LAUREN BOYER
Opinion Columnist
As Generation Z enters the workforce, suits are being replaced with slippers and cubicles with couches. Growing up, I would watch my father leave for work every day with his suit and briefcase. I would think to myself that I couldn’t wait to wear fancy clothes and have a busy day, just like the red-lipped women in my books who wore travel suits and fancy hats.
Now, as a college student, I wrote articles from home for my first internship. For my third, I spent weeks sitting on my bed looking at spreadsheets. In short, it was not what I believed the life of a working girl was like for all those years.
It was less exciting, less elegant and less engaged with the world. It was lonely, sloppy and boring. I wondered if this was because of the rise of technology new to my generation, and if so, did that mean we were losing something human about the way we work?
Office culture looks different around the world, especially throughout history. But COVID-19 hit worldwide just a few years ago — and while its impact was far from equitable, it was extensive to say the least. Working from home became easier and officewear became more casual. Now that the pandemic has ended, we need to embrace dressing up and going into work.
There’s nothing like real connection — and I’m not talking about Wi-Fi. When you go to the office, you meet the people there, and you make it a place worth going. We can all agree that no one looks the same online as they do in person — we’ve all had awkward photos of us posted by friends, right? Not only do people look different, but they also engage differently, in both conscious and unconscious ways, when we interact with them in person.
Secondly, networking is important for life and careers. How can you build a strong relationship with someone you never see? It’s possible, but I argue it’s less rewarding. For long term purposes, it’s better to meet your co-workers face-to-face. Who knows? Maybe they’ll become life-long friends or even spouses.
Working from home makes it easier to get distracted. There is a lack of accountability, and slacking off looks more like scrolling than bonding with teammates. Plus, wouldn’t you rather go outside every day and go to a place with free coffee?
Lastly, going into the office is a great motivator for dressing up. COVID may have lowered our standards, but isn’t it nice to look in the mirror and feel put together? Besides this, dressing professionally usually makes people feel better and going into work with optimism and confidence can boost performance rates. That’s why presenters often dress up.
As thrift stores fill up with blouses and slacks and students wear flip flops to class in January, the takeaway is simple: Dressing up and going into the office is important for developing enduring connections with the working community, as well as maintaining accountability and performance levels.
Lauren Boyer is an opinion columnist at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached at leboyer@udel.edu.
Police found that five Barbie packages containing fentanyl were sold. They have all been recovered.
The Trump administration has asked a federal judge to dissolve her order preventing ICE from deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia.
"Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated," reports the Verge: After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it's starting to mess with headlines in the traditional "10 blue links," too. We've found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process. For example, Google reduced our headline "I used the 'cheat on everything' AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything" to just five words: "'Cheat on everything' AI tool." It almost sounds like we're endorsing a product we do not recommend at all. What we are seeing is a "small" and "narrow" experiment, one that's not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how "small" that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it's tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news. The good news, for now, is that these changed headlines seem to be few and far between, and they're not yet the kind of tripe we've seen in Google Discover. (For example, Google Discover told me this week that the PlayStation Portal was getting a 1080p streaming mode, when it actually got a higher bitrate mode instead.) Compared to that and other lying Google Discover headlines like "US reverses foreign drone ban" — on a story reporting the opposite — the nonsense headlines we're seeing in Google Search are downright tame. The article points out that Google "originally told us its AI headlines in Google Discover were an experiment too. A month later, it told us those AI headlines are now a feature..." "Google confirmed that the test uses generative AI, but claimed that 'if we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it would not be using a generative model and we would not be creating headlines with gen AI'..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Statement from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards comes after the US threatened to target energy infrastructure
Several blasts could be heard from Jerusalem on Sunday, AFP journalists said, after the Israeli military warned of incoming missile fire from Iran towards central Israel.
Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency medical service said there were no immediate reports of casualties.
Continue reading...Witnesses describe coordinated raids in which homes and vehicles were set on fire and several Palestinians injured
Israeli settlers have carried out a series of attacks across the occupied West Bank, setting homes and vehicles on fire and wounding several Palestinians in what witnesses described as coordinated raids on communities.
The violence, reported across at least half a dozen locations overnight from Saturday into Sunday, comes amid a wider surge in tensions in the territory. The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, cited local sources as saying settlers had entered al-Fandaqumiya and the nearby town of Seilat al-Dahr, south of Jenin, late on Saturday.
Continue reading...Nasa confirms meteor after residents reported hearing thunder-like noises about the time the fireball was visible
A suspected meteorite crashed into a home in suburban Houston on Saturday night, according to local residents and officials.
Speaking to the local news outlet KHOU11 over the weekend, Spring area resident Sherrie James recalled the incident, saying: “My grandson went to check and said there was a hole in the ceiling … then I saw the rock, and I thought, ‘That looks like a meteor.’”
Continue reading...Shadow justice secretary had called Trafalgar Square event an ‘act of domination’
James Cleverly has said he disagrees with his Conservative frontbench colleague Nick Timothy that public Muslim prayers are an act of domination, as another senior Tory called for the party to respect the right to worship.
Kemi Badenoch has defended Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, after he posted images of mass prayer at a Ramadan event on Monday evening in Trafalgar Square, calling it “an act of domination” and “straight from the Islamist playbook”.
Continue reading...Trump and border czar Tom Homan confirm plan to assist TSA agents amid partial government shutdown standoff
Donald Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, have confirmed that the president’s administration is sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to US airports beginning Monday to assist with security amid extremely long lines – and to help airport security agents who have been working without pay since 14 February because of a partial government shutdown.
Homan will lead the effort, Trump said on Sunday.
Continue reading...Nebraska, Indiana and West Virginia Republicans have all rolled back child labor regulations while the number of violations has risen fivefold in the last decade
The number of child labor violations has risen fivefold in the last 10 years, but Republicans across the US are continuing to propose and pass legislation that rolls back protections or regulations for workers under the age of 18.
Republicans in Nebraska, Indiana and West Virginia have successfully passed legislation in 2026 rolling back child labor regulations, with legislation led by Republicans pending in other states, including Florida, Missouri and Virginia.
Continue reading...About 65% of US firefighters are volunteers, as New York state says number has fallen to lowest level in 40 years
Officials have warned of serious consequences after the number of volunteer firefighters, the bedrock of firefighting in the US, plunged, leading to entire departments to close in some states.
About 65% of American firefighters are volunteers, serving in their free-time alongside regular jobs. In 2008 there were 827,000 volunteers nationwide, but that figure dropped to 635,000 in 2023, the last year data is available.
Continue reading...Web domain added to government registry a month after president directed agencies to release files relating to UAPs
It was a gift to conspiracy theorists.
Last week, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency registered the alien.gov and aliens.gov web domains, adding both to the official government website registry.
Continue reading...Wait times aren't expected to improve until government funding is restored and TSA officers receive paychecks.
CNBC reports: Amazon has acquired Rivr, a Swiss robotics company developing machines for "doorstep delivery," the company confirmed Thursday... It announced the deal in a notice sent to third-party delivery contractors... "We believe this technology, when working alongside your [delivery associates], has the potential to further improve safety outcomes and the overall customer experience, particularly in the last steps of the delivery process...." In its notice to delivery service partner owners, Amazon said Rivr's technology, which includes a four-legged robot on wheels, will allow it to research and test how the devices can be integrated into delivery operations, including "helping [delivery associates] carry packages from delivery vehicles to customer doorsteps."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Running back retracts comments he gave on podcast
Player’s mother says she is asthmatic
New York Giants running back Cam Skattebo has apologized for saying that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and asthma are “fake”, insisting that his comments were not meant to be taken seriously.
In an appearance on the Bring the Juice podcast, the 24-year-old was asked whether he believes CTE – a degenerative brain condition linked to repeated head trauma – is real. Skattebo called the condition an “excuse”, before making a similar claim about asthma.
Continue reading...President Trump's threat comes after CENTCOM's commander said that Iran's ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz had been "degraded."
At a time when our nation is splintered in many areas of public life, the New Jersey Senator writes how virtue is a strategy to rekindle the belief that Americans' destiny is bound together.
The New Jersey Senator has been a face of the Democratic Party's resistance to the Trump administration. He expresses his hopes for our nation in a new book, "Stand," in which he encourages Americans to stand together, reminding us of our shared virtues.
Energy and oil sites across region would become ‘legitimate targets’, Tehran says
Iran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East if the US attacks its energy sites, hours after Donald Trump threatened to “obliterate” the country’s power plants if the strait of Hormuz was not opened within two days.
As Iranian missiles struck two southern Israeli cities overnight, injuring dozens and shattering apartment buildings, the developments signalled a dangerous potential escalation of the war in the Middle East, which is now in its fourth week.
Continue reading...Resolving boredom through our incessant attention to our devices has, according to New York Times bestselling author Arthur C. Brooks, also brought an end to letting our minds wander, inhibiting abstract thinking, and making us vulnerable to anxiety and depression.
In 2005, the "Friends" star played Valerine Cherish, a washed-up sitcom actress, in the HBO comedy "The Comeback." The show was cancelled, but it earned a cult following, and returned in 2014. Now, "The Comeback" is itself making a comeback.
The River Cafe in London has had a Michelin star since the late 1990s, thanks to co-founder, owner, acclaimed chef and podcaster Ruthie Rogers, whose new book, "Table 4 at the River Cafe," celebrates conversations and comfort food.
The phrase should evoke optimism, positive expectations about the future, trust and belonging. That seems almost out of reach in a chaotic world
One term has already become the well-intentioned weasel word of 2026: “social cohesion”. A phrase that can be dropped into speeches, inquiries and legislation, its meaning shape-shifts depending on the audience. Is it about “glue” or the rule of law? About community resilience or countering fear? Does it mean finding places of real exchange, or shutting up and getting on?
Although it has been in the political lexicon for years, the terror attack that targeted Jewish people celebrating Hanukah in Bondi last December brought social cohesion to the fore as an urgent problem to solve.
Continue reading...The White House’s politicization of the agency will have a real-world impact on small business owners in the US
Kelly Loeffler, the new administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA), announced recently that the agency charged with supporting the businesses that are the backbone of the US economy would no longer be approving loans to small business owners unless they are US citizens. If you’re a legal, tax-paying immigrant with a green card and full residency? No loans for you.
This is a big mistake.
Continue reading...Heather Danae Lewis who was one of 30 people charged in Minnesota church protest showed she did not attend event
Federal prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against a woman accused of participating in a controversial January protest at a Minnesota church after the woman apparently did not attend the event at all.
Prosecutors notified a federal judge they intended to drop charges against Heather Danae Lewis, who was one of 30 people charged in connection with an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protest that disrupted a service at Cities church in St Paul. Officials have charged the protesters with civil rights crimes, saying they interfered with the right of the congregants at the church to exercise their religious beliefs. The media professional Don Lemon, who was at the event reporting on the protest, was among those charged.
Continue reading...David Margolick's biography of Sid Caesar explores how the 1950s comic reinvented the art of comedy in the new medium of television.
Outfielder was angered by handshake snub during game
Arozarena says pair are ‘brothers and teammates’
Randy Arozarena says he has apologized to his Seattle Mariners teammate Cal Raleigh after an incident at this month’s World Baseball Classic.
Arozarena was representing Mexico against Raleigh’s USA when the teams met at the WBC on 9 March. Raleigh ignored Arozarena’s offer of a handshake during an at-bat, a move that angered the outfielder. In a later interview, Arozarena said Raleigh could “fuck off” and “go to hell.” Raleigh downplayed the incident, saying “we’re good friends and we’ll continue to be good friends”.
Continue reading...A master of humor, slapstick and accents, his 1950s series "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour" rewrote the rules of comedy in the new medium of television. Biographer David Margolick and comedian Robert Klein discuss Sid Caesar's unique gifts.
Following an executive order from President Trump, the Department of the Interior has removed dozens of educational signs at our national parks that the administration claims promote "divisive narratives" and "corrosive ideology."
PM’s ‘cost of living champion’ calls for consideration of temporary measure to prevent profiteering from Iran war
The government’s top cost of living adviser has called on ministers to explore a temporary cap on the profits of energy and petrol companies to prevent them from cashing in excessively on the war in the Middle East.
Richard Walker – a Labour peer, the chair of Iceland supermarkets and the prime minister’s “cost of living champion” – said he had asked the government to examine limiting how much businesses were able to benefit from higher energy prices after Iran’s blockade of the strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route for Europe’s oil and gas, and the wider conflict in the region.
Continue reading...The iNaturalist cellphone app not only helps users identify plant, animal and insect species; it also provides invaluable data to scientists studying biodiversity, species decline, and habitat loss.
Officer said he held himself responsible for accidentally phoning activist while in secret special branch meeting
An undercover police officer has admitted he was exposed as an infiltrator by his own blunder, which has been described by activists as worthy of Inspector Clouseau, the spycops public inquiry has heard.
The officer, who used the fake name Simon Wellings, jeopardised his own covert deployment by mistakenly recording himself discussing individual campaigners with other special branch officers.
Continue reading...Regulators narrow securities definitions – a shift that could benefit Trump family’s crypto projects
On Tuesday, major US financial regulators published rules for the cryptocurrency industry that may reduce regulatory requirements and that insiders believe will benefit the Trump family’s ventures.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued new guidelines for the cryptocurrency industry to answer the longstanding question of what does or does not qualify as a security, a classification that entails strict oversight. SEC chair, Paul Atkins, has dubbed the framework a “token taxonomy” for the sector. Published jointly with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the guidelines classify most of crypto-based assets as commodities, collectibles, payment tokens or “digital tools”, exempting them from the SEC’s more stringent oversight and disclosure requirements. Only blockchain-based representations of existing securities, such as stocks and bonds, remain classified as securities under this new framework.
Continue reading...News that chickpea dip is to join list of products used for UK inflation basket confirms its move into the mainstream
It is a sign of the times. This week it was revealed that hummus is joining the list of foods used to measure the cost of living in Britain as the ubiquity of the dip at mealtimes sees it billed as the “new ketchup”.
The decision to drop a pot of hummus in the inflation basket is a moment for the all-conquering chickpea dip, which arrived on supermarket shelves on the late 1980s. Since then Britons have gone from spending virtually nothing to £170m a year on the versatile stuff.
Continue reading...Outpatient prescriptions for the drug increased 71% after the announcement, but the FDA later approved it only for folate deficiency
When Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr stood up at the press conference in September to tout leucovorin, a vitamin B derivative, as a treatment for autism, some neurodevelopmental doctors were shocked – and they braced themselves. There was little evidence to suggest the folinic acid helps with autism, yet there was an immediate flood of parents calling and scheduling visits to talk about the medication.
“The average parent who maybe wasn’t getting the right information said, ‘Well, to be good parents, we need to try this,’” said William Graf, a professor of pediatrics and neurology at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. Outpatient leucovorin prescriptions for children ages five to 17 in the US rose by 71% in the weeks following the announcement, new research shows.
Continue reading...Most Republicans, especially MAGA, continue to support the US action and express a lot of confidence in Trump personally.
Growers face soaring fertiliser and fuel costs as shipping choke point of the strait of Hormuz hits supply chains
It is peak harvesting season for avocados in the lush southern highlands of Tanzania but growers are racing against time to find buyers for the precious green fruits before they become overripe.
Donald Trump’s disastrous Middle East war is being felt in the world’s energy markets but oil and gas are not the only products that transit through the maritime choke point of the strait of Hormuz. The conflict is also hitting supply chains elsewhere.
Continue reading...Three cases previously confirmed reclassified by UK Health Security Agency after further testing
The number of confirmed meningitis cases linked to the Kent outbreak has fallen from 23 to 20.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Sunday that three cases previously thought confirmed had been downgraded after further testing.
Continue reading...I saw the wild Nosh One up close in January and it's available for preorder now. Here's my take on the pricey robo-chef.
Don't give up something you love out of fear or frustration. You may have to explore and adapt, but ultimately it's still about having fun.
Next year marks the 20th anniversary of the Apple Phone. We don't know what will it be called but here's everything we know so far about the alleged iPhone 20.
At GDC 2026, Google trumpeted Gemini-powered games, but the industry still hasn't found must-have uses to win over players and developers.
Though the majority of the president’s base backs the war, a schism has developed among Trump-touting media stars
When the histories of the Iran war and Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” (Maga) movement are written, there may be a special place for the words of former US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis.”
Greene’s social media post summed up how the media stars of the Trump coalition have turned on each other in a ferocious, bitter and – sometimes – vulgar brawl. Figures such as Kelly, Levin, Tucker Carlson, Laura Loomer, Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro have clashed over the meaning of “America first”, the role of Israel and whether Trump is breaking his promise to end forever wars.
Continue reading...There are flooding rains in Hawaii, rare snow in Alabama and a severe heatwave in the west coast
The US is experiencing a striking mix of weather extremes this March. Flooding rains in Hawaii, rare snow in Alabama, flip-flopping temperatures in the north-east and, perhaps most concerning, a severe heatwave affecting the west coast are raising questions about how strange these patterns really are, and what role the climate crisis is playing.
Experts suggested that people around the US need to pay closer attention to the climatecrisis and do what they can to “minimize the impacts”.
Continue reading...Nvidia GTC brought out several robots I had never met before, offering a glimpse at many possible robotic futures.
Raging waters lifted homes and cars and prompted evacuation orders for 5,500 people north of Honolulu, though they were later lifted.
America's cable TV industry "is undergoing its most dramatic collapse in history," reports Cord Cutters News, "with operators large and small waving the white flag on traditional TV service and pointing their customers toward streaming platforms instead." Just in 2025 Comcast lost 1.25 million pay-TV subscribers (ending the year with just 11.3 million), while Charter Spectrum also lost hundreds of thousands of customers each quarter. But "for smaller regional operators, who lack the scale and diversified revenue streams of giants like Comcast, those kinds of losses are simply unsurvivable," they write. And "the companies that once delivered hundreds of channels through coaxial cables are now either shutting down entirely or reinventing themselves as internet providers." Pay-TV subscriptions have plummeted from nearly 90% of U.S. households in the mid-2010s to roughly half by the end of 2025, resulting in billions in lost revenue and forcing many smaller operators to conclude that continuing linear TV services is no longer viable... [This year over U.S. 50 cable TV companies — primarily smaller and midsize providers — are "expected to cease operations entirely or shut down their television services," Cord Cutters News reported earlier.] YouTube TV's pricing is so competitive that the platform is projected to have close to 12.6 million subscribers by the end of 2026, positioning it to become the largest paid TV distributor in the United States. Exclusive content deals, such as YouTube TV's acquisition of NFL Sunday Ticket rights, have further eroded the value proposition of traditional cable at every level of the market... As older cable subscribers age out of the market, there is no new generation of customers waiting to replace them... [Cable TV] operators like WOW! are betting that their physical infrastructure — now increasingly upgraded to fiber — is more valuable as an internet delivery system than as a cable TV platform. [WOW! serves customers across Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Alabama — but is "phasing out its proprietary streaming live TV service and directing all customers toward YouTube TV," the article notes.] Industry observers see this as part of a broader trend: operators shedding unprofitable video segments to focus on broadband, where returns and network investments are prioritized. By the end of 2026, non-pay-TV households are expected to surge to 80.7 million, outnumbering traditional pay-TV subscribers at 54.3 million — a milestone that would have seemed unthinkable just a decade ago. For the cable companies still standing, the math is now inescapable: the era of the cable bundle is ending, and the only real question left is how gracefully each operator manages its exit.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Israeli air defence systems fail to intercept projectiles during attacks on southern cities of Arad and Dimona
Iranian missile strikes have wounded about 200 people in southern Israel, after air defence systems failed to intercept projectiles that hit two cities close to a nuclear facility.
Among the injured in the attacks on Arad and Dimona were a 12-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, both reported to be in serious condition. The Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 reported early indications of possible deaths, though there was no official confirmation.
Continue reading...A partnership aims to ease food insecurity in low-income areas underserved by grocery stores
Dozens of newly planted fruit trees have created an oasis in a Florida “food desert” after local groups teamed up with the national Arbor Day Foundation in a project to counter soaring grocery prices.
Those behind the community forest venture in Orlando say demand from people struggling to afford basic, healthy food is at its highest level since the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...Leon Panetta calls president ‘naive’ over strait of Hormuz closure and says ‘the chickens are coming home to roost’
Donald Trump is stuck between “a rock and a hard place” after three weeks of war in Iran and “sending a message of weakness” to the world, Leon Panetta, a former US defence secretary and Central Intelligence Agency director, has told the Guardian.
Panetta, who served in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, recalled that national security officials were always keenly aware of Iran’s ability to create an energy crisis by blocking the strait of Hormuz. That very scenario is now unfolding, leaving Trump with no exit strategy beyond wishful thinking.
Continue reading...These updates are smaller and meant to patch certain software components on your iPhone.
The Supreme Court will consider whether states can count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive after.
Steve Reed says ‘UK is not going to be dragged into this war’ after Israeli warnings that Iranian missiles could hit Europe
Iran is not believed to have the capability or intent to hit the UK with its missiles, a cabinet minister has said, after Tehran aimed two at the UK-US airbase on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
One missile failed to reach the island, while another was shot down by a US warship, according to reports. It was the longest-range attack yet by Iran since the country was attacked by the US and Israel.
Continue reading...The 1.3 release has been a long time in the making and there are still some details to flesh out. But those are mostly about reducing the config options and tweaking a few small details, so I’m providing this feature preview release for people to try out the new code and provide feedback. The plan is for this to become 1.3 as-is, just with the aforementioned cleanups.
This release brings two major improvements, the Timing rework and Sepoint smoothing. There’s also the (firmware 6.06+ only) feature of normalizing the tunes via the motor torque constant (calculated from the Flux Linkage motor config value).
Overall, this version introduces a number of improvements that cause small changes in behavior. Realizing this can be disruptive, I’ve tried to bundle all of them into one release to reduce the inconvenience as much as possible.
I’ve written a lengthy post about the details of these improvements. Short story of these changes is:
The core Setpoint smoothing algorithm is the 3-Stage algorithm from the old implementation. The config options have been updated to be more user-friendly, but three options remain:
The first option represents the time in seconds it takes for the setpoint value to reach approximately 66% of its new target, if the other two options (On/Off Speed Time Constants) were 0. So just think of it as the smoothing delay, typically set to something like 0.2-0.3s. This can (by nature of the filter) still be too harsh and so the other two options come into play. They also define the time to reach 66% of the target value, but for the speed of the transition, meaning how fast the value is changing. No need to think too hard about that, just know they are not of the same scale as the Smoothing Time Constant, but they are of the same scale between themselves. What’s the difference between them then? They correspond to the two Tiltback Speeds: Smoothing On Speed Time Constant corresponds to Max Tiltback Speed and Smoothing Off Speed Time Constant corresponds to Max Tiltback Release Speed. So, if we consider e.g. uphill ATR, setting a high On Speed Time Constant will slow down the nose going up, a high Off Speed Time Constant will slow down the nose going down.
Note the defaults prioritize slower On Speeds and faster Off Speeds. At least one of them needs to be slow for a smooth ride and slower On Speed seems more comfortable for casual riding. Racers might want to tweak these.
The options are added for Torque Tilt, ATR, Turn Tilt and Remote in the feature preview. Brake Tilt uses the ATR values. Note the defaults for these values are not necessarily optimal, the goal of the feature preview is to gather feedback and fine-tune them. For Turn Tilt and Remote the smoothing should likely be hard-coded and the options removed.
For ATR, the Response Boost option has been removed due to being deemed no longer necessary and the Transition Boost option has been reworked. Due to it having a different effect now, it was intentionally changed so that it won’t transfer from backups. A default value of 2.0x will be set in all 1.3 tunes.
On firmware 6.06+ the package has access to the motor Flux Linkage value. This value expresses the torque capability of the motor (technically torque constant, Kt, inverse of the speed constant, Kv). Refloat 1.3 will compensate for this (effectively use the value to internally convert all currents to torque). This means tunes will slightly change in their torque output depending on how much the motor Flux Linkage differs from the reference value of 27 mWb.
There are now two more realtime data values available in the realtime data plot in package UI: Control Loop dt and Control Loop Frequency
They are both defined by the IMU Sample Rate. In an ideal world Control Loop Frequency would be equal to the Sample Rate, but it ends up being a bit different depending on circumstances. It is heavily impacted by the Motor Zero Vector Frequency, which puts a significant load on the controller. ZVF only has an impact when the board is engaged (or more broadly when the motor current modulation is on).
The Control Loop dt is the time between control loop iterations. For viewing it the Data Recording firmware is necessary, regular realtime data which are logged around 10x per second cannot accurately capture it. The Data Recording plot can be used to check and tune the noise on dt, which heavily depends on combinations of IMU Sample Rate and Motor ZVF (make sure to record while the board is engaged as the plot will be different from when idle).
For the LSM6DS3 IMU with my 6.06 Refloat Extras firmware, IMU Sample Rate 1200 Hz and IMU bus speed 700 kHz, this plot is with Motor ZVF 35 kHz:
And this is with Motor ZVF 25 kHz:
The combination of IMU Sample Rate 1200 Hz, bus speed 700 kHz and Motor ZVF 25kHz is the best that I’ve found so far for a very clean control loop timing. A disadvantage being the 25 kHz ZVF produces an audible high pitch noise.
A noisy dt does not necessarily mean it’s bad. The timing is partially compensated but low noise can only be better. I haven’t noticed any observable impact of having a noisy dt, any observations and feedback is welcome. You can play around with these values and see what you get.
Note on IMUs: You can find more info on the LSM6DS3 situation in the firmware link. For BMI160 upon a brief check, for configured 800 Hz the real frequency when engaged with ZVF 28 kHz is 500 Hz. You can inspect the data on your board and see what you find.
I invest a lot of time and energy into developing and testing of these improvements. If you would like to support Refloat development, here’s a few options to do so.
Scott Peyton left the Lafayette, Louisiana, diocese after priest admitted to abusing his son and was excommunicated months later
A Louisiana man who resigned as a Roman Catholic deacon after a priest molested his son and then was excommunicated from the church entirely by his local bishop is asking global church leaders to inform him of the fate of his appeal against the prelate’s decision, something that was supposed to be resolved more than a year earlier.
In a letter to the Vatican entity in charge of clerical discipline, a canon – or church – law attorney representing Scott Peyton asserts that his case is “nuanced and requires careful consideration”. “To the extent that the delay reflects such diligence, he is grateful,” said the letter to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), prepared by Dawn Eden Goldstein on 3 February and obtained recently by the Guardian.
Continue reading...BEIRUT — It is morning outside Mohammed Al-Amin Mosque in downtown Beirut, and beneath the gigantic crescent moon statue, a woman in a white hijab and dirtied floral dress is calling for her children.
She screams out the name of one of them, Mohammed, when he almost wanders into the busy street.
Fatima, 45, fled the southern suburb of Bourj al-Barajneh with her family on March 2 when Israel bombarded the community as part of the broadening regional war.
She is a mother of two young boys and an older daughter who are sitting cross-legged around her on cardboard boxes. Thick comforters, a jug of water, and a half-eaten bag of Lebanese bread lean on the statue behind them.
It’s not the first time they have been displaced. The family is originally from Syria but escaped the civil war for the relative peace of Bourj al-Barajneh. Fatima’s mother, Warde, 70, is there in her wheelchair; she sheltered in the exact same spot under the gigantic crescent moon statue in 2024 when Israel last struck their neighborhood.
This time, they abandoned their home when the explosions brought her sons to tears. “Children are not like adults; there is fear and there is terror,” she says. “So we left Bourj al-Barajneh. Yesterday we slept near this statue.”
“Our children have been hungry since yesterday. I mean there’s no food, no drink,” she explains. “And yesterday night the children were freezing.”
“Children are not like adults; there is fear and there is terror.”
Authorities in Beirut have done nothing to help them, Fatima says. They are among a wide swath of the Lebanese populace that has been uprooted and one of tens of families who have found shelter near the gigantic crescent moon statue. A few men brought them blankets when they saw that the family was cold. The problem is that they have nowhere to go now. “Now we’re afraid to go back. They’re saying there’s bombing. So, we’re forced to be sitting here on the ground. What can we do? There’s no solution. There’s nothing,” she says.
The next day, they are gone.
Israel’s wave of attacks on Lebanon are the deadliest conflict in the country since the 1975–1990 civil war. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 1,000 people, 118 of them children, and displaced 1 million others. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah but has consistently struck residential buildings in the south and east of the country, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and, recently, parts of central Beirut as well.
Nowhere seems safe, especially for those whose apartments are in evacuation zones that encompass nearly 600 square miles, according to the United Nations. As of mid-March, as many as 1 in 5 people in Lebanon have been displaced by Israeli military operations. The Intercept walked the streets of Beirut to learn their stories.
Across the street from the statue where Fatima’s family sheltered, two teenage boys lay on a thin mattress pushed up against a wall covered with purple and yellow graffiti. One is awake and scrolling his phone with one hand behind his head. Behind him, his brother sleeps.
Karim is 16, with dark brown hair and an inviting face. A few days ago, he was in Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, trying to pick up odd jobs to make money. He lived with his family in an apartment and shared a room with his brother.
On February 28, the night the U.S. and Israel killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Karim heard “problems would soon be coming to Lebanon.” He wasn’t convinced at first. When Israel started hitting the southern suburbs, Karim narrowly avoided an air attack as his parents and brother tried to escape by car on the street known as Airport Road, which connects downtown Beirut to the Rafic Hariri International Airport. “They were striking in front of us, cutting off the road.”
“If we find a house, we’ll go, and if we find a school, we’ll go. And if we don’t find anything, we’ll stay here.”
When they made it to downtown Beirut, his family tried to find a place to stay in schools that were being converted into makeshift shelters, but they were mostly full. “My mom has a mental health condition,” he explains. “The schools are overcrowded, and it bothers her too much.”
That’s why he’s sleeping on the street and using cafes to charge his phone. Karim runs into dukkan, or corner stores, for food, water, or whatever else he needs.
He wants to return to his house, but the strikes have only gotten worse in Dahieh since they arrived. “We have to be patient. What can we do? If we find a house we’ll go, and if we find a school we’ll go. And if we don’t find anything we’ll stay here. We have to have patience,” he says.
“Right now, everything is exhausting. I am just so tired.”
It’s hard to grasp the scale of displacement inside Lebanon. Already, according to the U.N., 667,831 people have registered themselves as displaced with Lebanon’s government. Lebanon’s National Disaster Risk Management Unit reports that “119,700 displaced individuals [are] currently accommodated in 567 collective shelters.” However, reports suggest that more than 1 million people — of a population of just about five and a half million — are displaced, including many who have not yet registered. According to Al Jazeera, about 99,000 homes were already damaged or destroyed in the previous 14 months before this escalation started.
The Lebanese government, with the U.N. and local NGOs, says it is responding to the emergency by opening public schools, the city’s stadiums, and universities as temporary shelters. With support from the U.N. Development Programme, they also created a disaster management unit to coordinate aid, such as essential supplies and cash transfers, and direct people to safer regions like the North and Bekaa.
Despite these efforts, the scale of displacement has far exceeded the government’s capacity to provide aid. Every one of the 36 displaced people in Beirut who spoke with The Intercept said the response has been inadequate.
“Where is the government? What are they doing?” one humanitarian aid worker asks frustratedly.
The man who raises this question over and over again is Mohammed, who shares his frustration while sitting on his motorcycle and smoking a cigarette in front of Ras Beirut’s Public Secondary School, which has been converted into a shelter. He describes himself as part of the “resistance against Israel,” and as “a son of Ras Beirut,” known in the capital city as an upper-scale and religiously mixed neighborhood.
“I am here to help the displaced people in that school behind me,” he points.
He doesn’t think the Lebanese government is doing enough for its displaced citizens. “Children, boys, women, girls, are just sitting in the street with no one to feed them, no medicine at all, so we are trying, as the sons of this area, to serve them best we can.”
Mohammed says that there are around 450 displaced people in the school with few resources. “They have no mattresses or pillows to put their heads on right now,” he begins to speak louder and get more agitated. “Inside the school, women and children are sleeping on the floor barefoot covering themselves with their clothes instead of blankets,” he says.
Throughout March, schools in Lebanon have faced a near-total disruption due to the sharp escalation in conflict. Since October 2023, Lebanon’s schools have faced repeated widespread interruption.
The atmosphere inside the school is tense as families bunch together in classrooms trying to find room. One couple has set up a nargileh, and the woman, who is in a black hijab, takes a long, deep pull from the hose and lets out a plume of smoke. “No pictures here,” one of the gentlemen running the displacement shelter tells a European journalist with a camera around her neck. “It is a very sensitive time for all of these people.”
The facade of the school has one blue balcony on the upper left-hand side that overlooks Hamra in Ras Beirut. On it, a pair of red children’s pajama pants, along with several other pieces of clothing, are hung out to dry. “These are the children of the southern suburbs, and where are they? They are on the streets,” Mohammed says.
Hundreds of tents have sprung up along the highway that passes Horsh Beirut, a park that butts up against the southern suburbs of the city. Yara Sayegh has taken it upon herself to help their inhabitants.
Sayegh runs an organization called Truth Be Told, which usually focuses on transitional justice and human rights in Lebanon. Now it is serving as an emergency response initiative, cooking and distributing meals and medicine to families in tents across the area. She has experience after responding the same way in during a period of intense Israeli strikes in 2024.
Recently, she decided to build a makeshift kitchen at Riwaq Cafe near Mar Mikhael in Beirut. “I decided, given how much transparency is needed and the importance and the attention to detail, and the amount of corruption I have witnessed during crises, I would just open up my own [kitchen].”
Every day, volunteers show up to the cafe around 10 a.m. to help cook and pack meals for those fasting in Horsh Beirut. Her chef, Omar Khaled, directs volunteers on how to dice onions, squeeze lemons, and cook mujadara. He counts and recounts the boxed meals before they go out to the houseless people on the streets. Sayegh passes out as many as 1,000 meals a day in the park and surrounding areas.
“Whatever I do right now, whatever a lot of us are doing, isn’t enough,” Sayegh says “There are too many families who are displaced.”
On a rainy night in mid-March, Sayegh drives the meals to Horsh Beirut. Along the perimeter of the park, tents lining the streets are sopping wet. Tarps hang over four or five of them at a time. As she backs up her car, a line forms of people who need her help.
“Is my medicine ready?” one woman calls out.
“No, ma’am not yet, but inshallah I will try to bring it to you tomorrow,” Sayegh responds as she jots down another young woman’s information onto an Excel spreadsheet on her laptop.
“I am committed to them, there aren’t enough people helping, and they have nowhere to go,” Sayegh says.
Israel’s attacks on Lebanon extend far beyond Beirut and its suburbs. The most devastating strikes have been across the south of the country.
Evacuation orders took effect both south and north of the Litani River, a crucial and agriculturally rich landscape powered by the river itself, in the last week. But problems for southerners started much before that.
At the height of its war on Gaza in 2024, Israel began a series of strikes in southern Lebanon, aimed at what it said were militant groups, including Hezbollah, that had been launching retaliatory salvos across the border. This included a campaign of deadly Israeli ground raids in the border region and the expansion of what it says is a “buffer zone.”
According to the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, between November 2024 and the end of 2025, Israeli forces have committed over 10,000 air and ground violations of a November 2024 ceasefire agreement. This included daily airstrikes and ground incursions that killed hundreds in Lebanon, including civilians. Israel never withdrew troops from southern Lebanon and has pushed further into the country as its right wing parties call to settle Lebanon and make the Litani River Israel’s northern border.
Buildings in that area have been leveled to the ground, and the Israeli military has paved roads over Lebanese homes, making sure displaced people can never return. The reality on the ground is “undeniable erasure” says Hanan, a queer Lebanese American art history student at the American University of Beirut. She is among those dealing directly with Israel’s aggression in southern Lebanon.
Hanan grew up in Arizona about 30 minutes from the Mexican border. She came to Lebanon in August to pursue a master’s degree in art history and curation. Ever since Israel’s so-called ceasefire with Hamas, she felt a pull to Lebanon and her family there. She was drawn by bucolic memories of past visits.
“I romanticize the shit out of that time now,” she says. “We literally ate mulberries off the trees on the mosque grounds and chopped vegetables all morning listening to Arabic music.”
Last week, her family’s house in Chehabiye, near the southern border, was destroyed. Hanan is now housing 12 relatives in her two-bedroom apartment in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood, an upper-class Francophile, predominantly Christian community.
“Some were more prepared than others when they came. They all mostly left in a hurry,” she explains. Because of the chaos and the traffic, it took her family two days to get to her apartment in Beirut. On the journey, they slept in their cars.
They had jobs at shoe stores and grocery stores, Hanan says. Kids were just beginning school. One relative had finally purchased a motorcycle after saving his money; it was destroyed in the strikes. “All of their lives have become completely upended,” she says.
She thinks her relatives’ building was targeted because a Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Qard Al-Hassan bank occupied the first floor. Founded in 1982, Al-Qard Al-Hassan operates more than 30 branches across Lebanon and is registered as an NGO with the Lebanese Ministry of Interior. But it is not licensed by Banque du Libam, the central bank of Lebanon, to operate as a bank. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Al-Qard Al-Hassan in 2007, stating Hezbollah uses it as a cover to manage financial activities and access the international financial system. This month, the Israeli military conducted a systematic campaign of airstrikes against numerous branches across Lebanon, identifying them as legitimate military targets because they fund Hezbollah’s military activities.
Even in Beirut, Hanan’s family is treated with suspicion. Soon after their arrival, a neighbor threatened to inform authorities that 12 relatives were crammed into Hanan’s two-bedroom apartment.
“My neighbors are afraid we are targets for Israel.”
“It is just because they are southern and could be supporters of Hezbollah, and so my neighbors are afraid we are targets for Israel,” Hanan explains. “What they don’t understand is that the people of the south are helping each other, even when others leave them hanging.”
The tensions got worse on March 13, when Israeli aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets over several neighborhoods in Beirut. They called on the Lebanese citizens to “disarm Hezbollah” and said “Lebanon is your decision, not someone else’s.” Another flier, designed to look like a newspaper, warned that the current situation in Lebanon would turn into something similar to Gaza. The leaflets asked Lebanese people to inform Israel of Hezbollah’s whereabouts using a QR code.
The point, many believe, is to stoke civil tension and sectarian fractures that will destabilize the country. Sayegh, for instance, says her family and friends don’t support her humanitarian aid work. She comes from a Christian background and is often criticized for helping supporters of Hezbollah. “We are one people and that is the only way forward, and that is why I help. I believe in one Lebanon for all,” Sayegh says.
Many in Lebanon understand that its diverse religious makeup leaves it vulnerable to outside forces pitting the people of the country against each other. But in the current chaos and terror of Israeli missile strikes, many who supported Hezbollah’s retaliation on behalf of Gaza just a year ago are now changing their minds. “Where were they when Israel was breaking the ceasefire in the south thousands upon thousands of times in the last year?” a young woman whose family hails from the south asks. “It seems like they came alive only for Khamenei’s death, and I don’t fully believe their leaders are doing this for Lebanon anymore,” she says.
Hanan knows the current situation is untenable in the long run. “Their loose plan is to return to the south, but I can’t realistically see that happening anytime soon,” she says.
She and her father are looking at renting an apartment in an area that will be more forgiving to her family’s circumstances and backgrounds, but with 1 million people pushed from their homes, it won’t be easy to find lodging.
An uncle works at a soup kitchen attached to a mosque that has some underutilized office space. “There’s two rooms there that they use as offices,” Hanan says. “So he’s thinking that he can turn them into rooms temporarily before they return south, which is actually crazy, because the building right next door got bombed the other day.”
The post More Than 1 Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced. These Are Their Stories. appeared first on The Intercept.
Iran’s military said it would respond to strikes on Iranian energy infrasturcture with counterattacks against U.S.-linked energy facilities in the region.
At a time when the bad news feels endless, we should celebrate the gutsiness of a judiciary quietly standing up for democracy
Cast your mind back to the American south in the late 1950s, when federal trial court judges were called upon to do a herculean job – enforce the supreme court’s titanic decision in Brown v Board of Education, which struck down the “separate but equal” school segregation regime.
Bear with me for a brief history lesson, because it resonates today.
David Kirp is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and a frequent contributor to the Guardian
Continue reading...Figures seen by the Guardian show the two peers each attended just 1.12% of sessions in past four years
Evgeny Lebedev’s longstanding commitment to being the most relaxed member of the House of Lords has come under threat from another peer, Ian Botham, with both recording identical attendance rates of 1.12% over the past four years.
According to Lords records seen by the Guardian, Lebedev and Botham – who were both appointed by Boris Johnson – each managed to make it to seven of the 625 sessions of the upper house that took place from the start of 2022 to the end of 2025.
Continue reading...Mother's Day will be here before you know it, but shopping for a gift for Mom doesn't have to be stressful. Check out these outstanding gifts, all hand-picked by our expert editors.
If you have presbyopia or trouble seeing up close, a pair of reading glasses can easily be bought online without a prescription.
The Washington Post’s Venezuela reporter writes on a couple divided by the authoritarian regime in Caracas — and their joyful reunion.
Tehran’s unwillingness to capitulate as the war enters its fourth week is wrapped up in the power it exerts over the Strait of Hormuz, officials in the region say.
A blended Black family’s annual journey on horseback to the Houston rodeo is part of a seven-decade tradition.
In Colorado, where gas prices have surged higher than the rest of the country, the impact of the Iran war has changed daily lives for many. But not equally.
Exclusive: Rebecca Harris promotes latest Crewkerne Gazette skit, created by Joshua Bonehill-Paine who says he is Tory member
The Conservative party’s chief whip has been condemned for promoting AI-generated footage created by a notorious far-right figure who was jailed for hate crimes against Jewish people.
Rebecca Harris reposted the latest skit by the Crewkerne Gazette, which depicts Kemi Badenoch and her shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, as characters in the gangster film Scarface.
Continue reading...Centre-left Robert Golob and rightwing populist Janez Janša are frontrunners in contest after polarised campaign
Campaigners in Slovenia have warned of a surge in anti-Romany rhetoric as the country heads to the polls on Sunday, leaving many bracing for the outcome of a vote that has become, in part, a referendum on how the country treats its most marginalised.
In Sunday’s vote, the prime minister, Robert Golob, of the centre-left Freedom Movement party, faces off against the rightwing populist and Donald Trump ally Janez Janša.
Continue reading...American last hit a competitive ball in 2022 but Instagram posts show her training again, with her motives still unknown
As was often the case in Serena Williams’s unparalleled tennis career, her time at the French Open in 2009 was far from straightforward. Her gritty performance in a third-round win against Spain’s María José Martínez Sánchez that went the distance was quickly overshadowed by a gamesmanship row after Martínez Sánchez refused to admit that one of Williams’s shots had struck her body, not her racket, before going back over the net. The point should have been awarded to the American.
An unimpressed Williams immediately protested to opponent and umpire. Then, once it became clear the point was a lost cause, she comically suggested Martínez Sánchez should probably not approach the net again. During her post-match press conference, Williams’s continued criticisms led to her uttering one of her more memorable quotes: “I’m, like, drama. And I don’t want to be drama,” she said, sighing. “I’m like one of those girls on a reality show that has all the drama, and everyone in the house hates them because no matter what they do drama follows them. I don’t want to be that girl.”
Continue reading..."It is the talk of the town today — the loud boom, the flash of light in the sky experienced by a lot of folks across the Houston area this afternoon," says a local Texas newscaster. "And then there was this — a home in northwest Harris county hit by something that crashed through their roof." Travelling at very high speed, the six-pound meteorite crashed through their roof and through their attic, crashing again through the ceiling oF the floor below. It then bounced off the floor, hit the ceiling again — and then fell onto the bed. CBS News reports: NASA said in a social media post that the meteor became visible at 49 miles above Stagecoach, northwest of Houston, at 4:40 p.m. local time. The meteor moved southeast at 35,000 miles per hour, breaking apart 29 miles above Bammel, just west of Cypress Station, NASA said. "The fragmentation of the meteor — which weighed about a ton with a diameter of 3 feet — created a pressure wave that caused booms heard by some in the area," NASA said in the post. Across the Houston area, residents described hearing a low, rumbling sound that many compared to thunder, even though the skies were clear, according to CBS affiliate KHOU. Earlier this week, an asteroid weighing about 7 tons and traveling at 45,000 mph traveled over multiple states. And last June, a bright meteor was seen across the southeastern U.S. and exploded over Georgia, creating similar booms heard by residents in the area.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Unpaid carers say they remain ‘in limbo’ as DWP continues to pursue discredited repayment bills
MPs have threatened to launch a fresh inquiry into the handling of the carers allowance scandal after unpaid carers spoke of being “stuck in limbo” by the government’s response.
The warning came amid concerns over delays in Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) plans to offer redress to tens of thousands of carers who were unfairly issued with overpayment bills based on discredited official guidance.
Continue reading...Electoral alliances expected to play vital role in number of contests including Paris and Marseille
Voting is under way in France in the second round of local elections seen as a bellwether for next year’s presidential race – with cities including Paris and Marseille in the balance and both the radical left and far right hoping for gains.
Most of France’s 35,000-odd communes elected their councils in the first round last Sunday, but in municipalities where the contest is tighter, including most large urban areas, the second round will be decisive, with electoral alliances playing a key role.
Continue reading...Cyber experts say influence operations in ‘asymmetric’ campaign to intensify moral pressure on US and Israel
Iran has radically overhauled its social media strategy in an all-out information war launched by the country’s Islamic rulers in response to US and Israeli military attacks.
Cyber experts say Iranian foreign influence operations have gone into overdrive as part of an “asymmetric” campaign designed to complement its military retaliation and intensify moral pressure on the US and Israel into curtailing their war efforts.
Continue reading...‘Problem-solving’, child-focused courts to replace adversarial hearings, with earlier intervention to cut delays
Family courts are “not good enough” and have treated women and children unfairly for decades, a government minister has said.
Announcing a major overhaul of the family justice system in England and Wales that will play a central role in “rebalancing” the family courts, Alison Levitt said often brutal legal showdowns will be replaced with a “problem-solving”, child-focused model.
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s ‘little excursion’ is likely to have long-term effects, from oil prices to inflation to growth, say experts
In the days after the US and Israel first bombed Iran, financial markets bet the economic fallout from Donald Trump’s “little excursion” in the Middle East would be short-lived.
“There are risks from higher oil prices longer term. But this is a tail risk,” one US-based fund manager said after the airstrike killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “History has shown time and time again that geopolitical flare-ups like this tend to be short-lived. This one should prove to be no exception.’’
Continue reading...National referendum is being seen as a de facto confidence vote on the government – and the polls are neck and neck
In the run-up to a referendum in Italy on a government quest to overhaul the judiciary, a campaign flyer circulated online quoting Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, taking aim at judges and feminists. “Judges block the deportations of rapists. Where are the feminists? Vote yes – there will not be another opportunity,” it read.
The flyer, posted on the Facebook page of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist roots, was subsequently removed. But its tone has defined a campaign dominated by inflammatory rhetoric rather than meaningful debate.
Continue reading...The other day the gate gaurd in my neighborhood went “ I saw an ad on YouTube… they make a new version that can go off-road” and it had me thinking I wonder what some funny uninitiated questions comments you guys have gotten
"After nearly a decade of delays and industry skepticism, Tesla's electric big rig is finally rolling out of Nevada's Gigafactory for mass production starting summer 2026," writes Gadget Review. And some truckers who tested the vehicles already love them (as reported by the Wall Street Journal): Dakota Shearer and Angel Rodriguez, among other pilot drivers, rave about the centered cab that eliminates blind spots during tight maneuvers. The automatic transmission means no more wrestling with 13-gear diesels, reducing physical stress on long hauls. Most surprisingly, the Semi maintains highway speeds on grades where diesel trucks typically crawl at 30 mph. The 500-mile range enables multiple daily round-trips — think Long Beach to Vegas or Inland Empire runs — without range anxiety... Sure, the Semi costs under $300,000 — roughly double a diesel equivalent — but the math gets interesting quickly. Energy costs drop to $0.17 per mile compared to $0.50-0.70 for diesel fuel. Maintenance requirements shrink dramatically; one fleet reports needing just one mechanic for their electric trucks versus five for 40 diesels... Tesla offers Standard Range (325 miles) and Long Range (500 miles) versions, both handling 82,000-pound gross combined weight at 1.7 kWh per mile efficiency. The tri-motor setup delivers 800 kW — over 1,000 horsepower equivalent — enabling loaded 0-60 mph acceleration in 20 seconds versus 45-60 for diesel. Fast charging hits 60% capacity in 30 minutes [which Tesla says is 4x faster than other battery-electric trucks] using the new MCS 3.2 standard, while 25 kW ePTO power runs refrigerated trailers without diesel auxiliaries. Charging networks remain the biggest hurdle for widespread adoption. Public charging stations lack the Semi's massive power requirements, limiting long-haul routes. Tesla plans dedicated fast-charging corridors starting this summer, but coverage remains spotty. The lack of sleeper cabs also restricts the Semi to regional freight rather than cross-country hauling. Production scales to 5,000-15,000 units by 2026, then 50,000 annually — assuming charging infrastructure keeps pace with demand. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A possible meteorite crashed into a Houston area house on Saturday night, tearing through the roof and two stories of the home, officials said.
When Gary Herbst, described by his Minnesota neighbors as confrontational, disappeared on July 8, 2013, it appeared he walked out on his wife and teenage son. Years later, a startling discovery would confirm what neighbors thought they might have witnessed.
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Circling back now to Diego Garcia, Iran fired two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at the joint US-UK military base in the Indian Ocean – but neither of them hit, according to news reports citing US officials.
The Wall Street Journal said one of the missiles failed in flight, and that a US warship fired an SM-3 interceptor at the other, citing two US officials. It could not be determined if an interception was made, one said.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 22.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 22, No. 545.
LeBron James broke the NBA record for games played in the Lakers' win over the Orlando Magic on Saturday, passing Robert Parish with 1,612 career games.
Iran struck two communities near Israel's main nuclear research center late Saturday, leaving at least 90 people wounded in the southern part of the country.
Donald Trump threatened to deploy ICE agents to US airports on Monday if congressional Democrats do not immediately agree to fund airport safety – key US politics stories from 21 March at a glance
Donald Trump threatened to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to US airports on Monday if congressional Democrats do not immediately agree to fund airport safety.
Transportation Security Administration personnel are set to miss a second full paycheck on 27 March amid a partial government shutdown in its 36th day as lawmakers clash over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency for TSA and ICE.
Continue reading...  | so ive been looking into the hubs and have been debating which one I should get and ideally want a btg set up but I dont see the option for tht particularly yet. As its not a small purchase id like to do a good buy and not have parts sitting around not being used in the end and not to have a duplicate. should I just wait for them to drop a btg hub for the xrc or does the gt btg hub work as an equivalent? and also on tht same thought is it a silly question to ask whether the xrv or gtv kit is best and the best battery etc to pair with it. (im pretty sure its the gtv although the naming can be confusing at 1st). and lastly I recently installed a flightfin fender to the xrc and my fm rail guards are preventing it from being flush and 100% secure which keeps the torque box sealed from the plastic flap. should I just take like rotary tool or something similar and just cut the like inch of the area it needs to secure without completely not having any railguards. [link] [comments] |
"We have removed all malicious artifacts from the affected registries and channels," Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury posted today, noting that all the latest Trivy releases "now point to a safe version." But "On March 19, we observed that a threat actor used a compromised credential..." And today The Hacker News reported the same attackers are now "suspected to be conducting follow-on attacks that have led to the compromise of a large number of npm packages..." (The attackers apparently leveraged a postinstall hook "to execute a loader, which then drops a Python backdoor that's responsible for contacting the ICP canister dead drop to retrieve a URL pointing to the next-stage payload.") The development marks the first publicly documented abuse of an ICP canister for the explicit purpose of fetching the command-and-control (C2) server, Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen said... Persistence is established by means of a systemd user service, which is configured to automatically start the Python backdoor after a 5-second delay if it gets terminated for some reason by using the "Restart=always" directive. The systemd service masquerades as PostgreSQL tooling ("pgmon") in an attempt to fly under the radar... In tandem, the packages come with a "deploy.js" file that the attacker runs manually to spread the malicious payload to every package a stolen npm token provides access to in a programmatic fashion. The worm, assessed to be vibe-coded using an AI tool, makes no attempt to conceal its functionality. "This isn't triggered by npm install," Aikido said. "It's a standalone tool the attacker runs with stolen tokens to maximize blast radius." To make matters worse, a subsequent iteration of CanisterWorm detected in "@teale.io/eslint-config" versions 1.8.11 and 1.8.12 has been found to self-propagate on its own without the need for manual intervention... [Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen said] "Every developer or CI pipeline that installs this package and has an npm token accessible becomes an unwitting propagation vector. Their packages get infected, their downstream users install those, and if any of them have tokens, the cycle repeats." So far affected packages include 28 in the @EmilGroup scope and 16 packages in the @opengov scope, according to the article, blaming the attack on "a cloud-focused cybercriminal operation known as TeamPCP." Ars Technica explains that Trivy had "inadvertently hardcoded authentication secrets in pipelines for developing and deploying software updates," leading to a situation where attacks "compromised virtually all versions" of the widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner: Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury confirmed the compromise on Friday, following rumors and a thread, since deleted by the attackers, discussing the incident. The attack began in the early hours of Thursday. When it was done, the threat actor had used stolen credentials to force-push all but one of the trivy-action tags and seven setup-trivy tags to use malicious dependencies... "If you suspect you were running a compromised version, treat all pipeline secrets as compromised and rotate immediately," Shakury wrote. Security firms Socket and Wiz said that the malware, triggered in 75 compromised trivy-action tags, causes custom malware to thoroughly scour development pipelines, including developer machines, for GitHub tokens, cloud credentials, SSH keys, Kubernetes tokens, and whatever other secrets may live there. Once found, the malware encrypts the data and sends it to an attacker-controlled server. The end result, Socket said, is that any CI/CD pipeline using software that references compromised version tags executes code as soon as the Trivy scan is run... "In our initial analysis the malicious code exfiltrates secrets with a primary and backup mechanism. If it detects it is on a developer machine it additionally writes a base64 encoded python dropper for persistence...." Although the mass compromise began Thursday, it stems from a separate compromise last month of the Aqua Trivy VS Code extension for the Trivy scanner, Shakury said. In the incident, the attackers compromised a credential with write access to the Trivy GitHub account. Shakury said maintainers rotated tokens and other secrets in response, but the process wasn't fully "atomic," meaning it didn't thoroughly remove credential artifacts such as API keys, certificates, and passwords to ensure they couldn't be used maliciously. "This [failure] allowed the threat actor to perform authenticated operations, including force-updating tags, without needing to exploit GitHub itself," Socket researchers wrote. Pushing to a branch or creating a new release would've appeared in the commit history and trigger notifications, Socket pointed out, so "Instead, the attacker force-pushed 75 existing version tags to point to new malicious commits." (Trivy's maintainer says "we've also enabled immutable releases since the last breach.") Ars Technica notes Trivy's vulnerability scanner has 33,200 stars on GitHub, so "the potential fallout could be severe."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Osaka admits to ‘dilemma’ after loss to Talia Gibson
Norrie, Boulter and Jones all out to end British hopes
Naomi Osaka has said she does not intend to continue competing if she frequently loses first-round matches after suffering a disappointing 7-5, 6-4 defeat to Australia’s Talia Gibson in her opener at the Miami Open.
