behind their regional rival, the United Arab Emirates, in artificial intelligence development, he added. Friday America's Director of National Intelligence told CNBC that espionage, "both commercial espionage, and I would say state-sponsored espionage, are realities. It's something that our private sector companies need to be wary of." (And CNBC adds that"An ex-CIA official, who asked not to be named because they were discussing information that is not public, told CNBC this week that the case is 'probably the tip of the iceberg.'") The suspect had recently said he helped advise government agencies in Saudi Arabia on technology, reports the New York Times: In an Arabic podcast interview last month, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, said he and other Saudi tech professionals in Silicon Valley had formed a group that advised Saudi organizations, including the kingdom's social insurance agency... "Silicon Valley is ground zero for espionage from a variety of countries around the world," said Amy Zegart, a professor at Stanford University who specializes in national security and intelligence. She added that she was "troubled" by the OpenAI incident and expected more cases "because these companies are so important." The Washington Post says the arrest "has ignited a fierce debate about the potential risks of Silicon Valley's international workforce — employees who often hail from nations seeking to rival the AI superpower status of the U.S." Foreign nationals have long formed the backbone of the American tech industry, helping U.S. companies surpass their would-be international rivals... As recently as April, Katrina Mulligan, a senior member of OpenAI's national security team, called for an "accelerated pathway to citizenship" for such workers, referring to foreign hires as a "national strategic asset" at an event on Capitol Hill. She estimated that a significant number of OpenAI's employees were not U.S. citizens, including Chinese nationals. Just half of the 300 top AI researchers in the world, she said, were American. Other industry leaders — as well as some lawmakers — have long accused top-tier tech companies with many foreign workers of disadvantaging Americans and being breeding grounds for Chinese espionage. Palmer Luckey, CEO of weapons maker Anduril, and venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital took to X on Wednesday to revisit arguments that the industry should focus on hiring U.S. citizens. "Silicon Valley has operated with maximum openness and maximum naivete toward foreign tradecraft," Maguire wrote... At OpenAI on Wednesday, employees continued tense conversations about the political implications of the arrest for immigrant workers, two OpenAI employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions... The arrest triggered a discussion on OpenAI's internal Slack messaging platform among employees about whether the incident might increase pressure from the Trump administration on OpenAI to not hire foreign nationals, said one of the people. In March, Emil Michael, the Pentagon's chief technology officer, wrote in court papers that AI developer Anthropic's reliance on staff with ties to China was among the concerns that fueled the Defense Department's conflict with the AI company.

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International Congress of Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders®

In an hour-long town hall hosted by CBS News, Vice President JD Vance argued the Trump administration's handling of the economy and Iran will pay dividends in the future.

Meet some of the elderly residents of Bolotana, in line to be the world’s sixth ‘blue zone’ for its high number of female centenarians

When Giovanna Marras opens the door to her home in Bolotana, a mountain village in central Sardinia, her eyes are bright with curiosity as she sizes up her visitors. Her sister, Mariangela, peeks out too, soon ushering her guests inside and handing out dishes of ice-cream. The sisters are full of life, talking animatedly. Giovanna is 101 and Mariangela is 99.

Sitting in their living room, Giovanna swiftly recaps her life story: she excelled at school before moving to Cagliari, the capital of the Italian island, at 18 to train as a seamstress. The sisters went on to run a successful tailoring business in Bolotana before travelling the world after retirement. Neither married.

Lena Schilling of Austrian Greens says images are ‘digital violence against women’ and a threat to democracy

An Austrian MEP has spoken out about her experience of being “stripped naked” online without her consent and has urged the EU to take action, as a report found that one in six female MEPs had been targeted by sexualised AI-generated content.

Lena Schilling of the Green party said she had learned last month about nude deepfakes of herself circulating online. When she opened the links, she found herself staring at images from one of her first ever press conferences – but the images had been digitally altered to remove her clothing.

Facing a slump in the polls, Argentina’s president is making economic attacks on the islands’ oil industry, and suggesting its key fisheries industry could be next

A dozen local people and a uniformed military police officer (“Do you mind if I sit in?”) took their seats at the back of the handsome wood-panelled courtroom that doubles as the Falkland Islands’ legislative assembly. Outside, it was a typically blowy early evening. It may nominally be spring in the south Atlantic, but Stanley harbour, with its dark grey water speckled with historical shipwrecks, was a cauldron of swells and churn.

Six of the assembly’s eight members – five men, one woman – waited patiently at a row of desks and microphones. The heating had been turned up to just short of uncomfortable. Behind them, a portrait of King Charles. From the other walls, dusty photographs of governors peered down on the scene.

• Rays defeat Guardians 7-3 to level ALCS at 2-2

• Díaz seals victory with ninth-inning home run

• Tampa Bay and Cleveland meet again on Sunday

Jonathan Aranda’s single led to two runs in the seventh inning when the ball got by right fielder Chase DeLauter, Nick Martinez pitched five and one-third innings for his first postseason win and the Tampa Bay Rays defeated the Cleveland Guardians 7-3 on Saturday night to even the AL Championship Series at 2-2.

Game 5 of the best-of-seven matchup is Sunday in Cleveland before the series shifts back to St Petersburg, Florida, on Monday. There is no off day for travel after Friday’s game was postponed by rain.

GUANGZHOU, China, Oct. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- On October 15, the Canton Fair Buyers Alliance was officially launched at the Canton Fair Complex, marking a significant milestone as the fair celebrates the 70th anniversary of its founding.

A Philadelphia newscast reports on a grey-haired lady who allegedly refused to move out of the path of a delivery robot as a form of protest because "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers." She was arrested, but says her actions were protected speech: According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the robot's path and ignored multiple commands from officers to move... Marvin said she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.... "I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward," Marvin said... Marvin said she has confronted delivery robots on multiple occasions... Ashley Baldwin of West Philadelphia said she witnessed one of those encounters. "I actually thought the robot hit her, so my original question was, 'Are you OK? Did the robot hit you?' And she said, 'No, I have to stop this. They're taking over the world,'" Baldwin said. Asked whether she plans to continue protesting the robots, Marvin said she does. She was charged with disorderly conduct. Uber did not respond to their request for a comment.

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Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that there are some federal immigration officers "who really screw up."

• Alex McPherson’s 34-yard kick seals 27-24 upset

• Georgia lose two interceptions and late fumble

Alex McPherson kicked a game-winning 34-yard field goal as time expired and Auburn, led by quarterback Byrum Brown’s dominant running game, upset No 1 Georgia 27-24 on Saturday.

It was the second straight week the top team in the AP Top 25 lost to an unranked opponent after then-No 1 Texas fell to Oklahoma last Saturday. Auburn’s win meant the team ranked No 1 in the AP Top 25 lost in consecutive weeks for the first time since October 1990, according to Sportradar.

President Trump spoke in the city of Highland Heights to boost Republican candidates, including Ed Gallrein​ for the U.S. House.

Pope Leo XIV was undergoing an examination for another reason when doctors discovered a tumor on his right lung, his doctor said.

Move comes after Trump administration announced restrictions that could slash water supplies

Arizona has joined Nevada in its legal battle against the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to their shares of the shrinking Colorado River.

The move comes after the interior department announced restrictions this summer that could slash the water supplied to lower basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – over the next two years depending on the river’s condition.

POLICE LOG – October 16, 2026

Two Dover Homes Struck By Gunfire Friday Evening

DOVER, Del. — Dover Police are investigating a shooting that damaged two homes on Mitscher Road Friday evening.