Osaka, who received a first-round bye as the 16th seed in Miami, moved sluggishly in an error-strewn performance and was outplayed by the talented 21-year-old Gibson, who will play Iva Jovic in the next round.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 22, No. 1,737.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 22, No. 749.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 22 #1015.
Humanitarian organizations began delivering aid to Cuba by air Friday, including solar panels, food and medicine.
People in hard-hit areas of Oahu and Maui told to evacuate with still more rain expected over the weekend
As Hawaii endures its worst flooding in more than 20 years, officials urged people in hard-hit areas to “LEAVE NOW”. That warning early on Saturday came after heavy rains fell on soil already saturated by downpours from a winter storm a week ago, and still more was expected over the weekend.
Muddy floodwaters smothered vast stretches of Oahu’s North Shore, a community renowned for its big-wave surfing. Raging waters lifted homes and cars and prompted evacuation orders for 5,500 people north of Honolulu. Authorities cautioned that a 120-year-old dam could fail.
Continue reading...President attacks ‘Radical Left Democrats’ after homeland security funding bill again sinks in Senate
Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to deploy federal immigration agents to US airports on Monday if Democrats do not agree to measures aimed at strengthening security and immigration enforcement.
“If the Radical Left Democrats don’t immediately sign an agreement to let our Country, in particular, our Airports, be FREE and SAFE again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
Continue reading...  | I am putting together the above mentioned board with a 5" pioneer tire and kush wide back footpad. I bought a drop top fender from tfl for an xr. I was planning to print adapters from the link. I noticed the fender looks too tiny for the pioneer and the adapters do not work with a kush wide. Any suggestions on what to do are appreciated. Thanks. [link] [comments] |
Victims of army drone attack on East Darfur health facility included children and medical personnel
A strike on a healthcare facility in Sudan has killed 64 people and wounded 89 more, the World Health Organization reported on Saturday.
The UN’s humanitarian office in Sudan had earlier said it was “appalled by the attack on a hospital in East Darfur yesterday, reportedly killing dozens, including children, and injuring more”.
Continue reading..."Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper," writes EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin. "That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months." The Internet Archive — the world's largest digital library — has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s... But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web's traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit... The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several — including the Times — are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There's a strong case that such training is fair use. Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for. If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren't just limiting bots. They're erasing the historical record... Even if courts place limits on AI training, the law protecting search and web archiving is already well established... There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | So I accidentally snapped the pins in my footpad connector while trying to replace the footpad. My bad. FM in their typical fashion wants me to buy a $450 replacement controller box. Id rather not. Now im trying to use a Fungineers connector to repair it myself instead. The onewheel won't even turn on right now, and im hoping its not bricked. Im hoping thats just because theres no footpad connected. Can someone explain to me like im 5, what NOT to do or unplug to avoid bricking it? Also, if anybody knows how to do this repair or has experience with it, please let me know and give me any tips. Thanks! [link] [comments] |
I will go back to France, my Onewheel is travelling by boat… a very long trip 😝. Wish battery will survive 4 months without charging 😫
 | Hey guys . My first post here . I just wanted to share my story with my onewheel original that i got for 300€ . The story is im a fan of onewheel since i was a teenager . I always dreamt of having one and i always saw that its a very unique machine . So i moved to Europe in the last 3 years and i saw an add of a onewheel for sell . I always wanted one . I wanted to buy it from the official website but unfortunately its difficult to get it here . So i was on the search for a cheap onewheel . But i couldn't afford the prices here . I decided to build one and i approximately failed (another story for another time ) . Then an an ad for a onewheel v1 pop-up up . I bought it it got delivered and it was very much fun . I fell most of the times . But you learn with each fall . Then the hard news came . The footpad sensor broke . I couldn't buy one because there is non . I couldn't buy a used one because there is non . And the fact that im based in europe makes it very difficult. [link] [comments] |
13 million people live in Moscow, reports CNN. But since early March the city "has experienced internet and mobile service outages on a level previously unseen." (Though Wi-Fi access to the internet is still available...) Russian social media "is flooded with jokes and memes about sending letters by carrier pigeons or using smartphones as ping-pong paddles..." [Moscow residents] complain they cannot navigate around the center or use their favorite mobile apps. The interruptions appear to have had a knock-on effect of making it more difficult to make voice calls or send an SMS. Some are panic-buying walkie-talkies, paper maps, and even pagers. The latest shutdown builds on similar efforts around the country. For months, mobile internet service interruptions have hit Russia's regions, particularly in provinces bordering Ukraine, which has staged incursions and launched strikes inside Russian territory to counter Russia's full-scale invasion. Some regions have reported not having any mobile internet since summer. But the most recent outages have hit the country's main centers of wealth and power: Moscow and Russia's second city, St. Petersburg. Public officials claim the blackout of mobile internet service in the capital and other regions is part of a security effort to counter "increasingly sophisticated methods" of Ukrainian attack... Speculation centers on whether the authorities are testing their ability to clamp down on public protest in the case there's an effort to reintroduce unpopular mobilization measures to find fresh manpower for the war in Ukraine; whether mobile internet outages may precede a more sweeping digital blackout; or if the new restrictions reflect an atmosphere of heightened fear and paranoia inside the Kremlin as it watches US-led regime- change efforts unfold against Russian allies such as Venezuela and Iran... On Wednesday, Russian mobile providers sent notifications that there would be "temporary restrictions" on mobile internet in parts of Moscow for security reasons, Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti reported. The measures will last "for as long as additional measures are needed to ensure the safety of our citizens," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on March 11... As well as banning many social media platforms, Russia blocks calling features on messenger apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Roskomnadzor, the country's communications regulator, has introduced a "white list" of approved apps... Russia has also tested what it calls the "sovereign internet," a network that is effectively firewalled from the rest of the world. The disruptions are fueling broader concerns about tightening state control. In parallel with the internet shutdown, the Kremlin has also been pushing to impose a state-controlled messaging app called Max as the country's main portal for state services, payments and everyday communication. There has been speculation the Kremlin may be planning to ban Telegram, Russia's most widely used messaging app, entirely. Roskomnadzor said that it was restricting Telegram for allegedly failing to comply with Russian laws. "Russia has opened a criminal case against me for 'aiding terrorism,'" Telegram's Russian-born founder Pavel Durov said on X last month. "Each day, the authorities fabricate new pretexts to restrict Russians' access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech...." The article includes this quote from Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society and an expert on Russian internet freedom. "In any situation when they (the authorities) perceive some kind of danger for themselves and accept the belief that the internet is dangerous for them, even if it may not be true, they will shut it down," he said. "Just like in Iran."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
First responders report 33 injured at multiple sites in Dimona, including a 10-year-old boy in serious condition
An Iranian missile has hit the Israeli town of Dimona, home to a nuclear facility, in what Iran said was retaliation for strikes on its own nuclear site at Natanz.
Dimona hosts a facility just outside the main town widely believed to possess the Middle East’s sole nuclear arsenal, although Israel has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons.
Continue reading..."Juicier steaks could soon be served up after barley was given the go-ahead to become Britain's first gene-edited crop," reports the Telegraph: In an effort to fatten up cows and get them to market faster, scientists have altered the DNA of Golden Promise barley to increase its fat content... [Regulators have approved the feeding of that barley to cows for further studies.] [T]he small increase reduces the time it takes for farmers to raise animals for slaughter and increases the amount of milk and meat they produce to make the industry more profitable. The gene-edited barley is also able to cut the amount of methane a cow produces, [Rothamsted Research professor/biochemist Peter] Eastmond said... Reducing methane from cattle is a major goal of the industry, and Professor Eastmond estimated his barley could cut the methane output from a single cow by up to 15%. The two genetic tweaks to the barley are believed to alter the gut bacteria in cows' stomachs and reduce the amount of methane-generating microbes, cutting the cows' emissions.... [Eastmond] is also working on applying the same two gene edits to rye grass to create pastures and meadows which are lipid-rich and calorie-dense. This, he said, could lead to entire fields of gene-edited grass which could be grazed by cows, sheep, horses and goats to fatten them up and cut emissions... "It would be better to have this technology in a pasture grass that's grown to supply the livestock and graze it directly." The barley "has been modified to have a single letter of DNA removed from two different genes to switch them off," the article points out. "No genes have been added to its DNA and it is not considered to be genetically modified." The article points out that Britain "has launched a push towards more gene-edited crops as a key post-Brexit freedom since splitting from the European Union," noting that U.K. scientists and private companies "have created products such as bread with fewer cancer-causing chemicals, longer-lasting strawberries and bananas, sweeter-tasting lettuce and disease-resistant potatoes, although these are yet to be granted permission to land on supermarket shelves..." But the EU has so far resisted the sale of any gene-edited crops in the EU. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Outrage mounts after president posted on Truth Social he was ‘glad’ former FBI director and special counsel had died
Donald Trump has been condemned as a “vile, disgusting man” and a “sick human being” after gloating over the death of Robert Mueller, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Mueller, a decorated Vietnam war veteran who led a politically explosive investigation into Trump, died on Friday aged 81, triggering a callous reaction from the US president.
Continue reading...Boozer ignites Duke rally in dominant second half
Texas storm from First Four into Sweet 16
Cameron Boozer shook off a quiet first half to finish with 19 points and No 1 overall seed Duke shot 61.5% after halftime Saturday to pull away from TCU for an 81-58 win in a physical second-round game at the NCAA Tournament.
The freshman voted a unanimous first-team Associated Press All-American earlier this week had just two points and missed his only shot in the first half. But he scored three times during the 11-0 second-half burst – twice on high-low feeds from fellow big Patrick Ngongba II in his return to the lineup – as Duke (34-2) finally shook free of the ninth-seeded Horned Frogs (23-12).
Continue reading...  | Hey r/onewheel, I’ve got the original Pint with the Quart battery upgrade and it’s been awesome, but I’m ready for more torque, speed, and range. I’m 6’2” and 185 lbs, so hills and bigger trails are starting to feel limited. I’ve seen mixed reviews on the GT, but the torque bump at this price and condition looks solid. On the flip side I’ve been eyeing the ADV2, but having to pay via Coinbase + 60-day shipping from overseas feels slightly sketchy and way too long What do you all think? Appreciate any advice — thanks! [link] [comments] |
Joyce Edwards scores 27 in Gamecocks romp
Southern held to two points in third quarter
UConn win by 38 in March Madness opener
Joyce Edwards had 27 points and eight rebounds and No 1 seed South Carolina won their 17th straight home women’s NCAA Tournament game with a 103-34 defeat of 16th-seeded Southern on Saturday.
Edwards and the Gamecocks (32-3) opened with a 15-0 burst and never let up against the Jaguars (20-14), the Southwestern Athletic Conference champions.
Continue reading...Robert Mueller served as FBI director from 2001 to 2013 and led the investigation into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
States argue deal would create largest broadcast station group in US, cut jobs and increase consumers’ cable bills
Eight states asked a US judge on Friday to issue a temporary restraining order to stop a $3.5bn merger of Nexstar Media Group and Tegna.
On Thursday, the local broadcast station owners received merger approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the US Department of Justice and said they had closed the transaction two hours after approval, the day after the states filed their lawsuit.
Continue reading...  | floating around the parking lot of the Barr Trail whilst wearing my custom made Barr Trail Tee shirt the wifey made spreading the words of her amazing things to the hundreds of climbers. impressed over 500 people in the 2 hours we were there. i am getting pretty proficient and feel like we should invent and have yearly X-games for the onewheel. we could joust with padded sticks ? whos in? [link] [comments] |
China's orbital outpost Tiangong was completed in 2022 and is hosting up to three astronauts at a time, reports CNN. But meanwhile U.S. lawmakers are now signaling there's not time to develop and launch a replacement for the International Space Station — considered the signal most expensive object ever built — before its deorbiting in 2030. A recent Senate bill calls for the U.S. to continue funding it as late as 2032, but that bill still awaits approval from the U.S. Senate and the House. But some private space companies are already building their alternatives: Private companies that are in the early design and mockup phase of developing these space stations are still waiting on NASA for guidance — and money... [NASA's "Requests for Proposals"] were delayed, in part because it took all of 2025 to cinch a confirmation for Trump's on-again-off-again pick for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman [confirmed in December]... Similarly, 2025 saw a 45-day government shutdown, the longest in history — adding another hiccup in the space agency's plans to begin formally soliciting proposals from the private sector. Companies now expect that NASA will issue its Request for Proposals in late March or early April, one CEO told CNN... Several commercial outfits have recently announced big funding influxes aimed at speeding up the development and launch of new orbiting outposts. Houston-based Axiom Space announced a $350 million funding round last month. Its California-based competitor Vast then notched a $500 million raise in early March. Vast is determined to launch a bare-bones station to orbit as soon as possible, with or without federal input, according to the company. "Our approach is to actually not wait for (NASA) and get going and build a minimum viable product, single-module space station called Haven-1, which we're launching into orbit next year," Vast CEO Max Haot told CNN in a phone interview earlier this month. Similarly, Axiom Space is working toward a 2028 launch date for a module that it plans to initially attach to the ISS before breaking off to orbit on its own. A spokesperson told CNN that it the company is "committed" to winning the NASA contract money and may continue pursing such goals even without contract awards. Still, there's lingering doubt that any of the companies pursuing space stations will be able to stay afloat without securing a coveted NASA contract or at least cinching significant business from the public sector. The article includes "Another complicating fact: Russia, the United States' primary partner on the ISS, has not pledged to keep operating its half of the space station past 2028." NASA will eventually evaluate proposals for an ISS alternative from Vast, Axiom Space, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Max Space and several competitors including Voyager Technologies, CNN notes, ultimately handing out an estimated $1.5 billion in contracts between 2026 and 2031. And while those companies may wait decades before a return on their investment, the article includes this quotes from the cofounder/general partner of Balerion Space Ventures, which led the fundraising for Vast. " What's obvious to us is you're going to have multiple vehicles with myriad companies go into space. You're going to have vehicles leaving from celestial bodies, like the moon. And we need a habitat."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Skattebo calls CTE and asthma ‘fake’ on podcast
Comments draw backlash citing medical consensus
Giants have not publicly responded to remarks
New York Giants running back Cam Skattebo is facing backlash after dismissing both chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and asthma as “fake” during a recent podcast appearance.
Speaking on the Bring the Juice podcast, the 24-year-old was asked whether he believes CTE – a degenerative brain condition linked to repeated head trauma – is real. Skattebo called it an “excuse”, agreeing with the host before making a similar claim about asthma.
Continue reading...Democrats are expected to eventually block the broader legislation.
Yvette Cooper says government wants swift resolution to war after two missiles directed at military base at Diego Garcia
The foreign secretary has condemned Iran’s strikes on a joint US-UK military base on the island of Diego Garcia, while stressing the UK has “taken a different position from the US and Israel” on the conflict.
Yvette Cooper said ministers wanted to see a swift resolution to the war, adding the government was supporting defensive action against the “reckless Iranian threats”.
Continue reading...I have a XR I just started using for this year again and I’ve started to notice my battery life will disappear after 20%. I will get a notification that the battery is at 20% then all of a sudden I will get pushback and battery is dead next time I look at the app.
Has anyone else experience anything like this? Is it a sign I’m going to need to replace the battery soon.
I have 5200 miles on it.
Mueller, who concluded Moscow had interfered in 2016 election, served as FBI director under Bush and Obama
Robert Mueller, the former special counsel who investigated Russian interference in 2016 and links between Donald Trump and Moscow, has died, his family said on Saturday. He was 81.
A statement from Mueller’s family, relayed by the New York Times on X, said: “With deep sadness, we are sharing the news that Bob passed away last night. His family asks that their privacy be respected.”
Continue reading...ReactOS aims to be compatible with programs and drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Microsoft Windows. And Slashdot reader jeditobe reports that the project has now "announced significant progress in achieving compatibility with proprietary graphics drivers." ReactOS now supports roughly 90% of GPU drivers for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, thanks to a series of fixes and the implementation of the KMDF (Kernel-Mode Driver Framework) and WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) subsystems. Prior to these changes, many proprietary drivers either failed to launch or exhibited unstable behavior. In the latest nightly builds of the 0.4.16 branch, drivers from a variety of manufacturers — including Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD — are running reliably. The project demonstrated ReactOS running on real hardware, including booting with installed drivers for graphics cards such as Intel GMA 945, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX 750 Ti, and AMD Radeon HD 7530G. They also highlighted successful operation on mobile GPUs like the NVIDIA Quadro 1000M, with 2D/3D acceleration, audio, and network connectivity all functioning correctly. Further tests confirmed support on less common or older configurations, including a laptop with a Radeon Xpress 1100, as well as high-performance cards like the NVIDIA GTX Titan X. A key contribution came from a patch merged into the main branch for the memory management subsystem, which improved driver stability and reduced crashes during graphics adapter initialization.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A total of 25 skiers were on the mountainside where the avalanche occurred, but most had escaped.
A landmark new CBA should be a moment of progress. Instead, the discourse around the negotiations revealed the same old attitudes – and my daughters recognized them instantly
I interviewed Jemele Hill for my podcast The Rematch and asked for her reaction to the WNBA’s landmark new collective bargaining agreement, a seven-year deal that includes a salary cap increase to $7m (up from $1.5m in 2025), maximum salaries approaching $1.4m, 20% revenue sharing, expanded rosters, charter flights and more.
Hill didn’t mince words.
Continue reading...Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: According to the research firm Gartner, 50% of U.S. consumers say they would prefer to do business with brands that avoid using GenAI in consumer facing content such as advertising and promotional messaging. The survey of 1,539 Americans, conducted in October 2025, also found growing skepticism about the reliability of online information, with 61% saying they frequently question whether information they use for everyday decisions is trustworthy... Gartner found that 68% of consumers often wonder whether the content they see online is real, while fewer people now rely on intuition alone to judge credibility [only 27%]. Instead, more consumers are actively verifying information and checking sources. Gartner's senior principal analyst offered suggests discretion for brands trying to use AI. "The brands that win will be the ones that use AI in ways customers can immediately recognize as helpful, while being transparent about when AI is used, what it's doing, and giving customers a clear choice to opt out."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mark Robinson, who ran for North Carolina governor in 2024, tells podcast he had ‘obsession’ with porn and sex
The former Republican North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson has admitted he misled voters during his unsuccessful 2024 gubernatorial campaign when he denied posting racist and offensive comments on a pornography website – suggesting he did so to protect Donald Trump’s successful presidential run.
Robinson, who worked in furniture manufacturing before entering politics in 2020, told the After the Call podcast on Thursday: “I won’t say that I completely lied. Some of the things about the whole story – some of it — there’s some truth to it.”
Continue reading...Videos of Labour’s Al Carns include him talking about his time as a marine and challenging a firefighter to pull-up contest
Labour minister Al Carns has claimed thousands of pounds on parliamentary expenses for promotional videos including one showing him doing pull-ups at a fire station in competition with a firefighter.
The veterans minister and former Royal Marine, who is tipped by some MPs as a leadership hopeful, claimed about £3,000, approved by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa), for the production of 17 videos that show him interacting with local businesses.
Continue reading...Kaiser pushed back on striking workers’ claims and AI fears, saying it delivers ‘timely, high-quality care to meet members’ needs’
Ilana Marcucci-Morris is worried about the patients she treats and how long it took for them to arrive in her office. At Kaiser Permanente’s psychiatry outpatient clinic in Oakland, California, she says she increasingly finds herself assessing people experiencing more severe mental health issues than two years ago. For those who do make it to their appointments, she thinks: “Thank God they’re still alive.”
It wasn’t always this way, according to Marcucci-Morris, a licensed clinical social worker. Licensed professionals used to almost always be the first point of contact for patients with behavioral health issues at Kaiser, she said. Had some of these patients received a screening with a licensed healthcare professional, she suspects they would have received an appointment within days instead of a meeting with her a week or two later.
Continue reading...The western United States experienced a severe snow drought this year, threatening the region's water supply and potentially setting the stage for its wildfire season.
A free built-in VPN is coming to Firefox on Tuesday, Mozilla announced this week: Free VPNs can sometimes mean sketchy arrangements that end up compromising your privacy, but ours is built from our data principles and commitment to be the world's most trusted browser. It routes your browser traffic through a proxy to hide your IP address and location while you browse, giving you stronger privacy and protection online with no extra downloads. Users will have 50 gigabytes of data monthly in the U.S., France, Germany and U.K. to start. Available in Firefox 149 starting March 24. We also recently shared that Firefox is the first browser to ship Sanitizer API, a new web security standard that blocks attacks before they reach you [for untrusted HTML XSS vulnerabilities]. "The roadmap for Firefox this year is the most exciting one we've developed in quite a while," says Firefox head Ajit Varma. "We're improving the fundamentals like speed and performance. We're also launching innovative new open standards in Gecko to ensure the future of the web is open, diverse, and not controlled by a single engine. "At the same time we're prioritizing features that give users real power, choice and strong privacy protections, built in a way that only Firefox can. And as always, we'll keep listening, inviting users to help shape what comes next and giving them more reasons to love Firefox." Two new features coming next week: Split View puts two webpages side by side in one window, making it easy to compare, copy and multitask without bouncing between tabs. Rolling out in Firefox 149 on March 24. Tab Notes let you add notes to any tab, another tool to help with multitasking and picking up where you left off. Available in Firefox Labs 149 starting March 24. And Firefox also released a video this week introducing their new mascot Kit.
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The footage, which shows the singer being arrested after struggling to perform field sobriety tests, was released by Sag Harbor police on Friday. Timberlake’s lawyers had sued to block the release of the video, arguing it would 'devastate' Timberlake’s privacy and that it would cause 'severe and irreparable harm' to his reputation. Timberlake pleaded guilty to driving while impaired in September 2024, about three months after the arrest
Continue reading...Kendra Duggar was charged with multiple misdemeanors a day after husband Joseph Duggar's arrest.
The US has been targeting not only people who have violated the law but many who are in the country legally
The Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration policy has led to a crackdown on immigrant communities that, increasingly, targets not just people who have violated immigration law but many immigrants who are in the US legally.
Throughout the past year, policies – many of which are actively being challenged in court – amount to the government attempting to strip people of their status, with countless numbers suddenly finding themselves undocumented, or about to be, and under threat of deportation.
Continue reading...I've been using my VESC for a while now on paths, off - road, MTB trails, and sometimes tricks.
Do you use one tune to rule them all, different tunes for different things?
Roughly, how many tunes do you use?
"The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil," reports the blog It's FOSS. They note that the field "can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves" — it's the same record that already holds metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location: Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is "an optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional. " In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide. A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here. "It enforces zero policy," Poettering said. "It leaves that up for other parts of the system."
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DraftKings pushed back on the accusation, saying in a statement that it is not engaging in trademark infringement.
Local reports estimate that roughly 40,000 people gathered across central Seoul to watch K-pop band BTS reunite.
Michael Smith, 52, charged after flooding platforms with thousands of AI songs and boosting them with bots
A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to defrauding music streaming platforms and his fellow musicians out of millions in royalties by flooding the services with thousands of AI-generated songs – and using automated “bots” to artificially boost the number of listens into the billions.
As part of a deal with federal prosecutors in New York’s southern district, 52-year-old Michael Smith pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Continue reading...Footage shows US musician struggling with field sobriety tests he calls ‘really hard’ before his 2024 arrest in New York
Justin Timberlake struggled to perform field sobriety tests requiring him to walk a straight line and stand on one leg after the pop star was pulled over in New York’s Hamptons in 2024 by police officers who suspected him of driving drunk, according to video footage released on Friday.
Timberlake tells officers at one point: “These are, like, really hard tests.”
Continue reading...The South Korean megastars thrilled tens of thousands of fans with their first concert in nearly four years following a break for military service and solo careers.
Dyson's first-ever wet and dry robot vacuum is out, and I got to get an early look at it at the Dyson Soho store.
Jeff Bezos "is in early talks to raise $100 billion," reports the Wall Street Journal, "for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation." "The Amazon.com founder is meeting with some of the world's largest asset managers to raise funding for the project." A few months ago, [Bezos] traveled to the Middle East to discuss the new fund with sovereign wealth representatives in the region. More recently, he went to Singapore to raise funding for the effort as well, according to people familiar with the matter. The fund, described in investor documents as a "manufacturing transformation vehicle," is aiming to buy companies in major industrial sectors such as chipmaking, defense and aerospace... Bezos was recently appointed co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new startup that is building artificial-intelligence models that can understand and simulate the physical world. Bezos plans to use the company's technology to boost the efficiency and profitability of businesses owned by the fund, a playbook that some investment firms are similarly deploying in sectors such as accounting and property management... [Prometheus has also hired employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, the article points out.] While much of the AI revolution has been focused on large language models, billions of dollars have begun to flow to companies that are seeking to apply spatially focused AI systems toward industries including robotics and manufacturing... Amazon, one of [America's] largest employers, has closed in on the milestone of having as many robots as humans.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Venezuelan-born dancer posts emotional video saying she plans to take on new projects in other areas
Strictly Come Dancing’s longest-serving female professional dancer, Karen Hauer, has quit the show after 14 years.
In a video posted on Instagram, Hauer said it was “the right time to close this chapter and take on new projects in other areas I’m passionate about”.
Continue reading...From layoffs to export troubles, California’s wine industry is in flux – but small producers are innovating to survive
After more than a quarter century tracking the seemingly endless growth of the wine industry, Rob McMillan was finally vindicated last year as California’s vigneron of doom.
McMillan is the author of Silicon Valley Bank’s annual state of the US wine industry report, and the 2025 edition was a doozy. Since 2018, the bank has warned the industry that a correction in demand would shake the wine world. That reality is now here, with 2025 revenue down, the volume of wine produced dropping and a “bumpy bottom” in demand forecast in 2027 and 2028.
Continue reading...The chef and podcaster's new book features interviews with famous names who reminisce about the comforts of food.
Joe Kent, who left Trump administration over Iran war, tells Megyn Kelly ‘facts are on my side’ amid FBI investigation
The counter-terrorism official who resigned from Donald Trump’s administration over the US and Israel’s war against Iran has said he is bracing for political retribution – but would do it all again anyway.
Asked by conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly if he was concerned about a pre-existing FBI search investigating him for leaking classified information, Joe Kent said he was ambivalent.
Continue reading...Here are some highly rated films to try, plus a look at what's new in March.
Anthropic fought against the government’s misuse of its technology, but authorities are buying Americans’ data, enabling them to surveil citizens at scale
The FBI declares it can conduct mass surveillance without AI, despite Anthropic’s protest.
A central part of the standoff between Anthropic and the Department of Defense has revolved around the artificial intelligence firm’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for mass domestic surveillance. Yet even without the cooperation of AI firms, remarks this week from Kash Patel, FBI director, show how authorities are by any reasonable measure already operating a system that can surveil citizens at scale.
Continue reading...Gig AI trainers worldwide are selling moments of their lives, including calls and texts, to AI companies for quick cash
One morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country’s minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.
The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.
Continue reading...Changing a few settings will help you get the best image possible from your Hisense TV.
Bodycam video footage of Justin Timberlake's June 2024 DWI arrest on Long Island was released to the media Friday.
Johnson edged as Pirovano clinches downhill globe
Italian wins third straight race to seal discipline
Aicher trims Shiffrin’s lead to 95 points overall
Italy’s Laura Pirovano claimed the women’s downhill World Cup title with victory in Lillehammer on Saturday, as Emma Aicher closed the gap on leader Mikaela Shiffrin in the overall standings.
The 28-year-old Pirovano had never even finished on a World Cup podium until earlier this month.
Continue reading...Autopsy reveals James ‘Jimmy’ Gracey’s injuries consistent with repeatedly hitting breakwater’s rocks, Spanish media report
A University of Alabama student who was found dead in Barcelona after going missing while vacationing evidently fell into the sea by accident in view of surveillance cameras – and an autopsy revealed injuries on his body that were consistent with having repeatedly struck a breakwater’s rocks.
Such details about James “Jimmy” Gracey surfaced in the Spanish media as a spokesperson for police in Barcelona told the Associated Press that “all signs point” to the 20-year-old’s death as having been inadvertent.
Continue reading...If you’ve ever had a nosedive caused by the board cutting the motor on you, you know there’s no worse feeling than getting back on the board as you can no longer trust it. That’s why it’s important to gather as much information on the incident before engaging the board again or power-cycling it. This can help you identify the root cause and spare you more unpleasant experiences.
Note this post doesn’t address logging, which is a useful tool, but you may not always find the issue there. Some events/data are not logged and the logging typically records samples at around 10x per second, an event shorter than that may not show in there.
It’s also important to distinguish nosedives caused by motor cuts and nosedives caused by simply overpowering the motor (which is still engaged and trying to balance you, but not having enough power).
This post assumes you’re running Refloat 1.2 or later.
First thing to do after having a nosedive is connect to the board with VESC Tool. Even if you weren’t connected during the accident, you will find all the important information as long as you don’t re-engage the board or power-cycle it. Navigate to the Refloat UI (tab next to the Start tab called “AppUI” up until Refloat 1.2.1 and “Refloat” in later versions). Tap the big glowing status text in the middle of the screen saying usually “READY”, an “Alerts” dialog will pop up. This dialog shows all the possible issues the board could have had, example:
You can find firmware faults listed there, even the history of how they occurred. That’s one common cause of motor cuts (you won’t normally see a temperature fault, only in a rare case of faulty electronics). If you don’t see any firmware faults, check for the Stop Condition: text at the bottom. This gives you the reason why the package disengaged the motor. If you see Sensor Full as the reason, that indicates a faulty sensor (usually the wiring). Assuming you have a tail-heavy board (vast majority), go to Refloat Cfg → Stop tab and enable “Disable Moving Faults”. This will prevent the fault as long as you’re not riding in reverse.
If the Stop Condition line is completely missing, it indicates a fresh bootup and means your controller must have reset. To verify this, go to the “Terminal” tab in VESC Tool (last tab).
If you have stock VESC firmware, type “uptime” into the text box at the very bottom and tap “Send”. This gives you the number of seconds since the controller was started. If the time matches approximately the time of your crash, that confirms a controller reset. You can’t find out more specific information for the reset on this firmware. I recommend installing my 6.06 Refloat Extras firmware release to be able to find out more.
In the 6.06 Refloat Extras firmware there’s another terminal command to help diagnose spurious resets (the command has been submitted for inclusion in the mainline VESC firmware, but wasn’t accepted yet). Type “crash_diag” into the terminal and “Send” it. This will print a bunch of indicators, which may be hard to understand. Take a screenshot and take it to discord or pev.dev to ask for help (feel free to tag me). In the rare case of a software (firmware or package) crash, the output of this command can provide invaluable information to find the cause of the crash.
Note on Floatwheels: Floatwheels have a history of turning off on their riders. If that happens (the board is off), you know what’s up. They can also cut the power only temporarily, potentially causing a firmware fault (e.g. UNDERVOLTAGE) or a controller reset, which should show distinct values in the “crash_diag” reset indicators.
Missile exchanges have jarred with the spirit of the holidays underway across the region.
In Georgia, a woman was charged with murder after allegedly taking pills to induce a termination. Yet America happily drops bombs on children abroad
How many children has the US helped kill this week in the Middle East? It’s hard to keep track, but Unicef reports that more than 1,800 children in the region have been killed or injured since the US and Israel started a war with Iran on 28 February.
In Lebanon, a US-backed Israel is killing or wounding a classroom’s worth of children every day, Unicef’s deputy executive director told Reuters. That’s just after killing more than 20,000 children in Gaza in two years, all with the help of US taxpayer dollars.
The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
Allergy season is here, but you don't need to suffer. CNET put 15 of the latest air purifier models through CNET's smoke bomb test to find out which perform the best at particle filtering, noise levels and energy efficiency.
Some in cabinet in despair over possible impact of war begun by Donald Trump, who branded Nato allies ‘cowards’
Donald Trump has branded the UK and other Nato allies “cowards” as anger grows among cabinet ministers that his war in Iran could jeopardise Britain’s fragile finances.
Senior members of the UK government are in despair about the potential effects on the economy, with experts warning of higher energy prices and increased mortgage and borrowing costs.
Continue reading...I put three methods for making bacon to the test in my own kitchen. One prevailed and it's my new go-to method.
We put more than two dozen air fryers of all shapes and sizes to the test. This unique model tops our list in 2026.
Doctors fear that skepticism, fueled by anti-science sentiment and mistrust, is extending beyond vaccines to other proven, routine care.
The Treasury Department’s authorization of the sale of Iranian crude already at sea is likely to provide revenue for Iran’s war effort against the U.S.
The Woman’s Hour host, who has died aged 75, could talk about hydrangeas, campaign against domestic abuse, then tear a strip off a politician – all within a few minutes
Before she took over Woman’s Hour in 1987, Jenni Murray was a presenter on the Today programme. She had joined the BBC in Bristol in 1973, and became a TV reporter and presenter for South Today, so arrived with solid news credentials. But Today in the 1980s was inveterately sexist – the guys took the politics, the women mopped up the rest – that the format was just too small for her.
Woman’s Hour, on the other hand, was absolutely reshaped in her image: there was no preconception of tone, and nothing was too serious or too light for it. Murray, who has died at the age of 75, could tear a strip off a politician, talk about hydrangeas, then campaign against domestic abuse, all within a few minutes. She was instinctively open and generous about her personal experience, but never solipsistic – an incredibly fine balance.
Continue reading...The Realme P4 Power introduces a 10,001mAh battery to a mass market product without any noticeable flaws.
Transit Officer Paul DeGeorge thought his son was lying on him. Then he realized something much scarier was happening.
“As controversial as AI is right now, this is one of those areas where it’s a real win,” said Julie Castle, chief executive of Best Friends Animal Society.
FoI request reveals no evidence of testing despite ministers hailing agreement as key to delivering AI-led public service reform
When the UK government signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI, the tech firm behind ChatGPT, the partnership was hailed as one that could harness artificial intelligence to “address society’s greatest challenges”.
But eight months on from the fanfare of that announcement, the government has yet to hold any trials involving the firm’s tech.
Continue reading...Iran war should be wake-up call about costs of not going full throttle towards EVs as Chinese have done, experts say
By the 1980s, Detroit’s once titanic carmakers were being upended by rivals from Japan. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had grown rich selling gas guzzlers, but when oil prices rose and suddenly cheap, fuel-efficient Japanese models looked attractive, they were unprepared. The collapse in sales led to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the automotive heartland of the US.
Now western car manufacturers are making what one former boss calls a similar “profound strategic mistake” as they pull back from electric vehicles (EVs) and refocus on the combustion engine just as oil prices are soaring once again. Experts say the industry’s future – and that of tens of millions of jobs – could be on the line. This time, however, the threat is from China.
Continue reading...In Appalachia, a deeply red region hit by poverty and cuts, some ask why billions are going to war instead of home
When it comes to politics in Appalachian Kentucky, one of the first things anyone will tell you is that people defy easy categorization.
There are fervent church goers who say that Jesus’ message of helping others is basically socialism, and that’s a good thing. There are gun owners who pine for universal healthcare.
Continue reading...Exclusive: War in the Middle East is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined
The US-Israel war on Iran is a disaster for the climate, according to an analysis that finds it is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined.
As warplanes, drones and missiles kill thousands of people, level infrastructure and turn the Middle East into a gigantic environmental sacrifice zone, the first analysis of the climate cost has found the conflict led to 5m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in its first 14 days.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Tariq Ahmad says he has raised concerns with party leadership after shadow justice secretary’s remarks
The shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, has been accused by a Conservative peer and former counter-extremism minister of “instilling fear” among Muslims with his comments about public prayer.
British Muslims were openly talking about leaving the Conservative party, added Tariq Ahmad, who said he had raised his concerns with the party leadership and expected action to be taken.
Continue reading...Commentary: With some phone-makers willing to push boundaries, the days of dull-looking devices may soon be behind us.
Court’s decision to eliminate Save plan and internal shuffling on who handles what when it comes to student loans presents new challenges for borrowers
Many Americans with student debt are again facing future upheaval after a federal appeals court recently ordered the end of a Biden-era student loan repayment program, known as the Saving on a Value Education (Save) Plan, a move that coincided with another grim revelation: new education department data shows that by the end of 2025, 7.7 million borrowers had defaulted on $181bn in federal student loans.
The Save plan, which was launched in 2023, is an income-driven repayment program created with the goal of cutting undergraduate loans in half, bringing some borrowers’ monthly payments to $0, and offering early forgiveness for low-balance borrowers. Shortly after the program was announced, Republican attorneys general across the country sued to get it killed, arguing that it was an overstep of executive power and imposed heavy taxpayer costs.
Continue reading...Nearly 300 of the actor’s items, from designer gowns to everyday basics, to be sold in Los Angeles, with some lots under $100
A customised sunhat. A slogan sweatshirt. A “mom” necklace. An old copy of Cosmopolitan. If these sound like items found in many homes today, they’re actually the castoffs of a household name: Gwyneth Paltrow.
Next week, nearly 300 pieces owned by Paltrow will be on sale as part of an auction at Julien’s, the Los Angeles auction house that has sold big-ticket items such as Marilyn Monroe’s so-called “naked” dress and the leather jacket worn by Olivia Newton-John in Grease. But, while those items went for six-figure prices, Paltrow’s sale is a little more affordable, with estimates starting at about $50 (£37) to $75 (£56) for some of Paltrow’s personalised stationery.
Continue reading...If you want to remain motivated, these fitness devices may hold the key.
These emoji still need to be approved but a pickle might replace the eggplant emoji in some contexts.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope unexpectedly captured a rare, early-stage breakup of comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) just days after it first began disintegrating. Phys.org reports: "Sometimes the best science happens by accident," said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. "This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target -- and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances." Noonan didn't know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. "While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one," said Noonan. "So we knew this was something really, really special." Hubble caught K1 fragmenting into at least four pieces, each with a distinct coma, the fuzzy envelope of gas and dust that surrounds a comet's icy nucleus. Hubble cleanly resolved the fragments, but to ground-based telescopes, at the time they only appeared as barely distinguishable, bright blobs. [...] "Never before has Hubble caught a fragmenting comet this close to when it actually fell apart. Most of the time, it's a few weeks to a month later. And in this case, we were able to see it just days after," said Noonan. "This is telling us something very important about the physics of what's happening at the comet's surface. We may be seeing the timescale it takes to form a substantial dust layer that can then be ejected by the gas." The findings have been published in the journal Icarus.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Online searches for electric and hybrid cars increase as war-linked fuel prices hit highest levels in nearly three years
US car buyers are showing a surge in interest in electric vehicles after Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran helped cause a major jump in gasoline prices.
The cost to refuel a vehicle in the US is at its highest level in nearly three years, with the average national price of gas standing at $3.90 a gallon on Friday.
Continue reading...Almost 60 injured in blaze in Daejeon with footage seemingly showing people jumping from burning building to escape
A fire at a car parts factory in South Korea has killed 14 people and injured almost 60 others.
Firefighters said all of the missing are now accounted for after a search operation of the wreckage of the three-storey building.
Continue reading...Striker will not play in March World Cup warmup games
Backlash after player based in UAE met Dubai’s ruler
Sardar Azmoun has been omitted from the Iran squad announced for two World Cup warm-ups after Iranian media reports that the striker had been expelled from the national team for a perceived act of disloyalty to the government.
Azmoun, who has scored 57 goals in 91 internationals, was the most notable absentee from a 35-man squad named by the head coach, Amir Ghalenoei, on Friday for friendlies against Nigeria and Costa Rica in the Turkish city of Antalya.
Continue reading...Police say two people tried to enter Faslane base in Scotland, home to core of UK’s submarine fleet and Trident nuclear weapons
Two people have been charged, one of them Iranian, after they allegedly tried to enter HM Naval Base Clyde in Scotland, which houses the UK’s nuclear Trident submarines.
A 34-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman were charged after the incident at the base, which is known as Faslane. Police Scotland said inquiries were continuing and that the pair were due to appear at Dumbarton sheriff court on Monday.
Continue reading...The latest edict from beard-obsessed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth adds strict new regulations to his crusade on facial hair, which rights groups have characterized as an attack on troops’ civil liberties.
In a March 11 memo, Hegseth, who has made grooming and appearances a central focus in his time at the helm of the U.S. military, raised the bar to qualify for a religious exemption to his blanket ban on beards. The guidelines lay out a strict new process by which service members may apply for a religious exemption and subject those who’ve already received one to a reevaluation, arguing they need to ensure their religious beliefs are “sincerely held” and have a genuine conflict with the grooming standards.
Service members who have spoken against Hegseth’s focus on grooming standards say his restrictions on beards are exclusionary to people from religious communities that require adherents to follow specific tenets of faith around beards, hair, and other grooming matters.
Sikhs, for example, who have served in the U.S. military since at least World War I, are required by their faith not to cut the hair on their head, to keep a beard, and to wrap their long hair in a turban. Members of many schools of Muslim tradition likewise have rules around beards and hair length.
A Sikh advocacy group derided the new requirements as “completely unnecessary.”
“Sikhs and other service members of faith already earned their accommodations, under policies and processes established under both the Obama and first Trump Administrations,” the Sikh Coalition said in a statement. “If there are accommodations that the Department of Defense feels are not sincere, they could have chosen to pursue those cases with a process that doesn’t force every single soldier, sailor, airman, guardian, and Marine with an accommodation through more paperwork and bureaucracy.”
The Department of War did not respond to a request for comment.
Hegseth introduced the new guidelines as the military increasingly embraces overt Christianity and Christian nationalism, including an ideological turn on the Air Force Academy’s oversight board and the presentation of the war on Iran as part of “God’s divine plan.”
The changes come months after Hegseth declared war on “beardos” in a combative speech in September.
“If you want a beard, you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave,” Hegseth said at the time.
In a November letter to Hegseth, four senators — Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Tim Kaine, D-Va.; and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. — warned that an overly strict grooming standard could force religious service members from the ranks and ultimately harm the military’s primary mission of national security.
“This will happen either by forcing out servicemembers with accommodations earned through carefully following their branch’s established processes or signaling to members of these religious communities that their contributions are not needed in the world’s greatest fighting force,” the senators wrote. “At a time when readiness and retention remain urgent concerns, such a move would be ill-advised.”
Federal courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of service members’ rights to observe tenets of faith while in the military, limiting Hegseth’s ability to put in place an outright ban on any facial hair. He has opted instead to tighten the screws on anyone wishing to get an exemption.
Courts have generally required the military to accommodate sincerely held religious beliefs unless it can demonstrate a compelling operational need.
Under the new rules, anyone applying for an exemption — or facing reevaluation under the new guidelines — must submit a sworn statement affirming their religious beliefs, a statement detailing those beliefs, a statement explaining how the grooming standard would conflict with those beliefs, and supporting evidence backing up their “sincerely held” beliefs. Additionally, anyone applying for an exemption must receive from their unit commander a written assessment of the applicant’s sincerity of belief.
The policy also places commanders in the position of evaluating the sincerity of a service member’s religious beliefs. False statements could expose service members to disciplinary action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The post Hegseth Makes Troops Prove “Sincerely Held” Faith in Latest Beard Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: The importance of truth in small matters
Where’s Vlad?: The Kremlin’s Toughest Man is suddenly hard to find
Video Break: Dancing with Zorba the Greek
Congress Turns Up the Heat: Pam Bondi to testify in Epstein case
Chief Justice Roberts: He wants growing hostility to judges to stop
What I’m Watching: Young Sherlock
Jukebox Playlist: You Can’t Always Get What You Want
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” — Albert Einstein
This is an actual quote from Albert Einstein. The wording may differ slightly, but that’s due to translation choices, not because some spurious or random statement was attributed to a famous person who never said any such thing. And though I don’t speak German, the tone of the original, from what I gather, is more ethical and deliberate than it appears in English. It’s less about accidental carelessness with the truth and more about a person’s attitude toward it.
In basketball, you find out quickly that greatness isn’t built on highlight plays, but on the quiet habits nobody cheers for: the extra pass, the box-out, the discipline to run the play even when the crowd wants a show. Winning matters, of course, but the game itself also matters—how it’s played. In other words, the best players are those who have an ethical and deliberate attitude. They do it for the love of the game, even when nobody’s watching.
The same is true in public life. Some people in power quietly protect the Constitution. Others perform for the cameras. They tend to “exaggerate” the errors of their adversaries while sweeping their own mistakes under the rug. We’ve seen this so often that we’ve come to take it for granted—the fact that Truth with a capital T takes a back seat to partisan politics. We tune in to government hearings hoping to hear thoughtful, well-calibrated questions grounded in research. Instead, we often see members of one party defending their own interests, with truth as an afterthought. This isn’t accidental carelessness or even, as it sometimes appears, outright stupidity. More often, it reflects an attitude toward truth that has become so malleable it can be pushed aside in favor of a paycheck or continued power.
Unfortunately, the more truth is handled this way, the less weight it carries. Over time, the system teaches itself to survive by obscuring the truth from its own people. An overt case at the moment continues to be Epstein and his infamous files. They’ve ceased to be simply about bringing criminals to justice and have become an indication of whether of not truth itself still matters—not only to elected officials, but to us all.
Societies drift away not with a bang, but with a shrug, not through dramatic collapse, but through a slow erosion of standards. A little secrecy here. A little intimidation there. A little bending of the rules “just this once.” A little sweeping of truth under the nearest rug. Our elected officials strain at a gnat and swallow a camel while expecting us to do the same…or at the very least, to turn away politely while they wash it down with a nice Chianti.
And when we finally decide to look again, we notice that the guardrails are not just no longer where we left them, they’re nowhere to be found.
Families, advocates and lawmakers say poor care, opaque investigations and bureaucracy leave deaths unexplained
The circumstances of many of the record number of deaths in US immigration custody under the second Trump administration have left loved ones often searching in vain for answers amid a lack of transparency over key investigations.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports mandated by Congress, autopsy reports and 911 calls collected by the Guardian raise questions about the quality of medical care, allegedly inadequate or haphazard responses to emergencies, and contraction of diseases and infections inside detention facilities that in some cases contributed to detainee deaths.
Continue reading...President revealing congressman’s terminal diagnosis follows caginess about his own health, such as recent rash
When Donald Trump revealed that Republican congressman Neal Dunn would have been “dead by June” if not for White House doctors who treated the representative’s reportedly terminal condition, many were shocked by his disclosure.
The president’s comments last week, which unfolded during a meandering presser with Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Kennedy Center leaders, came after Trump prodded the top politician for details on Dunn’s health.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care:
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
Starwood Digital Ventures is set to present its appeal on Tuesday morning to the Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board, after Delaware environmental regulators ruled that half of its two-part hyper-scale data center plan is not allowed under the state’s Coastal Zone Act.
Starwood’s controversial Delaware City data center plan, dubbed Project Washington, was originally denied because of its proposed use of 516 diesel generators for back-up power.
Now, the developer will challenge that denial – a process that could take months, or years, to be fully adjudicated.
This week’s hearing comes after New Castle County enacted sweeping regulations against data centers earlier this month, including new rules requiring they maintain buffer zones and use energy-efficient backup generators.
But the Starwood project, if its appeal is successful, would not be subject to these new regulations. As part of a compromise to get the rules enacted, New Castle County Council included a provision that made them only apply to newly proposed projects – not ones already in the development pipeline.
The Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board’s forthcoming decision about Starwood’s appeal will be its first in nearly five years.
📍 The Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board is scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. Tuesday inside the auditorium of the Richardson and Robbins building, located at 89 Kings Highway in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
The Prescription Opioid Settlement Distribution Commission (POSDC) is set to vote on funding applications submitted by various Delaware municipalities on Monday morning.
The commission – tasked with distributing the state’s nearly $250 million in legal settlements with drug manufacturers to municipalities and local organizations – will direct 15% of its total funds to 10 local jurisdictions that include Wilmington, Dover, Seaford and each of the state’s three counties.
The amount of money each jurisdiction will receive was determined based on a formula of population size, drug overdose deaths, and the number of admissions to substance use treatment facilities, POSDC Brad Owens previously told Spotlight Delaware.
📍 The Prescription Opioid Settlement Distribution Commission is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Monday inside the Springer Building on the Herman Holloway Campus, located at 203 Mitchell Ln. in New Castle. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Two stakeholder groups that oversee the Port of Wilmington – the Diamond State Port Corporation Board of Directors and the Port of Wilmington Expansion Task Force – will meet on Monday for the first time since Spotlight Delaware reported last month that a buildup of sediment is blocking fully loaded fruit ships from docking at the port – a facility long known as the top banana port in North America.
Spokespersons for Enstructure, the port’s operator, and for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – which is in charge of maintaining the navigable waters in the United States – each blamed the sediment buildup on delays in dredging that began last fall.
But those delays in digging out the buildup of sediment and mud could amount to a reputational setback for Delaware’s port.
They also mean the hours worked at the publicly owned, privately run Port of Wilmington are lower than what they would have been otherwise. And in some cases, those hours have been filled by non-union labor at upstream ports, sparking outcry from Delaware workers.
📍 The Port of Wilmington Expansion Task Force is scheduled to meet at 1 p.m. Monday, followed by the Diamond State Port Corporation board of directors at 3 p.m. Both meetings will take place at Buena Vista, located at 661 S DuPont Highway in New Castle. For more details about the expansion task force meeting, click here. For more details about the DSPC board of directors meeting, click here.
Budget season continues in the First State, with both New Castle County and Georgetown scheduled to hold public meetings this week focused on how they will spend money next year.
In New Castle County, County Executive Marcus Henry will formally present his budget proposal for the 2027 fiscal year — which begins in July — during a speech on Tuesday evening. A county council meeting will follow Henry’s address.
Facing a $23 million deficit, Henry has publicly said the county will likely see some kind of tax increase next year, though it is unclear exactly how much tax rates could rise.
In Georgetown, town officials will introduce their fiscal year 2027 budget during Monday night’s town council meeting.
📍 New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry is set to present his budget at 5 p.m. Tuesday at the Louis L. Redding City County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
📍 Georgetown Town Council is set to meet at 7 p.m. Monday inside council chambers, located at 39 The Circle in Georgetown. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
The Delaware House of Representatives will convene on Tuesday to consider a bill that would effectively ban private prisons in the state.
Introduced by Rep. Mara Gorman (D-Newark), House Bill 151 was first described as a ban on private detention facilities.
An updated version of that bill, set to be considered on the House floor Tuesday afternoon, walks back that description. But the legislation, if passed, would effectively render private prisons inoperable in Delaware.
There currently are no private prisons in the state.
Lawmakers will also consider a slew of other bills in committee this week, including one that would prohibit certain state employees from disclosing residents’ immigration status, and two Republican-led proposals to limit school districts’ ability to increase tax rates following property reassessments.
📍 The House of Representatives will convene at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave., in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here. To view details of all committee hearings, scroll through the “What’s Happening” box here.
Karl Baker, Olivia Marble and Maggie Reynolds contributed to this report.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect that Delaware received nearly $250 million in opioid settlement funds, not $7.4 billion.
The post Get Involved: data center appeal, opioid settlement funds, budgets unveiled, more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
To aid Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a friend of Russia, in his election, operatives proposed “the Gamechanger” — a staged assassination attempt to stir supporters.
The aggressive pace of expansion has alarmed advocates who say the construction will destroy pristine country, threaten endangered species, and cut off access to sacred Indigenous and archaeological sites.
A Kremlin spokesman said the Russian government is discussing “possible options for assisting Cuba in the difficult situation it finds itself in.”
Damn, you’re right, an omission on my part. Added.
At least 400 killed in Pakistan’s strike on drug rehab centre, Taliban say, with families searching unmarked mass graves
Sohrab Faqiri spent Eid, the Muslim festival to mark the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, looking for the grave of his brother, killed in a massive Pakistan airstrike on Kabul this week.
Pakistan’s bombardment campaign, on what it says is terrorist and military infrastructure in neighbouring Afghanistan, appeared to have gone catastrophically wrong. A rehabilitation centre for drug addicts was hit on Monday night, according to the United Nations and the Afghan authorities. The UN’s preliminary death toll is 143 people, while the Taliban administration puts the figure at more than 400 dead.
Continue reading...Bypassing animal health certificate system by using cheaper pet passport issued abroad could backfire, experts say
British pet owners who want to take their furry friends elsewhere in Europe have been warned not to try to dodge expensive health certificates by using a pet passport issued abroad.
Before Brexit, taking a cat, dog or ferret to the EU was relatively simple: the Pet Travel Scheme meant an animal needed a microchip, vaccination against rabies, a pet passport and, for dogs, there were also requirements concerning tapeworm treatment.
Continue reading...Washington considers Kharg Island takeover as Donald Trump calls Nato allies ‘cowards’ for refusal to ‘help open’ strait of Hormuz
Donald Trump said he was considering “winding down” military operations in the Middle East even as the US is reportedly sending three more amphibious assault ships and roughly 2,500 additional marines to the region.
The US president’s remarks on Friday followed an Iranian threat to attack recreational and tourist sites worldwide and another day of the airstrikes and drone and missile attacks that have engulfed the region.
Continue reading...Cases emerge after other people tell of change in Home Office policy on passports that has left people scrambling
Two more British teenagers have found themselves unable to return to the UK because of new Home Office border rules on British dual nationals.
Their cases emerged just hours after reports a 16-year-old British schoolgirl was blocked from boarding a flight in Denmark home to the UK because she was a dual national and did not have a British passport. She has missed two weeks of school so far.
Continue reading...DHSC corrects statements after regulator intervenes as experts say smoking causes far more cancer cases
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has had to retract a misleading claim that sunbeds are as dangerous a cancer risk as smoking.
In January, health officials announced stricter rules for sunbeds, incorrectly claiming they were “as dangerous as smoking”. The comparison was repeated in social media posts shared by the health secretary and NHS England and was reported by a number of media outlets.
Continue reading...schwit1 shares a report from the BBC: A French officer has reportedly revealed the location of an aircraft carrier deployed towards the Middle East after publicly registering a run on sports app Strava. French news outlet Le Monde first reported the officer, referred to as Arthur, logged a 35-minute run on the app while exercising on the deck of aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle on 13 March. He used a smartwatch to record his run and upload the activity to the app, the paper said, creating a map that showed his location. [...] The location of the vessel was said by Le Monde to have been northwest of Cyprus, around 100km (62 miles) from the Turkish coast, with satellite images capturing the carrier and its escort. A representative from the French Armed Forces said the officer's behavior "does not comply with current guidelines," which "sailors are regularly made aware of."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Medics and officials say there is systematic use of double-tap strikes in campaign to make the south uninhabitable
Lebanese healthcare workers and officials say Israeli bombings have deliberately targeted medical workers and facilities in south Lebanon, including through the use of double-tap strikes, in what they describe as a systematic effort to make the area unlivable.
Since the war began on 2 March, Israel has struck at least 128 medical facilities and ambulances across south Lebanon, killing 40 healthcare workers and wounding 107, according to the Lebanese ministry of health. The war started when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel, triggering an Israeli military campaign.
Continue reading...If the UK wants to regain serious respect in the world, it needs its European leg as well as its transatlantic one
“A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that.” Thus spoke Hugh Grant, playing the British prime minister confronting the US president in a famous scene in the romcom Love Actually. Real-life British prime minister Keir Starmer has attempted to stand up ever so slightly to the current bully in the White House over the latest US war in the Middle East. Despite the British government’s right-royal efforts to flatter Donald Trump ever since he was elected US president, his response to Starmer’s little attempt has been a torrent of contempt. So the reality is not Love Actually. It’s Contempt Actually.
Asked about the British government’s subtle distinction between defensive strikes in the Gulf, which it now supports, and offensive ones, which it doesn’t, Maga ideologue Steve Bannon tells the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward: “That’s diplomatic bullshit. Fuck you. You’re either an ally or you’re not. Fuck you. The special relationship is over.” Ah, the “special relationship”! It must be 40 years since I first heard former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt say: “The special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.”
Continue reading...Heavy rains have pummeled the Hawaiian island of Oahu and triggered the worst flooding the island has in 20 years
Towering flash floods and an imminent dam failure in the northern part of Oahu triggered mass rescues and evacuation warnings in Hawaii on Friday, as the state continued contending with a powerful storm this week.
The waters came on quickly in the middle of the night, and videos on social media captured inundated streets and cars being swallowed by the muddy flood waters.
Continue reading...Better seeds go 16-0 on Friday as chalk prevails
Baylor erase nine-point fourth-quarter deficit
LSU, Texas and TCU roll in dominant openers
Taliah Scott scored 15 points and Baylor rallied from a nine-point deficit in the fourth quarter, making 11 of 14 free throws down the stretch, to beat Nebraska 67-62 on Friday in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
After leading 19-11 after the first quarter, the sixth-seeded Bears (25-8) went cold and were down 50-41 with 9:33 to play in their March Madness opener. Baylor then turned up the full-court press and forced six turnovers by Nebraska in the final quarter.
Continue reading...Treasury secretary Scott Bessent says move will bring 140m barrels to market but insists Tehran will not benefit
The Trump administration has waived sanctions on Iranian oil purchases at sea for 30 days to ease surging oil prices driven by the US-Israeli war on Iran.
The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said the waiver would bring about 140m barrels of oil to global markets and help relieve pressure on energy supply.
Continue reading...Mors Imperator caused a scandal in 1887 amid fears it mocked the German kaiser – more than 100 years later it is being displayed in a state museum
Wrapped in a cloak with ermine fur and wearing a jagged iron crown, a hulking skeleton rests one foot on a globe and knocks over a royal throne with a dramatic flick of its ivory wrist.
Entitled Mors Imperator (“Death is the Ruler”), the German artist Hermione von Preuschen’s 1887 symbolical painting was meant to express the transience of fame and power. But authorities feared the picture could be seen as mocking the ageing German Emperor Wilhelm I, who then had recently turned 90, and refused to accept its submission to the Berlin Academy of the Arts’ annual exhibition that year.
Continue reading...US president claims he ‘always says yes’ to Australia, Japan and South Korea, after saying he didn’t need help from trio of countries earlier this week
Donald Trump says he is “very surprised” Australia has not sent warships to aid in opening the strait of Hormuz as the blockade of the key strategic route for global oil supply continues to affect fuel prices.
“I was very surprised,” the US president said in Washington on Friday when asked what he took issue with regarding Japan, South Korea and Australia.
Continue reading...World No 1 beats Brazilian 6-4, 6-4 at the Hard Rock Stadium
Spaniard says teenager ‘reminds me a lot [of me] when I was his age’
As Carlos Alcaraz worked through his service motion midway through his opening match at the Miami Open, a scream pierced the night-time air. One of the 16,000 spectators breathlessly cheering Alcaraz’s demise had attempted to distract the Spaniard just before he struck the ball.
In a spectacular atmosphere unlike many other Masters 1000 second round matches in recent memory, Alcaraz maturely navigated both a passionate, adversarial crowd and a prodigious teenage opponent in Joao Fonseca to reach the third round of the Miami Open with a 6-4, 6-4 win.
Continue reading...  | Hey guys, I just wanted to get the community’s insight into my situation. I ordered from craft&ride in late 2024, and I received most of my order with zero complaints. I really don’t want to post this because of my past good experiences, but I don’t know what else to do. I acknowledge that the answer is likely to take the loss and move on. The issue arose because I ordered PintX Fangs. I tried my best not to pester, as impatient as I can be, only asking for updates on what I consider to be a reasonable timeline. The delivery date was pushed along without updates, aside from when I asked. Along the way, I sadly had a mosfet failure in my board, which is soon to be acknowledged. I recently remembered the order that I had for the fangs and searched my email for any update. After research into the status of craft&ride, my understanding is that they have gone into a sort of indefinite hiatus, judging by the website that only links to social media posts. I understand we are living in tough times, but the thing that irks me is I wasn’t notified that my order could be neither fulfilled nor refunded. It feels a little disrespectful to not acknowledge the orders left unfulfilled in the business going under. In addition, note that my text messages were promptly replied to before it was apparent that my order would never come. Please let me know your guys’ thoughts, thanks. [link] [comments] |
 | Hey guys. I've got someone having issues with his Pint X. See the texts for the symptoms. Anyone got any idea? [link] [comments] |
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Trump administration on Friday issued (PDF) a legislative framework for a single national policy on artificial intelligence, aiming to create uniform safety and security guardrails around the nascent technology while preempting states from enacting their own AI rules. The six-pronged outline broadly proposes a slew of regulations on AI products and infrastructure, ranging from implementing new child-safety rules to standardizing the permitting and energy use of AI data centers. It also calls on Congress to address thorny issues surrounding intellectual-property rights and craft rules "preventing AI systems from being used to silence or censor lawful political expression or dissent." The administration said in an official release that it wants to work with Congress "in the coming months" to convert its framework into a bill that President Donald Trump can sign. The White House wants to codify the framework into law "this year" and believes it can generate bipartisan support, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday evening. That won't be easy in a deeply divided Congress where Republicans hold thin and often fractious majorities, and where Trump has already urged GOP lawmakers to prioritize his controversial voter-ID bill above all else ahead of the November midterms. BCLP has an interactive map that tracks the proposed, failed and enacted AI regulatory bills from each state.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nicholas Brendon was best known for his role as Xander Harris on all seven seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
The Trump administration has been strategizing methods and options to secure or extract Iran's nuclear materials, according to multiple sources, as the military campaign against Tehran enters a more uncertain phase.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 21.
This live blog is now closed.
The US military is deploying thousands of additional marines and sailors to the Middle East, three US officials told Reuters on Friday.
One of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the USS Boxer, along with the marine expeditionary unit onboard, were departing the west coast of the US about three weeks ahead of schedule.
Continue reading...NCAA files trademark suit against DraftKings
Seeks ban on ‘March Madness’ betting promotions
Claims use misleads fans on NCAA endorsement
The NCAA filed a complaint in federal court Friday seeking an emergency restraining order to stop online sportsbook DraftKings from using registered trademarks associated with the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
The complaint for trademark infringement was filed in the Southern District of Indiana and requests that DraftKings stop using terms including “March Madness”, “Final Four”, “Elite Eight” and “Sweet Sixteen” or variations of them in sports betting products, promotional campaigns or marketing.
Continue reading...Trump called alliance members ‘cowards’ for not wanting ‘to help open’ the strait of Hormuz; more than a dozen nations later made vague offer to help – key US politics stories from 20 March at a glance
Several Nato members and other US allied nations pledged on Thursday to join “appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage” through the strait of Hormuz. But the joint statement from the leaders of more than a dozen nations – including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Bahrain – did not provide details on how they would do this.
That followed a recent bashing by Donald Trump, who called alliance members “cowards” for not wanting “to help open” the strait of Hormuz. Iran has effectively closed the strait with periodic attacks on oil tankers and other shipping.
Continue reading...The separate narco-trafficking investigations, based out of New York's Southern and Eastern districts, didn't set out to target Petro, but his name has come up during the course of the probes, one source said.
Proposal fails to advance in Senate amid growing concerns about long lines to get through screening at some airports
A bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security failed to advance on Friday in the Senate amid growing concerns about long lines to get through screening at some of the country’s biggest airports.
Democrats declined to provide the support needed to move the funding measure toward final passage. Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said he would offer an alternative measure on Saturday to fund just the Transportation Security Administration, which screens passengers and luggage for hazardous items. That too is likely to fail as lawmakers hold a rare weekend session.
Continue reading...The company described changes Windows Insiders will be seeing over the next few months, many of which are long overdue.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 21, No. 1,736.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 21, No. 748.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 21, No. 1014.
A look back at the esteemed personalities who've left us this year, who'd touched us with their innovation, creativity and humanity.
The U.S. Treasury has authorized the purchase of Iranian oil that's already at sea, exempting buyers from the tight sanctions that have restricted Iran's oil industry for years, as the Trump administration grapples with high oil prices.
This week's guests include U.S. Representative to the United Nations Mike Waltz, Democratic Rep. Jason Crow and International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi.
Prosecutors say they paid ‘slammers’ to intentionally crash into tractor-trailers and file fraudulent lawsuits
A federal jury in New Orleans has found two personal injury attorneys guilty of involving themselves in a scheme to stage collisions with 18-wheelers and then collect settlement payouts.
The lawyers, Jason Giles and former Hollywood stuntwoman Vanessa Motta, were found guilty on Friday of fraud, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, local news outlets WVUE and WWL Louisiana – a Guardian reporting partner – reported. Their law firms were convicted of related charges.
Continue reading...A federal judge has struck down some of the Defense Department's strict controls on how journalists with access to the Pentagon are allowed to report — ending a policy that caused many news outlets to leave the Pentagon.
Clot appeared in his arm after injection in wrong place
‘I will never let the devil stop me from getting a gold’
On a night of dizzying speed and freakish drama, track and field found itself a new sprint sensation. It came in the form of Jordan Anthony, a 21-year-old American with one heck of a story, along with the first global gold medal around his neck.
“The devil is always going to try, but I will never let him stop me from getting a gold medal,” he said after winning one of the great world indoor championships 60m races of all time in 6.41secs, the fourth-fastest time in history.
Continue reading...Mary Fong Lau crashed into bus shelter in 2024, causing deaths of two parents and two infant children
The 80-year-old woman that prosecutors found responsible for a car crash that killed a family of four in San Francisco has been sentenced to two years of probation and will have her driver’s license suspended.
Lau will receive no jail time and will not be subject to home confinement. As part of her sentence, she must complete 200 hours of community service.
Continue reading...Former boxing world champion’s cause of death was hanging but his intention was unclear, inquest concludes
A coroner has said she “cannot be satisfied” that British former boxing world champion Ricky Hattonintended to take his own life.
Hatton, 46, was found dead in his home on 14 September, with the inquest concluding that the official cause of his death was hanging.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...Earlier this year, Microsoft openly acknowledged the sorry state of Windows 11, and made vague promises about possible improvements somewhere in the near future, but stayed away from making any concrete promises. Today, the company published a blog post with some more details, including some actual concrete, tangible changes it’s going to implement over the coming two months.
In coming builds, you’ll be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, instead of it being locked to the bottom, thereby reintroducing a feature present since Windows 95. They’re also scaling back their obsession with ramming “AI” in every corner of Windows, and will be removing Copilot integrations from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. Furthermore, and this is a big one among Windows users I’m sure, Windows Update will be placed under user control once again, allowing them to ignore updates, postpone them indefinitely, reboot without applying updates, and so on. These are the tangible improvements we’ll be able to point to and say the company kept their word, and they all feel like welcome changes.
There’s also a few promises that feel far more vague and less tangible, like the ever-present, long-running promise to “improve File Explorer”. I feel like Microsoft’s been promising to fix their horrible file manager for years now, without much to show for it, so I hope this time will be different. The company also wants to improve Widgets, the Windows Insider Program, and the Feedback Hub application. These all feel less tangible, and will be harder to quantify and benchmark.
Beyond these first round of improvements that we’re supposed to be seeing over the coming two months, Microsoft also promises to implement wider improvements across the board, with the usual suspects like better performance, quicker application launches, improved reliability, lower memory usage, and so on. They also promise to move more core Windows user interface components to WinUI 3, including the Start menu, which is currently written in React. Windows Search is another common pain point among Windows users, and here, Microsoft promises to improve its performance and clearly separate local from online results (but no word on making search exclusively local).
There’s some more details in the blog post, but overall, it sounds great. However, words without actions are about as meaningful as a White House statement on the war with Iran, so seeing is believing.
The vernal equinox heralds the arrival of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. But have you heard the myth about balancing an egg on its end?
CBS News is shutting down its nearly 100-year-old radio news service due to economic pressures and the shift toward digital media and podcasts. Longtime CBS News anchor Dan Rather said: "It's another piece of America that is gone." The Associated Press reports: When it went on the air in September 1927, the service was the precursor to the entire network, giving a youthful William S. Paley a start in the business. Famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow's rooftop reports during the Nazi bombing of London during World War II kept Americans listening anxiously. Today, CBS News Radio provides material to an estimated 700 stations across the country and is known best for its top-of-the-hour news roundups. The service will end on May 22, the network said Friday. "Radio is woven into the fabric of CBS News and that's always going to be part of our history," CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss said in delivering the news to the staff. "I want you to know that we did everything we could, including before I joined the company, to try and find a viable solution to sustain the radio operation." But with the radical changes in the media industry, she said, "we just could not find a way to make that possible." It was unclear how many people will lose their jobs because of the radio shutdown. CBS News was cutting about 6% of its workforce, or more than 60 people, on Friday. It's not the end of turmoil at the network, as parent company Paramount Global is likely to absorb CNN as part of its announced purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Customers could pay as much as $20 more each month if they hold onto their old plans.
Lawsuit alleged changes gave DoD free rein to punish reporters and outlets over coverage it did not like
A federal judge has blocked key portions of the Pentagon’s press access policy, siding with the New York Times and ruling that the Trump administration’s controversial policy was unconstitutional.
The policy, which was introduced in October, prohibited journalists from soliciting information that the defense department didn’t directly provide, and revoked the credentials of any outlet that didn’t sign on. News outlets including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg News and the Atlantic joined TV networks in refusing to sign. Of 56 news outlets in the Pentagon Press Association, only one agreed to sign onto the new policy.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 21, No. 544.
Jefferson hurt left ankle on untidy early landing
Miami (Ohio)’s charmed season ended by Tennessee
Kentucky reach second round after OT thriller
Iowa State forward Joshua Jefferson sprained his left ankle in the opening minutes of the second-seeded Cyclones’ 108-74 rout of No 15 seed Tennessee State on Friday, leaving the All-American’s status in question for the rest of the NCAA Tournament.
The Cyclones’ second-leading scorer and top rebounder did not appear to be touched as he drove the lane for an open layup. But his entire 240lb body came down on his left ankle as it turned beneath him, and Jefferson immediately dropped to the floor in front of the Iowa State bench as a hush came over a crowd filled with Cyclones fans.
Continue reading...It's been more than 10 years since Amazon stopped selling the Fire Phone. A new report says the company is giving it a second try.
Allegations of AI-generated text have caused Hachette to scrap the US release of Shy Girl.
The White House and Sen. Marsha Blackburn are proposing new laws around AI. Critics say the plan falls short of what's needed.
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft says it is finally listening to user complaints about Windows 11, promising a series of changes focused on performance, reliability, and reducing everyday annoyances. In a message to Windows Insiders, the company outlined plans to bring back long requested features like taskbar repositioning, cut down on intrusive AI integrations, and give users more control over updates. File Explorer is also getting attention, with promised improvements to speed, stability, and general responsiveness. The bigger picture here is less about new features and more about fixing what already exists. Microsoft is talking about fewer forced restarts, quieter notifications, and a more predictable experience overall, along with improvements to Windows Subsystem for Linux for developers. While the roadmap sounds reasonable, users have heard similar promises before, so the real test will be whether these changes actually show up in day to day use.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
One person survived and two were killed, the military said, who were turned over to Costa Rican coast guard
US Southern Command announced on Friday that US forces carried out another “lethal kinetic strike” on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific which left one survivor and two people dead.
After the strike, the military said that it “immediately notified US Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system” for three people who survived the strike. The coast guard said in a statement that one of its ships recovered two dead bodies and one survivor and turned them over to the Costa Rican coast guard.
Continue reading...A jury has found Elon Musk liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down Twitter's stock price in the tumultuous months leading up to his 2022 acquisition of the social media company.
Transcript: Siamak Namazi, Emad Shargi, Roger Carstens, Neda Sharghi on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," March 22, 2026
An effective U.S. oil blockade has worsened the island’s energy crisis. The U.S. Embassy in Havana, too, is feeling the effects.
Joseph Duggar's arrest comes almost five years after his older brother Josh Duggar was convicted of downloading child sexual abuse images.
As energy prices soar from the Iran conflict, the International Energy Agency is urging governments to cut energy use by taking up measures like remote work and reduced speed limits. The group warns the energy security crisis could persist for months, even if supply routes stabilize. "I believe the world has not yet well understood the depth of the energy security challenge we are facing," said IEA's executive director, Fatih Birol. "It is much bigger than what we had in the 1970s... It is also bigger than the natural gas price shock we experienced after the Russia's invasion of Ukraine." The BBC reports: Thirty-two countries are members of the IEA, including the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Japan and 24 other European nations. Its role is to act as a global watchdog, providing analysis and recommendations on global energy problems, such as energy security and the transition to clean energy. The IEA's other suggestions for governments, businesses and individuals include: - Promoting use of public transport - Giving private cars access to city centres on alternate days - Encouraging car sharing and efficient driving habits - Avoiding air travel where possible, especially business flights - Switching to electric cooking It also said there should be a focused effort to preserve liquid petroleum gas for cooking and other essential uses, by switching bio-fuel converted vehicles onto gas and introducing other measures to reduce its use. Birol said these proposals were in addition to action taken by IEA member countries earlier this month, when they agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil, 20% of its emergency reserves. Several countries in Asia have implemented emergency four-day workweeks and work-from-home mandates as they have been hit particularly hard from the conflict. Fortune notes: "Asia is particularly dependent on oil exports from the Middle East; Japan and South Korea respectively source 90% and 70% of their oil from the region."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Calls for Pennsylvania senator – Trump’s ‘favorite Democrat’ – to resign after casting decisive committee vote
Democrats reacted with outrage to their party colleague John Fetterman’s decision to advance the nomination of Republican US senator Markwayne Mullin as homeland security secretary.
Fetterman, the senior US senator from Pennsylvania, has in recent months broken with the party several times to support Republican proposals, and has routinely expressed staunch support for Israel. He cast the decisive committee vote on Thursday to advance Mullin’s nomination to succeed Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary.
Continue reading...Won't you be his neighbor?
I found WTF and stock, but nothing else. Are there any other types that exist, specifically for the pint series?
Judge rules that Trump’s health secretary did not go through proper procedures when issuing declaration
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary, overstepped his power when he declared that gender-affirming treatments are unsafe, a federal judge has ruled.
In a blow to the Trump administration’s attempts to limit access to gender transition procedures, Judge Mustafa Kasubhai ruled Thursday that Kennedy did not go through the proper procedures when issuing his 12-page declaration last December.
Continue reading...Team says ‘timing just didn’t work out’ for visit
No NBA team has visited during a Trump presidency
The reigning NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder will not visit the White House during their trip to the nation’s capital this weekend.
A Thunder spokesperson confirmed Friday that a “timing issue” will prevent the team from making the traditional appearance. Oklahoma City face the Wizards in Washington on Saturday.
Continue reading...Check out Ponies, a spy thriller series starring Haley Lu Richardson and Emilia Clarke.
Five people who were charged in connection to the Feeding Our Future scheme pleaded guilty to wire fraud this week.
Most observers expect Apple to launch its first foldable phone in September.
Markets seem particularly attuned to increasing oil prices, with S&P 500 and Nasdaq down 1.5% and 2% respectively
US stock markets dropped again on Friday, capping off a fourth week of market turbulence as investors worried about the US-Israel war on Iran and its widespread impact on global oil prices.
The Dow lost over 400 points on Friday, with the S&P 500 slipping 1.5% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq down 2%.
Continue reading...Diggins, 34, clinches fourth World Cup overall title
American seals rare feat in Lake Placid season finale
Minnesota-born star to retire after dominant season
No woman from outside Europe had ever captured the cross-country skiing World Cup overall title until Jessie Diggins in 2021. Now she’s won it four times.
The Minnesota-born star clinched yet another crystal globe in the twilight of her glittering career on Friday, securing the season crown with a fifth-place finish in the 10km classic at the World Cup finals in Lake Placid, New York. Diggins made it a mathematical certainty with two races remaining in the season-ending weekend, giving her a third consecutive overall title and fourth in total.
Continue reading...Two former Louisville police officers were facing civil rights charges in connection with the 2020 shooting death of Breonna Taylor.
Border czar Tom Homan is expected back on Capitol Hill later Friday for bipartisan talks.
Chuck Norris' family said his death at 86 was sudden, but did not share any details on the cause.
A look at the features for this week's broadcast of the Emmy-winning program, hosted by Jane Pauley.
Democrats opposing the Trump-backed SAVE America Act say if the legislation passes, millions of Americans will lack the documents needed to register to vote and cast a ballot.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said in a March 18 X post, "9% of American citizens don't have the identification that the SAVE act requires to vote. Almost 1 in 10. This is a voter suppression bill."
The bill, formally named the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, passed the House in February. The Senate began debating the legislation March 17; it does not appear to have the 60 votes needed to pass.
Duckworth’s statement comes from credible research organizations and is largely accurate but needs context. When contacted for comment, her spokesperson pointed to data about proof of citizenship.
Before casting ballots, people must register to vote. The SAVE America Act says people must present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, and it lists options including a passport or REAL ID driver’s license that indicates citizenship. However, REAL IDs offered by most states do not show citizenship status.
A handful of states offer the option of an enhanced ID that shows citizenship. Michigan, for example, has offered such IDs since 2008. About 2 million of Michigan’s 8.3 million driver’s license and state ID holders currently have this enhanced identification.
Nationwide, people can also register to vote with a government-issued ID plus a birth certificate or naturalization certificate.
Duckworth’s spokesperson pointed to a 2023 national survey by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland and voting rights groups, including the Brennan Center for Justice.
The survey asked 2,400 U.S. citizen adults if they had various federal government documents — a passport, birth certificate, naturalization certificate or certificate of citizenship. If the respondents indicated they did have one of these items, the pollsters asked if it was "in a place where you could quickly find it if you had to show it tomorrow."
Just over 9% — or 21.3 million people when applied to the entire U.S. citizen adult population — either did not have or could not readily access documentary proof of citizenship, the survey concluded. The survey didn’t drill down into why some people couldn’t access them, but Michael J. Hanmer, a University of Maryland professor who oversaw the survey, said that some people hold the documents in another location. For example, college students may have birth certificates at their parents’ homes, and older Americans may have their documents stored at an adult child’s home.
States administer elections and set laws, including on voter ID. The majority of states require some type of ID to vote while others use different methods to verify eligibility. The SAVE America Act would set standard rules nationwide.
The legislation requires that people show nonexpired government-issued photo IDs to cast ballots. That could include a driver’s license, state ID, passport, military ID or ID issued by a tribal government. Student IDs, which some states currently allow, would be banned under the bill.
On government ID, the survey that Duckworth’s spokesperson pointed to found just under 9%, or 20.8 million people, did not have a nonexpired driver’s license.
Black and Hispanic Americans were less likely to have a current driver’s license compared with white people. People ages 18 to 24, and those with less education or income, were also less likely than other groups to have a nonexpired driver’s license.
The survey was not specifically of registered voters. But another survey targeted voters, asking about their IDs. The 2024 Survey of the Performance of American Elections showed that 97% of voters surveyed said they had a driver’s license. Eighty-five percent said "yes" when asked if their driver’s license was unexpired, showed the same name under which the voter was registered to vote, and displayed the same address where the voter was registered..
Trump has said the SAVE America Act is his top domestic priority. It follows years of his voter fraud falsehoods.
Voter fraud is rare, including voter impersonation. In 2016, we found that people were more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate someone else at the polls.
We found anecdotal examples of people who cast mail ballots in the name of dead relatives, but the numbers are too small to affect a statewide election’s outcome. Cases of noncitizens voting are rare, too. If they vote, noncitizens risk deportation, fines or jail. When people register to vote, they sign a form attesting that they are U.S. citizens. Noncitizen voting is already banned in federal elections.
Many Republican-led states are using federal data to look for noncitizens on their voter rolls. They are finding small numbers. Utah, for example, found only one confirmed noncitizen who never cast a ballot.
Duckworth said, "9% of American citizens don't have the identification that the SAVE act requires to vote. Almost 1 in 10."
The SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot.
A 2023 national survey — of U.S. adult citizens, not exclusively voters — found 9% of adult U.S. citizens either did not have or could not readily access documentary proof of citizenship. Duckworth left out context that some of the respondents have the documents but don’t have easy access to them.
Nine percent of survey respondents also lacked a nonexpired driver’s license.
We rate this statement Mostly True.
RELATED: Fact-checking Chuck Schumer about SAVE America Act, how many Americans register to vote in person
CBS News announced Friday that CBS News Radio will be shutting down this spring after nearly 100 years of broadcasting, citing "challenging economic realities."
joshuark shares a report from Neowin: OpenAI is planning to combine its Atlas web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex coding app into a singular desktop "superapp." CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, said the company was doubling down on its successful products. By taking this move, the AI company aims to streamline the user experience and reduce fragmentation. Simo said in an internal memo: "We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts. That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The aproned robot had the moves, but unfortunately, it had to be restrained by restaurant workers.
With gas closing in on $4 a gallon, the Trump administration is pulling multiple levers to tame energy prices. The results have been mixed.
Veteran broadcaster interviewed prominent female leaders including Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton
Jenni Murray, the broadcaster who hosted BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for more than 30 years, has died at the age of 75.
Murray joined the programme in 1987 and presented it until she departed as its longest-serving presenter in 2020. She was awarded a damehood in 2011 in recognition of her contribution to broadcasting.
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Republican lawmakers advocating for the SAVE America Act — which would require government-issued photo ID to vote — often argue that Americans are already required to present ID for all sorts of everyday activities.
A House Republican recently said "it’s nuts" one needs an ID to buy a six-pack of beer but not to vote. (State laws vary on IDs and alcohol purchases.) Other leaders have locked in on a dreaded post-blizzard activity.
"You can’t rent a home, you can't go to work, you can't shovel snow in New York City without an ID," Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., said during a March 19 press conference.
Britt’s shoveling remark met cold corrections on social media; people don’t need an ID to shovel their own sidewalk.
Britt’s spokesperson told PolitiFact the senator was referring to a New York City program that hires residents to shovel snow following a major snowfall, and requires workers to provide two forms of ID. Other Republicans, including President Donald Trump and Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, have talked about this requirement when advocating for the SAVE America Act.
"If you apply for that job, you need to show two original forms of ID and a Social Security card," Trump said Feb. 24 during his State of the Union address. "Yet they don't want identification for the greatest privilege of them all: Voting in America."
On Feb. 22, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani held a press conference amid a snowstorm and was asked whether snow shovelers had to provide documentation.
Mamdani said yes, and that this was part of a longstanding program in which the city pays shovelers, so it asks for ID. "Federal law requires that employers get authorization and documentation to pay people for their work," Mamdani said. "We are not allowed to just cut checks to individuals for their work."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, said that the ID requirement stems from the Immigration Reform and Conrol Act of 1986 signed by President Ronald Reagan. That law, he said, requires that "every person who wants to work in the United States now has to produce proof of their eligibility." The requirement applies to U.S. citizens and noncitizens.
States set their own voter ID requirements, and the majority of them require ID to cast ballots, though with some variation on what form of ID is acceptable. Alabama, for instance, requires a photo ID to vote and has a long list of acceptable ID cards, including student IDs. Alabama law also says that voters who lack photo ID can vote if election officials sign a sworn affidavit stating that the person is eligible.
New York does not require all voters to present identification when they show up at the polls. But if a voter does not provide valid ID when they register, they must show ID at the polling place when voting for the first time. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections.
The Trump-backed SAVE America legislation would establish identical laws for every state and require that voters show nonexpired, government-issued photo IDs to cast their ballots. Acceptable IDs include driver’s licenses, state-issued IDs, passports, military IDs or IDs issued by tribal governments. Student IDs, which are allowed in some states, would be banned as voter ID.
People would also have to provide documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. And people who changed their names to something other than what shows on their birth certificates would have to provide documentation showing the name change was legal or sign an affidavit.
The House passed the SAVE America Act in February. Debate in the Senate began March 17.
Britt said, "You can't shovel snow in New York City without an ID."
Britt’s statement ignores critical facts: People can shovel their own sidewalk without an ID, but people need to present identification to get hired and paid by the city. That ID requirement, for any employment, stems from federal law.
We rate this statement Mostly False.
Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this fact-check.
Siamak Namazi, who was released from Iran's Evin prison in 2023, said "it's important" that President Trump "hears that there are innocent Americans being held like we were as political pawns."
Security lines are stretching up to 2 hours at some airports amid TSA staffing shortages. Here's how to check wait times before you leave.
 | So I have over 1700 miles on my pint x and just decided to deep clean it. Is this oxidation bad or concerning. It concerned me when I opened it and it smelled like that old battery smell [link] [comments] |
‘Teleporting is no fun,’ Gregg Phillips, picked to lead Fema’s office of response and recovery, has said on a podcast
A far-right conspiracy theorist turned high-ranking official at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) claims to have once teleported to a Waffle House.
Gregg Phillips, who in December was appointed to lead Fema’s office of response and recovery, has spoken on “multiple podcasts” about being teleported against his will, CNN reported on Friday.
Continue reading...It is unclear under what circumstances President Trump would authorize the use of U.S. troops on the ground in Iran.
Officials understood to be investigating use of visas by company linked to Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light
The Home Office is investigating a company linked to a religious sect based in Cheshire over its use of immigration visas.
The company under investigation is linked to the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL), a sect that blends tenets of Islam with conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and aliens controlling US presidents. Followers believe the sect’s leader, Abdullah Hashem, can cure the sick and make the moon disappear. About 100 of his followers live in a former orphanage in Crewe, in the north-west of England.
Continue reading...Crisis in the Middle East, a sandstorm in Gaza, a blackout in Havana and the Oscars – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Continue reading...It's definitely a good month to reup your subscription.
Here's a breakdown of the best platforms for streaming your favorite reality hits on demand.
An anonymous reader quotes a repot from the Portland Tribune: There was plenty of uncertainty and debate about the effectiveness of a cell phone ban decreed (PDF) by executive order last summer. But at least in Estacada, the policy has earned two thumbs up, including approval from a "grumpy old teacher." Jeff Mellema is a language arts teacher at Estacada High School. He has worked in the building for 24 years, and he said the new policy that prohibits students from using their phones during the day has been a breath of fresh air. "There is so much better discourse in my classroom, be it personal or academic," Mellema said. "Students can't avoid those conversations anymore with their phones." "This ban has brought joy back to this old, grumpy teacher," he added with a smile. That is the kind of feedback Gov. Tina Kotek was hoping for as she visited Estacada High School on Wednesday afternoon, March 18. Her goal was to visit classrooms, speak with administrators, and meet with students one-on-one to hear about the effectiveness of her phone policy. [...] In the classrooms, she was able to take a straw poll around the cell phone ban and then get specific, direct feedback from the kids. Overall, it was positive. The Rangers said they noticed changes in how they interact with teachers and peers. They don't feel that "siren's song" tug of their phones as often, and the changes are bleeding into everyday life as well -- think less reminders to put phones away during family dinners. Phones also led to issues around bullying and online toxicity during the school day. There are some hiccups. The students spoke about difficulties in tracking busy schedules. Many athletes relied on their phones for practice times and locations. Some advanced placement kids said the overzealous programs monitoring school laptops blocked access to needed resources for studying/researching schoolwork. There is even a strange quirk with school-provided tech that prevents them from accessing their calculators. "Maybe the filters are too strong right now," Gov. Kotek said. "That is why we are working with the districts to best implement the policy." The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a "bell-to-bell" policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change. That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek's executive ruling. "When you make a decision like this, you don't know how it will ultimately work," Kotek told the students. "I appreciate you adapting to the situation and making it work for you." While things could change in the future, the governor is pleased with the early results. The phone ban is here to stay.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A pharmaceutical company issued the recall after receiving complaints of "gel-like mass and black particles" in the product, the FDA said.
Eid al-Fitr celebrated amid political furore over claims public Ramadan prayers an ‘act of domination’
On Friday morning, little space remained in Baitul Futuh mosque as thousands of people poured in to mark the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
The south London mosque, one of the largest in Europe, offered a glimpse of the Eid al-Fitr festivities being celebrated by millions of Muslims across the UK. This year, however, a political furore around one of the most important holidays in the Islamic calendar has divided UK party leaders, drawn warnings of bigotry and left members of the community feeling disturbed and disappointed.
Continue reading...Forces have been stripped back since the cold war but political stasis is dangerous in the face of growing global threats
It will have been more than three weeks since the US and Israel first attacked Iran when the first British warship finally arrives off the coast of Cyprus, a belated defensive deployment that has highlighted the lack of military capacity available to the UK.
Nominally, HMS Dragon was one of three destroyers available out of six. In reality the warship has had to be hauled out of dry dock, prepared and then, after launch, tested for several days in the Channel. Its arrival date is still unconfirmed.
Continue reading...The Pentagon has put out a call to its civilian employees to volunteer with the Department of Homeland Security as the embattled agency enters its second month without funding and weathers a public relations crisis over its brutal immigration enforcement tactics.
As email dated Thursday compares immigration enforcement to fighting wildfires and other disaster response and implores civilian employees and contractors to “step up for our country’s next challenge.”
Those who volunteer “will directly support the operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they work to ensure a safe and orderly immigration system,” reads the email, listed as from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. “To date, participants have helped ICE and CBP develop concepts of operation, provide logistics support, and managed enforcement activities that enhance public safety.”
ICE and CBP have faced a wave of public backlash in recent months, as immigration operations have terrorized communities across the country and killed two civilians in Minneapolis. President Donald Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month, and in February, Congress triggered a partial government shutdown by letting DHS funding lapse while Democrats request reforms.
A photo of the memo, which was first reported by Military Times, appeared Thursday afternoon on an unofficial Facebook page for Air Force personnel. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but the email’s details match those of an earlier department press release published March 11.
The Pentagon’s current call for DHS support appears to be a re-up of an earlier ask for volunteers made last August. At that time, Michael A. Cogar, the deputy assistant defense secretary for civilian personnel policy, expressed pride in civilians joining the efforts of DHS.
“This is a national security problem, and our civilians have the critical skill sets to support DHS in their mission,” Cogar said in August. “We’re proud that our civilians are already willing to sign up.”
The memo sent out Thursday claimed that more than 900 people had submitted applications so far to take part in the details, but did not specify how many people have been deployed. The March 11 press release claimed that around 200 civilians had deployed as part of the program.
The email linked to a page on USA Jobs, a clearinghouse for federal job opportunities. The page, titled “Volunteer Force,” advertises a salary range of $25,684 to $191,900 per year. A list of potential volunteer duties include data entry, operational support, assisting ICE and CBP with managing the flow of detainees, and logistical planning.
The Pentagon has taken an active support role in DHS activities since the beginning of Trump’s second term, when Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border and authorized the armed forces to deploy there.
Pentagon spending on border security has been the subject of controversy over the past year. In December, Democratic lawmakers accused the Trump administration of siphoning at least $2 billion from the Pentagon’s budget and prioritizing hard-line border initiatives and political stunts over its traditional focus on national security.
Spokespeople for DHS, ICE, and CBP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The post Pentagon Implores Civilian Workers to Join ICE “Volunteer Force” appeared first on The Intercept.
Ah, yes. It’s a sensitive topic. Ennoid didn’t submit the hardware configs for all his hardware variants to upstream. He doesn’t even have them in git. He’s got them on a google drive somewhere and would hear nothing about doing things the right way. I’m not gonna be manually coping his source files from somewhere and figuring out if I’ve done it correctly, not even having the hardware to test them (even if I wanted to go out of my way testing them). So sadly, no support for those until Kevin gets his stuff straight 
They were at a salon getting their nails done for Eid al-Fitr. It was unclear who fired the missile.
Recent developments could improve the value of a CD account again. Here's what savers should consider right now.
Martinez Lake, about 145 miles west of Phoenix, reached 110F (43.3C) on Thursday amid scorching south-west heat
A small community in the Arizona desert has broken a record for the highest March temperature ever recorded in the US, as the south-west bakes in a blistering late-winter heatwave.
The astonishing temperature was recorded just outside Martinez Lake, Arizona, which reached 110F (43.3C) on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 20, 2026 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. has issued the following statement:
Supermicro was informed yesterday that the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has unsealed an indictment of three individuals associated with the Company in connection with an alleged conspiracy to commit export-control violations.
Supermicro is not named as a defendant in the indictment. The individuals charged are Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, Senior Vice President of Business Development and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors; Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, a sales manager in Taiwan; and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, a contractor. Supermicro has placed the two employees on administrative leave and terminated its relationship with the contractor, effective immediately.
The conduct by these individuals alleged in the indictment is a contravention of the Company’s policies and compliance controls, including efforts to circumvent applicable export control laws and regulations. Supermicro maintains a robust compliance program and is committed to full adherence to all applicable U.S. export and re-export control laws and regulations.
The Company has been cooperating fully with the government’s investigation and will continue to do so. Supermicro has not been named as a defendant in the indictment.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro Responds to US Indictment of 3 Individuals Tied to Export Control Allegations appeared first on HPCwire.
ARLINGTON, Va., March 20, 2026 — The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) has announced the formation of the National Security Commission on Robotics for Advanced Manufacturing. This initiative, co-chaired by SCSP President Ylli Bajraktari, Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), is designed to restore American industrial preeminence by mastering the convergence of physical AI and automation, ensuring that U.S. manufacturing capacity becomes a durable national security asset against our adversaries.
“We are at a hinge point in history where ‘Physical AI’ – powered by robotics – will determine the next era of geopolitical and economic power,” said Bajraktari. “The Commission is not just about making things more efficiently; it is about ensuring the United States commands the robotics-enabled industrial base required to defend our interests. We are bringing together the best minds to ensure America wins the race for the future of production.”
As the global landscape shifts toward autonomous production, the Commission will serve as the primary architect for a national strategy to scale next-generation robotics. By unifying public and private efforts, the Commission aims to bridge the gap between laboratory innovation and shop-floor execution.
“If the U.S. fails to deploy next-generation technologies, we risk our national and economic security falling behind. Improving America’s physical AI can help power a new manufacturing renaissance, and the deployment of robotics will create smarter systems and scalable solutions. Enhancing technology for workers will unlock new careers, reduce our reliance on adversaries, and ensure the advanced manufacturing capabilities that will define the future are built in America,” said Sen. Budd.
“To win the future you need a plan. And with advanced manufacturing and AI rapidly evolving, it’s critical to have organizations like The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) working to stay ahead so we don’t fall behind to adversaries like China,” said Sen. Slotkin. “This commission will work across government, academia and industry to strengthen our national security, protect workers, and boost advanced and robotics manufacturing in Michigan and across the nation.”
The Commission will focus its efforts on four critical pillars:
The co-chairs are joined by a distinguished group of commissioners representing the vanguard of technology, industry, and academia:
The year-long Commission’s recommendations will be published in its final report in March 2027.
The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) is a non-profit, non-partisan initiative with a mission to make recommendations to strengthen America’s long-term competitiveness as artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are reshaping our national security, economy, and society.
For more information, please contact Tara Rigler at tmr@scsp.ai.
Source: Special Competitive Studies Project
The post SCSP Announces Launch of National Security Commission on Robotics for Advanced Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 20, 2026 — Physicl emerged from stealth at NVIDIA GTC, introducing a new data infrastructure platform purpose-built for Physical AI and robotics.
Launched by members of the team behind Nfinite — the company known for building one of the largest pipelines of high-fidelity 3D digital twins and recently collaborating with Getty Images on AI-ready visual datasets — Physicl focuses exclusively on the next frontier: scaling world-ready data for embodied intelligence.
As the AI industry moves beyond language and image models toward systems that interact with space, a new bottleneck has emerged: physics-grounded, simulation-ready 3D data.
“Every major advance in AI has required a new data layer,” said Alex de Vigan, CEO of Physicl. “For Physical AI, that missing layer is structured, spatially consistent, physics-aware data that models can actually learn from. Physicl exists to build that foundation — enabling robots and world models to understand space, simulate environments, and ultimately operate reliably in the real world.”
Powering the Next Wave of Physical Intelligence
Physicl supports three converging pathways:
Built on nearly a decade of experience digitizing the physical world, Physicl’s infrastructure enables continuous, production-grade data pipelines, moving Physical AI beyond one-off datasets and toward scalable, world-ready infrastructure.
The platform is already supporting teams at leading technology and AI organizations, including Meta, DeepMind, World Labs, and Getty Images, integrating three tightly connected infrastructure layers:
Physicl Leverages NVIDIA Technology: The Data Layer for the Omniverse Ecosystem
As Physical AI scales, the team is building on NVIDIA’s Physical AI stack — NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, NVIDIA Isaac Lab, and NVIDIA Cosmos. Physical AI developers need production-grade 3D environments to train and evaluate their models. Today, most of that data is built in-house, slowly and at high cost.
Physicl is purpose-built to fill this gap:
Physicl launches with a library of millions of simulation-ready 3D assets and environments, providing a continuous supply of simulation-ready 3D data — much like Getty Images serves licensed visual content or Scale AI provides labeled training data.
While GPUs power the models, Physical AI requires a fundamentally different type of training input than language systems.
Industry leaders have increasingly emphasized that the next generation of AI will require exponentially larger volumes of high-quality data. For systems that must interact with space, that data must also encode geometry, physics, and spatial relationships.
“NVIDIA has built the compute and simulation infrastructure for Physical AI,” Alex continued. “Physicl is designed to be the dedicated data layer powering the next wave of AI and robotics”
Developers and researchers interested in early beta access can apply here: https://www.physicl.ai.
About Physicl
Physicl is building the data infrastructure layer for Physical AI — enabling robots and AI models to perceive, simulate, and interact with the physical world. Physicl delivers simulation-ready 3D assets, physics-accurate data augmentation, and human-validated environments used to train robotic systems, world models, and embodied AI.
Source: Physicl
The post Physicl Launches the Data Infrastructure Layer for Physical AI at NVIDIA GTC appeared first on HPCwire.
AMSTERDAM, March 20, 2026 — Nebius has announced it is collaborating with NVIDIA to accelerate physical AI development with an end-to-end platform purpose-built for the full robotics lifecycle, from simulation and training to real-world deployment at scale.
Combining Nebius’s global AI cloud infrastructure with the NVIDIA Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint, an open reference architecture for massive data generation and evaluation, Nebius will provide robotics developers and enterprises an agent-driven environment that addresses the two fundamental barriers to physical AI at scale: infrastructure and tooling fragmentation, and the lack of high-quality training data for rare, unpredictable scenarios that determine real-world success.
“Physical AI is going to be one of the defining technology shifts of this decade, and the teams building it today are being held back by infrastructure and tooling that was never designed for those workloads,” said Evan Helda, Head of Physical AI at Nebius. “Working with NVIDIA, we are building the execution layer for the entire physical AI ecosystem — so that any team, anywhere, can go from idea to deployed robot at the speed the market demands.”
“Physical AI is the next phase of computing — where intelligence is trained, tested and validated in simulation before it operates in the real world,” said Rev Lebaredian, VP of Omniverse and simulation technologies at NVIDIA. “That demands tightly integrated systems connecting large-scale AI training with physically accurate simulation to create a continuous data flywheel. By integrating the NVIDIA Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint, Nebius is enabling developers to generate physics-grounded synthetic data and build safe, robust autonomous machines at scale.”
Solving Physical AI’s Three-Computer Problem
Building physical AI at scale means operating across three distinct environments — large-scale GPU training, simulation testing, and edge deployment — each with its own infrastructure and tooling. Engineering teams routinely spend 30–40% of their time on integration work rather than improving robot behavior.
Real-world training data compounds the challenge: it is expensive and dangerous to collect, inconsistent across companies, and never sufficient to cover the long-tail edge cases that determine whether a robot succeeds or fails in the field.
The Nebius cloud solution for physical AI addresses both challenges. NVIDIA OSMO — delivered as an easy-to-consume managed service — provides unified, agentic orchestration across the entire pipeline. NVIDIA Cosmos open world foundation models generate large-scale, physics-consistent synthetic data that bridges the gap that real-world collection cannot close.
The whole stack runs on Nebius AI Cloud — purpose-built infrastructure combining NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, high-throughput object storage, integrated data management and labelling, serverless features and managed inference directly within the platform — so teams can consume it as a service, without having to provision clusters or manage integrations.
Beyond large-scale simulation and training, Nebius extends the robotics lifecycle into production with serverless and managed inference services, including Nebius Token Factory, enabling teams to deploy and scale trained policies with low-latency execution from cloud to edge.
The result is a complete managed physical AI runtime, from synthetic data generation to real-world inference, delivered through a tightly integrated platform that can be consumed as a service.
Leading Physical AI Companies Building the Future with Nebius and NVIDIA
RoboForce builds AI robots for unstructured outdoor environments — solar farms, construction sites, agricultural fields — where encountering rare edge cases is a daily reality. Using NVIDIA Cosmos open world foundation models on the Nebius cloud, RoboForce cut pipeline setup time by more than 70% and significantly accelerated the rate at which new policies reach production.
“Manual handoffs between data generation, simulation, and training means our GPUs can sit idle — costing us both time and money,” said Calvin Zhou, co-founder of RoboForce. “Using OSMO agentic orchestration, our engineers can push a single configuration file and run the entire pipeline end-to-end. We’re generating thousands of scenario variations with NVIDIA Cosmos on Nebius AI Cloud, powering our AI data flywheel and accelerating the development of our robot foundation model. This allows us to push hardened robot models straight to the edge and cut our iteration cycles from weeks to days.”
Voxel51, a physical AI data platform and key technology partner of Nebius, provides powerful data visualization, curation, annotation, and analysis capabilities for teams to build high-quality datasets for model training and simulations. By running FiftyOne workflows on Nebius GPU clusters, Voxel51 customers can curate, augment, and quality-check visual datasets at scale—reducing the time between data collection and model deployment.
“Data is the biggest determinant of computer vision success. As vision AI systems become more capable, the limiting factor is no longer algorithmic innovation, but the quality, coverage, and observability of the data used to train models,” said Brian Moore, CEO and co-founder of Voxel51. “Nebius gives our users the compute infrastructure for running complex data tasks such as auto labeling and generating novel scenes at the speed and scale needed by physical AI systems.”
Together with Nebius cloud for physical AI and NVIDIA technologies, Voxel51 is delivering a synthetic data generation pipeline for its customer, Porsche Engineering, to accelerate autonomous driving data augmentation workflows.
Milestone Systems, a global leader in intelligent video management software and the company behind the Hafnia platform for computer vision, selected Nebius to fine-tune its next-generation Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Milestone curates real-world video footage into compliant, annotated training data, then uses it to fine-tune NVIDIA Cosmos Reason into highly accurate, use-case specific VLMs. For this computationally intensive work Nebius provides sustained access to large GPU clusters, high-throughput data pipelines, and managed workflow orchestration that keeps training runs stable and cost-efficient.
“We evaluated several cloud providers, and Nebius offered the best combination of GPU availability, price-performance, and hands-on engineering support for our physical AI and VLM training workloads,” said Edward Mauser, Director of Hafnia at Milestone Systems. “We chose Nebius not just for their tech, but also for their commitment to data sovereignty — guaranteeing that European customers’ data can remain within Europe.”
The Nebius cloud for physical AI is available now across Nebius data centers in the US and Europe. Visit http://nebius.com/solutions/phy to learn more.
About Nebius
Nebius, the AI cloud company, is building the full-stack platform for developers and companies to take charge of their AI future — from data and model training to production deployment. Founded on deep in-house technological expertise and operating at scale with a rapidly expanding global footprint, Nebius serves startups and enterprises building AI products, agents and services worldwide.
Source: Nebius
The post Nebius Teams with NVIDIA to Build Cloud for Robotics and Physical AI appeared first on HPCwire.
Going from 6.05 to 6.06, Calibrate on Boot has been changed from a toggle into a bitfield for Offset Calibration Mode. So if desired to be off, the Calibrate on Boot option has to be toggled off under Motor CFG → FOC → Offsets after the firmware update
International Energy Agency recommends emergency measures, including working from home, as Iran war hits fuel supply
Lowering speed limits to minimise fuel consumption is among potential contingency plans being drawn up by the UK government as the crisis in the Middle East threatens global oil supplies.
Sources stressed that there is no shortage of fuel in the UK, but said that officials in the Department for Transport were working with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) on an analysis of what measures could be taken to curb oil demand.
Continue reading...Bill Ready pointed to Australia’s social media ban for under-16s as a model, though it does not apply to his company
Pinterest’s CEO called on world leaders to ban social media for youth under 16 in a LinkedIn post on Friday.
“We need a clear standard: no social media for teens under 16, backed by real enforcement, and accountability for mobile phone operating systems and the apps that run on them,” Bill Ready wrote. Pinterest, an image-sharing platform, has seen a surge in young users over the past year but has disappointed Wall Street with its quarterly financial reports of late.
Continue reading...Tania Warner and Ayla, her seven-year-old with autism, sent to notorious Texas detention center and told to ‘self-deport’
A Canadian woman and her seven-year-old daughter with autism who have been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for nearly a week have been transferred to a notorious detention center and asked to “self-deport”, according to her husband, who said the pair had been “traumatized” by the experience.
Tania Warner and her daughter Ayla Luca, originally from British Columbia, moved to the US five years ago, when Warner married Edward Warner, a US citizen.
Continue reading...The company plans to bundle ChatGPT, the Atlas browser and the Codex coding tool into one, according to a news report.
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from CNN: The co-founder of Super Micro Computer and two others were charged with diverting $2.5 billion worth of servers with Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips to China, in violation of U.S. laws barring exports to that country without a license. Yih-Shyan Liaw, known as Wally; Ruei-Tsang Chang, known as Steven; and Ting-Wei Sun, known as Willy, were charged with conspiring to violate export control laws, smuggling goods from the U.S. and conspiring to defraud the U.S. Liaw, who co-founded Super Micro Computer and served on its board of directors, was arrested Thursday in California and released on bail. Sun, a contractor, is held awaiting a detention hearing. Chang, who worked in the Taiwan office of Super Micro, remains at large. [...] According to the indictment, the men used a pass-through company based in Southeast Asia to place orders to obscure that the servers would end up in China. The men worked with executives at the pass-through company to provide false documents to the server manufacturer to further the deception, the indictment said. They used a shipping and logistic company to repackage the servers into unmarked boxes to conceal their contents before they were shipped to China. To deceive the manufacturer's auditors, who checked the pass-through company for compliance with export laws, the men allegedly used "dummy" nonworking copies of the servers when the actual servers were on their way to China. Two of the defendants allegedly worked to stage the dummy servers at a warehouse rented by the pass-through company, according to the indictment. Sun took photos and videos of the staged servers to one of the compliance auditors who instead of conducting the audit was "off-site enjoying entertainment paid for" by the pass-through company, according to the indictment. In another instance, prosecutors said surveillance cameras documented individuals using hair dryers to remove labels and add labels and serial number stickers to the boxes and dummy servers. Super Micro said it's fully cooperating with the investigation, but that hasn't prevented its stock from plunging. It's down nearly 30% following the news. The company issued the following statement: "The conduct by these individuals alleged in the indictment is a contravention of the Company's policies and compliance controls, including efforts to circumvent applicable export control laws and regulations. Supermicro maintains a robust compliance program and is committed to full adherence to all applicable U.S. export and re-export control laws and regulations."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Scientific advisory committee to examine impact of offering routine MenB jabs to wider range of people
Experts are considering the case for routinely vaccinating more people against meningitis B in response to the fatal outbreak in Kent.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s review was announced after the health secretary, Wes Streeting, asked it to “re-examine eligibility for meningitis vaccines” for a wider range of people than those who now qualify.