Officers responded to the 100 block of Mitscher Road at approximately 6:39 p.m. on October 16, 2026, after receiving a report of shots fired.

Police said two residences were struck by gunfire. One of the homes was occupied by two adults, but no injuries were reported. The second residence was unoccupied at the time.

Officers also located multiple spent shell casings in a nearby alley.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Dover Police Department at 302-736-7111. Tips may also be submitted through Delaware Crime Stoppers or the Dover Police Department’s online contact form. Tipsters may remain anonymous.

Hurricane warning in effect from Manzanillo to Cabo Corrientes as storm moves toward Pacific coast

Trudy strengthened to a category 2 hurricane as it moved toward Mexico’s south-western and west-central Pacific coast on Saturday, the US National Hurricane Center said.

A hurricane warning was in effect from Manzanillo in Colima state to Cabo Corrientes in Jalisco. The latest NHC data showed Trudy with maximum sustained winds of 100mph (155km/h) and about 205 miles (330km) south/south-east of Cabo Corrientes and 115 miles (180km) south/south-west of Manzanillo, moving north-west at 10mph (17km/h).

The driver of the vehicle is in custody, and two juveniles were in the vehicle, according to Wichita police department

Two people, including a child, were killed during a soccer game in Wichita, Kansas, when a person drove a vehicle through the field at Stryker soccer complex, police have confirmed. Multiple other people were injured.

The driver of the vehicle is in custody, Aaron Moses of the Wichita police department said Saturday in a news conference. There were two juveniles in the vehicle, he said.

For more than a year, The New York Times followed recipients of a universal basic income program who received $1,330 a month for an entire year. There were benefits, but also the everyday challenges of being poor, and turning their life around "did not turn out to be quite that simple." Across Silicon Valley, experimental guaranteed income programs have quietly taken off. Google began funding six different initiatives in 2022 as part of a $50 million donation to nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, saying basic income could be a novel way to prevent homelessness in one of the nation's most expensive locations. Each program has hundreds of participants who receive around $1,000 a month, and academics study the results. State and federal tax laws limit the lengths of the programs and the payment amounts. The studies have found that most basic income programs improve short-term employment and mental health while reducing food insecurity. But while data from these efforts has been closely tracked, less is known about the individual journeys of participants... The Times ultimately shadowed three people... All of the program participants, including the ones The Times followed, were previously homeless and transitioning off a housing stipend that paid for a portion of their rent, and many received the payments on top of other social assistance like food stamps. The Times's findings mirrored the academic studies. For all three recipients, the instant benefits of basic income were clear: They had breathing room for groceries, rent and other expenses. But the success of the payments in another area — giving people more free time and opportunity in the long term — was mixed. "It's a lot to ask of someone to get their life together in 12 months, when a lot of these issues are structural or systemic," said Jennifer Loving, who runs Destination: Home, a nonprofit that administers basic income programs in Silicon Valley. "And the world around them isn't getting cheaper." One recipient began going to community college — but resorted to taking one class at a time while single parenting — and using their monthly payments to help support relatives. In fact, the article notes that a recent study of 3,000 universal basic income participants found that money spent supporting friends and family increased 26%, "the most of any category. That was more than the increases for food (6%) and child care (11%)." Another recipient used the time to get help at a community college to find a higher-paying job. And one recipient died — but his mother used what he'd saved to help put his brother through a drug rehab program.

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Suspect shot a man in his 30s on the E train platform of the 53rd Street-7th Avenue subway station, according to NYPD

A man was shot and killed in a New York City subway station Saturday afternoon, and the New York police department is searching for the suspect.

The suspect fatally shot a man in his 30s on the E train platform of the 53rd Street-7th Avenue subway station, according to a statement from the NYPD.

• Eagles star sidelined by blood clot in his calf

• Hurts sustained injury against Rams on 4 October

• Super Bowl MVP must miss at least four games

Quarterback Jalen Hurts was placed on injured reserve on Saturday, two days after the Philadelphia Eagles revealed he had a blood clot in his calf.

Hurts was initially ruled out on Thursday for the Eagles’ upcoming game against Carolina. The Eagles said at the time that Hurts had been injured when he took a cleat to his calf during their game against the Los Angeles Rams on 4 October.

"When state lawmakers attempt to rewrite how the internet works," argues an EFF blog post, "users rely on courts to recognize that laws can't make technical impossibilities a reality." "That's why we were happy to see that a court has blocked Utah's attempt to outlaw the privacy protections of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)." In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah's SB 73, the state's draconian anti-VPN age verification law... Signed into law earlier this year, SB 73 attempted to regulate adult websites by requiring them to block VPN users or to identify the physical location of visitors using them or similar tools that mask their network traffic. It even went so far as to prohibit websites from offering instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these checks. This made Utah, to EFF's knowledge, the first state in the nation to target the use of VPNs to avoid legally mandated age-verification gates. The Utah federal court halted enforcement of the law's VPN provisions last week, ruling that the law likely violates the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on passing laws that significantly burden businesses and people outside Utah's borders. SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user's physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor's age just in case they might be in Utah. The law's "actual-location provision in practice requires an entity to perform age verification services for every user visiting its site from any location because the entity would violate the law if even one of those users happened to be obfuscating," the court wrote. The court essentially ruled that Utah has less-burdensome ways to prevent Utah minors from accessing adult websites than requiring all users in the world to comply with SB 73. EFF's position is that "forcing platforms to detect and block privacy-preserving tools undermines user privacy and security worldwide while demanding the impossible." But there's another problem, explained an EFF email this week. "Age verification laws that are predicated on users possessing identity documents exclude critical sections of populations. And this problem is global in nature: Millions of people lack government-issued identification or encounter regular challenges to obtaining or updating it...." Every site-blocking bill has the same rotten idea at their core: That enforcing copyrights requires building a censorship machine for websites into the architecture of the internet. This is, of course, a disaster for a free and open web. These proposals keep coming, but there is still no way to create a mechanism for blocking access to an entire website that does not invite both deliberate abuse and lots of collateral harm to free and lawful speech. EFF has declared this month "Opt Out October," and each day they're offering new guides on how to "stand our ground and take control over what happens with our data."

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MapQuest creates a new layer (that can be toggled on and off), Gizmodo reports: After promising not to comply with the Trump administration's "Lake America" gimmick, the platform announced a new "Surveillance Layer" that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety. Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify the locations of known outdoor surveillance cameras and plate readers from Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and others. While the company didn't specify how it sources its data, it appears to be similar to the data amassed by DeFlock, which maintains a user-submitted map of ALPR camera locations. MapQuest may be sourcing the information from DeFlock and the OpenStreetMap project. Engadget notes that MapQuest also recently added "useful, long-overdue features like Android Auto support and public transit directions."

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Footage circulating online appears to show several diplomats being attacked in the vicinity of the village of Taybeh, Israeli police said.