Continue reading...The failure to protect explicit case evidence in Denise Huskins' kidnapping and sexual assault case is driving reform at the State Capitol. New developments exposed a little-known gap in state law that could expose videos of sexual assault victims.
National intelligence director said voting machine seizure was requested by US attorney in Puerto Rico – who’s been trying to revive 2020 election conspiracy theory
When the US director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, testified on Thursday that her office seized voting machines from Puerto Rico, she said it was at the request of the office of the US attorney in Puerto Rico. Left unsaid was that the prosecutor, as the Guardian previously reported, has been the center of a push by Donald Trump supporters to revive a long discredited conspiracy theory purporting to link Venezuela to Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat.
Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the conspiracy theory maintains, controlled electronic voting machines worldwide and remotely manipulated results in 2020 to deprive Trump of a presidential victory.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 20, 2026 — VAST Data has announced the availability of VAST Foundation Stacks, a new open source library that augments and extends NVIDIA AI Blueprints into production-ready pipeline implementations that run natively on the VAST AI Operating System.
NVIDIA AI Blueprints provide developers with a foundational starting point for building advanced AI applications and intelligent agents, leveraging NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to rapidly prototype, customize, and deploy domain-specific AI workflows with minimal integration effort. VAST Foundation Stacks extend these blueprints into production-ready templates, enabling organizations to deploy and operate NVIDIA-powered pipelines natively on the VAST AI Operating System. Developers can now focus on the business logic that connects AI to their environment instead of assembling the underlying infrastructure and platform layers required to support it, enabling teams to deliver AI applications faster.
Enterprises are racing to operationalize proven AI patterns, but many reference examples still require extensive integration before they can run securely and reliably in production. Teams often must stitch together fragmented infrastructure, orchestration layers and data services to make these AI applications production-ready.
VAST Foundation Stacks address this challenge by extending NVIDIA AI Blueprints into repeatable, enterprise-ready implementations designed to run natively on the VAST AI Operating System. By unifying data access, database services, compute orchestration, eventing, and pipeline execution in a single environment, VAST enables organizations to deploy scalable AI pipelines without building complex infrastructure from scratch. These Foundation Stacks can be seamlessly and repeatedly deployed anywhere the VAST AI OS runs, including in the cloud as well as on-premises via VAST’s newly announced CNode-X platforms, as part of the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.
The first Foundation Stacks are based on NVIDIA AI Blueprints for Video Search and Summarization (VSS) and NVIDIA AI-Q:
The VSS-based VAST Foundation Stack enables organizations to ingest massive volumes of live or archived video and extract insights through semantic indexing, summarization, and interactive Q&A, powered by the high-performance data and pipeline services of the VAST AI Operating System.
The AI-Q based VAST Foundation Stack provides a foundation for building custom AI researchers that can operate across private, enterprise data sources, synthesizing hours of research in minutes while leveraging the VAST AI OS for persistent and secure context, scalable reasoning pipelines, and trusted agent execution.
“NVIDIA AI Blueprints have given the market an important starting point for building next-generation applications, but enterprises still need a production-ready way to deploy and operate those capabilities at scale,” said John Mao, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances at VAST Data. “With VAST Foundation Stacks, VAST is taking the architectural patterns behind leading NVIDIA Blueprints and giving customers a faster path from experimentation to production for scalable AI pipelines, video intelligence, and agentic AI systems.”
“As enterprises transition to production AI at scale, preparing enterprise data for AI has become one of the biggest challenges,” said Adel El Hallak, Vice President, Product at NVIDIA. “Turning data into AI-ready pipelines needs to be done continuously and requires full-stack acceleration across compute, networking and software. By extending NVIDIA AI Blueprints with the VAST AI Operating System, customers can prepare and serve data so intelligent agents are always working off the most recent and accurate information.”
In addition to the available VSS and AI-Q implementations, VAST plans to release additional Foundation Stacks in the coming months, including industry-focused examples. VAST Foundation Stacks will be available through a public GitHub repository, with interactive demos and planned sandbox environments for customers and partners.
About VAST Data
VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI.
Source: VAST Data
The post VAST Data Introduces Foundation Stacks to Accelerate Enterprise Adoption of NVIDIA Blueprints appeared first on HPCwire.
The insects covered its largest area since 2018, despite threats from habitat loss, climate crisis and pesticides
The population of monarch butterflies in Mexico increased 64% this winter, compared with the same period in 2025, offering a glimmer of hope for an insect considered at risk of extinction.
The figures, released this week by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Mexico, showed that the area occupied by monarchs expanded to 2.93 hectares (7.24 acres) of forest from 1.79 hectares (4.42 acres) the previous winter, the largest coverage since 2018.
Continue reading...Staffing shortages intensify and lead to longer screening times as TSA workers go for weeks without pay
Many travelers across the US are continuing to face significant delays at airport security checkpoints as the homeland security department shutdown, which has affected staffing of the Transportation Security Administration, remains ongoing.
With TSA workers going for weeks without pay, staffing shortages have intensified, leading to longer screening times and growing frustration among passengers.
Continue reading...Sabri Essid also found guilty of crimes against humanity after harrowing evidence from women enslaved by jihadist
A French member of Islamic State has been convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for atrocities committed against Yazidis in a historic judgment that highlighted the atrocities committed by jihadists.
The Paris criminal court found Sabri Essid, who was tried in his absence, directly participated in an organised system of killing, raping and enslaving members of the Iraqi ethnic and religious minority who are descended from some of the region’s most ancient roots.
Continue reading...A debt collector can't freeze your bank account on a whim, but certain debts make it easier to pursue a bank levy.
Benjy Taylor is suing Morehouse, two campus officers
Incident came after dispute over taunts, handshake line
Tuskegee men’s basketball coach Benjy Taylor filed a lawsuit against Morehouse College and two campus police officers on Friday, claiming he suffered emotional and physical harm when he was handcuffed and escorted off the court on 31 January.
“He has suffered financial harm, reputational harm, emotional harm as well as physical damages,” Harry Daniels, one of Taylor’s attorneys, told the Associated Press.
Continue reading...Anyone who rides with Nike Shox?
I’m concerned that they’re too cushiony, anyone who has some, or some other “bubble” like shoes?
I have Nike Air Max 90 right now.
Lawsuit alleges Ivy League university violated civil rights of Jewish and Israeli people in aftermath of war in Gaza
The Trump administration has renewed its assault on Harvard University, filing a lawsuit in Massachusetts alleging the Ivy League institution violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli people in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.
The lawsuit, shared publicly by the New York Times, accuses Harvard of allowing anti-Israel protesters to operate on campus “with impunity” following the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Gaza and Israel’s massive military response.
Continue reading...Gwyn Samuels, who committed crimes as James Bubb, befriended both victims online
A Metropolitan police special constable who raped a girl and a woman after “systematically” grooming them both online has been jailed for 24 years.
James Bubb, who now identifies as a woman named Gwyn Samuels, first sexually assaulted the girl when she was just 12 years old after befriending her online in 2018, the trial at Aylesbury crown court was told last year.
Continue reading...Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Friday condemned the deaths of three Mexican nationals in ICE custody this year.
KELLY HALL
Staff Reporter
“Sweeney Todd,” a musical performed by the Harrington Theatre Arts Company (HTAC) students, opened Nov. 13 in the Pearson Hall Auditorium and closed its four-show run on Nov. 18.
The musical is based on the 1973 play of the same name by Christopher Bond, with music and lyrics written by Stephen Sondheim. The show is a melodramatic thriller set in 19th century London and follows Sweeney Todd’s return to the city after being wrongfully exiled by Judge Turpin. Dark themes of revenge, murder and injustice are woven into the catchy and gripping songs performed throughout the show.
This was my first time seeing the show, though I was already familiar with its dark nature and a majority of the songs prior to entering the auditorium.
I have seen many of HTAC’s shows in the past, including “Heathers,” “Alice by Heart” and “Cabaret.” Recognizing some of the actors from past shows and seeing them step into new roles and embody their characters is always such an incredible experience.
Everyone involved is always extremely dedicated to the character they play, which makes it easy to get completely sucked into the show.
My two favorite songs from the show were “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” and “By the Sea.” “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” starts the show and has a bold, serious, dramatic energy that immediately captivated me. Even though I had listened to it on my phone beforehand, hearing it live was a thrilling experience.
Completely different from “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” the song “By the Sea” is light, airy and fun. In this number, Mrs. Lovett shares her fantasy and wishes of being at the beach with Sweeney, especially after sales at her pie shop are booming.
The actors and music staff did an excellent job keeping the audience engaged, while the lighting crew perfectly matched the colors and brightness of the stage to the lyrics and energy each song included.
Despite the music’s dark and violent themes of murder, cannibalism and vengeance, the funny one-liners, the actors’ deliveries of the scenes and occasional upbeat songs made the show less intense, which I really appreciated. My friends and I decided to go together, and it was so difficult to keep our mouths shut until after the show when we could discuss everything that happened.
In previous HTAC shows that I have seen, the theater has been filled with laughter, sometimes so loud that I could barely hear the actors in front of me. This time, however, you could hear a pin drop, especially during some of the more intense or emotionally compelling scenes.
I enjoy both types of experiences, but for this specific show, the quiet, on-the-edge-of-your-seat nature was palpable in the auditorium and made the show even more powerful.
As always, the show was wonderfully done. Everything from the set to the lighting to the actors was incredible. Every time I leave an HTAC production I consider it my favorite one yet, and this show was no exception.
I cannot wait to see HTAC’s upcoming shows, especially after having enjoyed “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” so much.
Longtime Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat writes: Chuck Norris, known for his roles in action films and as Texas Ranger Cordell Walker on the TV show "Walker, Texas Ranger," passed away on March 19, leaving behind a legacy of inspiring millions around the world. He was 86. He became Internet phenomenon after "Chuck Norris Facts" went viral online with such wildly hyperbolic statements as, "Chuck Norris had a staring contest with the sun -- and won," and, "When Chuck Norris does push-ups, he doesn't push himself up, he pushes the Earth down." His death was announced by his family through his official Instagram account, but no further details were immediately available. He was hospitalized earlier that day in Hawaii after experiencing a medical emergency, the family said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If I unplug the battery, does that stick brick the board even with the GTV upgrade?
The announcement comes as NATO faces criticism from President Trump, who's seeking military assistance in securing the key Strait of Hormuz.
The statute of limitations can expire on old debt, but that doesn't mean creditors lose their ability to collect.
Several Minnesota families saw justice served on Thursday morning after five young women were killed in a high-speed crash two summers ago in Minneapolis.
Experts warn that surging energy costs are likely to ripple through U.S. supply chains, resulting in higher prices online and in stores.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is a critic of President Donald Trump’s military track record and his decision to attack countries across the Middle East, parts of Africa and Venezuela without congressional approval. In a Senate floor speech, Warren criticized Trump’s explanations for beginning the Iran war and for backtracking on a campaign promise.
"He said he would be a president to stop wars, not start them. And Americans believed him. But now we face an ugly reality: In the modern era, no American president has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump," Warren said March 3. "None."
We wondered if Warren’s statement was accurate, and how she defines the "modern era." When we reached out to Warren’s office for her evidence to support her statement, a spokesperson sent PolitiFact several news stories, including:
A March 2 Axios article with an opening that nearly matches Warren’s statement: "No president in the modern era has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump." The Axios story defines "modern era" as presidents post-9/11: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden.
An article from The Washington Post about Trump’s 2025 military strikes, including those against alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. The Post reported that Trump authorized almost as many military strikes in 2025 as Biden did over his four-year term.
An Instagram graphic posted by The Recount, a politics-focused news organization, listing various countries, including in the Middle East, Africa and Venezuela, and faces of the 21st century president who ordered bombs there; Trump’s face appears next to each country. The outlet shared the graphic on Feb. 28, after Trump announced the U.S. and Israel’s Iran strikes.
After reviewing these sources and additional reporting, we found that Trump has authorized the highest number of strikes and targeted the most countries compared with other 21st century presidents.
So how many countries did each president target for military strikes?
Trump’s count is the highest, according to many news sources.
From the start of his first term to now, Trump struck 10 countries. Since starting his second term in January 2025, he has struck seven countries and boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean.
Biden’s military strikes hit five countries.
Obama’s strikes hit seven countries over two terms.
Bush’s strikes hit five countries over two terms.
For context, Bush launched long-running wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Obama ended the Iraq military operation in 2011, but introduced new military operations in Iraq and Syria after the rise of the Islamic State. The Afghanistan war continued through Trump’s first term, with Biden ending it — amid a chaotic withdrawal and suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. military members — in 2021.
Most presidents’ military strikes have been focused on counterterrorism, including Trump’s 2025 strikes against groups such as the Islamic State in Syria and the Houthis, an Iran-backed military group in Yemen, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Here are the countries targeted by each president:
Trump: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran.
Biden: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen.
Obama: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria.
Bush: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department, said the countries targeted were not surprising, even if Trump’s tactics were. For example, presidents have criticized Iran and Venezuela for years.
"It's been unpredictable, although his targets have been long discussed, both by him and by previous presidents," Cancian said.
Cancian recommended looking at the number of ground troops in combat zones as a more revealing metric of a president’s military use.
Trump has — so far — kept military activities to mostly air attacks. Cancian said the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq invasion were much larger military operations compared with Trump’s activities in Yemen, Venezuela and Iran. The U.S. deployed more than 150,000 troops at the outset of the Iraq invasion.
Warren mentioned "more military strikes against as many different countries," so we compared the presidents’ strike numbers.
Military strikes encapsulate various tactics, including unmanned drone and precision missile strikes and air strikes, which requires dropping bombs or ballistic missiles from a manned aircraft.
During Trump’s first term, he drastically increased airstrikes on Somalia and Yemen compared with Obama, who already increased strikes on those nations significantly during his presidency.
Trump carried out more drone strikes during his first term than each of Obama and Bush’s presidencies.
In 2017, Trump authorized over 10,000 more bombings on Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan than Obama and Bush did in each of their years with the highest military activity, 2016 and 2003, according to the U.S. Air Forces Central Command.
Biden was involved in the least military activity, authorizing 694 air and drone strikes during his four-year term, significantly fewer than those in Trump’s first term and slightly more than the number of 2025 Trump strikes.
Warren said, "In the modern era, no American president has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump."
From the start of his first term to now, Trump has ordered strikes on 10 countries, which is three more than the next-highest president in the 21st century, Obama.
We rate Warren’s statement True.
Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this fact-check.
Wait times at major U.S. airports continue as TSA officer callouts mount after employees missed their first full paycheck last week.
 | Working on off-road speed confidence with my daughter… she hit 25 mph As we enter the upcoming race season, I prepare my daughter for comfort at speed. What she lacks in speed she makes up for in technical skill. Practice makes progress and this is her first stepping stone toward being a well rounded rider. What do you do to level up your Skill speed? [link] [comments] |
Here's how to watch Timothée Chalamet's Oscar-nominated performance.
The first Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is coming from the Pacific, is still making its way toward the region.
Mediahuis suspends Peter Vandermeersch, who says he ‘fell into trap of hallucinations’, after investigation by newspaper where he was once editor-in-chief
The publisher of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and the Irish Independent has suspended one of its senior journalists after he admitted using AI to “wrongly put words into people’s mouths”.
Peter Vandermeersch, the former head of the Irish operations at Mediahuis, said he “fell into the trap of hallucinations” – the term for AI-generated errors – when using the technology.
Continue reading...There's almost nothing you can't make in the air fryer, but cooking directions and recipes aren't always a one-to-one match. Here's what you need to know before converting.
This live blog is now closed, you can read more of our European news coverage here
Meanwhile, French president Emmanuel Macron has confirmed the seizure of the tanker, which he said belonged to the Russian shadow fleet.
In a strongly worded post on X, he said:
“The French navy boarded this morning in the Mediterranean a new vessel from the shadow fleet, the Deyna.
The war in Iran will not divert France from its support for Ukraine, where Russia’s war of aggression continues.
Continue reading...Started a ride as usual, accelerate at a medium pace since there’s a few people nearby. About 8 seconds in when I was starting to get to speed, I fully nose dive.
I didn’t feel pushback, but my first thought was maybe I was just leaning into it a bit much but didn’t notice somehow. After a few seconds of groaning I checked the board to see it was turned off. No record of this crash in the app.
I’ve got the pint S motor which is usually pretty solid at accelerating, and I don’t think I did anything unusual.
I turn it back on and it’s roughly 60% which isn’t full, but I was probably only giving it 50% push. When it hop back on to slowly muster home, it’s hitting pushback at around 5mph, and and every little bump/hill I slow down to walking speed. Then after a little bit it seems fine?
I checked the bolts to see if they’re tight (since that’s given me early pushback before) and it seems good.
Anyone know how to proceed with looking into this. Though I originally thought user error it seems doubtful, and now I’m a bit scared to ride.
If you're on a current AT&T plan, it might cost you more to switch to one of the new ones.
Plunging oil shipments transiting the Strait of Hormuz have sent global energy prices soaring to their highest level in years.
During a six-decade career at the New Yorker, Mr. Tomkins profiled scores of artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Police in Barcelona said the death of Jimmy Gracey, a University of Alabama student from Illinois who went missing on vacation, was likely an accident.
Amazon is reportedly developing a new AI-focused smartphone that doesn't rely as heavily on traditional apps. "The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that can sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day," reports Reuters. From the report: As envisioned, the new phone's personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music or ordering food from partners like Grubhub easier than ever, the people said. They asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters. A key focus of the Transformer project has been integrating artificial intelligence capabilities into the device, the people said. That could eliminate the need for traditional app stores, which require downloading and registering for applications before they can be used. Alexa would likely be a core feature but not necessarily the primary operating system of the phone, the people said. When Amazon launched the Fire Phone in 2014, it aimed to compete directly with offerings from Samsung and Apple. Instead, the device received mixed reviews and failed to impress reviewers, leading Amazon to abandon the effort just over a year later.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stuart Niven suspended after revelations he was struck off as company director, while other candidates have been accused of extremist statements including describing Humza Yousaf as ‘not British’
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
Malcolm Offord, Reform UK’s Scottish leader, has doubled down on his defence of the party’s vetting by dismissing remarks by candidates backing Tommy Robinson or describing Humza Yousaf as an “Islamist moron” (see 10.12am) as “fruity language”.
It has taken a matter of hours for Reform Scotland’s big launch to fall apart and their true colours to show.
If Nigel Farage refuses to act and remove this candidate, Malcolm Offord must step up and show some leadership himself. This incident has confirmed once and for all how poisonous and chaotic Reform is and I have no doubt that Scots will send them packing.
Again, as I say, this was done in a former life before she became a member of Reform. We’ve all said things in the past that may be intemperate… I am saying that we have to grow up on this and not take offence at every moment in time.
I’ve been very clear that we have brought in a whole range of candidates, 80% of whom are not politicians. They’re real people with real lives who said real things in a past life. Okay, this was said before she was a candidate. She wasn’t even a member of the party at that time.
And what we got in the situation is that in all our lives in the past, we’ve made comments that might sometimes be intemperate. But the issue with this modern world we live in is everything is now written down and remembered. I just think we have to be more, more realistic about the fact that real people say real things, and now she’s a candidate, she will be held to a higher standard.
Liberal Democrats urge the government to ensure the NCA or new National Police Service takes over investigations into serious waste crime. We also need an independent review of the entire waste crime system to crack down on organised gangs once and for all. New powers for the Environmental Agency simply won’t cut it.
Continue reading...As the Iran war rages, Israel continues killing senior Iranian figures. CBS News asked experts how they do it.
Peter Coates’s family welcome end to years pursuing answers after he died when outage stopped oxygen machine
A family has welcomed a coroner’s conclusion that ambulance delays possibly contributed to their father’s death in 2019 after enduring “years of distress trying to pursue answers”.
The family of Peter Coates said they had been met with “delays and resistance” from a regional ambulance service as they tried to discover the full circumstances of his final minutes.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 20, 2026 — Nscale has signed a letter of intent with Microsoft to provide 1.35 gigawatts of AI compute capacity, setting up the West Virginia Monarch AI campus as a global flagship deployment of NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs as Vera Rubin NVL72 systems engineered with the NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design.
Nscale this week also announced the acquisition of American Intelligence & Power Corporation (“AIPCorp”), sponsored by Fidelis New Energy and 8090 Industries, which includes the Monarch Compute Campus, a site with up to 2,250 acres in Mason County, West Virginia, and the United States’ first state-certified AI microgrid with a power runway scalable to over eight gigawatts.
Under the collaboration with Microsoft, Nscale will construct and operate advanced AI data center infrastructure to host this large-scale GPU deployment based on the latest generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs and future technologies. The deployment will be delivered across multiple tranches beginning in late 2027, creating one of the largest dedicated AI compute installations in the world.
The planned infrastructure will operate under a long-term framework that includes an initial multi-year compute services term alongside a long-term data centre lease structure, reflecting the scale and strategic importance of the facility. This positions the campus to be a cornerstone facility for next-generation AI training and inference capacity in the United States.
“This collaboration with Microsoft marks a pivotal milestone both for Nscale and the development of the Monarch Campus,” said Josh Payne, CEO of Nscale. “By integrating our specialized AI infrastructure with Microsoft’s global platform, we are creating a foundation for innovation that can scale alongside the most ambitious AI models in the world”.
This acquisition and collaboration comes at a crucial moment. AI is forecast to drive a sharp increase in global data center demand, but estimates suggest existing supply is constrained by the pace at which power and new capacity can be brought online. McKinsey estimates AI-related data center capacity demand could reach 156 GW by 2030. The Monarch Compute Campus will build on Nscale’s current capacity of over 1GW.
The expansion capabilities of this site — which has the potential for a total power draw of 8GW — will allow Nscale to develop power capacity rapidly while supporting one of the largest announced AI compute deployments in the market today.
The campus is also expected to provide high-speed fiber connectivity to some of the nation’s largest AI hubs. Its close proximity to major centers of AI and cloud infrastructure, including Ashburn and Chicago, will offer customers low latency and minimal delays for AI workloads.
“Microsoft’s datacenter approach is to build the best global infrastructure informed by near-term and long-term demand,” said Jon Tinter, President, Business Development and Ventures at Microsoft. “Our investments blend owned datacenters, leased facilities, and strategic collaborations. This collaboration with Nscale and NVIDIA is an important step to deliver meaningful AI innovation to our customers.”
“AI is becoming essential infrastructure for every industry,” said Nico Caprez, Vice President, Global AI Infrastructure Growth, NVIDIA. “With this large-scale NVIDIA DSX AI Factory Blueprint, Nscale is building the infrastructure required to produce intelligence at industrial scale and power the next wave of global innovation.”
Power Collaboration with Caterpillar
Through a strategic collaboration with Caterpillar, Nscale will deploy Caterpillar G3500 series natural gas generator sets at sufficient scale to achieve two gigawatts of power generation by the first half of 2028, powering the NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design.
“This collaboration reflects Caterpillar and our dealers’ continued focus on supporting customers that require primary, continuous-duty power at scale through our broad energy solutions portfolio,” said Melissa Busen, senior vice president of Electric Power, Caterpillar. “Projects like Monarch demonstrate how Caterpillar’s natural gas generation platforms are being deployed as core infrastructure for data centers and other power intensive applications where reliability, speed of deployment, and lifecycle performance are critical.”
The G3500 series units provide Nscale with a proven, rapid-deployment power solution that collapses traditional infrastructure timelines and accelerates the path from site to live compute.
Providing Positive Community Impact
Nscale is working closely with state and local officials and community partners to ensure the development delivers lasting value for the region. The campus is being designed with local and environmental resources in mind. Power will be generated on-site as the facility operates independently of the local grid, eliminating the burden on existing utility customers and protecting ratepayers’ bills. The microgrid is also designed to enable future tie-in to the grid for export of power back to the grid.
Nscale is also pursuing carbon sequestration to offset emissions, with access to significant sequestration capacity in West Virginia. Even at full 8GW capacity, the campus will use a high-efficiency design that consumes less water with no impact on municipal water supply or residential users.
About Nscale
Nscale is building the global hyperscaler engineered for AI infrastructure. Through vertically integrated AI solutions and modular, first-principles datacenter design across Europe and North America, Nscale delivers the compute foundation for enterprise AI training, fine-tuning, and inference at scale.
Source: Nscale
The post Nscale Targets 1.35GW AI Deployment with Microsoft at Monarch AI Campus appeared first on HPCwire.
The Trump administration argued that Harvard unlawfully discriminated against Jewish and Israeli students, in violation of federal civil rights law.
DoorDash is launching tasks as a way for drivers to earn more money, but some jobs are specifically designed to train AI models.
Joe Kent, a top counterterrorism official in the Trump administration, resigned Tuesday citing his opposition to the ongoing war in Iran.
Kent’s resignation came as the most recent and perhaps most consequential of a series of rifts opening on the far right over the war in Iran. While most of the defections had come from MAGA media figures, Kent’s departure from his role as director of the National Counterterrorism Center was the first major defection from the administration.
In his letter of resignation, Kent condemned the war as a violation of the president’s campaign promises to steer clear of foreign wars, criticizing what he described as Israeli pressure as a catalyst for dragging the U.S. into a deadly potential quagmire.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” wrote Kent in a letter posted to X, where it had received nearly 100 million views as of Friday morning. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Kent is not the only government national security professional disaffected by Donald Trump’s war in Iran, according to advocates for conscientious objection who say they’re fielding nonstop calls from distressed service members. Many service members could refuse to take part in the war, either by refusing outright — and risking punishment — or by declaring as conscientious objectors, according to Mike Prysner, executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, a group that counsels members of the military on their rights in objecting to participation in or support of combat operations.
“This is the kind of thing that really resonates: seeing respected people in positions of power validating what many service members feel, which is that this is bad and people shouldn’t take part in it,” Prysner said. “There are a lot of people who may be inspired by what Kent did.”
Prysner said that in the weeks since the war began with joint U.S.–Israeli airstrikes on February 28, the group’s phones have been ringing around the clock. Active-duty military personnel and military families are scrambling, he said, to figure out what their rights might be in refusing to take part in the war. His group has helped dozens of service members explore or start applications to declare as conscientious objectors.
“We’ve started more people in the CO process in the past two weeks than we typically do over the period of a year,” Prysner said.
Prysner said the group has spoken with service members occupying ranks from major to private, including three fighter pilots.
Prysner’s numbers could not be independently confirmed, and representatives of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the number of new applications for conscientious-objector status.
Kent, an Army veteran who later served in the CIA before running as a hard-right House candidate in Washington state, is the most senior member of the administration to resign over the war in Iran. Until Tuesday, he served under Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence and herself a former critic of pressure to the U.S. and Israel to carry out regime change in Iran.
The resignation came amid a broader split in the MAGA movement, with some Trump loyalists backing up the president’s decision to go to war while others, perhaps most notably conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, questioning the logic of attacking Iran in concert with Israel. In the wake of Kent’s announcement, Trump called his departure “a good thing,” while White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the letter was brimming with “false claims.” Kent, according to media reports, was the subject of a leak investigation by the FBI.
The U.S. military offers service members avenues to avoid combat or even be discharged from the ranks if they can prove that they hold religious, moral, or ethical objection to “war in any form.” The practice in the U.S. of declaring as a conscientious objector goes back as far as the U.S. military, although the regulations around it and the reasons cited by would-be conscientious objectors have expanded over time, and in the current, all-volunteer military, regulations require that one’s believes have “crystalized” since signing on.
“It’s totally valid for people to cite a specific conflict in their CO application, as long as that leads them to the broader realization that they cannot participate in any war,” Prysner said. “It’s absolutely valid for service members to look at the war in Iran and make the conclusion that they can’t be part of this in any form.”
Prysner is himself a veteran who served in the Iraq War, and came to anti-war activism after his deployments there. He said he began to question the violence unleashed in Iraq after coming into contact with Iraqis. In the age of the internet, however, the horrors of war can be quickly beamed into people’s phones and social media, potentially spurring more members of the military to question their role in that violence.
That dynamic was on display in Iran, Prysner told The Intercept. The surprise nature of the U.S.–Israel attack caused the families of service members to reach out to loved ones stationed abroad, while numerous active-duty members who reached out had been motivated by the clear and devastating impact of the war on civilians, notably a U.S. airstrike on February 28 that killed 168 people, most of them children, at a school in the Iranian city of Minab.
“By far the most common thing we’ve heard from people for a specific thing that caused them to reach out was the Minab school massacre,” Prysner said. “It’s not wanting to be a part of what they see as crimes against people they have no reason to hurt.”
Hundreds of service members resisted participation in the Iraq War, including many who successfully applied as conscientious objectors. But many had a difficult time successfully proving that their opposition to war was not simply a fear of serving overseas. Others went AWOL, with at least 200 service members fleeing to Canada to avoid fighting.
Some, such as former Marine Stephen Funk, served jail time for refusing to deploy. Funk also faced discrimination in the Marines as a then-closeted gay man and spent months in the brig for his refusal to ship off to Iraq. In the years after his discharge, he worked with anti-war groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veteran Artists to promote peace and work with other vets to reintegrate.
Funk told The Intercept he has been horrified to see the U.S. yet again charging into a war that has already killed hundreds of civilians and stands to kill, injure, and morally compromise members of the U.S. military. He urged service members facing a crisis of conscience to listen to their heart.
“I would say go for it, the sooner the better,” Funk told The Intercept. “You don’t want to have injuries, or moral injuries, that you’ll carry for the rest of your life.”
Correction: March 20, 2026, 12:25 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story contained an errant reference to Mike Prysner’s military service; he did not serve in Syria.
The post Joe Kent’s Resignation Could Bolster a Wave of Conscientious Objectors to Trump’s Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.
In his latest book, the New York Times bestselling author writes of a cultural crisis: an increase in anxiety and depression, concurrent with a rise in social media use, during what he terms an "Age of Emptiness."
 | Ok guys I’m back with a brand new rendition Took the new gt back and now I present Icy White. Thought about naming her Jax Teller cause the white shoes but nah Icy White it shall be I am 53 and use my marvelous stick with a mirror and bells to ward off danger as I rescue litter from the ground and place in the proper place. I do this as an “Incline Pal” a 100 percent volunteer group I created here in Manitou Springs Colorado. I use the board to quickly get the town cleaned while wearing my wife’s link to our store. It’s all I can do because of early onset dementia. I forget too much and this board and the others that led to this actually made me wanna live again and I look forward to each new day. I’m the coolest volunteer in town and people love my stick. Now I am not about to drop in with the gt I’m going home to get the pint I’m more familiar with. I will have the wifey video and post it if that’s ok. I’m not trying to spam anything just sharing my life so I can look back and maybe remember? Namaste guys and whoever wants to joust , “Come at me dawg “ lol [link] [comments] |
Exclusive: Chris Bryant says policy agreements are being done in bits and pieces but a greater vision is needed by both sides
It was all smiles and warm handshakes when the two men in charge of renegotiating the UK’s relationship with the EU met in Brussels this week.
Maroš Šefčovič and the UK minister for EU relations, Nick Thomas-Symonds, sharing a stage on the third floor of the vast European parliament building, were at pains to show the cross-Channel relationship was in a good place after years of rancour.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a "lobster," hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organize his specialized industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek. "OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things," the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the "lobster" nickname. In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams. [...] Huang Rongsheng, chief architect at Baidu's smart device unit Xiaodu, said at an event on Tuesday that parent group chats for his daughter's primary school class have become overwhelmed by OpenClaw discussions. "My daughter came to me and asked: Dad, I see you raising a lobster every day," he said. "Can I have one too?" Bai Yiyun, another attendee at the Zhipu event, said she hopes to use the agent to start a side hustle during her retirement. "If DeepSeek marked a milestone for open-source large language models, then OpenClaw represents a similar turning point for open-source "agents," said Wei Sun, chief AI analyst at Counterpoint Research.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CBS News Radio to shutter after nearly 100 years as editor Bari Weiss tells staff cuts were ‘necessary’ decision
CBS News announced it is laying off dozens of employees on Friday and ending CBS News Radio – its nearly 100-year-old radio service – as part of a strategic restructuring.
The news was announced in a memo to staffers from its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, and president, Tom Cibrowski. Employees will be informed by the end of the day if their job has been affected, the two executives said in the memo.
Continue reading...The number of parents and children booked into the country’s only immigrant family detention center, in Dilley, Texas, plummeted in February by more than 75% compared with a month earlier, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by ProPublica.
Between April 2025, when President Donald Trump started sending families there, and January of this year, the number of people sent into detention with their families averaged around 600 per month. In February, those so-called books-ins fell to 133. As of mid-March, they dropped again to just 54.
This week there were only around 100 people in family detention at Dilley, compared with an average daily population in January of over 900, the data shows.
Current and former ICE officials and lawyers with clients in Dilley said they were unable to explain the reason for the sharp decline. However, they said the shift followed weeks of mounting public pressure generated in part by the widespread publication of letters written by several of the detained children in which they described the conditions inside Dilley and their despair at being ripped from their homes and schools.
ProPublica published several of those letters on Feb. 9 after visiting the facility — about an hour south of San Antonio — in mid-January. The letters set off a storm of outrage in Washington and across the country. They were raised in congressional hearings and pasted on posters in anti-ICE demonstrations.
Rep. James Walkinshaw, a Democrat from Virginia, read the letters aloud to ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, during a congressional hearing on Feb. 10, pressing him for answers about whether the children’s detention could cause adverse psychological effects. He pointed to one drawing by a 5-year-old Venezuelan girl named Luisanney Toloza of her family.
“My son’s 5. He can’t write many words, but he can communicate through drawings like this,” Walkinshaw said, making special note of the expressions on the family’s faces. “None of the faces are smiling.”
It was another 5-year-old who first triggered public attention to children being detained at Dilley. Liam Conejo Ramos was picked up on Jan. 20 in Minnesota and sent to the facility with his father. A photograph of him at the time of his detention, wearing a blue bunny hat, went viral.
Detainees, emboldened by the attention, organized a protest in a yard at the facility that was captured in an aerial photograph and widely published on social media. Lawmakers demanded multiple visits to push for the release of Ramos and others. Nearly 4,000 doctors, nurses and health professionals sent a letter to the Trump administration calling for the immediate release of all children currently in immigration detention. This month, social media personality Rachel Accurso, an educator better known as Ms. Rachel, who makes popular children’s programming, posted a video conversation with one of the kids detained at Dilley to her 4.9 million Instagram followers, garnering more than 3,700 comments.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas, has been at the forefront of a push by legislators from his party to shut down Dilley and for the administration to find alternatives to family detentions. When told about the drop in the number of families being held at Dilley, he said, “That trailer prison is no place for children, and I’m glad to hear that the numbers continue to decline,” adding, “It’s a reminder that people can make a difference by speaking up.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement that custody decisions are made “daily, on a case-by-case basis,” adding that the “administration does not make immigration decisions based on public opinion. We follow the rule of law.” In the past, the agency has said that Dilley offers families a safe environment equipped with access to educational materials, child care necessities and round-the-clock medical and mental health care. Meanwhile, CoreCivic, the private prison company operating the facility, said in a statement it does not have “any say whatsoever” in whether detainees are deported or released. In previous statements, it has said that the health and safety of detainees is its “top priority.”
Dilley first opened as a family detention facility under former President Barack Obama in 2014, mostly for recent border crossers. Trump kept the facility running during his first term, but President Joe Biden stopped holding families in 2021, arguing the United States shouldn’t be in the business of detaining children.
Soon after taking office a second time, Trump resumed family detentions at Dilley. As border crossings have dropped to record lows, more of the families being held there have been arrested inside the United States and have been in the country long enough to lay down roots and build networks of relatives and friends. The children detained there have ranged in age from newborns to older teenagers. The vast majority of adults held at Dilley had no U.S. criminal record.
Following the protests and the publication of children’s letters, detainees and attorneys interviewed by ProPublica said guards took away crayons, colored pencils and drawing paper during recent room searches. This week, ProPublica learned the facility had cut off access to video calls in common areas.
The Trump administration said in a recent court filing that personal property had not been destroyed at Dilley and items confiscated during searches were “limited to materials identified as protest-related and not authorized under facility rules.” CoreCivic “vehemently” denied staff confiscated or destroyed children’s personal artwork or supplies. DHS said the restrictions were put in place on video calls following the livestreaming of recorded calls online “that resulted in the unauthorized dissemination of law enforcement sensitive information.” The agency added the video calls are still available in private rooms, as is access to in-person visitation and phones.
While a long-standing legal settlement, known as the Flores agreement, holds that children should generally not be detained for more than 20 days, the data ProPublica obtained showed the average days in custody was longer than that for every month since family detentions resumed at the facility last year. In each month between November and February, the average stay in family detention was over 50 days.
DHS has said in the past that the Flores agreement, in place since the 1990s, is outdated and should be terminated because newer regulations address the needs of children in detention.
One Egyptian family, Hayam El Gamal and her five children ranging in age from 18 to 5-year-old twins, has been at Dilley for nine months. They were taken into custody after the father, Mohamed Soliman, was charged over an alleged antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colorado, that killed one person and injured 13 others. The family said it had no knowledge of his plans. DHS said it is still investigating.
One 13-year-old Guatemalan boy named Edison was released from Dilley with his mom this week. During his 92-day detention, Edison had cried in video calls to his father back in Chicago, saying he felt like he was being treated like a criminal. (His father asked that his son’s last name not be used.) Then in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a guard came to their bunk room and told him and his mom to start packing their belongings. By that night, they were on a plane to Chicago to be reunited with Edison’s dad. “We don’t understand why they were released,” his dad said. “All I can tell you is it was a miracle from God.”
As soon as they landed, the family went home to enjoy a seafood dinner, one of Edison’s favorites.
The post The Number of Families Being Held at Dilley Detention Center Has Plummeted appeared first on ProPublica.
Late-night hosts panned Trump’s joke about the 1941 attack, addressed new unredacted Epstein emails and talked popular puppy names
With The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on hiatus until at least 27 March, late-night hosts on Thursday discussed Donald Trump’s snafu while meeting Japan’s prime minister, his caginess over Iran, and new findings in the Epstein investigations.
Continue reading...March 20, 2026 — Under Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy, the NRC is investing over $900 million to develop aerospace defense capabilities, support Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) developing technologies for civilian and military purposes, and accelerate quantum technologies and defense applications.
Credit: Novikov Aleksey/Shutterstock
Accelerating Quantum Science and Biomedical Technologies and Defense Applications
In addition to its ongoing investment in quantum science and technology, the NRC is investing more than $161 million over 5 years to advance Canada’s leadership in quantum technology for defense and security applications.
This includes funding for industry, academia and government researchers to advance leading-edge solutions in quantum sensing, quantum internetworking and quantum-safe communications.
The NRC is investing $28 million to improve the ability to respond quickly to biological threats, high-consequence pathogens and pandemics that could affect national health security.
Key initiatives:
Through these investments under Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy, the NRC is strengthening Canada’s ability to develop and produce the critical technologies that safeguard sovereignty, preserve Canada’s national security and create lasting economic benefits for Canadians.
Source: National Research Council Canada
The post Canada’s NRC Allocates C$161M to Quantum Tech Within Broader C$900M Defense Plan appeared first on HPCwire.
Stuart Niven found to have diverted Covid grants to personal account and other candidates’ Islamophobic remarks revealed
Reform UK has suspended one of its Scottish candidates after it emerged he had been struck off as a company director, and the party faces growing attacks for fielding candidates making Islamophobic remarks.
Reform confirmed on Friday morning it had suspended Stuart Niven, its candidate for Dundee West, after the Herald revealed he had been struck off after diverting tens of thousands of pounds of Covid grants into his personal account.
Continue reading...The best filtered water bottles can remove contaminants like lead, pesticides, microplastics, sediment and bacteria.
Actor who rose to fame after starring in Bruce Lee’s The Way of the Dragon also became a TV fixture with Walker, Texas Ranger
Chuck Norris, the former world karate champion who used his fight prowess to become the star of a string of low-budget but financially successful action movies, has died aged 86.
His family posted a message on social media saying Norris had died on Thursday, adding: “While we would like to keep the circumstances private, please know that he was surrounded by his family and was at peace.”
Continue reading...I spoke with Andy Weir about the adaptation of his hit novel, Project Hail Mary. Our conversation quickly turned into a mind-blowing lesson about science fiction.
In Denmark, the spread of solar panels in rural areas has become a divisive issue among voters, especially in rural areas
In one telling of the story, the golden fields of a proud farming nation are under attack. Besieged by an industrial sprawl of solar panels, they are being smothered at the behest of an urban elite.
That narrative has failed to thrive in conservative heartlands such as Texas and Hungary, which have embraced solar power while lambasting green rules. But it is taking root in Denmark, the most climate-ambitious nation on Earth. “We say yes to fields of wheat,” said Inger Støjberg, the leader of the rightwing populist Denmark Democrats in a speech in 2024. “And we say no to fields of iron!”
Continue reading...‘These AI agents have been really, really helpful,’ says a former Sydney employee. ‘But you couldn’t use something like that to replace an actual human worker’
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Sacked from his “dream job” at software giant Atlassian, Rubio* wants just one thing – closure.
“We were probably exceeding expectations and there’s no explanation from the company as a whole as to why any of this happened,” he says.
Continue reading...Three weeks into the US-Israeli war of choice in Iran, Labor is warning of financial pain. But the economic cost isn’t the only risk here
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A group of public service chiefs gathered on Thursday night for a quiet dinner in Canberra to send off Australia’s new ambassador to the US.
There was lightning and heavy rain outside the upmarket Pan-Asian restaurant Chairman and Yip, but inside the private dining room the mood was cheerful.
Continue reading...The interest earning potential of all three is high, but that's not the only item savers should be thinking about now.
Scranton beat NYU to end three-year win streak
Violets’ bid for third straight NCAA title falls short
Peper scores 19 as dynasty run ends in Virginia
New York University’s historic 91-game winning streak is over after a 60-52 loss to Scranton in the Final Four of the Division III NCAA Tournament on Thursday night, ending one of the longest unbeaten runs in college basketball history.
The Violets (29-1) had the second-longest winning streak in NCAA history, trailing only UConn’s 111-game run between 2014 and 2017, and were seeking a third consecutive national championship. Instead, Scranton (32-0) advanced to the title game, holding off a late NYU rally.
Continue reading...Owner of labrador says bottle find may be connected to poisoning that led to one of England’s last public hangings
A man in Devon believes his beloved dog has dug up a key piece of evidence in his back garden connected to a notorious Victorian murder case.
Paul Phillips, 49, told reporters that his labrador, Stanley, recovered a blue glass bottle with the words “Not to be taken” written on the side from their home in Clyst Honiton.
Continue reading...HHS is looking into the states for ‘alleged disregard of, or confusion about’ the federal Weldon amendment
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Thursday that it is investigating 13 states that require state-regulated health insurance plans to cover abortion services.
HHS officials said in a news release that the department’s office for civil rights (OCR) is looking into the states for allegedly violating the federal Weldon amendment, which prohibits federal funding for programs or state or local governments that “subjects any institutional or individual healthcare entity to discrimination on the basis that the healthcare entity does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions”.
Continue reading...Three people were suing ex-Sinn Féin leader for liability over IRA bombings in UK that left them injured
Three victims of IRA bombings who sued Gerry Adams alleging he was a member of the paramilitary group and culpable for the attacks have withdrawn their lawsuit on the last day of the civil trial.
John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock, who were injured respectively in the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, the London Docklands and Manchester bombings in 1996, were seeking symbolic “vindicatory” damages of £1 each.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 20, 2026 — Nutanix has announced the Nutanix Agentic AI solution, a full software stack purpose built to help customers accelerate adoption of Agentic AI for business transformation.
With the shift to Agentic AI, enterprise adoption has hit a tipping point where the barrier to success is no longer the model or building individual agents, but the complexity of managing the infrastructure required to securely run thousands of agents at scale. Infrastructure and platform teams need better solutions to build and operate AI factories, and provide shared access to their resources while maximizing performance, security, and compliance with sovereignty requirements. In addition, data scientists and Agentic AI developers expect easy access to tools and services to run and fine-tune models, build agents, and securely connect them to enterprise data.
“Contrary to AI infrastructure for model training that was optimized to run ‘one big job,’ production Agentic AI infrastructure needs to handle scale and high rates of change for thousands of AI services, agents, and concurrent users and developers. Nutanix Agentic AI extends our AHV hypervisor, Flow Virtual Networking, Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, and Nutanix Enterprise AI to deliver a cloud operating model to enterprise AI factories, enabling infrastructure and platform teams to simply build, operate, and govern AI factories while providing Agentic AI developers with the performance and rich set of models and AI platform services they need,” said Thomas Cornely, Executive Vice President of Product Management at Nutanix.
The solution integrates with NVIDIA AI Enterprise at the Agent Builder layer and orchestrates the NVIDIA-certified ecosystem of AI factories for supported configurations. It enables customers with dynamic, multiuser AI environments to build, run, and protect agentic AI applications with a full suite of infrastructure orchestration and security software coupled with AI Platform Services (PaaS) and Models-as-a-Service (MaaS) for data scientists and Agentic AI developers. Nutanix and NVIDIA are also working together to build the foundation for autonomous agents in the enterprise through integration with the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit including the NVIDIA OpenShell open source runtime.
Optimizing Performance, Security, and Cost of AI Apps and Factories
The Nutanix Agentic AI solution reduces complexity, delivers optimized performance and security, and is designed to enable lower, predictable token costs by providing the following:
The Nutanix Agentic AI solution comprises products that are either already generally available or currently in early access and are expected to be available soon. More information about the solution can be seen here. More information about AI at Nutanix can be seen here.
About Nutanix
Nutanix is a hybrid multicloud computing leader, offering organizations a unified software platform for running applications, deploying enterprise AI workloads and managing data anywhere. With Nutanix, organizations can simplify operations for traditional and modern applications, freeing them to focus on business goals. Trusted by more than 30,000 customers worldwide, Nutanix helps empower organizations to transform digitally and power hybrid multicloud environments consistently, simply, and cost-effectively. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on social media.
Source: Nutanix
The post Nutanix Unveils Nutanix Agentic AI, Full Stack Software Solution for Enterprise AI Factories appeared first on HPCwire.
A 31-year-old Georgia woman has charged with murder by police who say she took pills to induce an abortion.
The Reform UK leader has belatedly clocked that most British people really don’t like the US president on whose coat-tails he has spent the past decade riding
At last, the culture has thrown up a split more nauseatingly up itself than Gwyneth Paltrow’s from Chris Martin. It is Nigel Farage’s attempt to consciously uncouple from Donald Trump, a man up whose backside he’s spent the past decade most firmly lodged. Nigel’s made such a massive, self-satisfied show of his real estate in the presidential large intestine for 10 years now that I actually don’t think non-surgical extraction is possible at this stage. He doesn’t just get to walk away whistling. The only way out is a full Faragectomy. I’ll give the president a piece of drone fuselage to bite down on.
Anyway: conscious uncoupling. Back in the day, you’ll remember, Gwyneth and the Coldplay singer deployed this particular phrase when announcing their marital split. Did the public love it? They did not. The general vibe – as with so much of Her Vajesty’s output – was that she would do even marriage failure more smugly and unachievably than mere plebs could ever. The pivot from gushing about her perfect marriage to gushing about her perfect divorce felt like mere days.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
What a Time to be Alive! by Marina Hyde (Guardian Faber, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Continue reading...Palestinians say the move is part of a wider Israeli strategy to leverage security tensions to tighten restrictions
For the first time since 1967, al-Aqsa mosque – Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site – was closed at the end of Ramadan on Friday, with tensions rising among Palestinians as Israeli authorities keep the complex shut, forcing worshippers to hold Eid prayers as close as they could to the sealed site.
On Friday morning, hundreds of worshippers were forced to pray outside the Old City, as Israeli police barricaded the entrances to the site.
Continue reading...Researchers develop an AI for Science framework that extracts and fuses cross-disciplinary expert knowledge with experimental data to accelerate alloy discovery and scientific insight
March 20, 2026 — High-entropy alloys are promising advanced materials for demanding applications, but discovering useful compositions is difficult and expensive due to the vast number of possible element combinations. Now, researchers have developed a novel AI-driven framework that integrates experimental data, computational modeling, and cross-disciplinary expert knowledge extracted from scientific literature. By combining these sources in a way that accounts for uncertainty, their approach can make reliable predictions even for poorly studied alloy compositions, outperforming conventional data-driven machine learning methods that rely on training data alone.
This study presents a hybrid framework that integrates materials data with AI-extracted scientific knowledge, enabling uncertainty-aware discovery. Evidence about elemental substitutions in alloys is collected from two independent sources: material datasets, where alloy pairs with matching properties indicate substitutable elements, and large language models queried across five scientific domains. These “evidence streams” are combined using Dempster-Shafer theory to evaluate candidate alloys while explicitly quantifying prediction confidence versus uncertainty, guiding researchers toward promising candidates while flagging regions where current knowledge is insufficient. Credit: JAIST.
Progress in modern technologies relies on advanced materials, such as alloys used in aircraft engines and components capable of resisting corrosion and heat in industrial settings. In this context, high-entropy alloys (HEAs) have emerged as one of the most promising areas of study in materials science. By combining several elements in near-equal amounts, these materials can achieve exceptional strength, stability, and durability. However, discovering useful HEAs is exceptionally difficult and expensive, as each additional element dramatically increases the number of possible combinations. With growing demand for sustainable energy technologies and next-generation electronics, accelerating the discovery of advanced materials has become increasingly urgent.
Researchers worldwide have turned to artificial intelligence (AI) as a powerful aid in materials research– but this comes with its own limits. Most machine learning models are good at interpolation, meaning they can make predictions for materials that closely resemble those already in their training data. When researchers move beyond familiar territory and consider truly new compositions, the models’ accuracy drops. Meanwhile, decades of expert knowledge about how elements interact and substitute for one another in HEAs are buried across the scientific literature, with no clear way to integrate that expertise into data-driven AI tools.
Against this backdrop, a research team led by Professor Hieu-Chi Dam from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has developed a new AI-driven framework for HEA discovery. Their study, published in the journal Digital Discovery on December 19, 2025, was co-authored by JSPS’s Researcher Dr. Minh-Quyet Ha and doctoral student Dinh-Khiet Le at JAIST, Dr. Viet-Cuong Nguyen from HPC Systems, Japan, Professor Hiori Kino at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan, and Professor Stefano Curtarolo from Duke University, USA. The team set out to combine experimental and computational materials data with cross-disciplinary expert knowledge extracted directly from scientific papers, creating a system designed specifically to work in data-scarce and unexplored regions.
At the core of the approach is a well-known idea in alloy design called elemental substitution. Under the optimal conditions, chemically similar elements can substitute one another without significantly affecting a material’s properties and stability. The researchers first identified substitution patterns directly from large materials datasets by comparing alloys that differ by just one element. They then used state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, GPT-.5, Claude Opus 4, and Grok3 to extract expert judgments in the literature pertaining to five key scientific disciplines: metallurgy, solid-state physics, materials mechanics, materials science, and corrosion science.
Each source of information provided a piece of evidence rather than a final answer, and these pieces were combined using a mathematical framework known as Dempster-Shafer theory. Unlike standard probability methods, this framework can explicitly represent uncertainty and even ignorance, as Prof. Dam explained, “Traditional classifiers force binary ‘yes-or-no’ predictions even when information is insufficient. Our approach explicitly quantifies uncertainty, allowing ‘we cannot tell’ as a legitimate scientific outcome.” Simply put, the proposed system does not pretend to know more than it does when exploring unknown territory.
When tested on several alloy datasets, the team’s framework consistently outperformed conventional machine learning models, especially when little information was available. Most strikingly, it was able to predict the behavior of alloys containing elements that were completely absent from the training data, achieving accuracy rates ranging from 86% to 92%. The researchers also validated their approach against 55 experimentally confirmed quaternary alloys from the literature and showed that it outperforms far more computationally expensive methods, such as free-energy models. Beyond individual predictions, the proposed method can produce compositional maps that show where predictions are reliable and where uncertainty remains high. This enables researchers to focus experiments on the most promising and informative regions of the compositional space.
According to Prof. Dam, the broader significance of this work lies in showcasing how AI can be used for scientific discovery. “LLM-based extraction combined with formal evidence fusion can transform decades of dispersed expert knowledge into searchable, comparable, and quantitatively usable resources, which are particularly valuable for interdisciplinary problems where relevant insights span multiple fields,” he said. Notably, the same approach used in this study could accelerate drug discovery, guide battery development, and help optimize catalysts. In each case, the framework’s ability to quantify uncertainty would help research teams prioritize the most informative experiments, potentially reducing discovery timelines and costs.
Overall, this work demonstrates a path forward for AI in scientific discovery– one where machine learning serves not to replace expert judgment, but to systematically extract and combine it with experimental evidence to accelerate innovation across disciplines.
Source: JAIST
The post Researchers Develop AI Framework Combining Expert Knowledge and Data to Accelerate Alloy Discovery appeared first on HPCwire.
Cheerleader-in-chief demands more enthusiasm for US-Israeli assault that is helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine
When even your mother calls you out as a cheat and a liar, then it’s probably fair to assume you’re a wrong ‘un. Not that this stopped Donald Trump from appointing Pete Hegseth as his defence secretary. Or as Trump prefers, his war secretary. After all, there’s no point in having all this shiny military hardware if you’re not going to use it. For most of the past two weeks, Hegseth has been the president’s cheerleader-in-chief for the war on Iran, and at the weekend he decided to have a pop at the media for not being enthusiastic enough. It seems we’ve been concentrating on trivial matters like asking what the overall plan for the war is. We heard the president talk about regime change and then change his mind when it was clear that, though he had killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime was still in place. We heard the president say he wanted to neutralise Iranian nuclear facilities when he had already claimed to have done so last year. We heard Trump say that the war was already won though he fancied winning a little bit more, while the Iranians were insisting they were not beaten.