"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin said Friday it plans to make extensive upgrades to its Florida launch facilities," reports CNBC, "with the goal of supporting multiple flights per week by the end of the decade." "The company will add two more launch and landing pads for New Glenn, its heavy-lift, partially reusable rocket." A $330 million expansion to its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, expected to be complete in the summer of 2027, will enable it to produce up to 150 upper stages of its New Glenn rocket annually, Blue Origin said in a blog post. "These investments are centered on one goal: building the capacity to support more missions, more reliably, and more efficiently," Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the post. "As we look ahead, this infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade...." Blue Origin said it's building a new customer integration facility with the U.S. Space Force at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station that will enable it to "prepare multiple missions at once" when it's up and running. Blue Origin has invested more than $3 billion in its infrastructure and facilities in Florida, which now spans more than 20 sites across the state's Brevard and Orange counties, with more than 5,000 employees, [Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the blog post]. The article notes it's part of "a flurry of investment" as SpaceX stops offering commercial rides on its Falcon 9, "with $92.5 billion invested in the commercial space sector in the first three quarters of 2026, according to a report this week by venture capital firm Space Capital." And it happens as Blue Origin, SpaceX and other rocket providers "are seeing increasing demand from companies and governments trying to deploy satellites into orbit." "Launching at a high cadence requires a connected system," says Blue Origin's blog post, "one that manufactures vehicles at scale, prepares customer payloads efficiently, supports reliable launch operations, and quickly returns reusable boosters to service. We are building that system here in Florida," and "laying the foundation for a future where access to space is more frequent, more reliable, and more affordable, for the benefit of Earth."

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Tweet by Sarah Helm, wife of national security adviser Jonathan Powell, ‘does not meet criminal threshold’

No further action will be taken against Sarah Helm, the wife of the prime minister’s national security adviser, after she was accused of supporting the banned protest group Palestine Action.

Helm, a journalist and author who is married to Jonathan Powell, posted on X on Thursday: “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action.”

Police fire teargas in Paris and protesters storm town hall in Marseille – with officials blaming violence on ‘ultra-left’

More than 400 people were arrested in France on Saturday after protesters supporting high school student grievances clashed with police.

Police fired teargas in confrontations with protesters, as demonstrations across France were boosted by other groups angry over high prices and the fraying of a social welfare system.

The post Cruz Turns to Anti-Trans and Anti-Muslim Rhetoric as GOP Fights for Senate appeared first on News Facts Network.

Federal officer slammed vehicle into a construction worker while pursuing a man who died in similar circumstances

A federal officer slammed a vehicle into a Houston construction worker and broke his leg, believing him to be a man who apparently died years ago, the dead man’s family said on Friday, further calling into question the account given by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The worker, 48-year-old Miguel Parra Hernandez of Mexico, remains hospitalized with multiple leg fractures and needs reconstructive ankle surgery, according to FIEL, a Houston-based immigration advocacy group. At a news conference on Friday, the group said the alleged suspect’s family had shared documentation proving his death.

Linux maintainers "have ruled that people no longer have to declare their LLM usage," reports XDA Developers, "as Torvalds himself calls a ban on AI 'utterly stupid.'" The first part of this story comes via a message sent to the Linux mailing list. It announces one of the major changes decided during the Maintainers Summit on October 8, 2026, in Prague, Czechia, where submissions to the kernel no longer need to use the "Assisted-by" tag... meaning that people can submit AI-generated code without needing to declare it as such. In some correspondence regarding concern about this new disclosure removal, the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, made his thoughts known... [Torvalds] compares an AI ban to getting rid of text editors, as doing so would prove that someone could write a good commit message without making any mistakes. He then rounds off his argument by asking, "Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?" and stating that he simply expects the people working on the Linux kernel to "understand what they are doing." Here's the last line of Torvalds' post. "Quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools." In a related story, Torvalds says he's used AI to help him understand patches that were hard to follow. And this week Torvalds even posted an LLM-assisted patch, reports Tom's Hardware: The development branch purports to fix an old issue with massive cache contention when many CPUs are reading the same file — a scenario potentially encountered when using shared libraries, databases, and web servers. Several developers had already made attempts over the years at fixing the issue, all with varied results, none quite ideal as an all-encompassing solution... He's now posted his solution in a development branch, and claims that he's seen a 23x performance improvement in a dedicated synthetic benchmark, though he notes that actual real-world impact will be far less significant, as "no real load" will witness those figures. Torvalds used Anthropic's Claude Code, reports The New Stack, and "said the assistant wrote the implementation, tests, and initial documentation, and reviewed the code under his direction. He ran the benchmarks himself, despite having previously criticized developers for claiming AI writes 99% of their code." Tuesday Torvalds submitted a 10-patch series. "Reviewers have since identified a race condition and raised concerns about memory reclamation," adds The New Stack. "Torvalds has handed further development to Kiryl Shutsemau, a Linux kernel developer who previously worked on the same bottleneck."

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Would-be MP recorded telling undercover reporter in ITV investigation that Muslims could not be British

A would-be Reform UK MP told an undercover reporter that Muslims could not be British and asylum seekers should be put in “concentration camps”.

The comments were recorded as part of the undercover investigation by ITV that has already seen Reform accused of “appalling behaviour” and “extreme racism”.

For years everyone has been dancing around Trump’s unpredictability, his bullying and his threats. It’s past time to reassert our values

In two weeks, Donald Trump faces his moment of truth; transformational midterm elections that will drastically influence the rest of his presidency, for better or for worse.

Assuming that he cannot find a way around the constitutional ban on him running for a third time in 2028, he now has a limited time left to make sure he leaves office the most consequential president ever. Again, for better, or worse.

Zoe Daniel is a three-time ABC foreign correspondent and former independent member for Goldstein

French mayor and archbishop also attacked during violent attempt to stop Palestinians harvesting olives

Israeli settler militants have attacked European diplomats, a French mayor and the archbishop of Cambrai in Taybeh, in the occupied West Bank, injuring three people and damaging a car, in the latest violent attempt to prevent Palestinians from harvesting olives on their own land.

Bernard Baudoux, mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, was wearing his red, white and blue sash of office and attempting to enter a vehicle with diplomatic plates when he was assaulted and knocked to the ground on Saturday.

Omar's attorneys asked the government to immediately return the congresswoman's property, and also demanded all video and audio recordings of the search be preserved.

Las Vegas has never been shy about making a spectacle of itself. But even by Sin City's standards, Formula 1 has moved remarkably fast from headline attraction to museum exhibit.

First Las Vegas GP. F1 pit-lane in the night. Image Credit: Shutterstock/cristiano barni

POLICE LOG – October 16, 2026

Delaware State Police are investigating a strong-arm robbery that occurred Friday afternoon at the 7-Eleven at 1700 Pulaski Highway in Bear.

Troopers responded at about 5:30 p.m. Police said a male victim was walking toward the store’s front doors when a female suspect grabbed his arm and demanded his property.

A male suspect then got out of a vehicle, approached the victim, struck him and took his property, according to police. Both suspects fled in a white sedan.

The victim suffered minor injuries and declined medical treatment.

The Delaware State Police Criminal Investigations Unit is investigating. Anyone with information is asked to contact Detective J. Dempsey at (302) 365-8472 or Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333.

About 6,000 homes under evacuation, affecting 16,000 residents in San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano

At least six homes burned and two firefighters were injured after a fast-moving wildfire blazed through parts of southern California on Friday.

Two firefighters were taken to the hospital with heat-related injuries from the Norte fire, officials said.

Programming issues and software updates have been blamed for delays in getting hundreds of thousands of people registered to vote.

"Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the company behind the [server-side] JavaScript and TypeScript runtime created by Ryan Dahl, the inventor of Node.js," Forbes reported last week. But Deno "has no future at Cloudflare, which will maintain the runtime for another year before ending its development," writes The Register. "That's OK with Dahl. 'I am now of the opinion that if you're choosing Node.js for building servers, you're doing it wrong,' Dahl told The Register." It all started with his team's work on the platform Deno Deploy, "We wanted to make running applications as straightforward as possible," Dahl wrote on the official Deno blog. "But building and operating Deploy also showed us how much complexity remained underneath that developer experience. I wanted to simplify that layer, too." This led to celld. Building on the Cloudflare Workers programming model, celld lets developers build distributed applications from the start while making the system simple to operate. What excites me greatly is that the scaling is built into the programming model, rather than infrastructure each app has to assemble itself.... We want to make this programming model the default way to build servers, whether you run on Cloudflare's network or your own infrastructure. Joining also means choosing where to focus our effort... Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development. Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down. We will provide migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers. [Deno's JSR package registry for JavaScript and TypeScript] will continue operating, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare. Forbes argues that this acquisition of Deno "turns a long-standing objection to Cloudflare Workers, the claim that applications built on it cannot easily leave, into a selling point." For CIOs evaluating serverless and edge platforms, portability now has a concrete answer... Released in August, [celld] is a single Rust binary that runs Workers and Durable Objects across many machines, with object storage as its only external dependency. Operators run multiple celld instances against one storage bucket, and the software handles placement, routing and persistence. Dahl and Belder will now lead an effort to merge celld into workerd and make self-hosting a supported way to run Workers applications. With this, customers can build an application on Cloudflare's network and move it to a private data center without rewriting it. "With Deno, we improved the experience of writing JavaScript," Dahl argues on the Cloudflare blog, "but we didn't fundamentally change what developers had to assemble around the runtime. The bigger problems are around networked applications: distributing computation, coordinating state, data storage in general, and autoscaling to meet demand..." Could the programming model make partitioning across machines part of the design from the start? The solution clicked into focus when I read about Cloudflare's Durable Objects. It provided a very powerful abstraction: the distributed singleton with a SQLite database. Each Durable Object is like a small, individually addressable server with its own relational database. Its JavaScript execution is single-threaded (which is easy to reason about), it handles WebSockets, and its local SQLite database can be accessed synchronously. By building a chat application using one Durable Object per channel, you have sharded your data and WebSocket connections, and thus made your application scalable... What excites me is the leverage this model gives developers: compute, relational databases, queues, and real-time communication primitives designed for applications distributed across machines. Now Dahl and 12 of his Deno colleagues "will work to build out Cloudflare's Workers platform," explains The Register, "expanding it for potential open-source use. He feels this approach is the way to go." "Right now, every other server is really operating at the Linux VM layer. That is not what Cloudflare Workers are," he said... The ever-fickle Dahl first debuted Deno in 2018 as a rewrite of Node. The name 'Deno' is an anagram of Node, and it was Dahl's attempt to fix everything he felt he got wrong with Node — built-in fetch, a permission model, native TypeScript support et al. Sequoia backed Dahl's company for $21 million in 2022, and as of August, Deno amassed 400,000 monthly users. Nonetheless, Node's gravity proved too heavy for Deno to achieve escape velocity. "What we found over years of working on Deno is that you can't really deviate from Node.js very much," Dahl told The Register. "As we continued to try to get adoption for Deno, we found we had to essentially backpedal on some of the original promises and become more Node compatible over time, and that left us as a kind of an alternative Node.js implementation." Going forward, Cloudflare will supply Deno with bug fixes and security patches for the next year, while Dahl looks for a new home for the MIT-licensed open source project. Dahl's worked could bring "yet another revolutionary turn for server-side JavaScript," the article argues, "offering a runtime that would require only 300 KB of memory per instance, rather than the hundreds of megabytes now required for Node/Deno. Such savings could quickly add up for a cloud provider, especially one serving the voracious agentic market." And as Dahl wrote on the Deno blog, "The need for better abstractions is especially acute with AI. Durable Objects bring together capabilities that are particularly useful for agent harnesses: inexpensive, serverless execution, persistent state, WebSockets, and a high-level JavaScript interface. This is what I'm most excited to explore and why celld focuses on Durable Objects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Washington, DC — President Donald Trump threatened California election officials with prison Friday as his administration escalated a dispute over more than 20,000 people the Justice Department claims may be noncitizens who received mail ballots.

“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social after the Justice Department warned state and local officials that knowingly processing ballots cast by ineligible voters could expose them to criminal investigation.

The administration has not publicly produced evidence showing that the roughly 20,000 people it flagged are actually noncitizens or that they intend to vote illegally. California officials say voter eligibility cannot legally be revoked based on unverified data matching.

The Justice Department sued California Thursday seeking to block ballots from the flagged voters from being counted until their citizenship can be confirmed.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan have challenged the reliability of the federal data. Logan said officials cannot withhold ballots “based solely on unverified allegations.”

The confrontation comes less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms and follows a broader administration campaign to obtain voter records nationwide.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal, and documented cases remain exceptionally rare. A federal judge recently blocked a separate Justice Department voter-roll program after finding it violated federal privacy and procedural laws.

Sources:

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Trump Threatens California Election Officials With Jail Over Voter Roll Dispute appeared first on News Facts Network.

Belgian foreign minister urges further EU sanctions and links attack to Israel’s ‘illegal settlement policy’

Masked settlers attacked a group of European diplomats during a visit to the occupied West Bank on Saturday, Belgium’s foreign minister said, on a second day of high-profile assaults on Palestinians and others during the sensitive olive harvest.

At least four people have been killed and more than 100 injured since the harvest began earlier this month, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Activists say Israeli authorities do little to stop attacks that involve weapons ranging from slingshots to guns. An attack on Friday seriously injured a Washington Post photographer and others.

Millions of current and former students at California's public school have had their data stolen — including names, date of birth, and addresses — stolen in a breach, reports the Los Angeles Times. The breach affects students "who took the state's mandated standardized tests that annually assess their academic proficiency, education officials announced Friday." The compromised information affects many more than the state's current 5.7 million public-school students as the breach dates back to 2023 enrollments. Students who left California but did not confirm their transfer to another school also were affected, dating back to 2006. The data breach involved [nonprofit] Educational Testing Service or ETS, which provides extensive services to California [including test participation and assessment data]... Affected former students, including those who are now adults, are eligible for 24 months of free identity-protection services and identity-restoration help if there is identity theft. Officials said that parents and guardians may want to consider requesting a free credit freeze for their children who are under 16 to help prevent unauthorized accounts from being opened in the names of their children. The breach involved a compromised login credential, according to a web page about the incident from California's Department of Education. The compromised credential was then used to copy files with student information at "various" times between May 22 and September 18, 2026, which drew concern from a cybersecurity expert interviewed by the Los Angeles Times: "A stolen login credential should not become a months-long passport to millions of students' personal records," said Anton Dahbura, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. "If that is what happened here, the critical question is why authentication safeguards, access restrictions, and monitoring systems failed to detect and stop the unauthorized activity." He added: "Incidents like this expose a fundamental weakness in how we manage student data: School systems may outsource the storage and processing of sensitive information, but they cannot outsource the consequences of a breach. When millions of student records are concentrated with a single vendor, one security failure can become a statewide problem with consequences that follow children for years." A spokesperson for ETS told the Times that they've now implemented additional safeguards, including strengthened access controls, enhanced monitoring, and more third-party review of their security practices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Delaware State Police Sex Offender Apprehension and Registration Unit (SOAR) is issuing the following public notifications of homeless and wanted sex offenders.

Wanted Sex Offenders

SOAR is currently looking for the following wanted sex offenders after they either failed to register or re-register at their current address.  If anyone knows the location of these individuals, please call (302) 739-5882.  Information may also be provided by contacting Delaware Crime Stoppers at (800) 847-3333.  The individuals shown represents only a portion of the current wanted sex offenders. Please see the Delaware Sex Offender Registry website for the complete list.