Continue reading...Paid plan customers can try out the new AI feature.
SINGAPORE, March 20, 2026 — As quantum technologies continue to advance, the resilience and trustworthiness of digital systems have emerged as critical priorities for Singapore’s future infrastructure. Addressing these challenges, TUMCREATE, the research arm of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) funded by the National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF), is playing a key role in QUASAR-CREATE (Quantum Security and Resilience for Emerging Technologies), a three-and-a-half-year research program.
The QUASAR-CREATE research program brings together an international consortium comprising Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Fraunhofer@NTU (FSR@NTU), TUMCREATE, the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and the National University of Singapore (NUS). The program aims to develop new methods and technologies that strengthen the security and resilience of emerging digital systems in the face of future quantum-enabled threats.
“Under the recently launched Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 (RIE2030) plan, Singapore is strengthening its capabilities in semiconductor and quantum-enabled technologies. The security of complex chips and electronic systems becomes a foundational design consideration,” said Professor Ulf Schlichtmann, CEO at TUMCREATE and Principal Investigator of the QUASAR-CREATE project. “QUASAR-CREATE contributes to this effort by advancing research on how security and resilience can be embedded at the hardware and system-design level. By bringing together complementary expertise from Singapore and Germany, the program supports the development of secure, trustworthy chip technologies that are essential for the future.”
Building Resilient Digital Foundations for the Quantum Era
QUASAR focuses on moving beyond conventional cybersecurity approaches by embedding resilience directly into the design of next-generation technologies. By integrating quantum-safe security mechanisms early in the development of digital systems, the program seeks to ensure that critical infrastructures remain robust, trustworthy, and adaptable amid increasing uncertainty.
The research program is organized into three coordinated thrusts, forming a complete security pipeline. Within this framework, TUMCREATE leads Thrust 1: Secure Hardware Platform, spearheading research into an open-source, verifiable, and quantum-safe hardware foundation for post-quantum security.
TUMCREATE Leads Secure Hardware Platform Research
Together with NTU’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), Thrust 1 focuses on the development of an open and verifiable, quantum-safe RISC-V processor platform, envisioned as a foundational building block for future secure systems. The research is positioned to deliver the world’s first fully open-source post-quantum cryptography (PQC)-secure 64-bit RISC-V processor implementation, integrating hardware-level protection and quantum-resistant cryptography from the ground up.
Professor Georg Sigl, Principal Investigator at TUM for QUASAR-CREATE, said: “Post-quantum security in resource constraint devices cannot be achieved by software alone. If we want digital systems to remain trustworthy in the era of quantum computing, security must be anchored directly in the hardware architecture. With QUASAR-CREATE, we are integrating quantum-resistant cryptography into a RISC-V processor with the final target to build a fully open-source chip design using open-source technology. The project plans to fabricate the chip using GlobalFoundaries’ 180-nanometer process technology at its manufacturing facilities in Singapore. This approach allows us to build a transparent and verifiable foundation for resilient digital infrastructures of the future.”
By embedding security directly into hardware architecture, the work addresses long-term trust, transparency, and resilience challenges that cannot be adequately mitigated through software solutions alone.
The research integrates both hardware and software-level protection mechanisms to defend against side-channel and physical attacks – threats that are expected to intensify as quantum and other advanced computing technologies mature. Key components include post-quantum cryptographic accelerators, secure operating systems, and trusted execution environments, ensuring protection across the entire computing stack.
To demonstrate real-world applicability, the platform will be validated through practical use cases such as FIDO2 authentication token, with future extensions exploring compatibility with quantum key distribution (QKD) technologies.
Strengthening Singapore’s Quantum Security Research Ecosystem
QUASAR-CREATE exemplifies Singapore’s commitment to advancing cutting-edge, internationally collaborative research with real-world impact. The program brings together complementary expertise from NTU, NUS, TUM and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, including contributions from the Fraunhofer Institute of Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC), the Fraunhofer Institute for Electronic Nanosystems (ENAS), and Fraunhofer Singapore as an institutional partner.
“As quantum technologies move closer to real-world deployment, ensuring trust and security will be essential for their adoption,” said Principal Investigator, NTU Professor Gwee Bah Hwee, School of EEE. “QUASAR-CREATE allows us to bring together expertise across institutions to address these challenges proactively, supporting Singapore’s efforts to harness emerging technologies in a secure and sustainable way.”
Through its leadership of the secure hardware thrust, TUMCREATE strengthens research collaboration with NTU in microelectronics – in close partnership with NTU’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) – extending existing educational ties into joint, application-driven research. The program also opens pathways for engagement with the QUASAR professorship at NTU, funded by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, reinforcing long-term capability building across research, education, and innovation.
By anchoring advanced quantum security research within Singapore’s research ecosystem, TUMCREATE contributes to the translation of frontier science into deployable, future-ready solutions that support trusted digital infrastructures in the quantum era.
About QUASAR-CREATE
QUASAR-CREATE (Quantum Security and Resilience for Emerging Technologies) is a three-and-a-half-year international research program funded by the National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF). The program brings together the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Fraunhofer@NTU (FSR@NTU), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, and the National University of Singapore (NUS) to address security challenges arising from emerging quantum technologies. QUASAR-CREATE aims to develop quantum-safe digital systems using post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution, while strengthening Singapore’s research capabilities and talent pipeline in quantum security.
About TUMCREATE
Founded in 2010, TUMCREATE is a multidisciplinary research platform fostering research exchanges between the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the world’s leading universities, local institutions, and public agencies as well as industry partners from the region to contribute to the sustainable transformation of societies through science and technology. Funded by the National Research Foundation, TUMCREATE’s multi-faceted research projects span topics from urban mobility, food science and technology, biomedical technology, and preventive care to solutions for a carbon-neutral megacity. For more information, please visit https://www.tum-create.edu.sg.
About Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
A research-intensive public university, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has 35,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Business, Computing & Data Science, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, Medicine, Science, and Graduate colleges.
NTU is also home to world-renowned autonomous institutes – the National Institute of Education, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering – and various leading research centers such as the Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute and Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N).
Under the NTU Smart Campus vision, the University harnesses the power of digital technology and tech-enabled solutions to support better learning and living experiences, the discovery of new knowledge, and the sustainability of resources.
Ranked amongst the world’s top universities, the University’s main campus is also frequently listed among the world’s most beautiful. Known for its sustainability, NTU has achieved 100% Green Mark Platinum certification for all its eligible building projects. Apart from its main campus, NTU also has a medical campus in Novena, Singapore’s healthcare district.
For more information, visit www.ntu.edu.sg.
Source: TUMCREATE
The post TUMCREATE Advances Open-Source RISC-V Processor for Post-Quantum Security appeared first on HPCwire.
The new Mighty2 retains the compact style of its predecessor while adding a useful particle sensor and some other nice touches.
SOFIA GUIDETTI
Staff Reporter
As soon as I saw that Caleb Hearon would be coming to the university on Feb. 20 for a Perkins Live event at the Trabant University Center, I immediately marked it down on my calendar to reserve a free ticket and see him live.
It is safe to say that, for me, going to the event was completely worth it.
Hearon is a comedian, writer and actor who has his own popular podcast called “So True with Caleb Hearon.” He has also appeared in several films and shows, including “Jurassic World Dominion,” “I Used to Be Funny” and “Overcompensating.”
Hearon is currently set to co-write and star in the upcoming film, “Trash Mountain,” directed by Lilly Wachowski, who is most known for creating “The Matrix” franchise with her sister, Lana Wachowski. In addition, he is co-starring in the highly anticipated movie, “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” which is supposed to premiere in May.
This Perkins Live event, announced on Instagram on Feb. 2, was a Q&A led by members of The Crew, the student-run programming board at the university. The event was an hour long, beginning with questions from the two moderators before opening up to audience questions that Hearon was eager to answer.
“So, starting off simple, what is your biggest fear?” the moderator said to begin the Q&A.
This question earned a bunch of laughs from the audience, as well as from Hearon himself, who replied with a funny answer before he gave a real answer, which was dying on a day when a bigger event happens. I did not even realize this could be a fear until he said it, and now I am afraid of that happening.
“What celebrity do you irrationally fear?” the moderator said.
“Irrationally fear? I don’t fear any of those f—— people. Take celebrities off a pedestal, because you meet these people and you’re f—— falling asleep,” Hearon said.
Although he was half-joking when he said this, later answering Patti LuPone or Julia Roberts, the sentiment made sense. Many people worship celebrities to the point where they do not view them as real people anymore, which is not a healthy mindset, and I think it is important that Hearon made note of it to a room of young college students.
Hearon also had some things to say about the current political, economic and cultural state of the world when asked about X, formerly known as Twitter.
“The cultural problem that we’re in is that so many of these [billionaires] get really good at, like, science or making cars or something. And then they’re like, ‘And now I need to be beloved and funny.’ And it’s like, when you’re neither, you f—— suck,” Hearon said.
Aside from being a comedian, he had some insightful things to say about the world around us. For many, art and politics are very closely intertwined, which Hearon’s background and career speak to. He originally intended to go to law school, or another graduate program, after graduating from Missouri State University with a bachelor’s degree in sociopolitical communications.
This is how most of the event went, with the moderators asking questions and Hearon responding with something witty, as well as insightful. Once the moderators opened it up to audience questions — that were submitted via scanning a QR code and writing a question — Hearon tried his best to get through most of them since he loved how attentive the university’s audience was.
One question from the audience that stood out to me was, “What is your opinion on the current political and economic state of the world?”
I know this is a meme of Jaden Smith that Generation Z likes to quote a lot, but Hearon had a very empowering answer, which stuck with me after the event.
“I have so much hope, and I think if you talk to organizers, who are doing genuine, important work in this country, they have hope as well,” Hearon said. “And hopelessness to me is a privileged person’s retreat from action … But I feel so hopeful.”
The ASSESS Summit in Atlanta gathered people who want simulation to operate as a core capability of engineering organizations rather than as a specialist service on the side.
Over two days, the most substantive material came from NAFEMS‑led projects and practitioner case studies. Those sessions focused on the structures that make simulation credible at scale: shared data, clear requirements, and governance that management can understand and fund.
From the outset, NAFEMS and ASSESS leadership framed the summit as part of a longer‑running program. They emphasized that simulation already sits behind many decisions about safety, sustainability, and profitability, yet senior recognition of its role remains uneven. At the same time, the surrounding ecosystem of software and data is becoming more complex, while vendor consolidation is reducing the competitive tension that used to drive innovation.
NAFEMS CTO Ian Symington
In response, ASSESS set out four strands of activity: leadership discussions to set direction, concrete technical projects, working sessions to define new projects, and an international community to share experience. The aim is to move beyond general statements about “the future of simulation” and create specific artifacts that organizations can use.
That intent was visible in NAFEMS CTO Ian Symington’s update on data‑driven benchmarks. Rather than talk about artificial intelligence in the abstract, his project starts from a simple structural problem that most analysts know well: a plate with a hole, with the region around the hole acting as a stress concentrator.
The team built several families of models by varying load, thickness, plate length, and hole position, then generated finite‑element results that capture principal stresses and concentration levels. They have made these datasets available in industry tool formats and through an open portal, with documentation and QR‑code access so that engineers can download them without a long setup process.
Symington did not present this as a polished showcase. He described training geometric deep‑learning models that performed well on some datasets and failed on others, and how understanding those failures required the same care analysts traditionally apply when checking a mesh or boundary condition. For teams that are curious about data‑driven surrogates but wary of investing months in bespoke training cases, this benchmark offers a controlled way to experiment, anchored in a problem whose physics and finite‑element behavior are already well understood.
A second project tackled interoperability.
Rather than start from particular standards, the NAFEMS team worked from the situations engineers encounter when moving models, meshes, and results between tools. They examined where information is lost, where manual workarounds are required, and where results become hard to trust.
For each situation they identified the data that must be preserved, the existing standards or technologies that address parts of the need, and the gaps where current mechanisms are weak or absent. The result is not a new standard, but a requirements‑centered description of what effective interoperability looks like in practice.
That gives engineering groups a clearer way to assess their current tool chains and a more concrete vocabulary to use when they push vendors on roadmap priorities.
Márton Gróza’s update on simulation for certification brought a similar level of specificity to regulated environments.
Márton Gróza, technical officer at NAFEMS
His team interviewed experts across sectors about where simulation is already used in certification contexts, what regulators accept, and where the friction lies. Several patterns emerged. Many authorities still look first to physical tests when they weigh evidence, even when simulation has been integral to the engineering work. Simulation outputs are seldom compiled in a way that supports outside review; documentation tends to be written for internal use.
There is wide agreement that verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification need to be tied more systematically to simulations that feed into certification decisions. At the same time, probabilistic metrics and risk‑based framing remain unfamiliar to many of the managers and engineers who must ultimately sign off on risk.
The project has produced a report that summarizes these themes and points to concrete examples, such as railway braking‑distance work in which probabilistic methods are being used to compare traditional test‑based processes with routes that rely more heavily on simulation. The next step will be direct engagement with regulators and certification engineers, using the interview findings as a basis for discussion. That is slow, detailed work, but it is exactly the sort of work a neutral organization is well placed to do.
The industry‑perspective talks added another layer, showing how organizations are applying data‑driven methods to specific workflows.
In one case, a Rescale‑supported project for a high‑performance vehicle manufacturer relied on explicit forming simulations to predict wrinkles, thickness changes, and fiber orientations in carbon‑fiber monocoques. These forming simulations then fed into structural crash analyses.
The turnaround time was long, sometimes eight to 10 weeks for a full cycle across many parts. By identifying forming and mapping to structural meshes as the main bottlenecks, the team was able to train a surrogate model on a carefully chosen set of high‑fidelity runs. That surrogate now predicts forming outcomes from process parameters and initial layup, within a defined design envelope. It can be used by design engineers to explore variants more quickly, and by manufacturing engineers to understand how changes in diaphragm pressures, temperatures, and friction will affect forming, without immediately resorting to full explicit analysis.
In a different example, Kinetic Vision presented a packaging case built on Siemens Simcenter Physics AI.
Over more than a decade, a client had accumulated over 100,000 bottle simulations, including critical top‑load studies. Those results had been archived in lightweight files. Physics AI learns directly on meshes from this archive, and once trained it can provide predictions for new geometries without meshing at the inference stage. In one instance, a model trained on forty‑five simulations in under four hours could generate a prediction in less than twenty seconds for a case that would otherwise take two to four hours to run.
That makes it realistic to screen many design candidates and reserve full simulations for the most promising designs. The speaker was explicit that such an approach is worthwhile only when there is an ongoing need to explore large design families; it would not be appropriate for one‑off studies.
The Caterpillar keynote from Darrel Meffert pulled many of these threads together into a long‑term enterprise narrative. Meffert has spent more than twenty years at Caterpillar and led its central simulation strategy for almost a decade.
He described how, around 2012, a group of mid‑level and senior managers concluded that Caterpillar’s physics‑based analysis was strong, but product leaders still preferred to wait for tests before making key decisions. Rather than wait for a directive from above, they pooled funding and brought in an internal strategist to help them shape an enterprise simulation strategy.
Several elements of that strategy stand out. The team identified and quantified real bottlenecks, such as constrained compute capacity and duty cycles that did not match actual machine usage. They used consolidated data and external benchmarks to make a case for more HPC investment directly to the chief information and technology officers. They paired application engineers with data scientists to derive duty cycles from telematics, so that simulations reflected how equipment is used in the field. They created joint projects between test and simulation teams, selecting problems that neither group could solve alone and requiring shared leadership. They provided constrained, comparative simulations in the environments where design engineers work, leaving detailed high‑consequence assessments to specialists. And they cataloged hundreds of simulation types on single‑page summaries, coupled with a structured way to express confidence in each piece of evidence.
Over time, that combination of capacity, better data, closer collaboration, and clearer communication shifted Caterpillar toward simulation‑led development in many areas. Meffert reported that, today, the annual savings associated with the enterprise simulation strategy exceed 10 times the total investment over nine years.
Across all of these sessions, I heard the same message over and over – the most important developments in simulation are not only new algorithms, but the scaffolding around them. These are the shared datasets, well‑defined requirements, structured links to certification processes, and enterprise strategies that treat simulation as a managed capability.
NAFEMS and ASSESS are positioned between users, vendors, and regulators, and in Atlanta they used that position to good effect. The work presented there will give organizations concrete models to draw on as they decide how to develop their own simulation roadmaps in the years ahead.
About the author: Kevin Jackson is an analyst at Intersect 360 Research, a market intelligence, research, and consulting advisory
practice focused on HPC data center trends, AI, cloud, big data, and hyperscale. He is the former editor of AIwire.
The post ASSESS 2026: How NAFEMS is Turning Simulation into an Enterprise Capability appeared first on HPCwire.
was browsing facebook market place and found a listing for a "onewheel plus" for 450, had nothing to loose so stopped by to check it out. it was actually a xr (has the over lip battery box was seen) and the rails were xr. it only had a front view for the marketplace listing so could not make out the rails or box. turns on, comes with charger. best part, they been sitting on it so long (if they would have had a side shot on the listing im sure it would have moved) that they took 200 bucks off the price tp get rid of it. put the downpayment down there and then. will pickup in april and update. excited for the project. this might be one of the best finds since i got into the sport.
Defense secretary had said relatives of service members killed in refueling tanker crash told him ‘do not stop until the job is done’
The father of a US military member killed in the Iran war has contradicted Pete Hegseth’s claim that bereaved families urged him to “finish” the job in the Middle East.
Hegseth, the defense secretary and a former weekend Fox News host, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on Thursday that he had spoken with relatives of all six service members killed in last week’s refueling tanker crash during a “dignified transfer” of their remains at Delaware’s Dover air force station the night before.
Continue reading...Mette-Marit says she ‘did not know he was a sex offender’, despite Googling him three years after his prison sentence
Norway’s crown princess, Mette-Marit, has said she was “manipulated and deceived” by Jeffrey Epstein as she spoke publicly for the first time about her years-long relationship with the late sex offender.
She also claimed that she “did not know he was a sex offender or an abuser” – despite telling him in an email in 2011, three years after he had been sentenced to 18 months in prison and pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14, that she had recently Googled him.
Continue reading...Former ACIP members make contradictory statements following judge essentially invalidating panel and recent decisions
Does the US have a vaccine advisory committee? The answer became surprisingly murky on Thursday, as former members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and health officials made contradictory statements following a federal judge essentially invalidating the committee and their recent decisions on Monday.
According to a former member of the committee who asked not to be identified to discuss sensitive matters, ACIP will continue to exist without the 13 members who were stayed by Judge Brian Murphy on Monday – and officials plan to start the process over again with new members.
Continue reading...Jonathan Horn scooped best sports feature prize for a series on AFL, while Chris Hopkins won for pictures of a cancer sufferer caring for her son
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Sports writer Jonathan Horn and photographer Chris Hopkins have won Melbourne Press Club awards for their work for Guardian Australia.
Guardian Australia was recognised with eight nominations in a range of categories in the 31st annual Quill awards, which were presented in Melbourne on Friday night.
Continue reading...It’s been kinda cold where I’m at, also a bunch of snow the last couple of months. While on YouTube the algorithm pushed some Onewheel ASMR videos and it was calming to listen to while working.
Kind of like river noises or white noise 🤣
Anyone else do this? Or any recommendations for long videos with mostly just sound instead of music or commentary?
Here’s that go me hooked:
Though the president wields great power, the conflict in the Middle East is spiralling in unforeseen ways that he may not be able to control
What a pity Benjamin Netanyahu remains at large after an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes committed in Gaza was issued in 2024. Had he been detained, as he certainly should have been, the peoples of Iran, Lebanon, the Gulf – and Israel itself – might have been spared much present-day pain and suffering.
The Israeli prime minister’s lifelong, passionate obsession with eradicating the real and imagined threats posed by Iran was reportedly a key factor in prompting Donald Trump’s abrupt, unprovoked plunge into all-out war. Netanyahu should be in jail, not committing more crimes while the powerful but ego-driven US president negligently looks on.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...George Strausman said his sudden stardom has been a shock, and he doesn’t quite understand why millions of people are interested in watching him shape clay.
Fusion of cherished American eateries hopes to revive brands that have ‘gone hungry’ while rest of industry feasts
No one could say the New York union of Applebee’s and Ihop happened without fanfare.
A car park in Hawthorne, 30 miles north of Manhattan, had been decked out with a 30ft-high inflatable red apple. Red, white and blue bunting flew from masts. Upbeat music blasted from speakers.
Continue reading...The right to protest is ‘fundamentally American’, says Bajun Mavalwalla who awaits trial and faces six years in prison
This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center
A US military veteran arrested on federal conspiracy charges after participating in a June 2025 protest against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told the Guardian he refuses to plead guilty and is ready to face justice.
Continue reading...Perhaps the most unexpected delight of the AirPods Max 2, priced at $549, is how it puts the cost of the MacBook Neo into perspective.
Is Iran one crisis too many for Trump? Independent Thinking podcast Audio sseth.drupal@c…
The US-Israel war on Iran is straining Trump’s alliances, at home and abroad.
Three weeks into exactly the kind of war of choice that he spent years decrying, US President Donald Trump is not getting the amount of international support that he seeks for his campaign of air strikes on Iran.
There is also reluctance among NATO and other allies to be drawn into the political and economic turmoil caused by the US-Israeli campaign, and Tehran’s region-wide retaliation.
Our experts discuss the state of US-Gulf relations, the muted European response to Trump’s appeals for help in re-opening the Strait of Hormuz, and what it could mean elsewhere in the world for ongoing crises in Ukraine, Cuba and Venezuela.
Joining host Bronwen Maddox this week are Dr Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow in our Middle East and North Africa Programme; Dr Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America; and Heather Hurlburt, a consulting fellow in our US and North America Programme.
Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists, and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.
More ways to listen: Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
Deficit rises unexpectedly to £14.3bn in February as markets price in up to three interest rate rises in 2026
Investors wary of the impact of the Iran conflict dumped UK government bonds on Friday, pushing the yield, or interest rate, on 10-year borrowing to its highest level since 2008.
The market move followed the Bank of England’s decision on Thursday to leave interest rates on hold and hint at a future increase. By Friday morning, markets were pricing in as many as three interest rate rises in 2026.
Continue reading...What causes meningitis, what the public health response has been and how the situation differs from Covid
The deadly outbreak of meningitis in Kent has fuelled concerns about how far the disease will spread and seen the return of people wearing masks and queueing for vaccines. The scenes are reminiscent of the Covid crisis, but meningitis is very different. Here we look at how the outbreak unfolded.
Continue reading...Foreign minister issues warning after Israeli attack on South Pars gasfield that prompted retaliatory strike on Qatar. Plus, what happened to the Oscars red carpet after the ceremony?
Good morning.
Iran has said it will show “zero restraint” if its energy infrastructure is targeted again as Qatar revealed that almost a fifth of its liquefied natural gas export capacity had been knocked out in an Iranian strike that is likely to have a years-long impact.
What did Araghchi say? In a post on X, he said: “Our response to Israel’s attack on our infrastructure employed FRACTION of our power. The ONLY reason for restraint was respect for requested de-escalation. ZERO restraint if our infrastructures are struck again.”
What’s the forecast for next week? More heat is in store for the coming days. By the end of the week, 100 cities could set all-time temperature records for the month of March, with temperatures climbing as high as 30F (17C) above average for the time of year, the new analysis says.
Continue reading...Fire service warns ubiquity of batteries in everyday products is outpacing public understanding and safety regulations
Lithium-ion batteries represent a new technological hazard that one fire science expert has said keeps him awake at night, as fire service chiefs warn the ubiquity of the batteries in everyday products is outpacing public understanding and safety regulations.
The blaze that devastated a historic building in Glasgow and resulted in the closure of Central Station, Scotland’s largest rail interchange, is believed to have started in a shop selling vapes, which are powered by lithium-ion batteries. Glasgow’s Central Station has since reopened.
Continue reading...Karachi particularly badly affected with 18 people killed, more than 50mm of rain and winds gusting up to 60mph
Unseasonally wet weather struck southern Pakistan and north-west India on Wednesday, as heavy rain rolled in from the west, accompanied by thunderstorms, hail, and strong winds.
Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, was particularly badly affected, locally recording more than 50mm of rain with winds gusting up to 60mph. Walls, buildings, and a pedestrian bridge collapsed, with flooding and power outages across the city. At least 18 people were killed and several more injured, many by structural collapses, with other deaths attributed to a fallen tree and a lightning strike.
Continue reading...Two of the three co-hosts of this summer’s tournament have been hit with the injury bug, casting doubt on a number of star players
When Marcel Ruiz slumped into the grass of San Diego FC’s Snapdragon stadium late in the first half of Toluca’s Concacaf Champions Cup game last Wednesday, he seemed to already know. He covered his mouth with his left hand and clutched his right knee – first the back of it, then the front – with his other hand. He turned his head every which way, perhaps hoping that he might scan something or someone who would tell him that this was not in fact happening. That his World Cup on home soil was not already over three months before it was to even start. That Mexico’s injury crisis had not just deepened further.
Ruiz is only 17 matches into his international career for El Tri, yet the central midfielder has firmly established himself as an important cog in Mexico’s setup with his clean passing and defensive cover. More pertinently, the 25-year-old was part of a young core finally asserting itself on a team that long felt caught between generations and suffered through a lackluster autumn, winning none of their six friendlies against World Cup-bound teams.
Continue reading...Dozens of volunteers, mostly over the age of 70, offer rides and serve as interpreters
On a February afternoon at a Spanish-immersion childcare center in Minneapolis, dozens of toddlers grabbed puffy coats out of cubbies as parents shuffled them out the door.
Down the hall, Michael, the husband of the center’s director, stared intently at a monitor streaming the building’s security footage, watching for any vehicles that might be carrying agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since January, when federal agents descended on the Twin Cities as part of Operation Metro Surge, he’s been leaving his own job early to volunteer here every afternoon.
Continue reading...These budget security kits performed well in my tests and can help protect a home while saving you some cash.
You can't remove the design from your device but you can at least darken some elements.
As Florida moves homeowners' policies out of its state-run insurer of last resort, insiders question one new company's finances.
BrianFagioli writes: Opera GX has officially landed on Linux, bringing its gamer-focused browser experience to Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE-based systems. The browser includes GX Control for limiting RAM and network usage, a Hot Tabs Killer to shut down resource-heavy tabs, and built-in sidebar integrations for Discord and Twitch. Opera says this is not just a one-off port, but a long-term effort with ongoing updates and community engagement. "PC gaming has long been associated with a single dominant platform, but that's changing," says Maciej Kocemba, Product Director at Opera GX. "Bringing GX to Linux users -- who are renowned for the control they like to exert over their tools -- means gamers and developers can manage browser resources, customize their setup, and keep their system performing exactly the way they want."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Closure of strait of Hormuz – a key fertilizer production and transportation route – has squeezed farmers as prices jump
Rodney Bushmeyer has been farming as long as he can remember. Bushmeyer’s father was a farmer, as was his grandfather.
The family-run Bushmeyer Farms in Illinois dates back more than 100 years, when his ancestors came to the US from Germany. They acquired the first 80 acres cost-free as homesteaders, cleared the land, and worked it.
Continue reading...Record 171 million passengers are expected to fly this spring, even as TSA funding lapse risks longer airport lines
Spring breakers in the US could see their long-awaited trips to party destinations disrupted by a trifecta of issues: airport security delays, high gas prices, and chaotic weather.
The potential for flight delays comes as US airlines expect that they will see a record-shattering spring travel season. Airlines for America, an aviation industry group, said that 171 million passengers are expected to fly – a 4% increase from the 2025 spring travel period.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Error in second half of 2025 came after IRS saw over a quarter of its workforce reduced after huge cuts by Doge
A technical glitch at the understaffed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is masking millions of dollars in campaign contributions to state-level election groups, including key governor and attorney general races, a campaign finance watchdog has told the Guardian.
A total of $51m for the second half of 2025 remains unaccounted for due to this technical error, according to the Center for Political Accountability (CPA), a non-profit that tracks corporate spending.
Continue reading...Michael Randrianirina, who sacked PM and cabinet without explanation, claims measure is to root out corruption
Madagascar’s military president has said new ministers will have to pass lie detector tests to root out corrupt candidates, after he dismissed the prime minister and cabinet without explanation earlier this month.
Michael Randrianirina came to power in a coup in October after weeks of youth-led protests under the banner “Gen Z Madagascar”. However, young people were quickly disenchanted by his choice of government officials, which they saw as being part of the old, corrupt elite.
Continue reading...Kyiv sources say they think injection contained relaxant meant to make people more talkative in interrogations
Hungarian security operatives administered a “forced injection” to one of the Ukrainians detained earlier this month during a dramatic raid on bank vehicles carrying gold bars and tens of millions of dollars and euros in cash, sources have told the Guardian.
Hungary’s TEK anti-terrorism police detained seven Ukrainians from the state savings bank, Oschadbank, on 5 March. They were accompanying a convoy of two armoured cars from Vienna to Ukraine, as it transited Hungary in what Kyiv claims was a regular transfer of state funds. Hungarian officials have claimed it was money for the “Ukrainian war mafia”, without giving details.
Continue reading...Company says tool to compare self-reported hours with computer estimates is for ‘awareness, not enforcement’
JP Morgan Chase has started to compare the hours junior investment bankers claim to have worked against logs on its IT system.
The US bank said it would begin issuing reports to junior bankers that compare computer-generated estimates of their work weeks against their self-reported time sheets as part of a pilot scheme.
Continue reading...From owing a debt to obscure Japanese horror Sweet Home to the influence of Aliens and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the franchise continues to petrify players three decades on
To many of us playing and writing about video games in the 1990s, Resident Evil seemed to come out of nowhere. The emerging PlayStation and Saturn consoles were all about slick, bright arcade conversions – the shiny thrills of Daytona and Tekken – and Japanese publisher Capcom was in a rut of coin-op conversions and endless sequels to Street Fighter and Mega Man. Scary games were rare at the time and mostly confined to the PC. So when the news of a horror title named Biohazard (the Japanese name for the series) started to emerge in 1995, it caught the attention of games journalists as it seemed radically out of step with prevailing trends. Games were about power, but as early demos quickly revealed, Resident Evil was about vulnerability.
Thirty years later, it’s still here. The series has sold more than 180m copies worldwide, with 11 core titles and dozens of spinoffs and remakes, as well as film, television and anime tie-ins. Its characters and monsters are icons, its tropes now embedded in game design practice. What has allowed it to not only survive but flourish in such a rapidly changing industry? Why do we still let it scare us?
Continue reading...The righteousness of the farmworker struggle persists in the face of a man who chose not to live up to its values
Cesar Chavez, one of the founders of the United Farm Workers, who died in 1993, led a movement for the rights and dignity of a long-abused, neglected and exploited agricultural workforce. Through a series of marches, hunger strikes, boycotts and union drives, Chavez and his movement succeeded in winning crucial labor and civil rights protections and advancing the cause and status of the Latino civil rights movement nationwide.
He also, according to a new report from the New York Times, sexually harassed and assaulted women in his movement, and sexually abused and raped the daughters of some UFW organizers when they were girls.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Continue reading...Jesus Javier Gomez Islas, 23, says in filing against LAPD he has permanently lost vision in one eye due to unjustified munition fired at his face
A 23-year-old Los Angeles man who attended a recent immigration protest outside a federal building says he was blinded in one eye by a law enforcement projectile.
Jesus Javier Gomez Islas filed a claim against the LA police department (LAPD) on Thursday stemming from permanent injuries he says he suffered at a 31 January demonstration outside the Metropolitan Detention Center. The federal facility has been the site of frequent protests against Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and was the site of “ICE Out” rallies that week.
Continue reading...Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the U.S. government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology.
On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.
As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.
“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.
“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.
“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.
“This is why we don’t use AI transcription in meetings,” another added.
ProPublica reviewed records of that meeting, providing a rare look at a dramatic shift underway in one of the most sensitive domains of public policy. The Trump administration is upending the way nuclear energy is regulated, driven by a desire to dramatically increase the amount of energy available to power artificial intelligence.
Career experts have been forced out and thousands of pages of regulations are being rewritten at a sprint. A new generation of nuclear energy companies — flush with Silicon Valley cash and boasting strong political connections — wield increasing influence over policy. Figures like Cohen are forcing a “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos on one of the country’s most important regulators.
The Trump administration has been particularly aggressive in its attacks on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the bipartisan independent regulator that approves commercial nuclear power plants and monitors their safety. The agency is not a household name. But it’s considered the international gold standard, often influencing safety rules around the world.
The NRC has critics, especially in Silicon Valley, where the often-cautious commission is portrayed as an impediment to innovation. In an early salvo, President Donald Trump fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson last June after Hanson spoke out about the importance of agency independence. It was the first time an NRC commissioner had been fired.
During that Idaho meeting, Cohen shot down any notion of NRC independence in the new era.
“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” he said, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In November, Cohen was made chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Department of Energy, where he oversees a broad nuclear portfolio.
The aggressive moves have sent shock waves through the nuclear energy world. Many longtime promoters of the industry say they worry recklessness from the Trump administration could discredit responsible nuclear energy initiatives.
“The regulator is no longer an independent regulator — we do not know whose interests it is serving,” warned Allison Macfarlane, who served as NRC chair during the Obama administration. “The safety culture is under threat.”
A ProPublica analysis of staffing data from the NRC and the Office of Personnel Management shows a rush to the exits: Over 400 people have left the agency since Trump took office. The losses are particularly pronounced in the teams that handle reactor and nuclear materials safety and among veteran staffers with 10 or more years of experience. Meanwhile, hiring of new staff has proceeded at a snail’s pace, with nearly 60 new arrivals in the first year of the Trump administration compared with nearly 350 in the last year of the Biden administration.
Some nuclear power supporters say the administration is providing a needed level of urgency given the energy demands of AI. They also contend the sweeping changes underway aren’t as dangerous or dire as some experts suggest.
“I think the NRC has been frozen in time,” said Brett Rampal, the senior director of nuclear and power strategy at the investment and strategy consultancy Veriten. “It’s a great time to get unfrozen and aim to work quickly.”
The White House referred most of ProPublica’s questions to the Department of Energy, where spokesperson Olivia Tinari said the agency is committed to helping build more safe, high-quality nuclear energy facilities.
“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, America’s nuclear industry is entering a new era that will provide reliable, abundant power for generations to come,” she wrote. The DOE is “committed to the highest standards of safety for American workers and communities.”
Cohen did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The NRC declined to comment.
The U.S. has not had a serious nuclear incident since the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, a track record many experts attribute to a rigorous regulatory environment and an intense safety culture.
Major nuclear incidents around the world have only strengthened the resolve of past regulators to stay independent from industry and from political winds. A chief cause of Japan’s Fukushima accident, investigators found, was the cozy relationship between the country’s industry and oversight body, which opened the door for thin safety assessments and inaccurate projections overlooking the possible impact of a major tsunami.
“We knew regulatory capture led directly to Fukushima and to Chernobyl,” said Kathryn Huff, who was assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Biden administration.
The U.S. has barely built any nuclear power plants in recent decades. Only three new reactors have been completed in the last 25 years, and since 1990 the U.S has barely added any net new nuclear electricity to its grid. Though about 20% of U.S. energy is supplied by nuclear power plants, the fleet is aging. Some experts blame the slow build-out on the challenging economics of financing a multibillion-dollar project and the uncertainty of accessing and disposing of nuclear fuels.
But an increasingly vocal group of industry voices and deregulation advocates have blamed the slow build-out on overly cautious and inefficient regulators. Among the most powerful exponents of this view are billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; both venture capitalists have their own investments in the nuclear energy sector and are influential Trump supporters.
Andreessen camped out at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, after Trump won the 2024 election, helping pick staff for the new administration. In late 2024, Thiel personally vetted at least one candidate for the Office of Nuclear Energy, according to people familiar with the conversations. Neither responded to requests for comment.
Four months into his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to supercharge nuclear power build-out. “It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry,” said Trump, flanked by nuclear energy CEOs in the Oval Office. He added: “And it’s become very safe.”
Under those orders, the NRC was directed to reduce its workforce, speed up the timeline for approving nuclear reactors and rewrite many of its safety rules. The DOE — which has a vast nuclear portfolio, including waste cleanup sites and government research labs — was tasked with creating a pathway for so-called advanced nuclear companies to test their designs.
The goal, Trump said, was to quadruple nuclear energy output and provide new power to the data centers behind the AI boom.
As DOGE gutted agencies, departures mounted in the nuclear sector. Career experts in nuclear regulations and safety departed or were forced out. When Trump fired Hanson, a Democratic NRC commissioner, the president’s team explained the move by saying, “All organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction.”
In an unsigned email to ProPublica, the White House press office wrote: “All commissioners are presidential appointees and can be fired just like any other appointee.”
In August, the NRC’s top attorney resigned and was replaced by oil and gas lawyer David Taggart, who had been working on DOGE cuts at the DOE. In all, the nuclear office at the DOE had lost about a third of its staff, according to a January 2026 count by the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit focused on science and technology policy.
That summer, Cohen and a team of DOGE operatives touched down at the NRC offices, a series of nondescript towers across from a Dunkin’ in suburban Maryland. He was joined by Adam Blake, an investor who had recently founded an AI medical startup and has a background in real estate and solar energy, and Ankur Bansal, president of a company that created software for real estate agents. Neither would comment for this story.
Many career officials who spoke with ProPublica were blindsided: The new Trump officials at the NRC seemed to have no experience with the intricacies of nuclear energy policy or law, they said. One NRC lawyer who briefed some of the new arrivals decided to resign. “They were talking about quickly approving all these new reactors, and they didn’t seem to care that much about the rules — they wanted to carry out the wishes of the White House,” the official said.
At one point, Cohen began passing out hats from nuclear energy startup Valar Atomics, one of the companies vying to build a new reactor, according to sources familiar with the matter and records seen by ProPublica. NRC staffers balked; they were supposed to monitor companies like Valar for safety violations, not wear its swag.
NRC ethics officials warned Cohen that the hat handout was a likely violation of conflict rules. It betrayed a misunderstanding of the safety regulator’s role, said a former official familiar with the exchange. “Imagine you live near a nuclear power plant, and you find out a supposedly independent safety regulator — the watchdog — is going around wearing the power plant’s branded hats,” the official said. “Would that make you feel safe?” The NRC and Cohen did not respond to requests for comment about the hat incident.
Valar counts Trump’s Silicon Valley allies as angel investors. They include Palmer Luckey, a technology executive and founder of the defense contractor Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, the software company helping power Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation raids.
It was among three nuclear reactor companies that sued the NRC last year in an attempt to strip it of its authority to regulate its reactors and replace it with a state-level regulator. Before the Trump administration came into office, lawyers watching the case were confident the courts would quickly dismiss the suit, as the NRC’s authority to regulate reactors is widely acknowledged. But new Trump appointees pushed for a compromise settlement — which is still being negotiated. The career NRC lawyer working on the case quietly left the agency.
Valar and its executives did not reply to requests for comment.
The deregulatory push is the culmination of mounting pressure — both political and economic — to make it easier to build nuclear power in the U.S. Over the years, a bipartisan coalition supporting nuclear expansion brought together environmentalists who favor zero-carbon power and defense hawks focused on abundant domestic energy production.
Anti-nuclear activists still argue that renewable energy like wind and solar are safer and more economical. But streamlining the NRC has been a bipartisan priority as well. The latest major reform came in 2024, when President Joe Biden signed into law the ADVANCE Act, which went as far as changing the mission statement of the NRC to ensure it “does not unnecessarily limit” nuclear energy development.
Some nuclear power supporters say the Trump administration is merely accelerating these changes. They cite instances in which the current regulations appear out of sync with the times. The NRC’s byzantine rules are designed for so-called large light-water reactors — massive facilities that can power entire cities — and not the increasingly in vogue smaller advanced reactor designs popular among Silicon Valley-backed firms.
Rules that require fences of certain heights might make little sense for new reactors buried in the earth; and rules that require a certain number of operators per reactor could be a bad fit for a cluster of smaller reactors with modern controls. Advances in sensors, modeling and safety technologies, they say, should be taken into account across the board.
The NRC has said it expects over two dozen new license requests from small modular and advanced reactor companies in coming years. Many of those requests are likely to come from new, Silicon Valley-based nuclear firms.
“There was a missing link in the innovation cycle, and it was very difficult to build something and test it in the U.S. because of mostly licensing and site availability constraints in the past,” said Adam Stein of the pro-nuclear nonprofit Breakthrough Institute.
The regulatory changes are in flux: This spring, the NRC is starting to release thousands of pages of new rules governing everything from the safety and emergency preparedness plans reactor companies are required to submit to the procedures for objecting to a reactor license.
“It’s hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it’s actually reducing public safety,” said one official working on reactor licensing, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “And that’s just the problem with going so fast — everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”
Lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been sent to the NRC to keep an eye on the new rules, a move that further raised alarms about the agency’s independence.
Nicholas Gallagher — a relatively recent New York University law school graduate and conservative writer whom ProPublica previously identified as a DOGE operative at the General Services Administration — has been involved in conversations about overhauling environmental rules.
He’s working alongside Sydney Volanski, a 30-year-old recent law school graduate who rose to national attention while she was in high school for her campaign against the Girl Scouts of America, which she accused of promoting “Marxists, socialists and advocates of same-sex lifestyle.”
NRC lawyers working on the rules were told last October that Gallagher and Volanski would be joining them, and they both appear on the regular NRC rulemaking calendar invite.
The White House maintains, however, that “zero lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been dispatched to work on rulemaking.” Neither Gallagher nor Volanski replied to requests for comment.
The administration is routing the new rules through an office overseen by Trump’s cost-cutting guru Russell Vought, a move that was previously unheard of for an independent regulator like the NRC. The White House spokesperson noted that, under a recent executive order, this process is now required for all agencies.
Political operatives have been “inserted into the senior leadership team to the point where they could significantly influence decision-making,” said Scott Morris, who worked at the NRC for more than 32 years, most recently as the No. 2 career operations official. “I just think that would be a dangerous proposition.”
Morris voted for Trump twice and broadly supports the goals of deregulating and expanding nuclear energy, but he has begun speaking out against the administration’s interference at the NRC. He retired in May 2025 as part of a wave of retirements and firings.
At a recent hearing before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board — an independent body that helps adjudicate nuclear licensing — NRC lawyers withdrew from the proceedings, citing “limited resources.” The judge remarked that it was the first time in over 20 years the NRC had done so.
Meanwhile, some staff members, other career officials say, are afraid to voice dissenting views for fear of being fired. “It feels like being a lobster in a slowly boiling pot,” one NRC official who has been working on the rule changes told ProPublica, describing the erosion of independence.
The official was one of three who compared their recent experience at NRC to being in a pot of slowly boiling water. “If somebody is raising something that they think that the industry or the White House would have a problem with, they think twice,” the official said.
Inside the NRC, the steering committee overseeing the changes includes Cohen, Taggart and Mike King, a career NRC official who is the newly installed executive director for operations. The former director, Mirela Gavrilas, a 21-year veteran of the agency, retired after getting boxed out of decision-making, according to a person familiar with her departure. Gavrilas did not respond to a request for comment.
Any final changes will be approved by the NRC’s five commissioners, three of whom are Republicans. In September, the two Democratic commissioners told a Senate committee they might be fired at any time if they get crosswise with Trump — including over revisions to safety rules.
Draft rules being circulated inside the NRC propose drastic rollbacks of security and safety inspections at nuclear facilities. Those include a proposed 56% cut in emergency preparedness inspection time, CNN reported in March.
Even some pro-nuclear groups are troubled by the emerging order. Some have tried to backchannel to their contacts in the Trump administration to explain the importance of an independent regulator to help maintain public support for nuclear power. Without it, they risk losing credibility.
“You have to make sure you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes nuclear energy and supports many of the regulatory changes being proposed by the Trump administration.
Greenwald’s group favors faster timelines for approving nuclear reactors, but she worries that the agency’s fundamental independence has been undermined. “We would prefer that they yield back more of NRC independence,” she said.
One Trump administration priority has been making it easier for so-called advanced reactor companies to navigate the regulatory process. These firms, mostly backed by Silicon Valley tech and venture money, are often working on designs for much smaller reactors that they hope to mass produce in factories.
“There are two nuclear industries,” said Macfarlane, the former NRC chair. “There are the actual people who use nuclear reactors to produce power and put it on the grid … and then there are the ‘nuke bros’” in Silicon Valley.
Trump’s Silicon Valley allies have loomed large over his nuclear policy. One prospective political appointee for a top DOE nuclear job got a Christmas Eve call from Thiel, the rare Silicon Valley leader to back Trump in 2016. Thiel, whose Founders Fund invested in a nuclear fuel startup and an advanced reactor company, quizzed the would-be official about deregulation and how to rapidly build more nuclear energy capacity, said sources familiar with the conversation.
Nuclear energy startups jockeyed to spend time at Mar-a-Lago in the months before the start of Trump’s second term. Balerion Space Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in multiple companies, convened an investor summit there in January 2025, according to an invitation viewed by ProPublica. Balerion did not reply to a request for comment.
A few months later, when Trump was drawing up the executive orders, leaders at many of those nuclear companies were given advanced access to drafts of the text — and the opportunity to provide suggested edits, documents viewed by ProPublica show.
Those orders created a new program to test out experimental reactor designs, addressing a common complaint that companies are not given opportunities to experiment. There are currently about a dozen advanced reactor companies planning to participate. Each has a concierge team within the DOE to help navigate bureaucracy. As NPR reported in January, the DOE quietly overhauled a series of safety rules that would apply to these new reactors and shared the new regulations with these companies before making them public.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright — who served on the board of one of those companies, Oklo — has said fast nuclear build-out is a priority: “We are moving as quickly as we can to permit, build and enable the rapid construction of as much nuke capacity as possible,” he told CNBC last fall. Oklo noted that Wright stepped down from the board when he was confirmed.
The Trump administration hopes some of the companies would have their reactors “go critical” — a key first step on the way to building a functioning power plant — by July 2026. Then the NRC, which signs off on the safety designs of commercial nuclear power plants, could be expected to quickly OK these new reactors to get to market.
According to people familiar with the conversations, at least one nuclear energy startup CEO personally recruited potential members of the DOGE nuclear team, though it’s not clear if Cohen was brought aboard this way. Cohen has told colleagues and industry contacts that he reports to Emily Underwood, one of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s top aides for economic policy. He is perceived inside government as a key avatar of the White House’s nuclear agenda.
In its email to ProPublica, the White House said, “Seth Cohen is a Department of Energy employee and does not report to Emily Underwood or Stephen Miller in any capacity.”
The DOE spokesperson added, “Seth’s role at the Department of Energy is to support the Trump administration’s mission to unleash American Energy Dominance.”
Cohen has been pushing to raise the legal limit of radiation that nuclear energy companies are allowed to emit from their facilities. One nuclear industry insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said many firms are fixating on changing these radiation rules: Their business model requires moving nuclear reactors around the country, often near workers or the general public.
Building thick, expensive shielding walls can be prohibitively expensive, they said.
Valar CEO Isaiah Taylor has called limits on exposure to radiation a top barrier to industry growth. A recent DOE memo seen by ProPublica cites cost savings on shielding for Valar’s reactor to justify changing those limits. “Shielding-related cost reductions,” the memo said, “could range from $1-2 million per reactor.” The debate over the precise rule change is ongoing.
The DOE has been considering a fivefold increase to the limit for public exposure to radiation, which will allow some nuclear reactor companies to cut costs on these expensive safety shields, internal DOE documents seen by ProPublica show.
A presentation prepared by DOE staffers in their Idaho offices that has circulated inside the department makes the “business case” for changing the radiation dose rules: It could cut the cost of some new reactors by as much as 5%. These more relaxed standards are likely to be adopted by the NRC and apply to reactors nationwide, documents show.
In February, Wright accompanied Valar’s executive team on a first-of-its-kind flight, as a U.S. military plane was conscripted to fly the company’s reactor from Los Angeles to Utah. Valar does not yet have a working nuclear reactor, and a number of industry sources told ProPublica they viewed the airlift as a PR exercise. Internal government memos justified the airlift by designating it as “critical” to the U.S. “national security interests.”
Cohen posted smiling pictures of himself from the cargo bay of the military plane.
Cohen told an audience at the American Nuclear Society that the rapid build-out was essential to powering Silicon Valley’s AI data centers. He framed the policy in existential terms: “I can’t emphasize this strongly enough that losing the AI war is an outcome akin to the Nazis developing the bomb before the United States.”
As it deliberated rule changes, the DOE has cut out its internal team of health experts who work on radiation safety at the Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, said sources familiar with the decision. The advice of outside experts on radiation protection has been largely cast aside.
The DOE spokesperson said its radiation standards “are aligned with Gold Standard Science … with a focus on protecting people and the environment while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”
The department has already decided to abandon the long-standing radiation protection principle known as “ALARA” — the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” standard — which directs anyone dealing with radioactive materials to minimize exposure.
It often pushes exposure well below legal thresholds. Many experts agreed that the ALARA principle was sometimes applied too strictly, but the move to entirely throw it out was opposed by many prominent radiation health experts.
Whether the agencies will actually change the legal thresholds for radiation exposure is an open question, said sources familiar with the deliberations.
Internal DOE documents arguing for changing dose rules cite a report produced at the Idaho National Laboratory, which was compiled with the help of the AI assistant Claude. “It’s really strange,” said Kathryn Higley, president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a congressionally chartered group studying radiation safety. “They fundamentally mistake the science.”
John Wagner, the head of the Idaho National Laboratory and the report’s lead author, acknowledged to ProPublica that the science over changing radiation exposure rules is hotly contested. “We recognize that respected experts interpret aspects of this literature differently,” he wrote. His analysis was not meant to be the final word, he said, but was “intended to inform debate.”
The impact of radiation levels at very low doses is hard to measure, so the U.S. has historically struck a cautious note. Raising dose limits could put the U.S. out of step with international standards.
For his part, Cohen has told the nuclear industry that he sees his job as making sure the government “is no longer a barrier” to them.
In June, he shot down the notion of companies putting money into a fund for workplace accidents. “Put yourself in the shoes of one of these startups,” he said. “They’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. And then they would have to go to their VCs and their board and say, listen, guys, we actually need a few hundred million dollars more to put into a trust fund?”
He also suggested that regulators should not fret about preparing for so-called 100-year events — disasters that have roughly a 1% chance of taking place but can be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.
“When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up,” he said.
The post DOGE Goes Nuclear: How Trump Invited Silicon Valley Into America’s Nuclear Power Regulator appeared first on ProPublica.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The Wilmington Senior Center has been a service hub for the elderly in and around the city for seven decades. But in recent years, the center has faced funding hardships, leading to pared back services.
Days after posting their March lunch menu onto social media, officials from the Wilmington Senior Center closed the doors of the 70-year-old facility.
According to multiple sources, including residents and elected officials, the senior center’s abrupt closure is now sparking conversations in Delaware’s largest city about what led to the decision and whether the center plans to reopen. As of Wednesday, the center remained closed during what would have been its normal operating hours.
Wilmington Senior Center officials have not made any public statements about the closure nor did they respond to questions from Spotlight Delaware.
The news comes about four months after the Senior Center ended its Friday operations and laid off a third of its staff, amid ongoing funding shortfalls. At that time, the center’s executive director, Sam Nussbaum, told Spotlight Delaware that it needed to make up 70% of its budget for the year.
“I need to save this agency,” Nussbaum told Spotlight last October. “We don’t have money coming in.”
According to government records, the Wilmington Senior Center received $3 million in state funding between the fiscal years 2018 and 2026. Most of that money came from Delaware’s legislative program, called grant-in-aid, that distributes taxpayer dollars to various organizations that serve the public.
In the most recent fiscal year of 2026, the Wilmington Senior Center received over $160,000 from the state.
New Castle County also allocated just over $63,000 to the organization between 2019 and 2023, according to the county’s open checkbook, with about one-third stemming from CARES Act funding given during the COVID pandemic.
Located near the city’s Brandywine Village neighborhood, the Wilmington Senior Center has been a social and wellness hub for the elderly community since 1956.
It serves people over 50 years old, offering a range of programs including affordable meals, health workshops, computer classes, Bible study, Pilates, and trips to local farmers’ markets. Memberships only cost $25 a year. There also are one-time lifetime memberships available for $500, according to the senior center’s website.
While Nussbaum cited financial difficulties last fall, it’s not clear whether potential shortfalls are what caused the facility to close earlier this month.
The organization has not filed an annual non-profit tax return form with the Internal Revenue Service since 2020, according to a federal database.
The database does show that its nonprofit status was revoked in 2024. It is unclear why that happened, but revocations can occur when an organization fails to file its tax forms for three consecutive years.
Nonprofit organizations are required to file tax forms, called Form 990s, which are publicly viewable online.
The Wilmington Senior Center brought in almost $875,000 in revenue in 2020 — the last year tax data for the organization is publicly available. Its 2020 finances capped a steady decrease in revenue that occurred over the previous decade. In 2011, the center brought in nearly $2 million.
Last spring, the IRS reinstated the Wilmington Senior Center’s nonprofit tax status but the organization’s tax forms for 2021 through 2024 are still not available online.
In October, Nussbaum told Spotlight that the center receives just over $200,000 annually from the state, while operating on a roughly $660,000 budget, leaving the center to make up more than $400,000 each year.
Several individuals who use the Wilmington Senior Center told Spotlight Delaware that earlier this month they received phone calls from senior center employees, announcing that services would be discontinued.
Verna Clark, a Baynard Village resident, was among those individuals. She said a senior center employee told her that the organization was closed indefinitely.
“That’s all she could tell me,” Clark said.
Clark, who has attended the senior center for nearly a decade, said that, with a car, she’s fortunate to have the option to go elsewhere. For now, though, she plans to wait and see if it reopens.