Click on the image to see the complete profile

Homeless Sex Offenders

The following individuals are not wanted for failing to register or re-register at their current address.  This is a public notification of homeless sex offenders.  If you have information that the listed individuals are occupying a residence, please call (302) 739-5882. Information may also be provided by contacting Delaware Crime Stoppers at (800) 847-3333.  The individuals shown are those recently reported homeless and represent only a portion of the current homeless sex offenders. Please see the Delaware Sex Offender Registry website for the complete list.

Click on the image to see the complete profile

The post State Police Issues Sex Offender Notifications appeared first on Delaware State Police – State of Delaware.

Washington, DC — President Donald Trump reportedly wanted former Fox News host Maria Bartiromo to become White House press secretary before Katie Zacharia took the job for a brief and turbulent five-day tenure.

Axios reported, citing two administration sources, that Trump was interested in Bartiromo after Karoline Leavitt stepped down. Bartiromo reportedly signaled she was not interested in taking the position. CNN commentator Scott Jennings was also said to have been under consideration but was never formally offered the job.

Bartiromo left Fox News in September after more than 12 years with the network. Her departure came amid reports that she had shared confidential internal guidance about Fox’s Trump coverage with the White House. Bartiromo has long been an outspoken supporter of Trump.

Zacharia ultimately began as press secretary on Oct. 12 but was out of the role by Oct. 16. Her sole formal briefing lasted about 14 minutes and drew criticism, while questions about her legal background intensified after she acknowledged failing the California bar exam.

Trump said Friday that he had encouraged Zacharia to “reconsider” the position and later suggested she could remain in the administration in another capacity.

The White House has not announced a permanent replacement, and Trump said he is in “no rush” to make another appointment.

Sources:

• Mediaite – MBFC Rating

The post Bartiromo Reportedly Turned Down Trump Before Zacharia Took Press Secretary Job appeared first on News Facts Network.

The Ukrainian president said Starlink issues are hampering his country's defensive efforts against Russian drones.

The 71-year-old pope had a portion of his right lung removed and received a diagnosis of lung cancer earlier this week.

The man was dragged into a pond and killed by the alligator, according to authorities.

TechCrunch writes: "Isn't it weird that I, like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like ... a business scam?" comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder gently asks Elizabeth Holmes. One month before the notorious Theranos CEO surrendered to begin her 11-year criminal fraud sentence in 2023, Holmes and her husband contacted A24 as a last-ditch effort to exonerate her in the public eye, suggesting they send a film crew to document her final days of freedom. Alongside director Lance Oppenheim, Fielder — a cringe-comedy mastermind whose work often walks the line between fact and fiction — embraced the impossible project of figuring out who the infamous Stanford dropout really is. "I never actually made that connection," says Holmes. "I think it's a pretty different situation...." We already know that Elizabeth Holmes is not innocent. What we still can't figure out, though, is whether she really, truly believes she did nothing wrong. Even as she sat on trial — listening to testimonies from investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars, whistleblowers who were silenced when they flagged that Theranos' blood-testing devices didn't work, and patients who acted on incorrect blood test results — Holmes never wavered. Business Insider says the scariest thing about the new documentary "is how much I wanted to believe her." SFGate calls it "one of the finest works of journalism I've ever seen." As Fielder ingratiates himself with Holmes and [her husband] Evans, he gets them comfortable enough to ask the hard questions: about Theranos, about prison, and even about themselves. The resulting footage is often shocking. You will see Elizabeth Holmes, who still maintains she did nothing wrong, answer "no" when Fielder asks her if she's ever lied in her life... [Y]ou will also see Holmes and Evans spend a great deal of time in this movie attempting to boot up Theranos 2.0. They even go so far as to drag out some of the original Theranos blood testing apparatus, which looks like a bunch of random parts from TigerDirect they hooked together, to show Fielder what their product can do. We do not see it doing anything on screen, but the couple assures that it we would if it was, like, hooked up properly. These scenes are extremely funny, but funny isn't what Fielder is looking for. He's trying to figure out if this woman is a clueless naif, if she believes her own lies, or if she is playing the character of an innocent woman, and doing so with such effectiveness that, to paraphrase Fielder, she might be the most manipulative person in the world. The answer proves fabulously elusive, and so Fielder and Oppenheim go to extremes in their attempt to find it. They hold the camera on Holmes' rubbery elfin face for what feels like hours at a time, to see if she'll blink (figuratively or literally!). They interview Holmes' visiting parents, with the father, former Enron exec Christian Holmes, casually telling Fielder that everything changed for his daughter "when she was raped." To the furthest extreme, they bring in actress Amanda Seyfried — who played Holmes in the Hulu TV show "The Dropout" — to recreate any dialogues Fielder had with Holmes herself that couldn't be recorded on camera. Seyfried is so convincing in mimicking Holmes that you, the audience, might forget which scenes were Seyfried talking to the camera and not Holmes herself. I know I did. Continuing that theme in the film, TechCrunch notes, is how her husband Billy Evans "has constructed a lifelike AI avatar of his wife, trapped inside of a large vertical screen that he wheels over to the dinner table to sit with him and his kids as though she's actually there." Elizabeth Holmes "comes off in the doc as every bit as innately bizarre as anyone showing up for a cinematic freak show might hope," writes Variety: My personal hunch is that Fielder came away thinking Holmes is on the level, to the extent that someone who sometimes seems like an AI program's idea of how a human should behave can be on the level. There are a few possibilities that might explain how Holmes comes off the way she does in the movie: (a) She is a simpleton. (b) She is a conniving sociopath who happens to be utterly brilliant at playing a simpleton. (c) Somewhere between those poles, she is the very emblem of a woman who throughout her life has put herself in the sway of controlling men, to the detriment of her intellect, willpower and emotional development... Is it possible that the more you learn about someone, the less you might know how to think about them? Meanwhile, NBC News recently reported: Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of fraud for siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from several high-profile investors, is scheduled to be transferred from a minimum-security federal prison to a halfway house next year, according to one of her victims... [America's Department of Justice "is required by law to notify victims of crime of case developments through letters and emails," the article points out.] She was sentenced in 2022 to 11 years and three months in prison. She and her business partner, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, were ordered to pay 12 victims a total of $452 million in restitution. Holmes has been serving that sentence at a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas. The halfway house will provide her greater freedom... In March, a judge cut Holmes' sentence from 135 months to 123 months. According to a court document, the judge agreed with Holmes that she did not personally cause "substantial financial hardship" to her victims. NBC News adds that a prison consultant they interviewed "said inmates who report to halfway houses can work, have phones, drive to religious services or shop for things they need and earn passes for weekends at home."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French government investigating why cars funded by UK to prevent asylum seekers crossing Channel were used in school protests

French police have used 4x4 vehicles paid for by British taxpayers to charge at student protesters during the school protests that have swept the country.

The French government has confirmed that an investigation has been launched into why the cars, funded by the UK government specifically to prevent asylum seekers crossing the Channel, were used during a protest involving school students in Dunkirk.

Descendants say theft from Portchester Castle reflects racism that has haunted ‘generation after generation’

The theft of a plaque in Hampshire that told the little-known story of African-Caribbean prisoners in 18th-century Britain reflects the enduring racism that has fuelled centuries of atrocities against Black and Indigenous Caribbean people, their descendants say.

Ronald Raymond McDonald, a professional drummer, was part of a delegation that travelled from Belize and elsewhere to Portchester Castle near Portsmouth last week to honour their ancestors: 2,500 men, women and children transported to Britain as prisoners of war in 1796.

John Swinney tells party conference SNP will use ‘six-figure war chest’ to renew argument for leaving UK

John Swinney has said that the second referendum campaign for Scottish independence “has already begun”, revealing a nationwide effort to renew the argument for leaving the UK in his keynote address to the SNP party conference.