“There are other centers that I would go to, but I said ‘I’m going to just hold off, and wait and see,’” she said.
Nussbaum did not respond to requests for comment for this story. When reached by phone, board member Loraine Bertuola declined to comment. When reached a second time to ask about new information that had been uncovered, Bertuola hung up shortly after the conversation began.
Senior center officials failure to publicly address the closure has left residents and some local and state officials in the dark. Many say they only heard about the closure from neighbors or employees.
Meanwhile, one legislator suggested that the center may reopen open.
Rep. Stephanie T. Bolden (D-Wilmington) said she met with senior center leaders who said the center closed temporarily because Nussbaum had been “dismissed” and replaced.
“They may have been closed for a couple of days to reorganize, but they have not shut down the Senior Center,” she said.
But other local government officials say they’ve heard differently. Wilmington City Council President Trippi Congo said he received calls from residents and Senior Center employees last week and learned that a reopening may be uncertain because of funding challenges.
Congo said he is working to schedule a meeting this month with officials from the senior center, the mayor’s office, New Castle County officials, and officials from Gov. Matt Meyer’s office to better understand the center’s situation and to see who may be able to assist.
“I wanted the state and the county to be there because they also have value for the seniors, and they have a lot more funding than we do,” Congo said.
State Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha (D-Wilmington)was also told last week about the center’s shutdown, and noted that he has not heard from leadership at the center.
Chukwuocha says he is in ongoing discussions with other senior centers, such as The Jimmy Jenkins Senior Center at the Kingswood Community Center, who said they could offer a pipeline for the seniors who are no longer being served.
He plans to hold more conversations with legislators and the Controller General’s Office to understand how to continue to support the seniors who were being served at the center.
Logan Herring, CEO of Kingswood Community Center, said he had been in discussions with the Wilmington Senior Center for about a year about creating a pipeline between the Wilmington Senior Center and the Jimmy Jenkins Senior Center. He said Nussbaum initially reached out to his office for guidance, but they were never able to move forward with the plan.
Asked if unresponsiveness from Senior Center officials led to the plan stalling, Herring suggested that if communication delays did occur, they may be due to the center operating in a crisis mode.
“I just think that they were really in a tough spot financially, and when you’re in survival mode, it’s hard to think beyond that,” Herring said.
The post Wilmington Senior Center abruptly shuts its doors, doesn’t say why appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The 55-year-old has is an assistant coach at the University of New Orleans. Now he believes he can take the step up to the top of his sport
You are Arizona State athletics director Graham Rossini, more of a forward-thinking sports executive than a classic campus administrator. The Sun Devils basketball team have just staggered through another middling season, missing the NCAA tournament for a third straight year. You’ve just fired coach Bobby Hurley, but the vacancy isn’t what anyone in the sport would call coveted – not compared to a blue-blood program like Duke or Kentucky, or even the cross-state rival Arizona Wildcats men’s basketball, standard-bearer of the old Pac-10.
You could hire another hardwood hero like Hurley, a Duke Blue Devils men’s basketball supervillain whose winning pedigree as a player surfaced only in flashes over 11 uneven years on the sideline. You could turn to a television retread, someone angling for a return to the bench and a larger stage. You could give some young striver a big break. Or you could do something else entirely – something big and bold: You could give Percy Robert Miller a shot.
Continue reading...From the White House to Iran’s former crown prince, proponents of the U.S.–Israel war on Iran sell it to the American people — and Iranians themselves — as a crusade for liberation. Instead, the regime remains in place as the death toll grows, environmental hazards proliferate, and civilian infrastructure is decimated.
As if the destruction inside Iran itself wasn’t enough, the war is starting to have serious ramifications for the global economy and, more to the point, expanding into neighboring countries.
Lebanon, in particular, has come into Israel’s crosshairs, with increasing Israeli incursions and missile strikes deeper into the country. The number of dead there is approaching 1,000 with Israeli missiles razing entire apartment blocks in central Beirut this week and a ground invasion getting underway. More than 1 million Lebanese people have been displaced.
“I think the Lebanese are suffering now, and there’s not really anyone who’s trying to save them,” says Afeef Nessouli, a Beirut-based journalist, speaking to The Intercept Briefing. “They know that, and they know that they’re just political pawns who are always at the worst end of the stick along with Palestine.” He adds, “The fear is that [Israel] will occupy south of Litani [River] … and just take people’s homes, take their land, and never give it back, make settlements for their country.”
“It’s been really stunning to watch that so many people fall for this idea of ‘This is a human rights intervention’ — and yet it’s accomplished through massive human rights violations,” says Ali Gharib, a senior editor at The Intercept. Commenting on Israel’s strategy of making failed states out of its adversaries in the region, he notes, the Israelis “don’t need [Reza] Pahlavi to work. They don’t need him to go in there and become this democratic leader. They just need him to lead a movement that damages the regime enough to put Iran into some kind of fractured state or state failure where it’s not a threat to Israel anymore.”
“We’ve had in the last 20 to 25 years, especially since the Iraq War in 2003, a lobby pushing for regime change in Iran,” says Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini, a veteran peace strategist. “The Iraq version of regime change ended up being a catastrophe from a U.S. perspective, but actually from an Israeli perspective and from a Saudi perspective, and even from a UAE perspective, the decimation of Iraq has been a success because if Iraq had turned out to be a liberal democracy, it would’ve challenged Israel on the question of Palestine. It would’ve challenged Saudi Arabia on the question of Islam and what is Islam.”
It’s a region in upheaval, and at the center are Israeli and American fictions about liberatory bombs.
“I’ve been on podcasts with Israeli journalists where they’re telling me the Iranians wanted us to go in and liberate them,” says Naraghi-Anderlini, “And my response to them is: Liberate their bodies from their souls?”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Ali Gharib: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Ali Gharib, and I’m a senior editor at The Intercept. The U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran is stretching into its third week, with attacks having started on February 28. The bombardment of Iran has remained relentless. At least 1,400 people have been killed and more than 18,000 have been injured.
Civilian infrastructure has taken a hit too, including Iranian hospitals, pharmaceutical plants, educational centers, and civilian energy depots. Iran, for its part, has retaliated by launching missiles and drones into Israel itself, as well as attacking U.S. bases in the region. It has also targeted energy infrastructure in the nearby Gulf Arab states.
Meanwhile, Israel has increased its attacks on Lebanon, killing more than 900 people and displacing more than 1 million, and it’s preparing for a ground invasion against the paramilitary group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
On Wednesday, Israel expanded its airstrikes into central Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, where it razed residential buildings.
Afeef Nessouli, is a journalist and Intercept contributor based in Lebanon, where he has been reporting since November. He joins me now from Beirut.
Afeef, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Afeef Nessouli: Yeah, thanks for having me, Ali. I appreciate it.
AG: Afeef, what can you tell us about what it’s actually been like in the parts of Lebanon where you’ve been reporting, since Israel increased its attacks on the country following the strikes against Iran?
AN: So I’m in an area of Beirut called Tayouneh. Tayouneh is hundreds of meters away from the evacuation orders that have been all over the southern suburbs — it’s just right north of the southern suburbs — so it’s very loud here. Right outside of my area, there’s hundreds of tents lined up.
It’s right outside of the park. Horsh Beirut is this public space, and families from the southern suburbs have just lined up their tents and have had to make do with such little resources.
It’s really so hard to see so many people without shelter. It’s just a catastrophic situation.
AG: It’s not entirely surprising to hear that you might be seeing people there in tent cities, given that, I think I read that 1 in 5 Lebanese people were displaced now, and especially with Israel expanding its attacks into Beirut and central Beirut, as we saw on Wednesday, decimating parts of central Beirut and imploding with missiles buildings in the center of town.
So what have you been seeing, what have you’ve been talking to people there, internally displaced people?
AN: So on Wednesday, Israeli airstrikes hit central Beirut. They killed at least 12 people, wounding 41 people.
Going to the strike areas is really just awful to see and awful to witness. Buildings are rubble. It’s causing panic and fear among people in places that were not told to evacuate.
I talked to a mother who was displaced from the southern suburbs, a neighborhood called Bourj Al Barajneh. She’s been staying under this huge statue of a crescent moon right outside of Al Amin Mosque in downtown Beirut. She’s mostly just worried for her kids — worried that they’re not getting enough to eat, worried about them just being terrorized, and also it’s just so cold.
You have to understand: Everything is all hands on deck. So a lot of schools are being turned into shelters. The stadium has been turned into a shelter.
One I visited in Ras, Beirut, which is in northwestern Beirut, over 200 families I think were in and out of that shelter. People are sleeping on the floors. I spend a lot of time with an organization called Truth Be Told that’s passing out hot meals from donations and prescription medication around Horsh Beirut, where all the families are lined up in tents.
What you’re mostly hearing is that people don’t have anywhere to go. They have nowhere to sleep. And everywhere they do have to sleep is incredibly uncomfortable. There are men sleeping in their cars. There are cars everywhere. People are struggling. They’re struggling to survive in an economy that was already just decimated from the last few years.
AG: I’m curious, on the geopolitics, Afeef — how do you think these attacks have affected Hezbollah, the Lebanese paramilitary group from the south of the country but has become a central player in Lebanese politics and obviously a group closely linked with Iran? Is your sense that Hezbollah has been weakened by these attacks? Is the group continuing to be diminished or are they holding pretty firm at this time?
AN: I can say that a lot of people inside of Lebanon and a lot of people outside of Lebanon had seemed to count Hezbollah out, for the most part. They had seemed decimated, especially after the Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was killed. It seemed like they were taking a long rest period.
So a lot of the criticism is, Israel had had over 10,000 ceasefire violations — and it took the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to be assassinated for the group to push into the war and take decisive action.
AG: And of course, you’re talking about Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of Hezbollah who was killed by Israel during an earlier round of its war with Lebanon — [after] a pager attack that Israel lodged against Lebanon, where it loaded pagers with explosives and meticulously distributed them to Hezbollah officials, killing scores of Hezbollah officials as well as countless civilians. And Ali Khamenei was the supreme leader of Iran until he was assassinated by Israel at the outset of this latest war with Iran.
AN: After the supreme leader was assassinated, I went to the public mourning in Dahiyeh. It was literally the evening of when Israel started striking the southern suburbs, and you could tell that the emotion was palpable. People were crying, people were wailing, people were chanting, people were angry. It was extremely well attended, it was extremely big.
Ultimately, the same night, I was awoken in the middle of the night by two really loud strikes on Dahiyeh. It was really clear that Hezbollah had decided to take Lebanon into the war. And a lot of Lebanese people were pretty upset at that. They felt like they weren’t given any consent; they were not able to consent to this sort of act. It’s become a pretty polarizing subject.
A year ago, when Hezbollah entered the war on behalf of Gaza, I think people were more amenable to the idea. They understood that Israel wanted to make incursions into the country and occupy land. I think in the last year, having not really responded to a lot of ceasefire violations in the south, but responding to Ali Khamenei’s assassination was just a disappointment to a lot of Lebanese people who felt, “Well, are you acting on behalf of Iran, or are you acting on behalf of our best interest?”
It seems like they’ve lost some support on the ground. So there is that, there is a decimation of their reputation right now, from what I am at least gathering on the ground. But also there’s a lot of people who understand or the people who are on the front lines, they’re the ones who have to self-help when all of their houses are demolished. And there’s military access roads for Israeli occupation soldiers to literally making their demolished houses gone forever because now there’s military access roads paved on top of them.
“It feels like this big psychological operation done to Lebanese people for decades to separate them into sects, into tribes, and to get them destabilized.”
In Lebanon, there’s so many political opinions. And when something like this happens, it really feels like the people of the country are pitted against each other. It feels like this big psychological operation done to Lebanese people for decades to separate them into sects, into tribes, and to get them destabilized, while all of these outside forces are manipulating their lived experience, their day-to-day experience. I think most people really just want to have a Lebanon that they can depend on economically, that they can depend on politically, and that they can depend on in general for having a life that isn’t burdened by cycles of violence every few months.
AG: Touching on that a little bit, I’ve talked to my friends, Lebanese friends, who admittedly are probably very self-selecting, but it seems they have sensed a resentment. You were sort of touching on this, a resentment of the fact that between the so-called ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, and the Israeli assassination of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, there were some tens of thousands of Israeli ceasefire violations recorded, and none of these prompted a response from Hezbollah. But their willingness to go in retaliation for the assassination of a foreign leader — do you sense that kind of resentment? Is that one of the things contributing to Hezbollah’s diminishing stature?
AN: Yeah, so I spoke to one woman last night. She’s in her mid-30s. She has family from the south. Someone who theoretically supported Hezbollah getting into the war on behalf of Gaza after October 7. Someone who understands having land in the south — family homes in the south — that have been under fire for, really, decades. She says that, in the last year and a half, since the so-called ceasefire was brokered, after 10,000 violations from Israel, after Hezbollah really didn’t respond to all of the violations, and yet they woke up on behalf of the supreme leader’s assassination — just doesn’t sit well with her. She doesn’t see the reason why Lebanon would have to be in this fight.
But on the other hand completely, there’s also this sophisticated understanding, obviously, that there’s a neighbor to the south that has occupied an entire country and wants to have the Litani River be its northern border. There is this idea that Israel has been manipulating and manufacturing this feeling for a while, that they are coming in and they were going to come in and they were attacking Lebanon much before Hezbollah had ever come around.
The fact of the matter is that Israel really does want to sow discord in the sectarian populations of Lebanon. They have dropped leaflets a couple days ago in central Beirut saying, “Lebanon is yours. You can inform on Hezbollah” and like they shared a QR code.
“What ends up happening is that a lot of people discriminate against people from the south, people from Shia backgrounds, because they’re basically afraid.”
And then they target residential buildings and say, “We’re coming after Hezbollah” and cause psychological damage and physical damage and ruin so much peace for so many people. Ultimately what ends up happening is that a lot of people discriminate against people from the south, people from Shia backgrounds, because they’re basically afraid that if they let them into their buildings or try to take care of them, they’re going to be around people that are affiliated with Hezbollah and are going to be targeted.
A lot of these people are just displaced. They’re unhoused in rain, their houses have been destroyed, and then their fellow patriots are literally just terrified that being around them or letting them in is going to result in Israel killing all of them. That’s a real fear on the ground right now.
It’s something that feels very beneficial to Israel and the U.S. to have: sects in Lebanon fighting each other all of the time not paying attention to the slow incursions — the slow pushing forth — on the southern border. Also, it’s probably beneficial to countries like Iran to pour money, pouring arms, have proxies that are fighting its battles.
Ultimately what happens is that the situation on the ground becomes unbearable. Everybody’s trying to pressure the people to orchestrate some heroic political ends that is impossible for the people to do because they’re obviously being manipulated by powers much larger than them. I think the Lebanese are suffering now, and there’s not really anyone who’s trying to save them. And they know that. They know that they’re just political pawns who are always at the worst end of the stick — along with Palestine. So, yeah, it feels really dismal in Lebanon right now.
“Most people really just want to have a Lebanon that they can depend on economically … and that they can depend on in general for having a life that isn’t burdened by cycles of violence every few months.”
AG: You mentioned in the south, the razing of people’s homes to make roads for Israeli military infrastructure as they increase their ground incursions and seem to be making preparations for a full-scale ground invasion.
Of course, this is all fraught with the history of the rise of Hezbollah in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, an occupation that lasted for nearly two decades with ongoing hostilities in the two and a half decades since 2000, when Israel officially left south Lebanon. What is the mood among people today in Beirut and also more broadly in Lebanon with regard to fears of what an Israeli occupation could mean for the future of their country?
AN: I think most people in Lebanon look at Israeli occupation as something that’s just unacceptable. While there’s a lot of opinions that are diverse politically in Lebanon, sometimes in contradiction of each other, one thing I think that is mostly true is that most Lebanese people do not want any normalization with Israel. There are some people who do, but it’s not many.
The fear is that they will occupy south of Litani — the Litani River is Israel’s northern border — and just take people’s homes, take their land, and never give it back, make settlements for their country. The feeling and the fear is that actually the more Israel does, the more it greedily takes up land, the less that anyone in Lebanon is going to stop fighting back. Because the fear is that there’s always going to be violence, and being caught in a cycle of violence and a cycle of economic destruction. I think most people really just want a Lebanon that is peaceful. I think they want a Lebanon that they can feel safe in. And now half of the country really feels like Hezbollah has dragged them into this war.
A lot of people know that Israel would’ve done it anyway, and a subset is always going to fight back on the southern border because that’s where they come from. So it just becomes a ripple effect for everybody in the country. Nobody wants the land to be occupied by Israel, but also not everybody at all wants to be in war constantly with Israel either.
So you just have different lived realities where there are people who are losing their homes, they’re displaced, they’re suffering, they’re fighting back as best as they can. Then there’s people in Lebanon who are living in a totally different reality and are really mad because, admittedly so, their city is getting bombed, their economy is degrading, they have no chance for a future that feels at all stable. So you just have a society that is at the highest level of tension — and everybody, without fail, is afraid of civil war.
Because the truth is that Hezbollah is part and parcel of society. So when the Israelis and the U.S. pressure the government to disarm Hezbollah, a lot of Hezbollah is in all sorts of society. A lot of them are in the army. So it’s not an easy fix here.
I think the idea is that the Israelis want to make it seem like the government can just easily disarm Hezbollah, and if they don’t, they’re going to get punished for it. But it’s obvious that’s impossible. So it’s made people feel completely disenchanted with all of the leadership that’s involved and the leadership in the state as well, because the response has been mostly inadequate. It’s just something out of a horror show.
AG: Given what we’ve seen, pretty clearly seems to be Israel’s strategy of making failed states out of its adversaries in the region, you have to wonder if Israeli’s strategic thinking is exactly to stoke that resentment. So yeah, a complicated situation.
Afeef, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It’s really a pleasure and really appreciate all your insights and also your excellent reporting. So thanks so much for joining us on the Intercept Briefing.
AN: Ali, I really appreciate you for covering Lebanon and having me on your show.
AG: After a quick break, I’ll be speaking to Sanam Naraghi Anderlini about Iran. Sanam is a peace strategist and founder and CEO of International Civil Society Action Network, or ICAN. She has served around the globe as expert for the U.N. on conflict mediation and was architect of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda.
We’ll be right back.
[Break]
AG: Welcome back to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Ali Gharib.
The war in Iran is deepening. Instead of finding ways to tone down the conflict, all the sides are doubling down on ultimatums and escalation. The cost has come in human lives, including to Gulf residents, Israelis, and American troops, but most notably in Iran, where Israel and America have been expanding their bombing campaigns, including carpet bombing in densely populated cities.
Joining me now to discuss all this is Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, a peace strategist and the head of the civil society network ICAN.
And full disclosure here: This is gonna sound familiar to members of the family WhatsApp group, because Sanam is actually my cousin.
She’s also a veteran peace builder and has been working on conflict resolution for decades. She intimately knows Iran and is an analyst on these issues as well. Thanks for joining us, Sanam.
Sanam Naraghi Anderlini: Thank you for having me.
AG: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the trap that the war is falling into — this kind of logic of “escalation of all sides.” There are all these interested parties that are involved in the war — which is basically the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans — and they all have different interests. Can you talk about how all of those different interests right now point to this conflict escalating, rather than finding any off ramps?
SNA: So the way we have to understand this is that you have an Iranian regime that is basically focused on survival. They’ve always been — their logic has always been survival.
In a conflict like this, with two nuclear states, they are fighting a war of asymmetry. So their tactics have been, “How do you escalate the pain for the other side?” to actually bring it to an end quicker. We call it the “hurting stalemate”: How do you get into a stalemate of some sort that is hurting the various parties, so that you end up with some kind of resolution? But at the moment, it’s the logic of escalation to get to that point of pain.
For the Israelis, the logic has always been to try and decimate Iran as a regional power and as a power that would challenge them on the question of Palestine more than anything else. We saw that for them, the decimation of Iraq — or basically Iraq falling to its knees, as opposed to turning into a liberal democracy or Syria or Libya or any of these countries. Their fragmentation and essentially the destruction of the state in those countries was beneficial to the Israeli cause of both Greater Israel, but also vis-a-vis specifically the Palestinians.
So right now, with the Iran war going on, they also want to do as much damage as possible, and we’re seeing that on a daily basis. Hospitals have been hit, civilian sites have been hit, residential areas. When they went after Larijani, the national security adviser, over 100 civilians were killed.
We’ve just heard on Wednesday about a petrochemical plant that’s been hit. This is de facto chemical warfare now being played out, using the sources that are on the ground. So they are going full on and essentially escalating.
Iran is retaliating and is doing a sort of matching retaliation. You hit a petrochemical plant, they say, we’re gonna hit yours. So then comes the U.S. The U.S. — as we have repeatedly now heard from different U.S. officials — doesn’t really know why it’s doing this. Iran was not a threat to them. There was no nuclear threat, there was no ballistic missile threat. They got dragged into this war by Israel, and they are now in it.
The problem is that as a major power — as a superpower, frankly — they can’t be seen to lose. So it’s a little bit like the situation of Russia and Ukraine. Russia can’t be seen to lose to Ukraine. So the U.S. is now caught in that kind of trap. So they’re also escalating at the moment.
“The problem is that as a major power — as a superpower, frankly — they can’t be seen to lose.”
But actually what I’m really worried about is that there are no guardrails. We don’t have anyone standing and actually being the grown-up in the room saying, “There are nuclear plants. They shouldn’t be hit.” The implications of a Bushehr plant, which something was lobbed there. No damage was done. But the implications of this kind of damage and radioactive spillage for the entire Gulf region is really significant. And yet there is no real attention to this kind of escalation or trying to put, as I say, guardrails around essentially what are war crimes happening now.
AG: Sanam, maybe you can speak a little bit to what you see on the broader international scene, because I think there have been some shifts in the past week where we’ve seen Europe pushing back on a few things. But this has all been set up by a very long campaign that’s largely centered around human rights as an idea for justifying this sort of intervention and interventions like it before. We saw this in Afghanistan, we saw it in Iraq. We’ve seen it in a lot of places.
For you and I looking at this who’ve worked in this world — you more than myself — it’s been really stunning to watch that so many people fall for this idea of “This is a human rights intervention” — and yet it’s accomplished through massive, massive human rights violations. This targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilian facilities and homes and disproportionate casualties happening on things like the Larijani assassination.
Can you talk about how we got to this place where this rhetoric is built up around human rights to justify something like, if not quite a total war, at least a massive full-scale destruction of a country that we’re seeing in process right now?
“If Iraq had turned out to be a liberal democracy, it would’ve challenged Israel on the question of Palestine.”
SNA: We’ve had in the last 20 to 25 years, especially since the Iraq War in 2003, a lobby pushing for regime change in Iran. They did it in Baghdad. It used to be said that men go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran. The Iraq version of regime change ended up being a catastrophe from a U.S. perspective, but actually from an Israeli perspective and from a Saudi perspective, and even from a UAE perspective, the decimation of Iraq has been a success because if Iraq had turned out to be a liberal democracy, it would’ve challenged Israel on the question of Palestine. It would’ve challenged Saudi Arabia on the question of Islam and what is Islam; we wouldn’t have ended up with all this sort of Wahhabi/Salafi versions of Islam being spread around the world. And it could have possibly challenged the UAE on being an economic powerhouse.
Iraq is an educated — was an educated population. They have oil, they were wealthy, et cetera, but it was decimated. And these other three powers rose.
Iran was always on their agenda, and especially on the Israeli agenda. And the first threat that was perceived was, let’s make it a question of a nuclear threat. OK, so that was the big thing on the table. Nuclear negotiations happened; 2015 JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] is achieved.
AG: The Iran nuclear deal.
SNA: We see a change in tactic. We started seeing massive propaganda using Iran International and other television stations into Iran with very gauzy nostalgic stories of the Pahlavi era. Then we see them co-opting the Women Life Freedom movement in 2022. It was meant to be some sort of coalition opposition movement that was again, trying to co-opt Women Life Freedom.
Now, Women Life Freedom was authentic. It was homegrown. It had nothing to do with the diaspora. The diaspora supported it because it was so beautifully nonviolent and so inclusive. It was women’s rights, and we had men standing with women. Life and the question of life is both around economic livelihoods and justice and so forth. And then freedom. The question of, can we have democratic freedoms and dignity?
The Iranian regime crashes down on that as they often do when they see protest movements. They crack down heavily, but ironically they also back down. So once the protest stopped, what we saw was that the mandatory nature of the hijab basically disappears. You see Iranian women walking around wearing whatever they want.
But the question of, how do we go about with regime change from the outside again? The focus shifts, and with Trump coming into power [in 2016] and getting rid of the JCPOA, that was about controlling and containing the nuclear program, but also removing sanctions so there would be economic relief for the Iranian public. Obama never got rid of the sanctions, and by the time Trump came in, he got rid of the nuclear deal — nuclear side of it.
The Iranians maintained and then they continued cooperating with the U.N. and the nuclear experts for a long time with inspectors. Then at some point it became clear that there was not going to be a new deal. And so the whole thing disappeared.
In the meantime, what was happening was that the shift in D.C. and again with Israeli support, became about “maximum pressure,” which is around economic pressure. It was really strangling the Iranian economy and really hitting inflation and affecting very poor people.
At ICAN, we did a report on sanctions in 2012. It was called “Killing them Softly,” and we were looking at the humanitarian implications of sanctions back in 2012. In 2017 onwards, it comes in really, really heavily. We’ve even had Nancy Pelosi in February of 2026 saying, we imposed these sanctions with the view of hurting the poor Iranians in rural areas so that there would be an uprising.
AG: It’s worth mentioning too that this strategy really came out of Israel’s closest allies in Washington, right? This was like the Foundation for Defensive Democracies — these Likud-oriented, right-wing pro-Israel think tanks that had literally called for a strategy of maximum pressure, which is what Trump put in place.
SNA: Exactly. This has been an ongoing fight between different think tanks, different leanings, et cetera. But of course those guys have a lot more money and a lot more resources because they’ve literally got the backing of the Israeli government behind them.
So you get maximum pressure. You get the protests back in December of 2025. They were economic protests. It was the bazaar and the traders and others, but people were really feeling the inflation level. So December protests start, and we don’t really hear that much about them. There isn’t really that much sort of repression of these protests. It’s very much a domestic issue.
Then all of a sudden we see Reza Pahlavi coming into this domain and calling out to people and saying, go out 7th and 8th of January, go out into the protest. Go out in your millions. We are with you.
AG: Reza Pahlavi, of course, the former crown prince of Iran, who’s become a central figure of the right-wing Iranian opposition, and who has claimed for himself the role as the head of the transition to a purported democracy that’s soon to be coming in Iran.
SNA: We start seeing Mossad or Israeli-aligned assets on Twitter saying, we’re there, we’re on the ground with you. We are there to help you. So these messages need to really be investigated. Because if you know the Iranian regime, you know that their instinct when feeling threatened is to crack down, and they will crack down heavily on their own population.
So how can you sit in Virginia or in Maryland and tell people to go out onto the streets and say, we’re going to be there with you, and actually expose them to what became a very violent crackdown coming on the back of the Twelve Day War, the Israeli American war in June?
Again, it had been during nuclear negotiations, and the attacks on Iranian leadership was pretty significant. So you’re dealing already with a regime that is going to be paranoid about infiltration. In January, you say to people, go out onto the streets. People’s kids are going out, and they go out into the streets, and then we see the internet blackout. Again, during the Twelve Day War, there was [an] internet blackout because banks were being attacked. There were cyber attacks against Iranian banks by Israeli assets. So you’re dealing, as I say, with a regime that is already on hyper alert and paranoid, and so they react very violently.
How many people were killed? This becomes a big topic of debate and discussion. The human rights organizations, and the one that I follow is an organization called Harana, they did a very meticulous verification of people who died, families verifying and so forth. They had reached the number of about 7,008 people who had been killed during those two nights of protests. That’s a lot of people. But the machinery of propaganda — news, whatever you want to call it — started inflating the numbers. And it became 12,000 and then 20,000 and then 30,000 and then 40,000 and then 50,000.
AG: The 7,000 number is bad enough.
SNA: Yes.
AG: Here we were in 2013 or whatever it was, completely outraged about Sisi’s counter-coup against the Muslim Brotherhood killing 1,500 protesters in one day. And that was outrage. We got talks in Washington about cutting off weapons to Egypt, cutting off Egypt from aid.
These numbers were already staggering. So to just watch it balloon out of proportion like this with no basis and evidence, it really showed you that some of the opposition at this point was really just absolutely going for it and willing to stop at nothing, in a very Trumpian way,
SNA: It was Trumpian, but it was also very — suddenly it started to look like the Gaza playbook, right? Because it was very much like the horrific things that happened on October 7 in Israel. It was using that horrific incident to then rile up and get emotionally charged around what the response should be.
In the case of Iran, it became about, well we need to go and protect people. We started subtly seeing Iranians in the diaspora using certain talking points. Because I was hearing it from different places. First it was somebody would say, “This is a war of liberation. These people who were on the streets were fighting a war of liberation.” That’s a dangerous thing to say, because if you’re claiming that the protesters who went out on a Friday night and a Thursday night out of frustration, out of anger, whatever, were soldiers and it’s a war — then you are putting them directly at risk.
AG: This is part of the opposition, from the opposition perspective, the Pahlavi perspective too. Pahlavi, as we know, has been traveling to Israel the past few years, is really — I think it’s safe to say at this point — has become a stooge of the Israelis. This was absolutely his strategy too. You heard him during the January protest crackdown.
The January protests were effectively a nonviolent movement. One of the things that was so shocking about the breadth of the crackdown was that this was a nonviolent movement. Sure, OK, setting the occasional police station on fire, but that is not what the movement was about.
And you had Pahlavi here saying everybody in the regime is legitimate targets, even civilian officials. That’s calling for a civil war. That’s calling for war crimes.
SNA: That’s the problem that you’re sitting, again, you’re sitting in Potomac, Miami, or wherever he happened to be when he said all this, and he’s sending out people. And either you know your opposition, you know the force that you’re fighting against the regime, in which case you have to be mindful of what you’re doing. We have known for 47 years that this is a regime that will use violence and it has used violence throughout time. So if you’re claiming to be the leader of the opposition, do you put your followers at risk like that? That, to me, is a question of responsibility. That’s definitely an issue.
If you don’t know the nature of your adversary, then that’s also admitting incompetence of some sort. How could you not know this could happen? So what was the intent of telling people to go out into the streets and then having all these Mossad voices on Twitter? What was the intent of it? Was the intent creating this space where this violence would come out so that then the next excuse for regime change becomes this is a regime that is killing its own people, it’s awful to its own people? We’ve had all the propaganda all these years. People, they’ve had it up to here with the economics, with the corruption, with all of the things that are going on, and the answer becomes well, yeah, it needs military attack.
AG: This is where you really see the Israelis start to step up and say, rise up. And for whatever reason, because of the desperation of Iranian people, people really latch onto this. It’s incredible for us to think, like many of our relatives have enough sense, certainly our relatives who are inside Iran, many of whom are geriatric and the rest of whom are just sensible, aren’t going out in the street and listening to Reza Pahlavi. But you listen to anecdotes from them about their friends. These people were actually listening to these messages and going into the street and being shot at and slaughtered. Meanwhile, Pahlavi and the Israelis are saying, do it, rise up, overtake the government.
SNA: Yeah.
AG: The people on the ground themselves can’t be blamed for thinking that there’s some sort of plan in place. This connects back to what you were saying about the Israelis, where this kind of is the plan, right? It’s that they don’t need Pahlavi to work. They don’t need him to go in there and become this democratic leader. They just need him to lead a movement that damages the regime enough to put Iran into some kind of fractured state or state failure where it’s not a threat to Israel anymore.
SNA: Yeah. So what I started seeing, and I think this is the situation we’re in now, unfortunately, is that you have a regime that has sacrificed the country and the nation for its own survival, and they’re continuing to do that. Then we have an opposition led by the Israeli sort of mentality — but now very much owned by Iranian diaspora themselves — that is so driven by getting rid of the regime that they’re also willing to sacrifice the nation.
The rhetoric that we hear it’s just heartbreaking because when the girls’ school was hit some people were saying, “Oh, it’s the regime’s own rockets.” Exactly like what we heard in Gaza when the hospital was hit. Then it became “This is collateral damage. There’s a price for freedom.” I find that really quite revolting because I’m thinking, it’s not your kid. Those children did not sign up to be the price for freedom, whatever freedom means.
Then we started seeing Israeli journalists. I’ve been on podcasts with Israeli journalists where they’re telling me, “The Iranians wanted us to go in and liberate them.” And my response to them is: Liberate their bodies from their souls?
AG: Liberate them from their pharmaceutical factories and their hospitals and their girls’ schools.
SNA: So many schools now, I think it’s 60 schools have been hit. Schools, homes, energy sources, flour depots for making bread and corn, food, water, energy. All of these things are being hit. Police stations.
Ali Gharib: Homes — residential towers with hundreds of apartments.
SNA: Thousands, right? So they’re hiding behind this language of freedom and this language of human rights and then causing incredible mass human rights assault going forward in terms of atrocities. It’s all war crimes as well.
Again, at the forefront of it, we have Reza Pahlavi, who to me, is not only a puppet, he’s like a pied piper. He’s the one who led this diaspora into: I’m gonna give you heaven. And it’s now pretty hellish for the people on the ground in Iran. So this is something that we have to reckon with. I think diasporas — I’ve worked on conflicts for many years — diasporas often play a significant role in terms of shaping the policy.
But what I always felt with Iranians was that no matter what differences we may have had politically, what drives us is a love of country. The targeting right now has been against the state and the nation. When you hear that something like 50 heritage sites have been damaged, for each of us, when we think about Isfahan or when we think about iconic buildings in Tehran, whether it’s the Azadi Tower or the Azadi Stadium, these are places and things that have meaning to us as a nation. They are part of how communities are formed and imagined and created. Iranians have a deep sense of nationhood, yet in this context, in the way that this polarization has happened, as I say, you have people who are saying, “Well, we will rebuild.” Are you now saying that in this war, another 30,000 people can die for freedom?
This is pretty despicable when you’re sitting outside the country. If you want to fight the war then by all means, fly to Istanbul, take the bus, and go straight to Tehran and be on the streets with the people. But to sit outside and wage war is horrific.
“Those of us who sit outside have a particular responsibility. … People living inside, they may not have the same information.”
Those of us who sit outside have a particular responsibility. We have seen what the United States has done in these countries. We have access to all of the information — whether it’s Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan — we know what kind of entity we deal with and in the international space, when these countries get embroiled in conflict. I think we have a particular responsibility in terms of trying to prevent that happening to our own country. People living inside, they may not have the same information. As I say, they are so traumatized by what the regime has done that it’s easy to say, “I want something else.”
One last point, which I think is really significant, is that there’s a generational issue here. My generation is probably the last generation that remembers the revolution and the Iran–Iraq war. I was 11 when that happened. And for the years that I was returning to Iran to do my research and understand what was going on, I remember in the 1990s, there were student protests. And the taxi drivers, I would say to them, “Did you go to the protests?” And the taxi driver would say, “No, ma’am, we’ve already been out there once to be against something. I’ll go out there when I know it’s for something.”
So this idea of everybody united against the shah, thinking the day after was going to be better and then they got the Islamists. People have been inoculated against that. They remember the Iran–Iraq war. That was a pretty horrific war for eight years, and Iran had no allies in the world except for Israel and Syria. Israel was giving weapons to Iran throughout the 1980s. So it’s interesting the shifts that have happened.
But what I’m saying is that I’m in my 50s now, so the generations that come after me, they don’t remember the revolution. They don’t remember the war. And this rallying around the Pahlavi name as an alternative to the regime — “whatever it is, it’s gotta be better than the regime.” That’s exactly the parallel that we’re seeing. And it’s a very dangerous one, I think.
AG: This is something that you said when we spoke on the phone earlier that I do want to get to because I think this is very important and it actually speaks to both sides. What you said is that inside of us all— And I think this both animates the people inside Iran who, I don’t want to take away their agency. There are people there who are calling for these bombs and celebrating them.
I think that now we’re getting to a point where some people are waking up to what that actually means. Something you’d mentioned before is that the Twelve Day War last June seems now like it might have been a prelude to calm people’s nerves, that this won’t be as bad as you think. So when the call for more bombs and war comes, “bomb this regime into submission,” people won’t get what it is — I think now people increasingly are starting to get a grip on it — but still there are people who are diehard for it. Diehard for Pahlavi. Part of this is polarization and information compartmentalization where people are watching Iran International, the Fox News of the Iranian diaspora that beams into the country. They’re getting bad information. There’s conspiracy theories about the girls’ school bombing — all this stuff that we don’t need to get into all this detail about. But those people really are just looking for something to grasp, to hope for, right?
Then you’ve got people on the outside throwing up their hands, and I think, like we’ve seen this in our family discussions where people say, “God, I hope it ends soon.” And what you said to me earlier in our pre-interview is that hope is not really a strategy. What can be our strategy on the outside that’s not just hope? How do we look at this conflict in a way that can advance things for the country and for the people inside that we think is morally sound for us to push?
SNA: I genuinely think that if we care about Iran and Iranians, we need to be really advocating for very serious guardrails around the type of weapons that are being used and the type of targets that are being hit. As I said, if they go after Bushehr nuclear plant, there’s going to be radioactive spillage in Iran and in the Gulf. This is dangerous. This is really dangerous. Petrochemical plants, oil plants, these are the kinds of things that have been hit, and Iran is retaliating. So there needs to be a collective voice of saying, “Enough, stop this, we have to put some limits on this.” The weapons and the targets, that’s number one.
“If they go after Bushehr nuclear plant, there’s going to be radioactive spillage in Iran and in the Gulf. This is dangerous.”
Number two is that at this point, I would like more of us — and those people who have a larger platform than I do — to be talking about the political prisoners. There are thousands and thousands of people who were arrested in January who need to be released, but there are also the long-term ones and the dissidents and others who have had the courage, despite everything that’s going on, to actually issue statements and speak out about what they want change to be.
So there’s been a pretty vibrant conversation inside Iran from within the regime and from the periphery of it and the opposition around referenda and changing things and so forth.
Third thing. We need to take a page out of the book of the countries that have done this before and learn some lessons. The first place I go back to is South Africa, where the opposition to the apartheid regime gathered together in the 1950s, all sorts of communists and ANC [African National Congress] and all sorts of liberation fighters and others. But they got together, and they articulated the people’s charter, and it was a vision of the South Africa they wanted to create. That document became a roadmap and a destination, if you want, for what they were fighting for. What is it that we are fighting for? What unites us? This is the kind of thing that I wish Pahlavi had done, or I wish that we could now do and actually open up the space for conversations.
“What is it that we are fighting for? What unites us?”
Related to that is the acceptance amongst all of us that Iran is now a country of 93 million people. Even if 5 percent of those people are regime supporters, that is a population of 4.5 million, 5 million people. We have to say that this is a country in which they also have a role. The future of Iran, I would like if it was my choice, I would like a future of Iran where I get to go and visit my father’s grave without fear of being arrested or being detained, where I could take my children to visit the country and see the beauty of my homeland without fear. But I also want other people to be able to go live back home there, and the folks that are living there, who have had to be part and parcel of the system that is there — for them to also feel safe.
All the horrors that this regime actually played out on us, I don’t want to become them. That to me is the question. So it’s really thinking about it in this way of: What does it mean to live with the lens of human rights and inclusivity and plurality? Then what do we do with the most egregious elements, whether it’s in the prisons and the torturers, whether it’s the leaders who ordered the violence, those kinds of things need investigation.
Again, South Africa had a tribunal. They also had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Other countries have done that. Yemen had a national dialogue process for two years where they brought people from all sorts of political parties and tribes and young people and women to actually imagine the future that they were going to have. These are the kinds of things that we need to have in Iran.
Let’s remove the embedded violence that has shaped this regime and has infiltrated into society, and actually bring it back to the Iran that we all love and the history of pluralism and frankly, secularism, that goes back 2,500 years. Secularism means Muslims — diehard Muslims — also get to live and practice their lives, right? It’s that kind of a vision that I think we need to be thinking about.
AG: And we’re going to leave it there. Thanks for joining us on the Intercept Briefing, Sanam.
SNA: Thank you, Ali.
AG: That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is the managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is the copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review came, as always, from the great David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you, our loyal readers and listeners. Your donations, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.
Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.
Until next time, I’m Ali Gharib.
The post “Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.
Why Should Delaware Care?
On Thursday, Secretary of Education Cindy Marten announced her recommendation to revoke the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence’s charter, and State Board of Education members voted to approve her recommendation. As a result of the vote, the charter school will close its doors at the end of the 2025-26 school year. The vote marks Delaware’s first charter school closure by state regulators in a decade.
Delaware education officials announced Thursday that the state will move forward with closing a Georgetown charter school due to persistent struggles with low enrollment.
The Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence (BASSE) will close its doors at the end of this school year, leaving roughly 120 students from throughout Sussex County to find placements in new schools.
During a Thursday State Board of Education meeting, members voted to confirm Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten’s recommendation – also made that day – to close the school.
The decision came one day after BASSE students advocated for their future by holding a moment of silence in support of their school. They also lined the hallway with posters that said “We are BASSE strong,” and “Let us learn at BASSE.”
During the Thursday meeting, Marten cited concerns relating to enrollment and economic viability at the school. In her comments made at the meeting, she referenced a 2025 audit of the school, which stated that “auditors were unable to obtain sufficient information to assess the school’s financial condition.”
Also during the meeting, State Board of Education Vice President Deborah Stevens noted BASSE staff and families had passionately fought for their school’s survival. Still, she said the reality is that Delaware’s public education funding formula relies on the number of students enrolled in a school.
“When there is a lack of students, there’s also a lack of funding, and it really does put a school in jeopardy as a result,” she said.
Speaking during the meeting’s public comment period, BASSE Board of Education Secretary Katherine Cauley noted that Marten’s December announcement of a state investigation into the school came just as prospective students were sending in applications for attendance the following year.
She indicated that the timing of the announcement amounted to state officials not giving the schools “a fair chance” to boost its enrollment.
During a February meeting between BASSE and Delaware’s Charter School Accountability Committee, school officials also argued that Marten’s announcement caused some parents to feel uncertain about their kids’ future at the school.
Named after the prominent civil rights attorney who was born in nearby Milton, the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence was founded in 2018.
Shortly after the announcement of the closure on Thursday, BASSE released a statement calling the decision troubling, “given that the Secretary has never visited the school or spoken directly with its leadership.”
The decision marks the first Delaware charter school closure in seven years and the first to be closed by state regulators in a decade. It also leaves Sussex County with just two charter schools, compared to six in Kent County and 15 in New Castle County.
In 2016, the state Board of Education revoked the charter of the Delaware STEM Academy. In recent years, most troubled charter schools have voluntarily closed, rather than face a forced closure.
Charter schools are publicly funded but independently operated by their own board of directors. They are not eligible to receive taxpayer dollars for facilities and capital projects, but do receive state funding for each enrolled student.
The tuition-free schools feature specialized missions or academic curricula that differ from traditional public schools, and that requires them to maintain certain enrollment levels and reporting duties to the state Department of Education, which issues their founding charters.
While BASSE will close largely because of low enrollment, many students and parents told Spotlight Delaware on Wednesday that they value the school because of its small learning environment, which they say has benefited students’ learning outcomes.
BASSE is made up of students from throughout Sussex County, where many school districts grapple with overcrowded schools.
One eighth-grade student named Bella said the small-school environment has helped her improve her reading, writing, and public speaking skills because she gets more quality time with her teachers.
Bella previously attended the Laurel School District, which is at 76% capacity, according to the Delaware Department of Education.
Bella said she wants to become a special education teacher when she grows up, and believes that the tight-knit community at BASSE has helped show her “what it actually takes to be a spec ed teacher.”
BASSE special education teacher Sherri Webster, who started working at the school at the end of September, also said the school’s small environment helps her develop close bonds with her students.
In the past, Webster has worked at middle schools where caseloads of 50 special education students caused some to “fall through the cracks.” At BASSE, she typically works with just 18 students — less than half of her previous caseload.
Webster also said she has seen more success with her students at BASSE than anywhere else she has worked.
“Here, you’re able to really see your work and how you’re impacting these kids. It’s tremendous,” she said.
Multiple students also told Spotlight Delaware about their experiences with bullying in previous schools.
BASSE, they said, is a safe space for them.
Lizzie, a ninth grader, said she was bullied at two previous schools before coming to BASSE midway through the 2024-25 school year. She called the charter school her “last hope.”
Ultimately, she met another ninth grader, Maddie, who she says has become “like a sister.”
Aside from close bonds, Lizzie also said BASSE is the first place where she has been able to advocate for herself in the classroom. She has an individualized education plan (IEP) to help with her speech, and says she was able to sit in on an IEP meeting with school staff and her mom — something she never had the opportunity to do before.
“I really like to advocate for myself in those types of situations,” she said. “I love to be there in the conversation.”
While parents on Wednesday did not know whether their school would reopen for the next school year, some said they knew for certain that their children would not return to traditional school districts.
Megan Wharton said her son went to a Christian school for years before deciding he wanted something different. He then enrolled in a traditional public school where he had an “awful” experience with bullies.
Wharton then enrolled her son at BASSE at the start of this school year, where his life has changed, she said. He is now even on the honor roll.
Wharton said she had been praying that BASSE would not close, and she had already enrolled her son at the charter for the next school year.
She knew one thing for sure. Her son would not go back to his regular school district for the eighth grade.
“I will do whatever I have to do … but never back into (traditional) public school,” she said.
The post State will close Georgetown charter school at end of academic year appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Anglo-Dutch company, which also owns Dove and Hellmann’s, will focus more on personal care products if deal agreed
Unilever, the owner of Marmite, Dove and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, is in talks to combine its food business with the US-based spice and seasoning maker McCormick.
The Anglo-Dutch food company – which last year spun off its ice-cream division, the home to Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum and Wall’s – has entered discussions over the future of the “highly attractive” business.
Continue reading...States were on notice from the U.S. Department of Justice that if they didn’t fall in line, the federal government would force them into compliance.
It wasn’t President Donald Trump’s administration applying pressure. It was the early 1990s, and President Bill Clinton had signed the “motor voter” law requiring states to offer voter registration when someone applies for a driver’s license.
Idaho, with its fiercely independent streak, didn’t want to participate. So instead of going along with the federal government’s new National Voter Registration Act, state legislators followed the recommendation of Idaho’s top election officials and scrambled for a way out. Because the federal voter law said states with same-day voter registration could be exempt, Idaho lawmakers passed a bill almost unanimously, with full support from Republicans, to adopt same-day registration.
Idaho’s chief deputy secretary of state at the time, Ben Ysursa, described the move as an almost existential response to “an insidious federal intrusion into state election procedures.”
The Clinton Justice Department eventually sued three states for not complying with its demands. By then, Idaho’s had a shield against litigation due to its exemption.
Three decades later, the exemption and the philosophy that led to it are at the heart of Idaho’s refusal to comply with a very different demand by the Trump Justice Department. The state’s top election official cites the exemption as one reason he will not sign a deal to give the Trump administration all the voter data his office holds, including sensitive personal information like partial Social Security and driver’s license numbers.
Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane is one of about a dozen Republicans nationally to resist the administration’s efforts to gather sensitive voter data ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, in the face of litigation threats from the Justice Department.
In a state that Trump won in 2024 by one of the largest margins in the country, an effort that the administration touts as essential to weeding out noncitizen voters has tested the limits of what a committed Trump stronghold will tolerate when it comes to privacy and federal power.
Lists of voter addresses and party affiliations are often available to the public through an open records request. McGrane provided the government with this version. But state election administrators also keep more sensitive information such as a person’s exact date of birth and partial Social Security number. In Idaho, the law says this information can’t be given out — and that’s what the Trump administration is still after.
Among the other five states exempt from the law, three have refused to give up their voters’ sensitive information and have since been sued by the Justice Department. Wyoming handed over its data without a lawsuit. Other states that are not exempt have also been sued.
McGrane, who is an attorney, told the Justice Department in letters that he doesn’t see any legal reason why he should honor the government’s request — and that, given the administration’s recent admissions over its handling of sensitive data, he couldn’t be sure the department would keep it safe, which is his duty under state law.
The trimmed-down version of voter info he’d already handed over should be enough for “any legitimate inquiry” by the government into how effectively Idaho maintains its voter lists, McGrane wrote.
Through a spokesperson, McGrane declined an interview request from ProPublica, citing the possibility of an impending lawsuit from the Justice Department. A spokesperson for the Justice Department also declined to comment.
A Justice Department attorney threatened to sue Idaho in December, in a halting voicemail with McGrane’s office that was obtained by ProPublica and previously reported on by the Idaho Capital Sun.
“I need to get some clarification as to what you’re going to be doing. Or not doing. So, again, I need a response from you,” the lawyer says in the recording. “You may have seen in the news that we have sued six states earlier this week for refusing to provide their voter registration lists, and we’re preparing additional lawsuits.”
The lawyer then tells the secretary of state’s office he would “like to keep everyone out of that as possible — as much as possible, but I haven’t heard anything back from you.”
Ysursa, who served three terms as secretary of state until 2015, said McGrane is “in a much more politically volatile situation than I ever was.”
“Going against Trump in Idaho on certain things, that’s a fine line,” Ysursa said. “And I think he’s doing a good job. He’s doing the right thing.”
Public policy surveys in Idaho conducted since the 1990s have surfaced a current of “distrust or wariness towards federal control or national control,” said Matthew May, survey research director at the Boise State University School of Public Service.
The polling over time has revealed Idahoans’ strong belief in independence, May said.
In the months since McGrane’s refusal, more than 130 constituents have called, emailed and sent handwritten cards and letters to his office. Of those, just one person said they wanted McGrane to provide information to the Trump administration. The others were supportive, appreciative or, in some cases, seemingly panicked by the prospect of their private information being released.
Although the senders skewed more Democratic than Idaho’s electorate, just over half the messages came from Republicans and unaffiliated voters, based on a review of voter registration data for commenters who left their names.
“Mr McGrane has done a masterful job of dancing around the US Justice Dept request for the full voter records of Idaho voters,” wrote one registered Republican. “When the dancing no longer works, I expect Mr McGrane to give them a big fat NO!
“Voting is our one sacred right in this country,” the person continued. “DOJ has no legitimate business receiving our PRIVATE voter information. They may threaten to sue, but so will the voters of Idaho if you grant their request. Do not give them our personal voter information. Thank you.”
Ysursa told ProPublica that he has urged McGrane to “hold the line,” even amid threats of repercussions. Ysursa is one of nine former secretaries of state who filed an amicus brief in federal court, arguing against the administration’s demands for full voter information.
The Trump administration’s creep toward nationalizing elections runs counter to the ethos of “keep your federal hands off Idaho,” Ysursa said.
McGrane is a self-described election nerd who worked his way up through elections offices, as opposed to cultivating a resume as a professional politician. He served as a county elections chief and gained a reputation for approaching voting day with a Super Bowl level of enthusiasm. He also became known for his ability to resist the political winds.
McGrane was one of seven people featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2022 as “the defenders” of America’s elections. That year, McGrane was the only Idaho Republican candidate for secretary of state who did not back the false claim that fraud was responsible for Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
In perhaps the strongest sign that Trump’s base in Idaho has not been inflamed by McGrane’s pushback on the administration’s demand for voter rolls — which received plenty of media attention locally — he drew no challenger by last month’s deadline to enter the Idaho Republican primary for his position.
While the Constitution gives states the authority to run elections, the National Voter Registration Act gives the federal government an oversight role when it comes to ensuring voter lists are properly maintained. The law says election officials must make a “reasonable effort” to keep ineligible voters off of the rolls, and typical oversight comes in the form of lawsuits claiming that states aren’t doing a good enough job.
Under Trump, the Justice Department has gone a step further. The department claims it has the right to seize states’ unredacted voter rolls without proving its case in court, citing in lawsuits the powers that agency officials say they have under the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and the Civil Rights Act.
The Justice Department has privately told states more about its intentions, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through public records requests.
In Montana, a federal lawyer told the secretary of state’s legal counsel that the department was requesting voter rolls to “facilitate a review for noncitizens and dead voters,” adding that federal officials would be able to assess whether there are duplicate registrations as well.
The demands come as part of the Trump administration’s focus on hunting down noncitizens on the voter rolls, a long-standing preoccupation for the president. He has long claimed, without evidence, that noncitizens have infiltrated the rolls to influence elections.
Three judges who have considered the government’s lawsuits fully so far have dismissed them, saying that the federal laws the Trump administration cites as the basis for its demands do not apply — especially not where voters’ private information is concerned.
In Oregon, U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai wrote that the Justice Department’s claims were “troubling,” representing federal overreach.
In California, U.S. District Judge David Carter said the centralization of the information would have a chilling effect on voter registration, leading to decreased turnout as people worry their data could be used for an “inappropriate or unlawful purpose.”
“This risk threatens the right to vote which is the cornerstone of American democracy,” Carter wrote.
In Michigan, U.S. District Judge Hala Y. Jarbou echoed that interpretation, writing that “the risk of having one’s personal information misused will deter people from registering to vote.”
The Justice Department has appealed all of the courts’ decisions.
Leaders in Republican-led states that have held back their voter rolls, meanwhile, have taken pains to show they are making other efforts to keep noncitizens from voting.
Idaho started looking for evidence of problems well before the Trump administration’s request. McGrane said in a letter to the Justice Department that his office worked with federal agencies to check the citizenship status of all registered Idaho voters in the lead-up to the 2024 general election.
Given what Idaho has already done and the processes already in place, the federal government has “no legal or practical rationale for duplicative review,” McGrane wrote.
The tools Idaho employed, he said, included a Department of Homeland Security program known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.
Idaho’s search found 11 cases of noncitizens registered to vote — none of whom actually cast votes in 2024 — and state police referred those cases to the Justice Department’s chief prosecutor in Idaho for review.
McGrane told the Justice Department that he hadn’t heard anything about those cases since.
The post As Trump Demands Voter Data, This Fiercely Independent Red State Says No appeared first on ProPublica.
Interim president announces changes after firing defence minister, who was close to Maduro, the leader ousted by US
Venezuela’s interim president has said she has replaced all her senior military commanders, the latest in a flurry of changes since the US ousted Nicolás Maduro.
Delcy Rodríguez announced the changes in a social media post a day after firing the long-serving defence minister, who had been close to Maduro, and replacing him with a former intelligence chief.
Continue reading...In retaliation for the ongoing U.S.–Israeli war, Iran responded with a novel form of counterattack. For the first time in military history, private sector data centers came under deliberate attack.
In an era when companies known for e-commerce, social networks, and search engines have also become close collaborators with militaries, is bombing their servers fair game?
Three days after the U.S. and Israel began their joint bombardment, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched kamikaze drone strikes against Amazon-owned data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain that provide an array of cloud computing services to customers throughout the Middle East. The impacts and subsequent fires “caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” according to Amazon, resulting in service outages across the region.
The motive behind the attack, according to Iranian state television, was not to block people from ordering groceries or posting to social media, but rather to highlight “the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.” Though only Amazon’s centers are known to have come under fire, a March 11 tweet from the quasi-official Tasnim News Agency listed dozens of regional facilities, including data centers owned by Microsoft, Google and others, deemed “Enemy Technology Infrastructure” suitable for targeting.
It’s unclear if the Amazon data centers struck by Iranian drone strikes are used for military purposes or civilian purposes, or both. And it’s unknown if the attacks in any way hindered the militaries of the U.S., Israel, or their allies in the Gulf from using AI or other cloud-based services in their war efforts. But with Amazon, Google, and even Facebook parent company Meta are all eager partners of the Pentagon that augment the destructive power of the United States in Iran and elsewhere, server farms may now have the same status as factories building bombs and warplanes.
Scholars of international law and the laws of armed conflict say that when a military runs on the cloud, the cloud becomes a legal military target. But the cloud is an abstraction, not a physical site — a global network of millions of chips in servers spread across hundreds of massive buildings across the planet, servicing both civilian apps and state tools used to surveil and kill. Separating the former from the latter is an extremely difficult task.
“The legality turns on whether the specific facility, at the specific moment, is genuinely serving the military operations of a party to the conflict in a way that offers a concrete and definite advantage to the attacker,” explained León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a lawyer with the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague.
Sometimes the split between military and civilian use is straightforward. Microsoft, for example, helps run the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, which the Pentagon says provides it with “greater lethality.” This work involves the processing of classified data, which the government does not want commingling with civilian tech. Cloud computing services are generally offered via geographically distinct “regions,” each made up of many physical data centers. Customers typically select the region that is closest to them to minimize lag time. Microsoft’s US DoD Central and US DoD East regions are “reserved for exclusive [Department of Defense] use,” according to the company, and are serviced by data centers in Des Moines, Iowa, and Northern Virginia, respectively.
Amazon offers similar cloud regions exclusive for Pentagon use, though the location of these data centers is not public. Oracle, another JWCC provider, operates Pentagon-specific facilities in Chicago, Phoenix, and Virginia. Companies are understandably tight-lipped about where exactly on the map these facilities stand, in no small part because Iran, or any country at war with the U.S., would have reason to target them.
“A data center that is used solely or primarily for military applications is targetable,” said Ioannis Kalpouzos, an international law scholar and visiting professor at Harvard Law, “and a center that supports the Pentagon’s JWCC falls in that category.”
The march of data center construction has become a point of contention across the United States and around the world, with communities frequently — and sometimes successfully — rallying to block what they view as enormous resource-draining eyesores. But for those living in the widening shadow of data centers, planned or built, their status as military targets may be unsettling beyond concerns over water and energy consumption.
And as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aggressively shoehorns AI tools into the military wherever possible, the rapid expansion of data centers means the potential proliferation of legitimate military targets across the United States.
With comparisons between the destructive power of AI-augmented warfare and nuclear weaponry becoming more common, the ever-expanding network of American data centers may recreate Cold War anxieties around intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, silo placement. The country’s nuclear launch capabilities were famously clustered in the relatively sparsely populated Upper Midwest, forming a so-called “nuclear sponge” that would draw Soviet nukes away from population centers and toward rural areas and farmland.
But the legal calculus around most data centers will be less clear. Google, for example, says the Pentagon uses both its general purpose public cloud and smaller specialized air-gapped networks that don’t touch the public internet, depending on the sensitivity of the data involved. Even cloud work involving Top Secret military data “can operate within Google’s trusted, secure, and managed data centers.” The company also sells modular mini-data centers for use closer to battlefields or bases.
These arrangements, shrouded in both military and trade secrecy, make it hard to assess whether a server is hosting a student’s homework or Air Force R&D, blurring the legality of attacking data centers that may host both. Google may have little control over how governments use its cloud tools; The Intercept has previously reported that Google executives worried internally they wouldn’t be able to tell how the Israeli military was deploying its cloud services.
“The practical challenge is that cloud infrastructure is often technically opaque, even to providers themselves,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz said. “The services a given data center supports may not be readily ascertainable from the outside or even inside, which complicates the attacker’s legal obligations considerably.”
Amazon and Google’s Project Nimbus similarly provides cloud computing services across the Israeli government, including both civilian agencies and the Ministry of Defense, along with state-owned weapons companies.
“The picture becomes more legally complex when a data center functions as a so-called ‘dual-use’ object,” simultaneously hosting military data or capabilities alongside civilian services,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz told The Intercept. “Once a facility is found to make an effective contribution to military action, the entire physical object can, under the dominant legal view, qualify as a military objective.”
The embrace of commercial cloud computing by the U.S. and others has muddled an already murky legal picture, Castellanos-Jankiewicz explained. “A military’s decision to store classified data or run AI-enabled military systems on commercial cloud infrastructure shared with civilian services could itself raise legal concerns — particularly if the commingling of military and civilian uses makes a strike more likely or increases the foreseeable harm to civilians when one occurs.”
Determining whether a given data center can be legally attacked under international humanitarian law — itself comprised of various treaties that not every country adheres to — relies on a complex series of balancing tests that rarely produce concrete answers. To begin with, every object and person is generally presumed civilian and exempt from attack under this framework. Before launching a strike, a country is supposed to have a verifiable reason to believe a data center contributes to the enemy war effort, and reason to believe an attack will appreciably harm that effort. What “effectively contributes to military action” will, of course, be a source of disagreement.
Anthropic’s Claude large language model was reportedly used to accelerate American airstrikes against Iran; Claude, in turn, was built in part using 500,000 chips housed in an $11 billion Amazon data center in Indiana. If Claude is now arguably a weapon, is this Indiana site the data equivalent of a bomb factory? Kalpouzos, the Harvard Law visiting professor, told The Intercept it depends on the facts at the moment the bomb hits, not past usage. “If the facility is currently used in the training of the LLM that is used in the conduct of military operations — for example, by fine-tuning object classification or user-interaction features — then this could render it targetable,” he said.
In a recent article for Just Security, Klaudia Klonowska and Michael Schmitt said that the law calls for proportionality and restraint even against military targets. An attack against a data center that provided both military and civilian computing would need to be precise enough to destroy the former while minimizing harm to the latter, they argued. But international law may call for a degree of carefulness that militaries have little interest in. “If it were possible to attack only the area of the data center where servers hosting military data are located without destroying the entire center, the attacker would need to do so,” they wrote.
These requirements can be hard to observe in reality. The U.S. and Israel both tout the extreme precision of airstrikes that regularly slaughter civilians. And neither country, nor Iran, is a signatory to some of the relevant legal frameworks that make up the so-called “laws of armed conflict” in the first place.
Indiscriminate warfare practice by U.S. and Israel has also, ironically, been instrumental in reshaping how these laws are interpreted and effectively loosened. Throughout the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israel’s military and the Pentagon both made clear it’s acceptable to destroy an apartment block or hospital if one first claims there is a genuine military target inside.
The second Trump administration in particular has been keen to more tightly integrate Silicon Valley into the global American killing apparatus, a plan to which the industry has shown itself to be largely amenable. Even after being thoroughly maligned by the administration following the collapse of its Pentagon deal over purported disagreements around safety guardrails, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a public statement making clear he still wanted in on military spending: “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences. We both are committed to advancing US national security and defending the American people, and agree on the urgency of applying AI across the government.” That attitude, now commonplace across the tech sector, will see the further commingling of consumer tech and warfare both in the abstract and under sprawling data center rooftops across the country.
“These [data centers] are further melding military and civilian infrastructure,” said Kalpouzos, “and together with the increasingly permissive rules of engagement adopted by the U.S. and Israel, are potentially drawing in larger sectors of the economy and society in what is targeted and destroyed.”
The post Data Centers Are Military Targets Now appeared first on The Intercept.
Having lapped its rivals in the US landscape, the most powerful American sports league is pushing for supersonic expansion of its calendar and its geography
“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy.” When Mark Cuban, then owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, fired that line at the NFL in 2014, he was partly goading and partly gloating.
It felt directionally true. The NFL looked bloated, arrogant and vulnerable. Decades-long skeletons were tumbling out of the closet. Crisis followed crisis: concussions, Colin Kaepernick, sinister owners, cheating scandals and an almost Nixonian attempt to institute law and order. Youth participation declined. Football felt, if not dying, then at least dated, creaking under the weight of its own mythology.
Continue reading...It’s difficult to put yourself in the place of Cherise Doyley, a pregnant mother of three who found herself facing a judge while in labor at the University of Florida Health hospital in downtown Jacksonville.
She had arrived at the facility with a plan for her birth. She wanted to try for a vaginal delivery, but she understood from years of experience as a professional birthing doula that things don’t always go as planned.
She arrived overnight at the hospital after her water broke. Doctors told her they were concerned about the risk of uterine rupture, a potentially deadly complication for her and her baby. She understood the risk to be less than 2% and repeatedly told doctors she wouldn’t consent to a cesarean without trying to have a vaginal delivery first. The doctors appeared to relent, leaving her to labor for several more hours.
Then a nursing supervisor wheeled a tablet up to her bed and informed her she was in court. The reason? Failing to agree to a C-section.
When advocates for pregnant women say that you shouldn’t lose your constitutional rights just because you conceived, this is the kind of situation they’re talking about.
I’m a reporter based in Alabama, and throughout my career, I’ve focused on women facing the consequences of the state’s fetal personhood policy. That’s the idea that fetuses should have the same legal status as children. My investigation shows how a similar theory played into the cases of two women: Cherise Doyley and Brianna Bennett, who experienced eerily similar situations in Florida. In both cases, they found themselves fighting for their rights to make medical decisions because they were pregnant.
I obtained a video recording of Doyley’s court hearing. Watching her argue her case from her hospital bed shocked me. Even though courts have found time and time again that you can’t force someone to undergo medical treatment — even if it could save someone else’s life — the video underscored for me how pregnant women are the rare exception.
In several states, judges have ruled pregnant patients can be forced to receive blood transfusions or remain on bed rest if it is in the best interest of the fetus. In Doyley’s case, a court would force her to undergo surgery.
ProPublica has already investigated how abortion restrictions can lead to pregnant women being denied lifesaving care. Experts worry that the opposite problem, forced treatment, could also become more common in states like Florida that have fetal personhood policies.
Doyley signed a waiver allowing the hospital to discuss her case with ProPublica, but a spokesperson for University of Florida Health in Jacksonville would not comment, citing patient privacy.
By sharing and examining Doyley’s case with her consent, we aim to show you what forced medical treatment can look like. And, while we encourage you to read the full investigation, we wanted to offer you a look inside the Zoom court hearing so you can see for yourself what happened.
You can see the confusion on Doyley’s face as she realizes she’s being taken to court over her medical decisions. She asked for a lawyer, or at least a patient advocate. Florida courts don’t require lawyers for pregnant women in hearings about their medical decisions and the hospital didn’t provide an advocate, so Doyley had to go it alone.
Judge Michael Kalil was on the call in his black robe and explained how the hearing would work. Doyley, a Black woman, was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to IVs and monitors and covered by a sheet. She was surrounded on the screen by nearly a dozen doctors and lawyers, most of them white, who offered a lot of testimony about what could happen to Doyley’s baby if she continued to refuse a C-section.
Dr. Erin Burnett said during the hearing that she did not think Doyley could successfully give birth vaginally. A long labor could increase the risk of uterine rupture, which could kill Doyley and the child, she said. Dr. John Davis, the chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department, said in the hearing the hospital had been recognized for its low C-section rate and did not perform unnecessary surgeries. Doyley’s condition required intervention, he said.
“Everybody was very concerned about the baby’s welfare,” Jenny Van Ravestein, director of women’s services at the hospital, said during the hearing.
Burnett and Davis did not respond to requests for comment, and the hospital declined ProPublica’s requests to interview them and others involved in Doyley’s care.
The research on the risks of uterine rupture after prior C-sections is unclear. Studies have found that 0.15% to 2.3% of these labors resulted in a rupture, depending on a number of factors such as body mass, a history of successful vaginal births and whether the labor began spontaneously or had to be induced. Either number felt pretty low to Doyley.
What the testimony doesn’t include, though, is much about the downsides Doyley faced from having another C-section, which could entail a long recovery, infection and other complications, along with the risk of death.
But she couldn’t explain her reasoning until the judge decided to unmute her.
Doyley had her reasons to want to avoid major abdominal surgery: She had difficult recoveries from her previous C-sections. A hemorrhage after a prior C-section had sent her back to the hospital for almost a week.
She worried that she wouldn’t be able to care for her children if she was struggling with recovery from the surgery itself and potentially also with complications. And she was concerned that if she were to die, her children could fall into the foster care system. Doyley said she didn’t see surgery as a low-risk option. She wondered aloud in the hearing if her other children’s lives — and her own — mattered to the hospital and doctors.
Kimberly Mutcherson, a law professor at Rutgers University, said that women who want to opt for care that seems risky to doctors often face accusations of not caring about their babies.
“You’re somebody who is a bad mother, right?” Mutcherson said. “Which is a huge part of what the thought process is here. This is not what mothers do. Mothers sacrifice, including allowing somebody to cut you open.”
Obstetricians care for two interconnected patients — the mother and her fetus. Sometimes their needs conflict. When that happens, the ethical guidelines for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say the doctor should prioritize the well-being of the mother. However, these cases show that doctors sometimes elevate the welfare of the fetus over the mother, said Elizabeth Kukura, a law professor at Drexel University.
“It reflects a deep understanding of women as the incubators,” Kukura said. “Women in their role as childbearers.”
The hearing dragged on for more than two hours. At one point, Doyley asked for a transfer to another hospital because she did not want anyone involved in the hearing to operate on her if she needed a C-section. Hospital officials said that wasn’t likely to happen since another hospital would have to accept her as a patient first.
Doyley agreed to stay at University of Florida Health but asked if the hospital could assign a Black nurse or doctor to her care. She wondered aloud in the hearing what would happen in the morning, after the 6 a.m. deadline imposed by the court had passed. “They’re going to tie me up and go give me a C-section against my will?”
The judge did not order an immediate C-section, but he said the hospital could perform one in an emergency without her consent.
Doyley later said she did her best to maintain her poise and composure. And at the end, she even thanked the judge and highlighted how absurd the whole thing felt to her.
“I appreciate you spending two hours on a Sunday going through my medical history and fighting for my vagina and my baby,” she said.
Overnight, doctors said the baby’s heart rate dropped for several minutes. They rushed Doyley into surgery, and she, once again, gave birth via C-section.
The next morning at 8 a.m., nurses again put Doyley in front of a tablet for a final hearing. Doyley said the baby was born at 2 a.m., and she still hadn’t been taken to the neonatal intensive care unit to see her daughter.
“Tell them I don’t want to be on,” she said. “Y’all can have your own meeting. I want to see my child.”
Once Kalil heard the baby had been born, he wished Doyley well and closed the case.
In response to questions from ProPublica, Kalil wrote in an email that the judicial code of conduct prohibits judges from commenting on cases. “These ethical standards exist to protect the integrity of the judicial process, ensure fairness to all parties, and preserve the Court’s neutrality,” he wrote.
For a year, Doyley and her family tried to forget about the case and move on. But she couldn’t shake the feeling of violation. She said if the hospital could force her to undergo surgery, it could happen to anyone.
“When we use the courts to basically strong-arm, bully someone into an unnecessary medical procedure against their will, it’s akin to torture, in my eyes,” Doyley said.
The post She Was in Labor at a Florida Hospital. Then She Was in Zoom Court for Refusing a C-Section. appeared first on ProPublica.
Rather than evacuation, Israel’s defense minister said the mission now is “to protect northern communities against raids and anti-tank fire.”
Israel’s assault on the world’s largest natural gas deposit has renewed tensions between the two allies’ end goals in Iran.
This is not Britain’s war, it’s Trump’s and Netanyahu’s. The prime minister should be wary of becoming ensnared like Blair was with Iraq
Is this the turning point? A deranged US president and an Israeli prime minister facing prosecution are seeking to entice the armies of the world into the stupidest war of the 21st century. Israel’s strike this week on Iran’s South Pars gas field was clearly meant to provoke an Iranian retaliation so massive as to ensure a ferocious response from Donald Trump. Thus escalation beckons. This is how small wars become big.
There is only one way of calling a halt. It is for Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to stop bombing Iran. Yet both leaders clearly see themselves as trapped. Trump, having already claimed to have won the war, now feels lonely. Though he has amassed the largest aggressive force of modern times, he pleads with his one-time allies to come and give him moral support. But Trump started this war. He must face the wound to his pride that may go with stopping it. He must then complete the harder task of getting Israel also to stop.
Continue reading...Unseasonably warm and even dangerous temperatures this week were up to 30F above average for the time of year
The record-breaking heatwave scorching the US west this week would have been “virtually impossible” if not for the climate crisis, a team of scientists has determined.
Millions of Americans from the Pacific coast to the Rockies baked under unseasonably warm and even dangerous temperatures this week, with temperatures up to 30F (17C) above average for the time of year.
Continue reading...AleRunner writes: "China is helping Cuba race to capture renewable solar energy as the United States imposes an effective oil blockade on the Caribbean island, creating its worst energy crisis in decades," reports The Washington Post. Later in the article, it states that "China's decades-long push into clean energy technology is now helping to protect it from the soaring oil and gas crisis spurred by Trump's war against Iran," and that "Chinese exports of solar equipment to Cuba skyrocketed from about $5 million in 2023 to $117 million in 2025 and show no sign of stopping." According to researchers from Ember, solar could be responsible for as much as 10% of Cuba's electricity generation. "That would be among the fastest expansions of solar energy anywhere [...] and place Cuba ahead of most countries -- including the U.S. -- in the share of electricity generated by sun power," the report says. As the Iran war drives energy prices higher, countries around the world are working overtime to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. China sees this as a big opportunity. "Chinese authorities have made clear that they intend to replicate what they're doing in Cuba elsewhere," reports the Washington Post.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
IEA makes 10 recommendations to help households and businesses prepare for a drawn-out disruption to energy markets
The world’s energy watchdog has advised governments to reduce highway speeds and encouraged workers to carpool or, ideally, work from home to combat soaring oil prices and impending fuel shortages caused by the Middle East conflict.
It has also recommended countries consider limiting car access to designated zones in large cities, by giving vehicles with odd-numbered plates access on different weekdays to those with even-numbered plates.
Work from home where possible to save petrol.
Reduce highway speed limits by at least 10km/h to reduce fuel usage.
Encourage public transport to reduce oil demand.
Limit car access to roads in large cities through a number-plate rotation scheme.
Increase car sharing.
Encourage efficient driving for commercial vehicles through load optimisation and vehicle maintenance.
Divert LPG use from transport to preserve it for essential needs like cooking.
Avoid air travel where possible.
Encourage electric cooking and other options to reduce reliance on LPG.
Help industrial facilities switch between different petrochemical feedstocks to free up LPG.
Continue reading...Artificial intelligence agent instructed engineer to take actions that exposed user and company data internally
An AI agent instructed an engineer to take actions that exposed a large amount of Meta’s sensitive data to some of its employees, in the latest example of AI causing upheaval in a large tech company.
The leak, which Meta confirmed, happened when an employee asked for guidance on an engineering problem on an internal forum. An AI agent responded with a solution, which the employee implemented – causing a large amount of sensitive user and company data to be exposed to its engineers for two hours.
Continue reading...An investigation by journalists working with Republik magazine may have struck a nerve by suggesting the company has failed in Switzerland
It was over beers on an autumn evening in Zurich in 2024 that a group of journalists with an independent Swiss research collective began to discuss investigating Palantir, one of the world’s biggest tech companies.
Three years earlier, Palantir had advertised that it was setting up a “European hub” in the Swiss municipality of Altendorf, a sleepy town of roughly 7,000 people on the shores of Lake Zurich.
Continue reading...Boyband drops album that speaks to its Korean roots ahead of Seoul comeback concert, with more than a quarter of a million fans expected to attend
K-pop stars BTS released a new album on Friday billed as reflecting the maturing boy band’s Korean roots and identity, as buzz built ahead of their open-air comeback concert in the heart of Seoul.
The Saturday night gig, which is expected to draw around 260,000 people, will be BTS’s first after a hiatus of almost four years while all seven members served compulsory military service. It comes ahead of an 82-date world tour.
Continue reading...Dončić drops 60 as Lakers win eighth straight
LeBron posts triple-double in Miami return
Luka Dončić scored 60 points, LeBron James had a triple-double on a night where he tied the NBA record for games played, and the Los Angeles Lakers pushed their season-best winning streak to eight games with a 134-126 win over the Miami Heat on Thursday night.
It tied the second-most points Dončić ever scored in a game, behind a 73-point night against Atlanta in 2024 and matching a 60-point night against New York in 2022. Dončić also broke the record for a Heat opponent, topping the 58-point effort from James Harden for Houston on 28 February 2019.
Continue reading...After a trip back out to the launch pad, NASA's Artemis II rocket will be readied for a historic flight to the moon.
How America can take advantage of the status quo.
A socioeconomic divide shapes the country’s politics—and its aggressive foreign Policy.
External escalation, internal consolidation.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice. As The Reg revealed in January, Broadcom shuttered the scheme, a move sources claimed affects hundreds of CSPs across Europe and curtails options for enterprises buying VMware software and services. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Provider in Europe (CISPE) trade group, representing nearly 50 tech suppliers, filed the complaint today with the EC Directorates-General, accusing Broadcom of bully-boy tactics, and calling for authorities to halt what it terms as "ongoing abuse." Francisco Mingorance, CISPE secretary general, said of the complaint: "Businesses -- both cloud providers and their customers -- are being irreparably damaged by Broadcom's unfair actions, which we believe are illegal. "After imposing outrageous and unjustified price hikes immediately following the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom is now applying the 'coup de grace'. We need urgent intervention to force them to change. The only way to stop bullies is to stand up to them." CISPE claims that, since Broadcom completed its $69 billion takeover of VMware in October 2023, prices have risen tenfold, payment is demanded upfront, products are bundled regardless of customer need, and minimum commitments are based on potential rather than actual consumption. The VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program officially closed in January and all transactions must be complete by March 31. After that date, only a select group of suppliers will be able to sell VMware subscriptions -- either standalone or as part of a broader service. Across Europe, we're told this equates to hundreds of businesses losing their authorization. For some, the loss of VCSP status effectively destroys their market. Those whose operations were built around VMware must now hand customers to another authorized supplier or begin the costly migration to an alternative platform. Broadcom said in a statement responding to the complaint: "Broadcom strongly disagrees with the allegations by CISPE, an organization funded by hyperscalers, which misrepresent the realities of the market. We continue to be committed to investing significantly in our European VMware Cloud Service Provider partners... helping them offer alternatives to the hyperscalers and meet the evolving needs of European businesses and organizations."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Justice Department says it has shuttered four websites that were allegedly used by Iranian government-linked groups to post hacked information and threaten regime critics.
Samoa and Tonga raise supply concerns with foreign partners as businesses and residents in Papua New Guinea grapple with higher fuel prices amid the Iran war
The leaders of some Pacific countries have appealed for help with oil supplies while others urge against “panic buying” as the import-reliant nations grapple with fears over possible fuel shortages and escalating costs caused by war in the Middle East.
Oil prices have surged to nearly $110 a barrel after strikes against energy infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf states.
Continue reading...This blog is now closed – our coverage of the Middle East crisis continues here
Turning to Australia now, a petrol tsar will manage “unprecedented” supply issues caused by the Middle East conflict as the finishing touches are put on measures to address dire shortages in many regional areas.
Prime minister Anthony Albanese convened a snap virtual meeting of the national cabinet on Thursday to discuss major price shocks and shortages driven by the US-Israel war on Iran.
My government will be announcing more measures to prepare the nation for supply chain challenges over coming days and weeks.
Our fuel supply is currently secure. However, I want us to be over-prepared.
Continue reading...The vote by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members are supporters of the president and were appointed by him earlier this year, was without objection.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 20.
This live blog is now closed.
Answering a reporter’s question on Iran’s missile capabilities, considering the country has managed to strike numerous states in the Gulf, Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, said Tehran retains “some capability” to attack American assets.
“They came into this fight with a lot of weapons.,” he said, adding that the US continues to be “as aggressive and assertive” in striking Iran.
Continue reading...The FCC announced Thursday that it had approved the $6.2 billion merger of major broadcast station owners Nexstar and Tegna.
 | Do most of you ride solo, or do you usually roll with a crew? If you ride with friends, how deep is the squad typically? Just you and one other rider, 3-5, or 12 apostles deep? [link] [comments] |
As other Asian economies race to conserve energy, China has huge reserves of oil and gas as well as alternative energy sources like wind and solar
Xi Jinping has been preparing for a crisis like this for years. China must secure its energy supply “in its own hands”, its president was reported to have said during a visit to one of its vast oilfields in 2021.
The US-Israel war on Iran plunged the Middle East into a deep conflict, with the strait of Hormuz – one of the most important waterways in global trade – all but closed and key energy facilities across the region under attack.
Continue reading...This morning, I powered on my board, saw the juice was low, and tossed it on the charger. About 2 hours later, I went to check on it and the light bar was showing the same low reading as it had been when I plugged it in. I cycled the power, and the light bar was now looking more accurate, but in the onewheel app, it was showing connected, with 0% battery. Closed the app, powered down the board, relaunched the app, and booted up the board. Light bar looked cool, and the app was showing 90%, but when I opened diagnostics, it was showing 0's across the board. Everything. Hmmmm.
I decided to charge it up to 100% and leave it on the charger for the next 10ish hours, even though I've heard the GT-S is balanced as soon as the charger turns green and the light on the board goes off. When I powered it on, the board showed 100, the light bar was fully illuminated (almost too illuminated. it seems like when you power the board on, the light gets fully illuminated, but once it cycles, if you look at it from a side angle, it can look like a few LED's aren't lit up. maybe i'm imagining that). I took it for a cruise, tho., and brought it down to 85%, but the light bar is still fully illuminated.
I ride this year round. It gets charged daily. I avoid bad weather. Any ideas what I should look into, or be concerned about?
RYAN SHORE
Staff Reporter
As the NCAA regular season comes to a close, there was a lot at stake for the Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens going into the Thursday night game against the Sam Houston State University Bearkats. The nationally televised, Star Wars themed night brought in a packed student section in a must-win scenario.
Before the transition from the Coastal Athletic Conference (CAA) to the Conference USA (CUSA) division over the summer, the Blue Hens lost a heartbreaker to the University of North Carolina Wilmington Seahawks in the CAA Championship game, ending their run in the conference.
Despite making the conference championship game, the Hens were the 12-seed in the division. Delaware witnessed a similar fate in its first CUSA season this year. Yet, by winning Thursday’s game, the Blue Hens keep their opportunity to compete in the conference tournament in their first year.
The game began with both teams running strong on defense until the Blue Hens found an early run of fast breaks. The Bearkats spent the rest of the first half fighting back and the game sat tied at 33 after the second quarter.
Senior guard Justyn Fernandez had a team-high thirteen points at the half, with the Blue Hens having seven big three-pointers as well. Junior guard Christian Bliss had two big steals, as well as senior forward Houston Emory with two major blocks on defense.
The second half began in a similar fashion, with the Hens beginning the half with a 17-6 run, only to find themselves tied with seven minutes remaining. As minutes started to slip away, Delaware found its momentum. Bliss, Fernandez and guard Alex Kazanecki showed up in the clutch, combining for 12 of the team’s 14 threes. Bliss and Fernandez combined for 48 points on the night.
In the closing minutes, the Bearkats did all they could to gain the lead back, but the clock hit zero and the Fightin’ Blue Hens won 83-80 in a Thursday night thriller.
Fernandez showed confidence and resilience throughout the whole game, with 26 points, four assists and a pair of rebounds.
“Controlling what we can control, just sticking to the game plan, making sure to complete the task at hand today,” Fernandez said. “Just continue to be aggressive, continue to go through our progression. We’re happy that we were able to get to the line and convert at the line more than anything. As a group, just sticking together, trying to hold them to one possession, continuing to follow the game plan.”
Regardless of the close game, the Blue Hens’ defense had a highlight reel that included eight steals and 10 blocks, compared to five steals and one block from the Bearkats. Bliss had four steals and forward Houston Emory ended the game with four blocks and a steal, running the paint on his own.
With a three-game win streak around mid-February, followed by a losing streak going into their matchup with the second-seed Bearkats, the Blue and Gold won their first game in the past five as they prepared for what may be the end of their season.
Delaware played the regular season closer two days later, where they fell to the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs with a 81-38 final score. The Blue Hens finished the 2025-26 campaign with a 10-21 overall record, and a 6-14 conference record.
Federal law says living presidents can’t appear on currency, but commission approves design for US’s 250th birthday
A federal arts commission on Thursday approved the final design for a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing Donald Trump’s image to help celebrate the US’s 250th birthday on 4 July.
The vote by the US Commission of Fine Arts, whose members are supporters of the Republican president and were appointed by him earlier this year, was without objection. It clears the way for the US Mint to begin production on the coin, whose size and denomination are still under discussion.
Continue reading...The man who attacked a synagogue in Michigan last week sent a photo of himself with the AR-style rifle he had during the attack to a family member in Lebanon, according to a U.S. official.
US president was meeting with Japanese PM when he said: ‘Who knows better about surprise than Japan?’
It would be funny if it wasn’t so Trumpy.
Hosting the Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in the Oval Office on Thursday, Donald Trump could not resist mocking Japan about its 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor during the second world war.
Continue reading...Scott Bessent says actions will increase oil supply and bring down prices, but long-term effects in question
The US may soon remove sanctions on Iranian oil stranded on tankers at sea, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said on Thursday as Washington seeks to curb prices soaring over Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz.
“In the coming days, we may un-sanction the Iranian oil that’s on the water. It’s about 140m barrels,” Bessent said during an appearance on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria.
Continue reading...The 31-year-old Georgia woman went to the emergency room with severe pain after allegedly taking abortion pills at home, according to police and court records.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz described Orbán’s U-turn on the loan Hungary had agreed to in December as ‘a gross act of disloyalty’
EU leaders fumed after Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, refused to drop his opposition to a vital €90bn (£78bn) loan for Ukraine, accusing him of betrayal and acting in bad faith.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz described Orbán’s U-turn on the loan Hungary had agreed to in December as “a gross act of disloyalty” adding: “I am firmly convinced that it will leave deep marks.”
Continue reading...Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 20 #1013.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 20, No. 747.
ABC has canceled its already filmed season of "The Bachelorette" starring Taylor Frankie Paul after video surfaced of a 2023 incident in which she was charged with assault.
In her first public interview since the investigation, Dolores Huerta said that at the time of the incidents, she felt alone and trapped.
Mother and child held in notorious Rio Grande Valley detention centre despite presenting visa, family says
A Canadian mother and her seven-year-old daughter, who has autism, have been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Texas since Saturday, family members have said.
Relatives of Tania Warner and her daughter Ayla Lucas say they were detained unlawfully. They are uncertain about what problem ICE found with their immigration paperwork.
Continue reading...Some highs in California, Nevada and Arizona recorded at 25-35F above normal, with widespread alerts and closures
States across the US south-west recorded blistering temperatures at the tail end of winter, including some of the hottest March temperatures ever recorded in the US, with forecasts indicating hotter days are still to come.
California, Nevada and Arizona were all under heat warnings on Thursday amid record-breaking temperatures.
Continue reading...It's tough to ignore the buzz of your phone when a new message arrives.
When Google said they were going to require verification from every single Android developer that would end the ability to install applications from outside of the Play Store (commonly wrongfully referred to as “sideloading”), it caused quite a backlash. The company then backtracked a little bit, and said they would come up with an “advanced flow” to make sure installing applications from outside of the Play Store remained possible. Well, Google has detailed this “advanced flow”, and as everyone expected, it’s such a massive list of onerous hoops to jump through they might as well just lock Android down to the Play Store and get it over with.
First, if a developer is verified, you can download their applications to your device and install them the same way you can do now. Second, developers with “limited distribution accounts”, such as students or hobby projects, can share their applications with up to 20 devices without verification. Third, and this is where the fun starts, we have unverified developers – basically what all Android developers sharing applications outside of the Play Store are now.
Here’s the full “advanced flow” as described by Google to allow you to install an application from an unverified developer:
- Enable developer mode in system settings: Activating this is simple. This prevents accidental triggers or “one-tap” bypasses often used in high-pressure scams.
- Confirm you aren’t being coached: There is a quick check to make sure that no one is talking you into turning off your security. While power users know how to vet apps, scammers often pressure victims into disabling protections.
- Restart your phone and reauthenticate: This cuts off any remote access or active phone calls a scammer might be using to watch what you’re doing.
- Come back after the protective waiting period and verify: There is a one-time, one-day wait and then you can confirm that this is really you who’s making this change with our biometric authentication (fingerprint or face unlock) or device PIN. Scammers rely on manufactured urgency, so this breaks their spell and gives you time to think.
↫ Matthew Forsythe at the Android Developers Blog
- Install apps: Once you confirm you understand the risks, you’re all set to install apps from unverified developers, with the option of enabling for 7 days or indefinitely. For safety, you’ll still see a warning that the app is from an unverified developer, but you can just tap “Install Anyway.”
Setting aside the fact that developer verification is, in and of itself, a massive problem, I’m kind of okay with a few scary warnings, a disclaimer, and perhaps a single reboot to enable installing applications outside of the Play Store – a few things to make normal people shrug their shoulders and not bother. However, adding enabling developer mode and a goddamn 24-hour waiting period is batshit insanity, and clearly has the intention of discouraging everyone, effectively locking Android to the Play Store.
Android is already basically an entirely locked-down, closed-source platform, and once this “advanced flow” comes into force, there’s virtually no difference between iOS and Android, especially for us Europeans who get similarly onerous anti-user nonsense when trying to install alternative application stores on iOS. I see no reason to buy Android over iOS at this point – might as well get the faster phone with better update support.
From Apple and Samsung to budget wildcards, here are the smartwatches actually worth buying after testing dozens.
If prosecuted, case against 31-year-old would be one of first in Georgia since it passed 2019 law banning most abortions
A 31-year-old Georgia woman has been charged with murder by police who say she took pills to induce an illegal abortion.
If state prosecutors decide to move forward with the murder charge brought by local police against Alexia Moore, her case would be one of the first instances of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a 2019 law banning most abortions.
Continue reading...  | Onewheel GTS for 1,200$ with 3,000 miles on it is it worth the buy what are the things bound to go wrong ? [link] [comments] |
As attacks rattled markets, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration might lift restrictions on Iranian oil already loaded onto vessels.
Cloudflare's CEO predicts AI-driven bot traffic will surpass human internet traffic by 2027, as AI agents generate vastly more web requests than people. "If a human were doing a task -- let's say you were shopping for a digital camera -- and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that's doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview at SXSW this week. "So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that's real traffic, and that's real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account." TechCrunch reports: Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google's web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors. "With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we're seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online," Prince said. The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation. "What we're trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can -- as easily as you open a new tab in your browser -- you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there," Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these "sandboxes" for agents would be created every second. "I think the thing that people don't appreciate about AI is it's a platform shift," Prince said. "AI is another platform shift ... the way that you're going to consume information is completely different."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Akrotiri and Dhekelia bases have become targets for Iran after outbreak of Middle East crisis
EU leaders have pledged to stand behind Cyprus as it seeks “an open and frank discussion” on the future of the British bases on the island, which have become a target after the outbreak of the latest Middle East crisis.
Ahead of an EU summit on Thursday, Cyprus’s president, Nikos Christodoulides, said he wanted “an open and frank discussion with the British government” regarding the status and future of the British bases on the island.
Continue reading...Legislators propose designating 31 March as Farmworkers Day in light of allegations against late labor leader
California quickly moved to rename Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day in the wake of allegations the labor leader abused women and girls.
Less than two weeks before the annual holiday celebrating Chavez, the California state assembly and state senate said they were introducing a bill to redesignate the day.
Continue reading...Few Americans feel they know a lot of the specifics about the SAVE Act.
Popular shows and films can be had without jetting off to a pirate site.
The body James Gracey, the University of Alabama student who disappeared in Barcelona, has been found, Spanish police said Thursday.
Foreign minister issues warning after Israeli attack on South Pars gasfield and as Qatar reels from retaliatory strike
Iran said on Thursday it would show “zero restraint” if its energy infrastructure was targeted again as Qatar revealed that almost a fifth of its liquefied natural gas export capacity had been knocked out in an Iranian strike that is likely to have a years-long impact.
The warning, delivered by the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, followed Israel’s attack on Iran’s massive South Pars gasfield – which it shares with Qatar – which triggered Iranian retaliatory strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas complex and other Gulf neighbours, sending stock markets tumbling globally and triggering sharp increases in gas prices.
Continue reading...  | not much to see here. I just wanted to post that my XR is still working and nothing is wrong with it. it continues to work. there's a lot on here about issues and breaks and fixes and stuff like that. I just wanted to post something for people who don't have a one wheel yet, so they know they do work sometimes. [link] [comments] |
The UK regulator Ofcom fined 4chan nearly $700,000 (520,000 pounds) for failing to implement age checks and address illegal content risks under the Online Safety Act, but the platform mocked the penalty and signaled it won't pay. A lawyer representing the company responded with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster, writing in a follow-up post on X: "In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment." The BBC reports: The fines also include 50,000 pounds for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published and a further 20,000 pounds for failing to set out how it protects users from criminal content. 4Chan has refused to pay all previous fines from Ofcom. "Companies -- wherever they're based -- are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," said Ofcom's Suzanne Cater. "The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we'll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
James ‘Jimmy’ Gracey was at nightclub in Spanish city for spring break when he separated from friends at about 3am
The body of James “Jimmy” Gracey, a 20-year-old college student from Illinois, was found Thursday in the water off a Barcelona beach, police in Spain said.
Gracey’s body was found by police divers and positively identified, the press office for Catalonia’s regional police in Barcelona told the Associated Press.
Continue reading...Domestic energy companies could benefit from high oil prices in the short-term, but take a hit if the Iran war drags on.
From Windows models with Qualcomm Snapdragon X and Intel Panther Lake processors to MacBooks running on Apple's latest M5 chip, these are the longest-lasting laptops we've tested.
Mortgage rates, though still well below their level a year ago, have edged up since the Iran war erupted. Here's why.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 20, No. 543.
Former FBI Director James Comey has been subpoenaed by prosecutors in Miami as part of the Justice Department's investigation into Obama-era intelligence officials.
Democrats are fighting hard against the Republican-backed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE America Act, saying it would erect roadblocks for Americans seeking to register to vote or cast a ballot.
As the Senate began several days of debate about the bill March 17, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., emphasized the problems he said the legislation would cause.
The act "would force Americans to register (to vote) only in person, something only 5% of Americans do today," he told reporters.
Schumer is correct that the act would require documentary proof of citizenship be presented in person to register to vote. But he’s wrong about the percentage of Americans who register to vote in person, according to federal data. Federal surveys show it’s higher than that.
With President Donald Trump’s strong support, the House passed the SAVE America Act in February following years of falsehoods and exaggerations about noncitizen voting, something that rarely occurs.
The bill says someone seeking to register to vote "shall not be registered to vote in an election for federal office unless the applicant presents documentary proof of United States citizenship in person to the office of the appropriate election official" by the registration deadline.
Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director for the voting rights and election program at the liberal Brennan Center for Justice, said this requirement would apply not only to new registrants and those registering in a new state, but also to potentially a lot of people who don’t consider themselves new registrants.
For instance, depending on how a state interpreted the bill’s language, moving to a new county within a state or to a new voting precinct could count as a new voter registration and trigger the citizenship proof requirement.
States’ decisions on how to classify residential moves will affect whether the documents are needed, Sweren-Becker said.
The law is also vague about who qualifies as "an election official," she said. Would that mean only election workers? Or would an employee of a motor vehicle agency — where many voting registrations are made — qualify?
Data from the federal Election Assistance Commission shows the percentage of voters who register in person is significantly higher than Schumer’s count.
A Schumer spokesperson told PolitiFact the senator referred to a report by the liberal Center for American Progress that used data from a 2022 survey by the Election Assistance Commission. The report said 5.9% of voters registered in person at election offices.
But the data Schumer cited, which is not the most recent available, excludes in-person registration at other government offices and at polling places.
Every two years, the Election Assistance Commission compiles the Election Administration and Voting Survey. The most recent edition reflects 2024 election cycle data, including the methods Americans used to register to vote during the two years before the 2024 election.
The survey tracked at least six ways voters would have registered in person: at election offices (6%); at polling places and voting sites (2.2%); at public assistance offices (1%); at disability services offices (0.1%); at armed forces recruitment offices (0.1%); and at other public facilities, such as libraries (1.8%).
Collectively, these add up to 11.2%.
"Clearly, more than the 5% or 6% going to elections offices are registering in person," said Matthew Weil, vice president for governance at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank.
An even larger share of voter registrations — 30.7% — came from motor vehicle agencies. Federal law allows voters to register to vote when they get driver’s licenses or do other automobile-related tasks. (For another 8.7% of voters, the registration method was not recorded.)
Because some states allow voter registration online through motor vehicle agencies, and states’ policies on voter registration at those agencies vary, it’s unclear what share of that 30.7% is occurring in person versus online. The data doesn’t specify, a spokesperson for the Election Assistance Commission told PolitiFact.
But voting administration experts said it was highly likely that many such registrations required an in-person visit.
So the percentage of-in person voter registrations before the 2024 election was between 11% (if all motor vehicle agency registrations were online, which is unlikely) and 42% (if every motor vehicle agency interaction was in person).
The survey listed four categories that do not require registering in person, and collectively they accounted for almost half of all voter registrations before the 2024 election. Automatic voter registration — an option in some states where voters are registered automatically unless they opt out — accounted for 25.2%. Online registration accounted for 13.9%; mail, email and fax registrations accounted for 8.3%; and voter registration drives accounted for 2%.
"A sizable share of Americans do register online and by mail, sharing their drivers license information for identity verification or showing ID when they vote," said Lisa Bryant, a political scientist at California State University-Fresno. "These convenient options will very likely disappear if SAVE were passed."
Schumer said the SAVE America Act "would force Americans to register only in person, something only 5% of Americans do today."
The bill under consideration in the Senate would require documentary proof of citizenship be presented in person to register to vote.
However, Schumer significantly understated the percentage of people who register in person; before the 2024 election, it was between 11% and 42%, depending on how many registrations stemmed from in-person visits to motor vehicle agencies, a data point that is not being collected.
The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True.
Senior correspondent Amy Sherman contributed to this article.
CLARIFICATION, March 20, 2026: The story was updated to more accurately characterize 2022 data Schumer referred to.
RELATED: President Trump wants to slash voting by mail. About 1 in 4 Republicans voted that way in 2024
Royer Perez-Jimenez, 19, from Mexico, was found ‘unconscious and unresponsive’ in Florida detention center
A teenager held at a US immigration detention facility in Florida died this week, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said on Thursday, the youngest person to die in ICE custody since Donald Trump took office last year.
Royer Perez-Jimenez, 19, originally from Mexico, was found “unconscious and unresponsive” in his room on 16 March at the Glades county detention center in Moore Haven, Florida, according to the ICE press release.
Continue reading...What happens if you make a Linux syscall in a Windows application?
So yeah, you can make Linux syscalls from Windows programs, as long as they’re running under Wine. Totally useless, but the fact that such a Frankenstein monster of a program could exist is funny to me.
↫ nicebyte at gpfault.net
The fact that this works is both surprising and unsurprising at the same time.
Brit overcomes seven-time grand slam champion 7-5, 7-5
25-year-old secures first victory since January
In her first training session at the ATX Open in Austin last month, weeks after injury put an end to her Australian Open, Francesca Jones found herself in an unusual, delightful situation. Her training partner across the net was none other than Venus Williams, the most successful active female tennis player.
Being able to train with such a legendary player was a dream itself, but Jones can now say that she has also defeated her as she closed out a 7-5, 7-5 win over the 45-year-old seven-time grand slam champion in the first round of the Miami Open. The victory marks Jones’s first WTA 1000 match win in her career, breaking a four-match losing streak.
Continue reading...For the second time in the past month, an AI agent went rogue at Meta -- this time giving an engineer incorrect advice that briefly exposed sensitive data. The Verge reports: A Meta engineer was using an internal AI agent, which Clayton described as "similar in nature to OpenClaw within a secure development environment," to analyze a technical question another employee posted on an internal company forum. But the agent also independently publicly replied to the question after analyzing it, without getting approval first. The reply was only meant to be shown to the employee who requested it, not posted publicly. An employee then acted on the AI's advice, which "provided inaccurate information" that led to a "SEV1" level security incident, the second-highest severity rating Meta uses. The incident temporarily allowed employees to access sensitive data they were not authorized to view, but the issue has since been resolved. According to Clayton, the AI agent involved didn't take any technical action itself, beyond posting inaccurate technical advice, something a human could have also done. A human, however, might have done further testing and made a more complete judgment call before sharing the information -- and it's not clear whether the employee who originally prompted the answer planned to post it publicly. "The employee interacting with the system was fully aware that they were communicating with an automated bot. This was indicated by a disclaimer noted in the footer and by the employee's own reply on that thread," Clayton commented to The Verge. "The agent took no action aside from providing a response to a question. Had the engineer that acted on that known better, or did other checks, this would have been avoided."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The FBI uses "all tools to do our mission," Director Kash Patel said on Wednesday during a Senate hearing.
Tiny North Carolina university stuns Wisconsin
No 1 Duke survive upset scare against No 16 Siena
Nebraska ends NCAA drought with rout of Troy
Chase Johnston made his first two-point basket of the season, a fast-break layup with 11.7 seconds remaining that gave No 12 seed High Point an 83-82 victory over fifth-seeded Wisconsin on Thursday in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
Johnston finished with 14 points, including four three-pointers for the Panthers, who were 10-and-a-half-point underdogs. He came in shooting 64 of 136 (47.1%) from three-point range but 0 of 4 inside the arc.
Continue reading...Horizon to begin trading on March 20 on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ‘HQ’
SINGAPORE and LAS VEGAS, March 19, 2026 — Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. Ltd. (Horizon Quantum), a pioneer of software infrastructure for quantum applications, today announced that it has completed its previously announced business combination with dMY Squared Technology Group, Inc. (dMY), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company. The Business Combination was approved by dMY’s shareholders at dMY’s special meeting held on March 17, 2026. On March 20, 2026, the combined company’s Class A ordinary shares and warrants will begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbols “HQ” and “HQWWW,” respectively.
Horizon Quantum is building software infrastructure that empowers developers to use quantum computing to solve the world’s toughest computational problems. The closing of the Business Combination provides Horizon Quantum with gross proceeds of approximately $120 million, before transaction expenses, which the company plans to use to accelerate its investments in research and development, strengthen its hardware testbed, and further advance its integrated development environment Triple Alpha.
“Recent rapid progress in advancing quantum computing hardware and breakthroughs in error correction mean that the field is reaching an inflection point. With today’s closing and our Nasdaq listing, Horizon Quantum is positioned to deliver the software infrastructure that will power this next phase of computing and help enable broad quantum advantage across tough computational problems,” said Dr Joe Fitzsimons, Founder and CEO of Horizon Quantum. “While there is still much work needed before quantum computers reach their full potential, with more than 20 years in quantum computing research, I have never been more excited about the prospects and future of the technology.”
Harry You, Chairman and CEO of dMY, said, “Over the tenure of my career, I have witnessed many technology companies triumph, and I have found that the ones who are most successful in building long-term shareholder value have been those that build software infrastructure and operating systems. Horizon Quantum is compelling because the company is approaching the quantum industry with hardware-agnostic software infrastructure that stands to benefit regardless of which way the market share ultimately falls across the competing quantum modalities, including the cloud.”
Advisors
Needham & Company, LLC, served as dMY’s exclusive financial advisor and exclusive placement agent for the PIPE transaction. Ellenoff Grossman & Schole LLP represented Horizon Quantum as legal counsel and Rajah & Tann Singapore LLP represented Horizon Quantum as Singapore legal counsel. White & Case LLP represented dMY as legal counsel and TCF Law Group, PLLC represented dMY as Massachusetts legal counsel. Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP represented Needham & Company as legal counsel. ICR, LLC, served as dMY’s strategic communications advisor.
About Horizon Quantum
Horizon Quantum’s mission is to unlock broad quantum advantage by building software infrastructure that empowers developers to use quantum computing to solve the world’s toughest computational problems. Founded in 2018 by Dr Fitzsimons, a leading researcher and former professor with more than two decades of experience in quantum computing, the company seeks to bridge the gap between today’s quantum hardware and tomorrow’s applications through the creation of advanced software development tools. Its integrated development environment, Triple Alpha, enables developers to write sophisticated, hardware-agnostic quantum programs at multiple levels of abstraction. Learn more at www.horizonquantum.com.
Source: Horizon Quantum
The post Horizon Quantum Closes Business Combination with dMY, Secures $120M to Advance Quantum Software Stack appeared first on HPCwire.
BARCELONA, Spain, March 19, 2026 — Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech has announced SpeQtrum QaaS, a full-stack Quantum as a Service cloud-based service, providing remote access to classical as well as analog and digital quantum computers. SpeQtrum will give users access to Qilimanjaro’s multimodal data center in Barcelona, the first in the world to integrate digital QPUs, Qilimanjaro’s unique analog QPUs, and classical HPC accelerators within a unified framework.
The integration of analog and digital QPUs with classical GPUs is designed to enable researchers and developers to prototype, execute, and optimize quantum workflows that improve results beyond individual modalities or dual combinations, and will be accessible via the cloud.
“SpeQtrum QaaS is the first opportunity for researchers and developers to have access to the best of three worlds, both digital and analog quantum QPUs and classical GPUs,” said Marta Estarellas, CEO of Qilimanjaro. “Users will be able to select the platform best suited to the particular use case from the world’s first multimodal quantum data center.”
Key aspects of the platform include:
The Qilimanjaro team will work closely with clients to help them implement this technology in their research and development teams, to support them in accelerating adoption and become quantum ready. The beta phase of the software will open in Q3. Anyone interested in securing a spot in the beta phase can sign up here: https://qilimanjaro.tech/speqtrum.
Analog quantum computers encode complex problems naturally within the system and its continuous dynamics. This paradigm bypasses the error correction required by the more common digital quantum systems which use quantum gates. By combining analog, digital and classical supercomputers, Qilimanjaro’s platform is designed to maximize the utility of each system to unlock real computational value years ahead of digital-only roadmaps.
About Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech
Based in Barcelona, Qilimanjaro is a quantum computing company, fast-tracking useful quantum computers via the development of the company’s signature analog quantum chips. Founded in 2019, Qilimanjaro builds full-stack quantum computers based on fluxonium analog qubits. This novel architecture bypasses the need for error correction and unlocks faster, more scalable solutions. Analog quantum systems provide near-term advantages in simulation, optimization, and AI, where digital QPUs either fall short or require massive overhead. The company follows this dual technology strategy to expand access to quantum computing resources now. First, the SpeQtrum QaaS platform provides remote access to hybrid quantum data centers combining analog, digital, and classical compute. Second, the company’s SpeQtrum on-premise systems offer full-stack and modular quantum integration both for analog and digital QPUs for HPC centers and research institutions.
Source: Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech
The post Qilimanjaro Launches SpeQtrum QaaS with Access to Multimodal Quantum and HPC Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
It's the last day of Nvidia GTC. This is your ultimate guide to everything the chipmaker has talked about here in San Jose.
Every 1-cent increase in gasoline prices reduces consumer spending by $1.5 billion annually, one economist says.
Academics discover black people ‘significantly more likely’ to be identified when compared with other ethnic groups
Essex police have paused the use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after a study found cameras were significantly more likely to target black people than people of other ethnicities.
The move to suspend use of the AI-enabled systems was revealed by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which regulates the use of the technology deployed so far by at least 13 police forces in London, south and north Wales, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Surrey and Sussex.
Continue reading..."The morale is getting worse by the day because no one knows when this is gonna end," said Cameron Cochems, a lead TSA officer in Boise, Idaho.
Asked why the U.S. didn't inform allies ahead of the Iran strikes, President Trump said, "Who knows better about surprise than Japan?"
Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer testified to the House Oversight Committee that he "had no knowledge whatsoever" of his client's crimes.
Two sources confirmed to CBS News that Saleh Mohammadi, a young member of Iran's national wrestling team, was among the three men executed in Iran.
Thursday's meeting with Tom Homan marked a key development as progress to date has appeared stagnant.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 20, No. 1,735.
March 19, 2026 — Microsoft combines accelerated computing with cloud scale engineering to bring advanced AI capabilities to customers. For years, Microsoft has worked with NVIDIA to integrate hardware, software and infrastructure to power many of today’s most important AI breakthroughs.
Credit: Shutterstock
What’s new at NVIDIA GTC:
From Frontier Models to Production-Ready Agents
At the foundation of this system is Microsoft Foundry: serving as the operating system for building, deploying and operating AI at enterprise scale. Foundry builds on Azure to bring together models, tools, data and observability into a single system designed for production agents. Microsoft is expanding those capabilities across Foundry Agent Service and NVIDIA Nemotron models.