On Saturday, the Scottish first minister said the SNP would launch its “most sophisticated campaign in history” to convince Scottish voters of the benefits of independence, backed by “a six-figure war chest”.

Ukrainian president warns it will embolden Russian leader and intensify war as Moscow hits country’s power plants

• Power plant attacks reflect Russian blueprint to make Ukrainian cities unlivable

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Donald Trump’s decision to roll back sanctions on Russia as a “reward” for Vladimir Putin and warned it will embolden the Russian leader and intensify the Kremlin’s war, as Moscow launched one of its worst strikes yet on Ukraine’s power plants in an attempt to black out the country’s cities before winter.

The Ukrainian president also said he expected the Trump administration to lift more sanctions against Russia in the future and called for Europe to establish its own negotiations with Moscow as the US has sought better ties and business deals with the Kremlin.

Steve Hamilton was fishing in Winter Garden when he was attacked by gator, which was later killed

A man fishing at a pond in Florida was killed on Friday by an alligator that was almost 12ft long in a rare kind of animal attack, according to authorities and media reports.

Steve Hamilton, 71, was on the shoreline in the community of Winter Garden when the animal dragged him into the water, the Florida news outlet WOFL reported, citing local police and the state’s fish and wildlife conservation commission.

With the IMU overhaul done, the firmware can now make full use of well-connected IMUs. Here are my recommendations for VESC controller makers on how to wire the IMU. It’s not difficult, I just wanted a short, clear and easy to reference post.

https://pev.dev#p-6530-use-hardware-spi-1Use hardware SPI

Connect the IMU to pins wired to a hardware SPI peripheral. A hardware SPI transfer runs at up to 10 MHz (versus 700 kHz of I2C) and doesn’t put load on the CPU. The Thor301, Thor400 and Z400 already do this.

https://pev.dev#p-6530-wire-the-data-ready-interrupt-2Wire the data-ready interrupt

Route the IMU INT1 pin to a free MCU pin. This is to drive the sample timing from the IMU via an interrupt. It’s a single PCB trace. Currently only the Z400 onboard IMU has it.

One detail for the pin selection: EXTI interrupt lines are shared across ports by pin number (e.g. for pin B6 the 6 is the number), so pick a pin whose number doesn’t collide with another external interrupt in the design.

https://pev.dev#p-6530-consider-a-modern-imu-3Consider a modern IMU

The IMU device layer rewrite also made adding support for new IMUs much easier. The ST LSM6DSV32X is now supported as a new modern IMU. It has much better on-paper temperature drift (nearly 10× lower gyro zero-rate drift) and somewhat lower noise.

But my opinion at the moment is that IMUs can have their quirks, which differ unit by unit. Especially the ST LSM6 IMU line (might just be the DS3) seems to be quite susceptible to this, so it’d be nice to have some comparison to more modern IMUs. Note though, given these unit-to-unit differences, IMUs should ideally be evaluated in a larger sample size, either with very expensive equipment and a lot of engineering time, or simply by riding.

If you’re considering a new IMU and need firmware support for it, or any help with the IMU integration in general, I’m available to help.

https://pev.dev#p-6530-support-the-project-4Support the project

This work is done in my free time and benefits the whole VESC Onewheel ecosystem, including the products built on top of it. If you’re a hardware vendor and you think my work makes your product better, consider supporting the development.

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In the west the technology comes with at least some effort to provide security and a benign intent – not so from China

There is much to fear from artificial intelligence developed in China and handed to businesses and governments in the west almost free of charge.

Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Microplastics are a source of extreme concern for health: the presence of these tiny pieces of plastic has been linked to heart attacks, stroke, dementia and brain tumors. But what drives these associations is unclear. Now a study published in Nature offers a tantalizing clue: microplastics interact with water, generating highly reactive molecules. When microplastics come into contact with water, the water near their surface can become chemically active, generating highly reactive species that can modify nearby substances, including biologically important molecules. As plastics wear down to microscopic sizes, their surface-to-volume ratio increases dramatically. For example, when a credit card is fragmented into particles some 10 microns in diameter, there is a more than 200-fold increase in its surface area, says Wei Min, a chemist at Columbia University and one of the senior authors of the study. As a result, any chemical activity is amplified. Min and his colleagues examined various microplastics -- including polystyrene, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate. Plastic surfaces are hydrophobic, meaning they repel water, Min says. Thus, water molecules cannot form the hydrogen bonds they maintain in liquid form. That changes molecular arrangements, and, in turn, the change influences the local electrical environment and chemical reactivity. The presumed chemical inertness of bulk plastics overlooks the toxicity of their fragmented microscale forms. "For microplastics, this is especially important because fragmentation creates enormous amounts of new surface area," Min says. In past research, microplastics have been shown to cause inflammation, oxidative stress and decreased mitochondrial activity. The new study provides a possible mechanism for this, showing that plastic-water interfaces can perturb proteins, cell membranes, and more. How this might contribute to damage in living tissues in humans is still unclear, Min says. "Ultimately, we hope to connect fundamental interfacial chemistry with quantitative measurements of biological effects, which would help us better understand potential health risks," he adds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump-boosting billionaire was sued over promise to give away $1m per day to random signatories of petition

Elon Musk and his ⁠America Pac political action committee said recently that they agreed to settle two ⁠proposed class ⁠actions ​alleging the billionaire entrepreneur defrauded residents in closely contested states before the ⁠2024 US election by promising voters a lottery-style daily $1m giveaway.

The plaintiffs, Musk and America Pac ​told the ‌judge overseeing the two ‌related lawsuits in federal court in Austin, Texas, ‌on Thursday that they have reached settlements subject to court approval.

Minnesota lawmaker’s attorneys asked for return of seized items and the preservation of any recordings of search

Ilhan Omar’s attorneys have asked the US Department of Justice to return property that federal agents removed days earlier from her home during a search.

The lawyers for the Minnesota Democrat contended that the seizure as “neither justified nor lawful”, according to a letter that the Associated Press reported on Friday.

A consensus is emerging among scientists that certain foods are addictive for some people. But questions remain about which foods, which people and why.

Photo Gallery contributed by Photojournalist Dave Reeder on Friday 10/16. Image developed on 10/17 with AI.

Riders win fifth straight as second-quarter surge and strong defense deliver victory over St. Georges Tech

CAMDEN, Del. — Caesar Rodney celebrated homecoming Friday night with a hard-fought 17-10 victory over St. Georges Tech at Rider Stadium, extending its winning streak to five games in a matchup between two of Delaware’s top high school football programs.

The victory improved the Riders to 5-1, while St. Georges Tech fell to 4-2.

Quarterback Gavin Johnson led a second-quarter surge that gave Caesar Rodney a 14-2 halftime advantage. The Riders then held off a second-half comeback by the Hawks to preserve the victory.

The win marked a successful opening to Caesar Rodney’s Class 3A District II schedule and continued one of the program’s strongest starts in recent seasons.

Dave Reeder captures the action

Delaware LIVE photojournalist Dave Reeder was on the sidelines at Rider Stadium, capturing the intensity, key plays, and homecoming atmosphere surrounding one of the weekend’s most anticipated games.

The following photo gallery offers a closer look at Caesar Rodney’s 17-10 victory over St. Georges Tech.

The first photo shows the ball clearly out of the St. George’s running back’s control before it crossed the goal line or was downed by contact, yet the on-field referees called it a touchdown for St. George’s Tech, the only touchdown of the game.

• Event: Caesar Rodney vs. St. Georges Tech football
• Date: Friday, Oct. 16, 2026
• Location: Rider Stadium, Caesar Rodney High School, Camden
• Final score: Caesar Rodney 17, St. Georges Tech 10
• Photo gallery: Dave Reeder photojournalist for Delaware LIVE

Photos by Dave Reeder, Delaware LIVE on 10/17/20206

Caption: This was called a touch down for St. Georges. Photo by Dave Reeder

Warner Bros. assumed ‘Trick ‛r Treat’ would be such a bust that the studio released it straight to DVD in 2009. Here’s how it became a holiday classic.

As the WNBA finals kick off Saturday in San Francisco, the pro-LGBTQ+ sports fanbase push a message of inclusion in the face of anti-trans attacks

• Sign up for WNBA 30: a free women’s basketball newsletter

At Wilka’s Sports Bar in lower Manhattan, a crowd of mostly LGBTQ+ fans was fired up during a WNBA playoff game between the New York Liberty and the Atlanta Dream. When the Liberty’s Jonquel Jones blocked the Dream’s star forward Angel Reese at the basket, then chest-bumped her – leading teammates to separate them – the bar erupted in cheers. One fan quietly joked: “Now kiss!”

“I love strong women, and I love supporting strong women,” said August, a trans organizer and Liberty fan who asked to go by their first name for privacy reasons.

Actor experienced a ‘medical emergency’ on flight during which she allegedly injured crew members, statement says

Actor Selma Blair did not mean to hurt anyone during the recent flight which led to her arrest on allegations that she assaulted a pair of cabin crew members, a police officer and a nurse, her representatives said on Friday in a statement that characterized the episode as a medical emergency.

The lengthy statement also dismissed prior media coverage of Blair’s arrest after a Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to New York as unsympathetic and inaccurate, singling out reporting from several outlets alleging that she tried to open the door of the airplane that she and her fellow passengers were on.

Doctors say pontiff is ‘fit for discharge’ after operation to remove cancerous tumour from his lung

• Pope Leo lung cancer surgery: what kind of operation did he have and what happens next?

Pope Leo has been discharged from hospital in Rome after undergoing an operation to remove a cancerous tumour from his lung.

Leo, 71, was deemed “fit for discharge”, his doctors, Luigi Carbone and Stefano Margaritora, said in a statement published by the Vatican.

Should have posted this way earlier, there’s a small percentage of users getting markable nose oscillations (nose hunting) after upgrading to Refloat 1.3.

From what I’ve heard so far, decreasing the IMU Sample Rate to 416 Hz is a workaround to fix the problem.

I’m not sure about the exact cause of this, I believe it’s just the messed up timing from the old firmware IMU sampling code. Seems updating to a firmware with my IMU fixes does fix the issue.

For LSM6DS3 controllers, firmware 7.00 should do, though it doesn’t have all the fixes. For BMI160 controllers (or if you wanna get all the fixes for LSM6DS3), it will be 7.01 (which will have all my IMU fixes so far), or right now my 7.00 Refloat Extras release (linked somewhere in the middle, it’ll get updated if newer versions get released).

Chilean-American author awarded Premio Planeta for sequel to her 1982 debut novel, The House of the Spirits

The Chilean-American author Isabel Allende has won Spain’s €1m (£843,000) Premio Planeta, one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, under a pseudonym, with a sequel to her celebrated debut novel, The House of the Spirits.

Allende, 84, won the 75th edition of the award on Thursday with La hora antes del alba, which returns to the characters of her 1982 novel, a multigenerational family saga set against political upheaval in a country inspired by Chile.

School looking to sell piece of open land beloved by people in Devon town to fund refurbishments

On Saturdays throughout autumn, residents of Totnes have met at a field on the banks of the River Dart to play ballgames, fly kites or simply sit on the grass and chat.

But it hasn’t just been about having fun – this has been a “play protest” aimed at trying to save a beloved piece of open land in the historic Devon market town.

Whenever a new technology is created, it will, without exception, immediately be used to harass girls and women

You may be familiar with rule 34 of the internet, which states that if something exists or can be imagined, there will almost certainly be online porn of it. Now let me introduce my rule 35: whenever a new technology is created, it will, without exception, immediately be used to harass girls and women.

See, for example, Meta’s “pervert glasses”. As anyone could have foreseen, putting a tiny camera and microphone into smartglasses would immediately lead to people using them to record and harass women. Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. So-called manfluencers have filmed themselves trying to flirt with women in public spaces and then uploaded the footage to TikTok. The women in these videos are often not aware they’ve been recorded until their identities are shared online and they are harassed by strangers. And what’s Meta doing about this? It’s instituted a few bans and made some privacy updates, but doesn’t seem to have an appetite to properly solve the problem. Indeed, at the Meta Connect 2026 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg did not feel the need to apologize to the women whose lives have been upended by his technology.

A modern-day prospector promised rural Imperial thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue – but his plan has set off a firestorm of resistance

Sebastian Rucci zoomed in on a map in late 2024, looking closely at a large block of brown earth. The barren plot sandwiched between sprawling alfalfa fields and sleepy desert suburbs was exactly what he’d been searching for – the perfect place to realize his dream of building the largest artificial intelligence datacenter in California.

The dusty expanse wasn’t an obvious location. It was in the Sonoran desert, just north of the Mexican border, where temperatures regularly rose past 100F (37.8C). Water was scarce in the once-booming agricultural area, which gets its supply from the beleaguered Colorado River. And then, there was the city of Imperial – population 22,000 – to win over. As controversial datacenter projects have sprung up across the US, residents were naturally skeptical of a new, energy-guzzling neighbor.

This hybrid emergency room proposed for Smryna would be among a handful of new slate of expansion and renovation projects around the state. | PHOTO COURTESY OF BAYHEALTH

Monstropolis, Villains Land, Piston Peak, Avengers rides, Indiana Jones and more. Here are all the details.

A shooting at an elementary school in Bend on Thursday left three children and one teacher dead

For three long hours on Thursday afternoon, Joe Camarlinghi waited at a Bend, Oregon, church for word about his daughter.

Camarlinghi had received an alert about a shooting at Silver Rail elementary, heard sirens and quickly headed to campus, where he was directed to the church along with other parents. Parents and teachers cried and hugged, and waited.

Andrew Bailey among finance leaders to leave session in Bangkok when Russian finance minister addressed group

The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, has taken part in a walkout of finance leaders who left an International Monetary Fund meeting in protest against Russian involvement.

Bailey joined counterparts from France, Germany and a number of Scandinavian and Baltic countries who left the session in Bangkok when the Russian finance minister, Anton Siluanov, addressed the group in Russian.

Old-fashioned holiday tables had a little of everything. These 15 dishes bring back that look with roast pork, cheesy sides, hearty soups, meatballs, quiche, smoked pork, and a cookie tray.The post 15 vintage dishes that made my family’s holiday table…

Brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and Carter Rhoad were on a surfing trip to Mexico's Baja California when they were killed during an attempted robbery.

Prosecution did not act in fair and impartial way in grand jury proceedings, judge rules, after West Wing actor charged with groping young boy on TV set

A state court ⁠judge in New Mexico has dismissed charges of child sexual abuse against West Wing actor and director Timothy Busfield, saying the prosecution did not act in a ⁠fair and impartial manner during grand jury proceedings.

Judge Joseph Montano said prosecutors could pursue new charges against Busfield.

President Trump prevented some new sanctions on Russia and hefty tariffs on large-scale buyers of Russian oil from taking effect late Friday, as he seeks to ease prices by tapping Russian energy.

Andrea De Armas thought her concerns weren't being taken seriously. Then she received alarming information.

As Mark Cocker approaches a landmark for the world’s oldest column in an English-language newspaper, he is still inspired by powerful encounters with nature

In the autumn of 1987, Mark Cocker sat in a field near Norwich and watched a jay burying acorns for the long winter ahead. He described the scene in his first country diary for the Guardian. Thirty-nine years on, some of those jay-planted acorns will be mature oaks now, and Cocker is completing his 1,000th diary for the world’s oldest column in an English-language newspaper.

In his next diary, he will reflect on the changing birdlife around Flint Clough, in the Peak District, where he first marvelled at rare birds aged 12 after devouring bird books in his bedroom. As a boy, he would find cuckoo, golden plover, ring ouzel and twite, a once-common bird which is now virtually extinct in England.

State has confirmed six measles-related deaths and county at center of outbreak lacks its own health department

The county at the center of Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak is at a clear disadvantage because, local officials say, it lacks its own health department and it will now get special assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As of Wednesday, Pennsylvania had confirmed 1,222 measles cases, up from 86 the week before. Six measles-associated deaths have also been confirmed by the state.

Game day food gets easier with 17 recipes built for passing, dipping, scooping, and grabbing between plays. Expect golden sausage balls, hot crab dip, pizza, shrimp, croquettes, chili, cookies, and more.The post 17 game day recipes loaded with melty, golden…

T-Mobile just raised a mandatory fee again, but it’s not the only carrier taking small bites out of your wallet.

United Arab Emirates will reportedly resume payments to Yemeni forces as gains by Iran-backed Houthi fighters alarm Gulf state rulers

• Yemen civil war: what sparked latest escalation and who is involved?

The United Arab Emirates has agreed to re-enter the Yemen conflict by resuming payments to some government forces fighting Iran-aligned Houthis in the south, according to sources in Yemen. In return, Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide air cover for the anti-Houthi force.

The new cooperation agreement is the first tangible sign that the deep rift between the UAE and Saudi Arabia over Yemen’s future is starting to be healed – if only because the advance by Houthi forces across Yemen has alarmed all the rival Gulf state rulers.

As Americans express frustration with the country's economic outlook, Vice President JD Vance told CBS News this week it could take some time to see improvement.

Westminster appears to be waking up to warnings over AI safety, with concerns over its use by extremist groups and bad actors

“I have this sense that, within a few months, AI is going to be all anyone is talking about,” said one cabinet minister, with an ominous stare.

It was Labour conference, with everyone from ministers to activists jubilant at Andy Burnham’s takeover and a bounce in the polls after the change of leader.

Long week, low energy, and dinner still needs to happen. These 13 recipes lean on one-pot and one-pan cooking, with curry, chili, ramen, soup, meatballs, and quick skillet dinners.The post 13 one-pot recipes low-effort enough for a cook who’s had…

Mark Smith, who is married to a Swedish woman, says he was told three times he needed to do nothing in order to remain after Brexit

A seriously ill British man living in Sweden has been forced into hiding amid fears he will be deported as a result of what he says is a government Brexit residency error.

Mark Smith, 60, who has had hearts attacks, strokes, severe headaches and chronically high blood pressure that has been difficult to treat, was told on the phone he should leave Sweden by 17 October as he was an “alien” without permission to stay.

How a string of bizarre events led writer Linda Geddes to don her sleuthing cap and dig into a world of shadowy impersonators

It started with an entirely ordinary interaction on LinkedIn. Someone had tagged me in a post, saying how much they’d enjoyed contributing to a New York Post article I’d written about “chronoworking”. As the author of a book about circadian rhythms, it was exactly the sort of subject I might write about. Except I’d never heard of this person, let alone interviewed them.

I clicked on the link and my stomach dropped. There, above an article about people who organise their working lives around their biological clocks, was my name: Linda Geddes.

President has hit red states to drum up Republican support – and his increasingly strange performances are on full display

Montana, Tennessee, Alaska. In the run-up to an election, a Republican president typically wouldn’t be campaigning in these traditionally red states.

These aren’t normal times, however, and Donald Trump, an unpopular president leading an unpopular party, has held rallies in those states in the last week, seeking to drum up support. But a series of eccentric performances from the president means his behavior has been the focus, rather than any of the candidates he is backing.

The organization We Are the Seeds began planting as part of a push to return land sovereignty to Indigenous people

Xiao Hui Star kneeled on her haunches, with her hands in the dirt as she cleared a spot to plant a flowering perennial in late summer. Surrounding her was a native garden replete with golden sunflowers, beans, squash, pawpaw and corn. She ruffled tufts of sweetgrass, which emitted a vanilla-like fragrance. Birds fluttered by and swooped down into a small bath filled with hard clam shells. Sandwiched between a brick home and a playground in west Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, the native garden featured plants endemic to the region.

“These are very special endangered varieties that we are rematriating back to the soil,” said Star, who is part of Rhode Island’s Narragansett tribe. She is also the manager of new initiatives at the Philadelphia-based organization We Are the Seeds, which hosts public events and education on Indigenous arts and culture. “Who knows how many centuries it’s been since a Lenape corn or a Nanticoke squash have grown in this soil.”

You can get a word processor, a spreadsheet program and more for free with LibreOffice.

Google is expanding its Android Earthquake Alerts System from 98 to more than 200 regions worldwide, using smartphone sensors to detect early earthquake activity and warn users before potentially dangerous shaking begins. The update also enhances the system's "Be Ready" alerts with estimated earthquake magnitudes, epicenter information, maps showing affected areas, and additional safety guidance. From a Google blog post: Be Aware: A straightforward alert for estimated light shaking, letting you know an earthquake has been detected nearby. Be Ready: A detailed alert for stronger shaking, alerting you to prepare to take action. Take Action: A full-screen alert for moderate to heavy shaking, giving you immediate advice on how to stay safe. We've built-out our Be Ready alert with new helpful guidance. In the coming months, you'll see a map with a radius of where we've detected shaking, estimated earthquake magnitude, action you can take, and a button to learn more about the earthquake as information comes in.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Environmental watchdog Mighty Earth reveals two-year effort to postpone and weaken EU Deforestation Regulation

US corporate lobbyists launched a two-year “blitz” to postpone and weaken the world’s most progressive legislation to protect forests, according to a new investigation by the environmental watchdog Mighty Earth.

Major US firms and trade associations, including Cargill, Bunge, Mondelēz and the US Soybean Export Council, as well as numerous other US firms and organizations, sought to influence the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) in more than 350 meetings, the advocacy group found.

Ryan Amacher, who played role in bid to damage campaign, has also made antisemitic and racist posts on social media

An influencer who played a key role in hoax claims that Democratic US senate candidate James Talarico was in a mental health facility has a long history of social media posts that favorably invoke Nazi Germany, express antisemitism and anti-Black racism, criticize miscegenation and call for “remigration” of refugees.

On X, the Lake Oswego, Oregon, resident Ryan Amacher, known online as Rhein Amacher, has described Muslims as “sub-human”, claimed that Black Africans are “monkeys” with low IQ, characterized immigrants as “vermin” and expressed support for the far right, including Germany’s AfD and the UK’s Tommy Robinson.

Police Scotland says boy, 16, and 80-year-old man died in incident north-east of village of Drymen in Stirling

A 16-year-old boy and an 80-year-old man have been killed in a light aircraft crash near Loch Lomond in Scotland.

Emergency services were called to reports of an incident north-east of the village of Drymen, Stirling, at about 4.45pm on Friday.

Lord Ricketts said Vladimir Putin was ‘trying to undermine morale in European countries’.