The next-generation Foundry Agent Service and Observability in Foundry Control Plane are now generally available, enabling organizations to build and operate AI agents at production scale. Foundry Agent Service allows teams to quickly develop agents that reason, plan and act across tools, data and workflows. Once created, Foundry Control Plane provides the developer end-to-end visibility into agent behavior, unlocking both developer productivity as well as enterprise trust. Companies such as Corvus Energy are already using Foundry to replace manual inspection workflows with agent-driven operational intelligence across their global fleet.
Microsoft is further simplifying the path from prototype to production with the availability of Voice Live API integration with Foundry Agent Service, in public preview, which enables developers to build voice-first, multimodal, real-time agentic experiences. This pairs with the general availability of a refreshed Microsoft Foundry portal and expanded integrations for Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma AIRS and Zenity, delivering deeper builder experiences and runtime security across the entire agent lifecycle.
NVIDIA Nemotron models are also now available through Microsoft Foundry, joining the widest selection of models on any cloud, including the latest reasoning, frontier and open models. This bolsters Microsoft’s recent partnership announcement bringing Fireworks AI to Microsoft Foundry, enabling customers to fine-tune open-weight models like NVIDIA Nemotron into low-latency assets that can be distributed to the edge.
Scaling AI Infrastructure for the World’s Most Demanding Workloads
Inference AI workloads are reshaping cost, performance and system design requirements. To operationalize agentic AI at scale, customers need purpose-built infrastructure for inference‑heavy, reasoning‑based workloads that can be deployed and operated consistently across global and regulated environments.
Microsoft’s AI infrastructure approach is engineered to seamlessly bring next-generation NVIDIA systems into Azure datacenters that are designed for power, cooling networking and rapid generational upgrades. This allows customers to move with speed and agility and stay at the leading edge from generation to generation.
In less than a year, Microsoft has deployed hundreds of thousands of liquid-cooled Grace Blackwell GPUs across the company’s global datacenter footprint, and now Microsoft is excited to be the first hyperscale cloud to power on NVIDIA’s newest Vera Rubin NVL72 in its labs. Over the next few months, Vera Rubin NVL72 will be rolled out into Microsoft’s modern, liquid-cooled Azure datacenters.
Microsoft’s infrastructure innovation with NVIDIA also extends to sovereign and regulated environments to give customers control of both where AI runs and how it evolves over time. Recently, Microsoft announced Foundry Local support for modern infrastructure and large AI models, and now the company has initial support for NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform on Azure Local, extending accelerated AI capabilities to customer-controlled environments. This approach allows organizations to plan for next-generation AI workloads, including reasoning-based and agentic systems, while maintaining Azure-consistent operations, governance and security through Microsoft’s unified software layer with Azure Arc and Foundry Local.
Bringing AI into the Physical World
As AI moves beyond digital experiences, Microsoft and NVIDIA are collaborating to support the next wave of Physical AI. At GTC, this work centers on NVIDIA Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint, with Microsoft Foundry as the platform for hosting and operating Physical AI systems on Azure at cloud scale.
By integrating this blueprint with Azure services as part of a Physical AI Toolchain, Microsoft enables developers to build, train and operate physical AI and robotics workflows that connect physical assets, simulation and cloud training environments into repeatable, enterprise-grade pipelines. To support, Microsoft is introducing a public Azure Physical AI Toolchain GitHub repository integrated with the Nvidia Physical AI Data Factory and with core Azure services.
To further the impact of AI in real‑world, physical environments, Microsoft and NVIDIA are deepening the integration between Microsoft Fabric and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, connecting live operational data with physically accurate digital twins and simulation. This allows organizations to see what’s happening across their physical systems, understand it in real time and use AI to decide what to do next. In practice, customers in manufacturing and operations and beyond are using this approach to move beyond dashboards and alerts to coordinated, AI‑driven action across machines, facilities and workflows.
From Innovation to Impact
Microsoft is delivering reliable, production‑scale AI by bringing together its global AI infrastructure, platforms and real‑world systems with the latest innovation from NVIDIA. For customers, this means the ability to operate intelligence continuously, running inference-heavy, reasoning-based and physical AI workloads with the performance, security and governance required for real businesses and regulated industries.
Whether powering always-on agents, scaling next-generation AI infrastructure or deploying intelligent systems in factories, energy facilities and sovereign environments, Microsoft and Nvidia are helping customers move faster from insight to action.
Source: Yina Arenas, Microsoft
The post Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC: New Solutions for Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI Infrastructure and Physical AI appeared first on HPCwire.
Order up a Raggedy Ann or a Barbie doll: Playing with dolls helped children develop a stronger tolerance for diverse perspectives.
Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Rapper Afroman, born Joseph Edgar Foreman, famous for his 2000 hit "Because I Got High", has won a defamation lawsuit that seven Ohio police offers filed against him. A jury found he did not defame the officers in music videos he made about a 2022 police raid of his home. In August 2022, Adams County Sheriff's Department raided Afroman's home on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. Neither drugs nor kidnapping victims were found, and charges were never filed. However, local officials would not pay for damages occurred during the raid including a broken front door and a video surveillance camera. Afroman used his home security footage of the raid to create music rap videos criticizing the police over the incident; "Will You Help Me Repair My Door?", "Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera?", and "Lemon Pound Cake". He posted the videos on YouTube. In March 2023, seven officers filed a lawsuit against Afroman for invasion of privacy and the unauthorized use of their images from the security footage in addition to defamation claims. The officers requested an injunction for Afroman to stop speaking about them or using their photos. The officers also wanted all proceeds from the videos, song sales, performances, and merchandise claiming they had suffered "emotional distress" due to the videos. Afroman's defense included Freedom of Speech rights to criticize public officials. The ACLU filed an amicus brief supporting the rapper, arguing that the lawsuit was a SLAPP suit only meant to silence criticism. In October 2023, the court agreed and dismissed the invasion of privacy, "right of publicity", and "unauthorized use of individual's persona" claims but allowed the defamation case to proceed. Defamation claims by the officers included the allegation Afroman repeatedly had sex with the wife of Randolph L. Walters, Jr. When Afroman's lawyer asked Walters "But we all know that's not true, right?", the officer replied he did not know. Defamation from emotional damages requires that harm arise from a false statement; however, if a statement is so outrageous that no one would believe it to be true, then reputational damage cannot be a result.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As we sat down for an interview in the GTC Expo this week, it was hard not to notice that Sam Werner, the General Manager of IBM Storage, was excited. “Did you hear Jensen talk about Nestlé?” he asked. “The work we had done that was highlighted, and the 30x cost performance improvement?”
Indeed, 15 minutes into his GTC keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showcased how IBM’s customer, Nestlé, had adopted Nvidia GPUs to speed up its order-to-cash data mart, which is used to coordinate every order, delivery, and invoice across the food manufacturer’s global operations. Instead of running the 15-minute routine to update the data mart several times a day, thanks to GPUs, Nestlé was able to lower the data mart query time to three minutes, while dropping its costs by 83%, which translates to the 30x cost performance figure cited by Werner.
Nestle’s IBM watsonx data mart is GPU-accelerated thanks to cuDF
But the way that Nestlé implemented GPUs is important. Nestlé uses the IBM Storage Scale System (formerly Spectrum Scale) to house its enterprise data. Thanks to the work that IBM has done to bridge the open source software it’s adopted, including the Velox library and the Presto SQL query engine, with Nvidia’s CuDF, Nestlé was easily able to brings the sheer horsepower of Nvidia GPUs to bear on structured data sitting in its watsonx.data lakehouse.
“It was Scale underneath, which is my storage solution,” Werner told HPCwire. “We help bring all that data to the GPUs with our high-performance storage layer.”
It’s easy to forget how important storage is to AI, whether it’s running the latest large language model (LLM) or running traditional machine learning algorithms. Storage is also critical to running large SQL analytics workloads, as Huang talked about in his keynote with Nestlé.
No matter what workload is proposed, Werner is confident that IBM’s storage solutions will have something to offer. But Werner is particularly excited about the potential for his Storage Scale unit to sell lots of storage in support of AI initiatives, and in fact to lead the industry.
Here are seven aspects of IBM’s current Storage Scale offerings that some customers may not know about:
Sam Werner is the General Manager of IBM Storage
IBM Fusion Storage provides a unified solution for modern storage (Image courtesy IBM)
Like every storage vendor on the planet, IBM is working with Nvidia on its new STX platform, which uses BlueField-4 DPUs to implement Nvidia’s Context Memory Storage (CMX) architecture to break through the GPU memory wall for large-scale AI inference. The more work that AI users can push down into the storage layer, the less work there is for the GPU, and the greater the throughput can be.
(Nick-N-A/Shutterstock)
“AI is triple-digit growth for me in this space. It’s a huge growth driver,” Werner said. “AI has finally given customers the opportunity to unlock the value of this enormous amount of data they’ve been sitting on…Now they’re able to unlock that value and I’m able to help them do that. So I’m able to show a really good ROI and people will be able to do that.”
IBM may not be the first storage vendor that comes to mind when IT decision-makers sit down to hash out an AI strategy. But Werner says there’s no other storage vendor can match IBM in offering such a wide spectrum of storage capabilities. As the AI boom continues, Werner is confident of the hand that Big Blue is holding, not to mention a few wildcards that play in its favor, thanks to its experience and its legacy of supporting the IT endeavors of the biggest organizations on the planet for more than 100 years.
“The biggest banks in the world run on my stuff because they know my stuff is secure and I can do this,” Werner said. “A lot of these others don’t have that experience. And at some point people are going to wake up and go, holy crap, my AI application needs to be highly available. It needs DR, it needs all of this because this is mission-critical.”
The post Seven Reasons IBM’s Storage Chief Is Bullish on AI appeared first on HPCwire.
Lawsuit says rescission of endangerment finding – which ruled greenhouse gases threaten public health – was illegal
A coalition of 24 states, alongside a dozen cities and counties, has sued the Trump administration over its decision to revoke the bedrock scientific determination underpinning virtually all US climate regulations.
The new lawsuit, filed in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Thursday, is being led by the states of Massachusetts, California, New York and Connecticut. It argues that the Environmental Protection Agency’s February rescission of the 2009 endangerment finding – which the White House described as the “single largest deregulatory action in US history” – was illegal.
Continue reading...LUXEMBOURG, March 19, 2026 — SUSE, a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, today released its inaugural Cloud and AI Pulse Survey revealing that a growing number of enterprises are turning to hybrid (59%) and private (16%) cloud due to technical and business concerns and digital sovereignty requirements. The global survey of nearly 600 enterprise technology leaders in the U.S., UK, Japan, India and Germany examined the impact of AI on cloud adoption, budgets, governance, IT priorities and resilience. In the U.S., amidst shifting global sentiment, one-third (31%) cited digital sovereignty as a top tech priority this year, fueled by the need for open source support and vendor lock-in concerns.
“While it was no surprise that more than half of survey respondents say implementing AI is a major challenge, we were encouraged by the impact AI is having on hybrid and private cloud adoption and digital sovereignty as it relates to AI model training data,” said Margaret Dawson, Chief Marketing Officer at SUSE. “This new data confirms what we are seeing from customers; priorities are shifting toward more flexible, scalable and governed deployments.”
AI Drives New Set of Priorities
As AI increases system complexity, risk exposure and priorities are shifting toward scalable and governed deployments.
Hybrid Cloud and Open Source Resurgence
Across the globe, data reveals that respondents are re-architecting AI environments around control and compliance. Hybrid and multi-cloud were cited as strong options, providing the ability to support regulated, sensitive, and edge workloads while maintaining operational flexibility.
This shift away from public cloud is consistent with the larger industry movement fueled by AI, such as the buildout of private AI factories which is expected to reach 20% adoption this year according to Forrester alongside growth of on-premises servers to manage local compute costs, performance, and data governance requirements.
U.S. Concerns and Priorities: Vendor Lock-In and IT Resilience
In the U.S., concerns around vendor dependency and IT resilience are shifting from concerns to core priorities.
Survey Methodology
The Cloud and AI Pulse Survey was conducted among 596 global enterprise technology leaders, including director-level and senior decision-makers responsible for software tools and IT infrastructure strategy.
Forrester Blog – November 10, 2025: Predictions 2026: Prepare For AI, Security, And Integrated Network Infrastructure And Operations, Michele Pelino and Naveen Chhabra
About SUSE
SUSE is a global leader in enterprise open source software, across Linux operating systems, Kubernetes container management, Edge solutions and AI. The majority of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to provide resilient infrastructure, enabling IT leaders to optimize cost and manage heterogeneous environments. SUSE collaborates with partners and communities to provide organizations with choices to maximize their current IT systems and innovate with next-generation technologies across traditional on-premises, to cloud native, multi-cloud to edge and beyond.
Source: SUSE
The post SUSE Survey Finds Hybrid and Private Cloud Adoption Rising Amid AI and Sovereignty Demands appeared first on HPCwire.
US Southern Command chief briefed senators amid Trump’s increasing use of force in the region and comments about taking Cuba
The US military is not rehearsing for an invasion of Cuba or actively preparing to militarily take over the island, the top general overseeing American forces in Latin America has told lawmakers.
But Gen Francis Donovan, head of US Southern Command, said the Pentagon stands ready to address any threats to the US embassy in Havana, defend its base at Guantánamo Bay and aid US government efforts to address any mass migration from the island, if needed.
Continue reading...Nvidia says it's modified OpenClaw with added privacy and security controls, making claws safe for enterprises. The jury is still out.
SEOUL and SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 19, 2026 — AMD has announced a strategic collaboration with NAVER Cloud to accelerate the development of sovereign AI infrastructure in Korea, supporting national-scale AI capabilities with AMD’s open, high-performance compute platforms. The collaboration further strengthens the existing relationship between the companies and aims to advance AI infrastructure by integrating AMD compute platforms across NAVER Cloud’s AI and cloud offerings.
Credit: Shutterstock
To support large-scale AI training and inference workloads across its cloud and AI services, NAVER Cloud is expanding its use of AMD EPYC processors to include deployment of the upcoming 6th-Gen AMD EPYC “Venice” processor. AMD is also providing NAVER Cloud with access to next-generation AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs to support its cloud and production environments.
Both companies will collaborate to optimize NAVER Cloud AI services and software stacks on AMD platforms and AMD ROCm software. Additionally, the companies plan to collaborate on research and development initiatives to enable new AI services and solutions for NAVER customers.
“Sovereign AI infrastructure plays a critical role in accelerating how nations build and deploy advanced AI,” said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO, AMD. “Our expanded collaboration with NAVER Cloud brings together AMD’s leadership AI compute platforms and open software ecosystem with NAVER’s cloud and AI capabilities to enable scalable infrastructure and accelerate the next generation of AI in Korea.”
“NAVER Cloud is focused on building scalable and open AI infrastructure to support the rapid growth of AI innovation,” said Soo Yeon Choi, CEO, NAVER. “Through our collaboration with AMD, we will leverage high-performance AMD compute platforms to enhance our AI and cloud services and deliver new capabilities to customers and developers.”
This collaboration reflects the shared goal of both companies to advance sovereign AI infrastructure, enabling organizations in Korea to build and deploy AI services with greater control over data, performance, and scalability.
About AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.
About NAVER Cloud
NAVER Cloud, a subsidiary of NAVER Corporation, has been providing IT infrastructure and platform services since 1999. With over two decades of experience powering NAVER and its affiliates, NAVER Cloud offers its public cloud service, NAVER Cloud Platform, to support enterprise digital transformation with proven technology and operational excellence. NAVER is the world’s third company to develop a hyperscale Large Language Model (LLM), and NAVER Cloud leverages this advanced AI expertise to deliver end-to-end capabilities across the entire AI value chain — encompassing AI services, data, foundational AI infrastructure, supercomputing resources, cloud platforms, and data centers.
Source: AMD
The post AMD and NAVER Cloud Announce Strategic Collaboration to Advance AI Infrastructure in Korea appeared first on HPCwire.
Enjoy all the discounts without having to put in any of the work.
Reform party leader criticised for making comments after event held in London’s Trafalgar Square this week
Muslim leaders have condemned Nigel Farage’s call to ban public prayer by Muslims in the UK as bigoted and warned of a “growing tide of hate” after the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, questioned whether the events fitted “within the norms of British culture”.
Farage was speaking at the launch of Reform UK’s manifesto for the forthcoming Scottish parliament elections when he made the remarks.
Continue reading...DarkSword spyware reports are scary, but basic iOS software hygiene can go a long way to keep your data safe.
US president says he told Netanyahu ‘don’t do that’ as he distances himself from attack that has angered Gulf allies
The US-Israeli war against Iran has exposed further divisions between the two countries after an Israeli strike on Iran’s largest gasfield angered US allies in the Gulf and prompted Donald Trump to say he knew nothing in advance about the attack – a claim that Israeli officials disputed.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he had spoken to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu following the strikes on Iran’s South Pars gasfield – part of a reserve shared with Qatar – and had told the Israeli prime minister to refrain from further attacks that could escalate a regional war on energy infrastructure.
Continue reading...After a long wait, Apple has unveiled the AirPods Max 2. Here's my full skinny on all the performance and feature upgrades the new model offers.
About a quarter of prison places are unsafe, Ministry of Justice admits
The government has reneged on a pledge to make all prison cells fire-safe or take them out of use by the end of next year, meaning tens of thousands of prisoners in England and Wales will remain at risk.
The Ministry of Justice has admitted it has known for almost two decades that about a quarter of prison places are unsafe, putting the people housed in affected cells at risk.
Continue reading...In an interview with "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said there had already been damage done to Iran's nuclear sites.
Prepare to gawk at the newest reveals for Barbie, Masters of the Universe and more.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is planning big changes for Android in 2026 aimed at combating malware across the entire device ecosystem. Starting in September, Google will begin restricting application sideloading with its developer verification program, but not everyone is on board. Android Ecosystem President Sameer Samat tells Ars that the company has been listening to feedback, and the result is the newly unveiled advanced flow, which will allow power users to skip app verification. With its new limits on sideloading, Android phones will only install apps that come from verified developers. To verify, devs releasing apps outside of Google Play will have to provide identification, upload a copy of their signing keys, and pay a $25 fee. It all seems rather onerous for people who just want to make apps without Google's intervention. Apps that come from unverified developers won't be installable on Android phones -- unless you use the new advanced flow, which will be buried in the developer settings. When sideloading apps today, Android phones alert the user to the "unknown sources" toggle in the settings, and there's a flow to help you turn it on. The verification bypass is different and will not be revealed to users. You have to know where this is and proactively turn it on yourself, and it's not a quick process. [...] The actual legwork to activate this feature only takes a few seconds, but the 24-hour countdown makes it something you cannot do spur of the moment. But why 24 hours? According to Samat, this is designed to combat the rising use of high-pressure social engineering attacks, in which the scammer convinces the victim they have to install an app immediately to avoid severe consequences. "In that 24-hour period, we think it becomes much harder for attackers to persist their attack," said Samat. "In that time, you can probably find out that your loved one isn't really being held in jail or that your bank account isn't really under attack." But for people who are sure they don't want Google's verification system to get in the way of sideloading any old APK they come across, they don't have to wait until they encounter an unverified app to get started. You only have to select the "indefinitely" option once on a phone, and you can turn dev options off again afterward. "For a lot of people in the world, their phone is their only computer, and it stores some of their most private information," Samat said. "Over the years, we've evolved the platform to keep it open while also keeping it safe. And I want to emphasize, if the platform isn't safe, people aren't going to use it, and that's a lose-lose situation for everyone, including developers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
UK’s bilateral aid to African countries, which funds areas such as schools and clinics, to be cut by almost £900m by 2028-29
Some of the world’s poorest countries will lose out on UK aid that funds programmes such as schools and clinics, due to budget cuts set out by the foreign secretary.
The UK’s bilateral aid to African countries will be reduced by almost £900m by 2028-29 – a 56% cut – as part of more than £6bn in cuts which are funding an increase in defence spending.
Continue reading...Cryptocurrency’s biggest Pac spent more than $10m for their candidates, only to be defeated by those who are anti-crypto
The cryptocurrency industry spent big and lost often in this week’s Illinois primaries.
As the industry prepares to make massive donations in the 2026 midterm elections to replicate its success in 2024, the Illinois losses mark an early setback for firms that are trying to establish themselves as power players in American politics.
Continue reading...Meta's Horizon Worlds will be available on Quest headsets for a while after all, after originally aiming for a June 15 hard shutdown. But it won't support anything new.
Two former FBI agents who helped investigate President Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results sued the federal government, alleging they were wrongfully terminated.
The US president wanted an easy win, but the conflict is spiralling following Israel’s attack on a gas field and Iranian retaliation across the region
Shortly after the US and Israel began their illegal assault on Iran, with the US president still preening himself over the kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro the previous month, a state department official joked that Donald Trump had a new foreign policy credo: “Decapitate and delegate”. It was a reversal of Colin Powell’s invocation of the “Pottery Barn rule” ahead of the invasion of Iraq: you break it, you own it.
Gen Powell, then secretary of state, was warning that wars can escalate beyond expectation and are harder to exit than enter. It remains unclear what precisely the Trump administration expected from this conflict – perhaps not least to the White House itself – but it is certain that the president was not paying heed when people described the likely consequences.
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Continue reading...Ok so bad news first; my XR isn’t taking a charge for some reason. I thought I left it with middle battery left over the winter and that’s worked just fine in the past, but when I went to break it out the battery is zero and staying there even after 24 hours to try to “reset” it.
But the good news is that I’ve been converting VESC for awhile and now this is the perfect excuse! But here’s the thing; I want more power but I’m also kinda cheap. What’s the best build-for-the-buck? What parts do I need? What’s the cheapest option and what build is worth splurging on? Any tips appreciated!
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell used the phrase "we don't know" at least 14 times during his press conference. Investors are nervous.
Gold has dropped sharply from its recent highs, offering investors an opportunity to capitalize on the lower price.
March 19, 2026 — Blood is often pictured as a smooth, continuous stream, but in reality it behaves more like rush-hour traffic in a dense city with crowded lanes, sudden merges and countless tiny intersections where direction and speed change instantly. For most people, those arterial roadways manage this traffic gracefully.
Sickle blood cells (blue) are jostled by healthy blood cells (red). Image credit: Michael Graham, 2020.
For people living with sickle cell disease (SCD), however, the circulation is under constant strain. Much of the harm happens quietly in the body’s smallest blood vessels, where red blood cells must bend, slide and divide into branching pathways to keep tissues alive. When this choreography breaks down, damage accumulates over years, injuring vessels, stressing organs and shortening lives.
Recent research, supported by U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS allocations on the Expanse system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the University of California San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences, zooms in on what happens when blood encounters microscopic vessel bifurcations, the tiniest forks in the road where one capillary splits into two branches.
“Blood isn’t just a liquid, it’s a suspension of living, flexible particles,” said Michael Graham, the Steenbock Professor of Engineering and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Once you recognize that, you realize that where cells are located within the flow can matter just as much as how fast the blood is moving.”
Using high-performance computing (HPC) systems like Expanse at SDSC, Graham’s team along with Wilbur Lam, a physician-scientist at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, have shown that in SCD, a subset of abnormal red blood cells consistently takes the wrong turn at these junctions, triggering a chain of mechanical events that may help explain how vessels are gradually injured over time. Graham said that in healthy microcirculation, red blood cells tend to drift toward the center of a vessel as they move along, so when a vessel divides, these centrally located cells are more likely to follow the branch carrying the larger fraction of blood. This pattern helps oxygen distribute efficiently throughout the body’s web of capillaries.
SCD disrupts that balance. Some red blood cells become stiffer, smaller and less flexible with properties that push them away from the center of the vessel and toward the wall, where they travel in a thin layer rather than mixing evenly with the main flow. That seemingly subtle shift has major consequences at a fork in the road.
Simulations supported by NSF ACCESS and run on SDSC’s Expanse showed that when a vessel splits, stiff, sickle-shaped cells near the wall are more likely to peel off into the slower-flowing branch rather than following the faster stream. Over time, that pattern causes certain pathways to become disproportionately loaded with abnormal cells, effectively reversing the usual “traffic rule” that steers centrally located cells into higher-flow branches.
For SCD patients, the key issue is not only which branch a cell enters but what happens once it gets there. After the split, sickle cells tend to cluster along the outer walls of the branches, exactly where the flow can generate strong mechanical forces. When stiff cells repeatedly skim along the vessel lining, they create sharp spikes in shear stress, the frictional force the flowing blood exerts on the wall.
Those stress spikes matter because the endothelium, the inner lining of blood vessels, responds to mechanical forces just as it does to chemical signals. Persistent, elevated stress can trigger inflammation, make vessel walls “stickier” and promote further obstruction. Over years, this wear-and-tear may help explain why people with sickle cell disease face higher risks of stroke, organ damage and chronic pain, even in regions where vessels never become completely blocked.
“What we’re seeing with simulations on Expanse is a purely physical mechanism that can contribute to vascular injury,” Graham said. “The cells don’t need to stick chemically or form clots. Their stiffness and location alone are enough to increase stress on the vessel wall.”
At the individual level, this work reframes sickle cell disease as not only a problem of oxygen delivery but also a disorder of cumulative vascular injury. Even when blood continues to move, repeated mechanical insults can quietly damage vessels in the brain, lungs, kidneys and other organs. The study also sheds light on why complications often cluster in specific regions of the circulation rather than appearing uniformly throughout the body. Vessel geometry, including branch diameter and angle of divergence, can amplify these effects and create persistent hot spots of stress.
Graham said that the findings suggest new directions for therapy. Instead of focusing solely on preventing outright blockages, future treatments might aim to change how red blood cells distribute themselves within flowing blood. Drugs that soften cells, reduce dehydration or lessen their tendency to migrate toward vessel walls could lower harmful mechanical stress even if overall flow rates stay the same. Microfluidic devices inspired by this work might allow clinicians to test how an individual patient’s blood behaves under different conditions, opening the door to more personalized treatment strategies.
“Our research does not offer an immediate cure, but it provides a clearer map of how microscopic events translate into long-term harm,” Graham said. “With the help of SDSC’s Expanse system, we have connected the repeated wrong turns of sickle cells at the smallest junctions of the circulatory system to the real-world suffering of patients. Our work shows how damage can accumulate silently and why managing sickle cell disease requires more than simply maintaining blood flow.”
Allocations on SDSC’s Expanse were supported by NSF ACCESS (allocation nos. MCB190100 and PHY240144).
More from HPCwire: Comet Supercomputer Supports Sickle Cell Disease Discovery [2020]
Source: Kimberly Mann Bruch and Scott Paton, SDSC
The post SDSC’s Expanse Charts the Hidden Toll of Sickle Cell Disease appeared first on HPCwire.
Royer Perez-Jimenez was arrested by the Volusia County Sheriff's Office in January, according to ICE.
House of Lords decision welcomed as ‘landmark moment’ after attempt to strike out amendment is defeated
Women who have been convicted, and in some cases jailed, over illegal abortions are set to be pardoned after a historic vote in the House of Lords.
Last June, the House of Commons voted to end the criminalisation of women who terminate their pregnancies outside of the legal framework, while keeping the existing framework in place. Doctors and others who act outside of the law could still face the threat of prosecution.
Continue reading...Discovery at Monte Verde puts north-to-south expansion theory back at centre of heated debate on continent’s human history
A groundbreaking new study may have once again upended our understanding of human prehistory in the Americas.
For years, the predominant theory of how humans arrived in the western hemisphere centred around the Clovis culture, which crossed the Beringia land bridge from Asia between 13,400 and 12,800 years ago, and spread south.
Continue reading...As Americans face a housing crisis, this development shows how communal living can bring homeownership within reach – and foster connection
Continue reading...2027’s short season will precede full calendar switch
Five Concacaf Champions Cup berths will be awarded
No inter-conference play until MLS Cup
The typical cliche for a regular season is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. In 2027, Major League Soccer will be the exception.
On Thursday, MLS revealed how its short 2027 “sprint season” will be formatted as it nears flipping its schedule to a fall-to-spring format next year. The competition’s structure will be familiar in many ways, with the regular season table seeding a postseason bracket and culminating with MLS Cup. Lasting just under three months, it’ll proceed at a breakneck pace that could be an enthralling departure from the league’s usual flow.
Continue reading...I used CNET's lab test data to calculate the cost-per-megabit for each router generation. The results showed me I was wrong about the value of Wi-Fi 7 routers.
Meta is partially reversing its decision to drop VR support for Horizon Worlds, keeping VR access for existing Unity-based games while shifting future development to a new flatscreen-focused Horizon Engine. UploadVR reports: If you somehow missed it, on Tuesday Meta officially announced that its Horizon Worlds "metaverse" platform would drop VR support in June, meaning it would only be available as a flatscreen experience for the web and smartphones. But now, in an "ask me anything" session on his Instagram page, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says the company has decided to "keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games to support the fans who've reached out." Bosworth says this specifically applies to worlds developed with the Horizon Unity runtime, suggesting it applies to those built inside VR or with the Horizon Desktop Editor, but not those built for the new Horizon Engine with Horizon Studio. The picture painted here is of a clean technical break, with the legacy Unity version of Horizon Worlds continuing to support VR, and the new Horizon Engine focusing fully on flatscreen. This VR support will continue through the Horizon Worlds VR app, which Bosworth says will stay on Quest's store "for the foreseeable future". Specific worlds will not be recommended by the operating system, though, and nor will they be seen in the storefront. Horizon Worlds will be just another app on the store. As for the reason behind not supporting VR in Horizon Engine, Bosworth repeated the explanation he's been giving for two months now -- "because that's where most of the consumer and creator energy already was, and so we're leaning into that."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mozilla sets a release date for its next version of Firefox, which will include a free VPN service and a new split-screen tab mode.
The Pentagon wants $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for its war on Iran, a defense official told The Intercept. That sum is four times the amount originally floated by Pentagon officials. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said that number could even increase.
The request for the additional $200 billion has been sent to the White House, which normally reviews requests before they go to Congress, according to the defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely about the pending proposal. The $200 billion ask, first reported by the Washington Post, is in addition to a record-setting $1.5 trillion War Department budget request for 2027.
“Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth said when asked about the request during a press conference on Thursday. “As far as the $200 billion, I think that number could move.”
Hegseth spoke only in terms of immediate costs of the war. “We’re going back to Congress and folks there to ensure that we’re properly funded for what’s been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition is everything’s refilled, and not just refilled but above and beyond,” he explained.
Immediate war expenses will, however, be dwarfed by estimates offered by experts in the costs of war, lawmakers experienced with the Pentagon budget, and government officials briefed on Operation Epic Fury.
“Now, Secretary Hegseth wants $200 billion for a war that Congress never authorized?”
“Taxpayers haven’t gotten any clarity from the administration about the goals or costs of this war. To date, all we’ve seen are ballpark estimates, and lowballed ones at that. Now, Secretary Hegseth wants $200 billion for a war that Congress never authorized?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending.
Linda Bilmes, who co-authored “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” with economist Joseph Stiglitz, previously told The Intercept that short-term expenses — like munitions, costs of deploying aircraft carrier strike groups, and aircraft lost — will pale in comparison to long-term expenditures such as the costs of veterans’ benefits and interest on war debt. She said the cost of the conflict could ultimately reach into the trillions of dollars.
Costs will rise dramatically if the 50,000 U.S. troops deployed around the Middle East file disability claims at the typical rate due to exposure to “toxins, contamination, acid rain, dust from infrastructure destruction, and burning oil fumes,” Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said.
A new war also makes it more likely for Congress to approve a bigger Pentagon budget going forward, Bilmes told The Intercept. “That becomes the base budget and, over a decade, it’s another trillion dollars added to the defense budget.”
Murphy said the supplemental request raises fundamental questions for which the War Department and White House have yet to offer answers.
“$200 billion is 20 percent of the Pentagon’s budget this year. This is much more than the direct cost of the war so far, and likely more than will be needed anytime soon,” he said. “This request begs the question: Is the Pentagon just trying to pad its already-massive budget, or is the administration planning for a protracted war?”
The post Pentagon Claims It Needs Additional $200 Billion to Pay for War on Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
Leaders are scrambling to rename streets and schools after reports that the farm labor activist sexually abused girls in the movement he led.
Duggar, 31, was taken into custody in Arkansas and was awaiting extradition to Florida, where he faces charges
Former reality TV star Joseph Duggar is facing a child molestation charge in Florida, almost five years after his brother Josh, who also starred in the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting, was convicted of downloading child sexual abuse images.
Joseph Duggar, 31, was arrested in Arkansas, where he lives, and was awaiting extradition to Florida on Thursday. Duggar is charged with lewd and lascivious behavior toward a child under 12 years old, according to an arrest affidavit from the Bay county sheriff’s office in Panama City, Florida.
Continue reading...March 19, 2026 — By optimizing microorganisms that could bolster production of high-value fuels, chemicals, and materials, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers are compressing the time from lab experiments to commercial biotechnology readiness.
Microbiologist Bram Stone observes bacterial growth in an automated liquid handling system, which has been paired with AI to optimize growth conditions. Photo credit: Andrea Starr, PNNL.
The acceleration has been made possible by integrating AI and high-throughput automation into existing research programs that are harnessing microorganisms to bolster production of high-value fuels, chemicals, and materials.
A Test Case for AI and Automation in Experimental Design
Researchers Bram Stone and Joonhoon Kim have trained an open-source AI platform to focus on growth boundaries of microbial systems—that is, the point at which they either thrive or stop growing. They reasoned that an AI algorithm trained to analyze important growth conditions could help them narrow the search space for optimized ones exponentially faster than if they used traditional experimental approaches. Stone, a microbiologist, and Kim, a computational scientist, combined their expertise to modify BacterAI, which was originally created by a team at the University of Michigan led by Paul Jensen.
Jensen created BacterAI to accelerate infectious disease research using robotics, genomics, and computation to design new therapies. BacterAI operates on binary responses to data inputs, indicating either the presence (yes) or absence (no) of an ingredient. This approach is effective for experiments where presence or absence is the only information researchers seek, but to use the AI for investigating the growth or demise of microorganisms, scientists at PNNL had to change the algorithm to account for a range of growth conditions in experimental designs.
Stone called the AI training process “search and learn.”
Rather than asking the AI whether an ingredient is present, he said, the model now explores concentration ranges—1, 2, or 3 grams within 10 liters, and so on—proposing small, incremental changes to ingredient levels and learning from simulated outcomes.
“The computer runs through simulations for each step until it makes a prediction that growth will stop. And that’s the point where we know we need to delve deeper and perform more detailed analyses of our microbes,” said Stone. Exploring concentration ranges is critical to identifying the growth boundaries of a microorganism.
PNNL has made a large investment in decoding and predicting the ways that complex biological systems interact with their environments and help shape them. The ability to predict and engineer such systems is behind the burgeoning field of predictive phenomics. PNNL’s internal investment, called the Predictive Phenomics Initiative (PPI), is funding Stone and Kim’s project, as well as 10 more.
Optimizing Conditions for Industrial Scale Growth
Bioprocess scientist Jeff Czajka leads another PPI project and is also wrestling with the challenge of maintaining productivity of the microbes during the transition from lab-scale to industrial-scale tanks.
Czajka is conducting experiments with a versatile yeast called Yarrowia lipolytica that is used to produce biofuels, oils, and flavorings. By varying environmental conditions in 2-liter lab-scale bioreactors, Czajka aims to maintain the organism’s growth and production rate at industrial quantities.
This year, Czajka is partnering with Stone and Kim, contributing data and experimental conditions—such as pH, temperature, oxygen, and nitrogen—that will be used as inputs for the AI to optimize experimental design.
“We’ll combine the environmental conditions of a bioreactor with microorganisms in individual wells, allowing us to control the variables while simultaneously running many experiments,” said Stone. “We’re really excited to get started and look forward to comparing our data with Czajka’s experiments in the bioreactors.”
Moving to High-Throughput Automation with Tecan
In the coming months, Stone and Kim plan to integrate the modified AI model with a new Tecan Fluent automated liquid handling system, coupled to a fluorescence plate reader and incubator, to increase experimental throughput.
Stone plans to input 13 experimental variables into the AI, which will generate many thousand distinct experiments. After simulating these experiments, AI will pare the list to 300 key experiments. The Tecan system will then use a robotic arm to prepare 12 acrylic plates the size and shape of a postcard, each with 96 tiny wells representing 25 experiments done in triplicate and including several types of control experiments to assure automated data quality. The Tecan executes the experimental protocol, incubates the plates for two days, and then generates the data that Stone subsequently feeds back into the AI model for further refinement.
In just 18 minutes, the AI suggests another set of 300 experiments based on what it learned from the data produced in the previous batch.
“As humans, we wouldn’t be able to analyze data from 300 experiments in only 18 minutes and design the next set of experimental parameters,” he said. With this level of efficiency, researchers could realistically conduct 900 experiments per week while simulating new experiments in the parameter space of several billion experiments. Previous research has shown that 10,000 to 20,000 experiments can provide enough data to accurately represent a microorganism’s behavior in a system.
Stone said they’re also using the AI and automation systems to investigate a hearty soil bacterium called Pseudomonas putida that can break down waste streams and produce chemicals.
A specific strain of P. putida, he explained, naturally produces nitrogen during growth, yet dies when exposed to excessive amounts of it. By simulating incremental additions of ingredients, such as nitrogen, trace minerals, or salts to the microorganism’s growth mixture, the AI agent will search for the point at which these increments stop the strain from growing. These critical parameters form the basis for the next round of physical experiments.
“AI and automation are enabling us to understand growth boundaries at a faster rate, exponentially accelerating the time from lab discovery to commercialization. The faster we can get scientific solutions to industry, the greater impact we have on driving down costs,” said Stone.
The integration of AI and automation into biological experimentation aligns with PNNL’s broader Genesis Mission effort to accelerate scientific discovery using computing intelligence and power.
The updated BacterAI algorithm developed by Stone and Kim will be made available in the PPI’s open-source repository on GitHub, with original design credit to Jensen’s team.
Source:
The post PNNL: Robotics and AI Power Biotechnology Advances appeared first on HPCwire.
Fed officials expected to lower capital requirements for banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase by 4.8%
US federal regulators are trying to soften bank requirements, loosening the amount of capital US banks must have, in what would be some of the biggest changes to bank restrictions since the 2008 financial crisis and a huge win for financial institutions.
On Thursday, US Federal Reserve officials are expected to vote to lower capital requirements – the funds they need to cover risky assets – for the biggest banks by 4.8%, which could free up capital for banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Continue reading...A Fed rate pause this week has left homebuyers with multiple items to consider. Here are four to think about now.
Distributor says authorities warned screening Tunisian film-maker Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama could harm India–Israel relations
The Indian release of The Voice of Hind Rajab, the Oscar-nominated Tunisian film about the death of a five-year-old girl during the Israel-Gaza war, has been blocked by the country’s ratings body, according to the film’s Indian distributor.
In a report by Variety, Manoj Nandwana of Mumbai-based Jai Viratra Entertainment said that he was told that if the film was released, it would “break up” India-Israel relations.
Continue reading...Daria Boyarskaya coordinating OSCE mission overseeing vote in which pro-Moscow Viktor Orbán could lose power
Hungarian rights groups have raised concerns over the appointment of Vladimir Putin’s former interpreter to a key role in an international election monitoring mission, amid fears of Russian interference ahead of Hungary’s crucial vote next month.
Daria Boyarskaya, who worked for many years for Russia’s foreign ministry and interpreted in numerous high-level meetings including one between Putin and Donald Trump, is now a senior adviser at the parliamentary assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE-PA), based in Vienna. She is coordinating the body’s mission to monitor next month’s parliamentary election in Hungary.
Continue reading...OpenAI announced it's acquiring developer tooling startup Astral to strengthen its Codex AI coding assistant, which has over 2 million weekly users and has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year. CNBC reports: "Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it feels like to build software," Astral's founder and CEO Charlie Marsh wrote in a blog post. The company's acquisition of Astral is still subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anyone who was at Club Chemistry in Canterbury from 5 March to 15 March advised to get antibiotics and vaccination
The government has announced a major expansion in vaccination against meningitis in Kent after seven new cases of the disease were confirmed in the county, taking the total number of cases to 27.
On a visit to the University of Kent, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said anyone who attended the Club Chemistry nightclub in Canterbury from 5 March until 15 March should come forward for antibiotics and vaccination.
Continue reading...UK central bank has left rates on hold, and warned that CPI inflation will be higher in the near term as a result of the ‘new shock to the economy’ from Iran war
Bank of England holds interest rates at 3.75% and signals rise is possible within months
Why are mortgage rates going up when the Bank of England base rate hasn’t changed?
European stock markets have dropped sharply at the start of trading, hit by worries about surging energy prices.
In London, the FTSE 100 blue-chip share index has tumbled by 162 points, or 1.6%, to 10,142 points.
“Fears of a sustained energy shock have resurfaced after the escalation in the Iran war sent oil and gas prices soaring. The prospect of a longer, more drawn-out conflict is in sharp focus, as both sides ratchet up attacks on energy infrastructure.
Brent crude remains highly volatile but has traded as high as $114 a barrel today, threatening to climb back towards recent scorching levels. Gas prices have surged by 25%, reaching a range not seen since early January 2023.
The Company is ready to restart production and exports quickly with an improvement in the security environment.
Continue reading...
Rep. Byron Donalds, Florida’s leading Republican gubernatorial candidate, supports eliminating all property taxes on primary residences, which would cut public school funding — a stance that sets him apart from other Republicans championing a state property tax overhaul.
"The biggest people who've actually increased property taxes on the hardworking men and women of our state are school districts," Donalds said in a March 8 CBS News Miami interview. He pointed to Miami Dade, Broward, Hillsborough and Collier school districts and said they have decreasing enrollment but are collecting "far more property taxes than they ever have."
Florida public schools received around 40% of the state’s property tax revenue in recent years and typically make up the largest share of local taxes in homeowners’ bills. But they aren’t the main driver of property tax increases — that distinction goes to skyrocketing property values.
School districts control some of the local tax money they receive and can choose to lower certain rates. Any increases, though, are subject to caps or voter approval. A large portion of school property tax revenue also comes via a mandatory rate the Florida Legislature sets that districts must levy to receive state funding.
"The primary driver of rising property taxes are rising property values," said Abigail Hall, a University of Tampa associate economics professor. "Most of what is happening in terms of school funding is outside of the school districts’ control."
When reached for comment, a Donalds campaign spokesperson told PolitiFact that many Florida school districts have increased property taxes or are "actively considering" it. The spokesperson sent articles about Alachua County, Leon County and several others.
The articles, however, don’t prove that school districts are the "biggest" drivers of higher property taxes. In Alachua County, for example, a school board budget that led to a 6% increase in property tax revenue was largely because home values in the county increased.
The district kept its operating and infrastructure rates capped. Its overall budget decreased by about $8 million.
Florida House Republicans passed their version of a property tax overhaul in February that would eliminate some property taxes on primary residences with voter approval, exempting schools. The Senate, however, didn’t take up the measure, raising the possibility of a special session.
School districts are funded with federal, state and local money, with local funds almost exclusively coming from property taxes. State funding largely comes from sales taxes.
Local governments, including school boards, set millage rates, which are used to calculate property taxes. One mill equals $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed property value. So a rate of one mill on a $200,000 house would equal $200 in annual taxes, excluding exemptions.
Florida’s public schools primarily rely on three millage rates. One, called the "Required Local Effort," is set annually by the Legislature and dictates what K-12 schools must collect from local taxpayers.
Schools can reduce or increase two of the three primary millage rates, but those rates are still subject to caps under Florida law. So all millage rates that school districts levy have some level of state control. School boards can also request tax money to finance specific projects, such as security officers in schools or teacher pay increases, via local voter referendum.
"While property tax collections may increase as property values grow, school district tax rates themselves are largely governed by state law and have trended downward over time," Nadine Drew, a Broward County Public Schools spokesperson, said.
Hall agreed, saying, "The state largely controls the rules. On the surface it may look like local officials appearing responsible for tax increases, but the underlying formula they’re required to use comes from the state."
Florida’s rising property taxes are influenced by several factors, but increasing home values are a primary driver.
Nationwide, the average home sale price rose from $383,000 in 2020 to $534,000 in 2025, a nearly 40% increase. And Florida has followed a similar trajectory, with its median home price rising from $330,000 in 2020 to $425,000 now, a 29% increase.
Florida’s property taxes have similarly increased; in 2019, the state collected $33.9 billion in property tax revenue, and in 2024 it collected $55.1 billion, a 62% increase.
A nonprofit’s 2025 study examined the relationship between property values and property taxes. For Florida, researchers found a correlation between rising home values and rising tax revenue. That’s because the state has no laws limiting the amount of tax revenue local governments can collect, which would insulate homeowners from an inflated housing market.
For the 2025-26 fiscal year, Florida school districts received about $21.6 billion in property tax revenue. About $10.9 billion of that came from the state’s mandated millage.
Bruce Baker, a University of Miami professor and public school financing expert, said data from 2017 to 2022 showed Florida’s K-12 education spending as a percentage of personal income declined faster than property taxation. This shows "school spending from property taxation is not creating the pressure," he told PolitiFact in an email.
(Bruce Baker, University of Miami)
Matthew Caldwell, the Lee County property appraiser and a former Republican lawmaker, said school taxes apply to a larger portion of a property’s value since they aren’t subject to certain exemptions, one reason they may appear outsized compared with other local taxes. Caldwell said districts can choose to roll back millage rates to prevent spikes in property taxes but typically don’t do that.
School districts say they are hamstrung by Florida’s decreasing public school investment and declining student enrollment, which reduce state funding.
Norín Dollard, a Florida Policy Institute senior policy analyst, said $4 billion, or 24.2%, of the state’s general revenue education funding is now going to private school tuition and homeschoolers, which "leaves county school districts responsible for a greater and greater share of support for public schools."
State revenue per pupil started to decline in 2000 and was replaced by increased local contributions, largely from property taxes, according to a 2025 study Baker conducted.
"The State Legislature has passed along much of the cost of operating elementary and secondary schools to local property taxpayers. Per pupil spending for Florida school districts is at or below where it was in 1993," Baker said.
Donalds said Florida’s school districts are the "biggest" drivers of increased property taxes.
Higher property taxes are largely related to increased property values. Since 2020, property tax revenue in the state has increased by over 60% as home values soared.
Florida’s school districts received around 40% of the state’s property tax revenue in recent years. All school millage rates have some level of state control, including one the Legislature mandates that districts levy to qualify for state funding.
Donalds’ statement contains an element of truth because districts maintain some control over taxation; districts can choose to roll back millage rates to prevent spikes in property taxes but typically don’t do that. But his statement ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
RELATED: Will Florida’s Supreme Court have to review lawmakers' property tax proposal? Only if someone sues
RELATED: Is DeSantis right that most Florida property tax dollars come from vacation homes, businesses?
Nellie Pou’s bill follows refusal of ICE chief Todd Lyons to rule out enforcement near stadiums and fan festivals
A New Jersey congresswoman introduced legislation on Thursday to block immigration enforcement from conducting raids within a mile of a Fifa World Cup soccer match or fan festival in the US this summer.
The Save the World Cup bill, introduced by Nellie Pou, a Democrat, is meant to assure visitors that they will not be detained and to remove the chilling effect of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations on the events, she said in a release. The World Cup’s first US match begins on 12 June.
Continue reading...High-end specs meet DIY-friendly features. Gigabyte's latest Aorus Elite makes it easier to build a powerhouse PC without the typical installation headaches.
This live blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here
Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz also called for de-escalation in the Middle East, welcoming what he said were signals by US president Donald Trump that combat action in Iran could come to an end, which could allow Europe to contribute to securing peace in the region.
“I am expressly grateful that the US president sent a signal in this regard last night that he is prepared to bring the fighting to an end,” he told reporters ahead of an EU summit in Brussels in comments reported by Reuters.
Continue reading...Days after Donald Trump won his second election to the White House, Democrats flocked to the New York Times to blame their stunning electoral defeat on alleged capitulations to minority groups — and cement themselves as the future leaders of the party.
Few appeared more eager than Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a moderate congressman and former presidential candidate with a reputation for bucking party leadership.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” Moulton lamented to the paper. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
That was over a year ago. Now, Moulton is running to unseat one of the most progressive members of the Senate, in the bluest state in the country, on a platform of generational change. And the anti-trans comments he’d hoped would establish him as a thought leader could help tank his campaign.
Polls consistently show Moulton trailing his opponent, incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, particularly among younger voters. Despite making a case for a new generation in office, Moulton has a 3 percent favorability rating among likely voters ages 18 to 34, compared to Markey’s 67 percent, according to a February 24 poll from the University of New Hampshire. Only 2 percent of likely Massachusetts primary voters under 34 said they would vote for Moulton if the race were held that day, while 53 percent said they would support Markey.
Though it’s still early — most Massachusetts voters won’t cast their ballots until September 1 — the state of the race suggests that Moulton, while attempting to style himself as the vanguard of a brash new Democratic party, picked up some serious political baggage.
Tatishe M. Nteta, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Moulton was far from alone in his post-mortem for Kamala Harris. “The problem is, those comments now have defined [Moulton], not just as a national figure who bucked Democratic viewpoints, but now within the state,” he said. “In order for him to win, he’s going to either have to walk it back or justify it.”
There were warning signs at the time. Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said the Salem congressman was “playing politics with people,” but Moulton refused to apologize. He argued that the backlash only reinforced his point and accused Democrats of forcing people to “change our values” to meet “the demands of one very small minority group,” by doing things like making them “put pronouns in their email signatures.”
“His ideas are from the last generation.”
“We were extremely offended by the comments that Seth Moulton made,” David Seaton, a college student at Tufts University and vice president of political affairs for the College Democrats of America, told The Intercept. “While Seth Moulton is running on a platform of generational change, his ideas are from the last generation, and his values are certainly from generations past.”
Moulton is now stuck in a political quagmire trapping other Democratic pundits and politicians, some with presidential designs, who tripped over themselves to blame Harris’s loss on the party becoming too woke and out of touch. But now, as voters seem more concerned with rising costs, mounting war, and waning access to health care than pronoun usage, those comments seem less like a prediction and more like a political liability.
“When you look at how much the world has changed since that moment,” said Josie Caballero, director of voting at Advocates for Trans Equality, “it just seems very out of touch with where we are now.”
It might seem obvious that transgender rights aren’t the losing issue that Moulton predicted in deep-blue Massachusetts, where in 2018 residents overwhelmingly voted to keep statewide protections for trans people in place. But Caballero pointed to elections that suggested similar trends in red and purple states like Maine, Texas, and Virginia, where Republican Winsome Earle-Sears’s campaign and affiliated PACs spent millions on anti-transgender attack advertisements targeting her Democratic opponent, now-Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
The former Virginia congresswoman did not capitulate on her positions regarding trans rights and not only trounced Earle-Sears on Election Day, but a poll of likely voters found they trusted her on “transgender policy” by a margin of 13 points.
In New York City, Zohran Mamdani won his mayoral election after running an advertisement celebrating trans history and pledging his support to the community, along with a detailed policy agenda.
Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the Transgender Law Center, said that voters this cycle are looking for candidates who can speak to universal issues like health care and affordability, instead of scapegoating vulnerable groups.
“I think we are living in a time where people are asking for an intersectional approach, where all bodily autonomy is respected, where people’s concerns are heard,” he said.
In Texas, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico has pivoted toward economic populism when addressing anti-trans attacks.
“The only minority destroying this country is the billionaires,” Talarico said on TV news, criticizing the media’s fixation on trans athletes. “Trans people are 1 percent of the population. We are focused on the wrong 1 percent.”
Graham Platner, who is running in a competitive primary for the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has similarly addressed the issue of transgender rights.
“An out-of-state billionaire is funding an anti-trans ballot question in Maine — so that we’ll spend our time fighting about trans people instead of raising his taxes,” said Platner in an interview with Slate.
Still, Chestnut said that while Platner and Talarico’s stances offer a necessary “starting point” for Democrats, they’ll also have to address the topic directly and advocate and explain their beliefs.
“The Democrats’ response was, let’s not say anything and hope it’s just a non-issue.”
“We’re also in a moment where not saying anything proved to also be a losing strategy. Our opposition in the presidential election, on every corner, was blaming transgender people,” he said. “The Democrats’ response was, let’s not say anything and hope it’s just a non-issue. And the reality of it is, it’s an issue.”
In Massachusetts, Moulton’s tone has shifted from his more reactionary rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, said Caballero.
“We went through the whole gay rights movement. We went through the whole civil rights movement. We never had to say, you know, ‘Seth Moulton: Straight’ or ‘Seth Moulton: White,’” he told WGBH at the time. “And all of a sudden, we have to change all our values to meet the needs or demands of one very small minority group.”
Now, Moulton appears to be walking a tighter line without apologizing or qualifying his comments. He has shied away from making additional comments about trans athletes or pronouns in recent interviews and has instead focused on emphasizing his voting record.
“Congressman Moulton is acutely aware of the trauma the transgender community is facing,” wrote a spokesperson for Moulton in a statement to The Intercept, echoing other recent interviews. “He is a career-long ally with a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign for his voting record, and is a member of the Equality Caucus.”
The spokesperson added that Moulton still believes that “Democrats must engage in difficult conversations” in order to keep the transgender community safe.
The tide has not completely turned. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the current unofficial front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has continued to fan the flames of hysteria over the participation of trans athletes in sports — despite the fact that there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of some 510,000 in the entire NCAA as of 2024.
“We just couldn’t figure out how to make this fair,” he told Katie Couric this month, referring to trans girls’ participation in track competitions.
Rather than assuaging people with questions about transgender issues, these comments from Democrats help Republicans to make trans rights a “wedge issue,” said Chestnut.
Despite his controversies, an Emerson poll in February found that Newsom had a slight lead with likely Democratic voters if the presidential primary were held that day — though there are still more than two years and one midterms cycle to go before voters pick their next president.
For his part, Moulton has denied changing his opinion on transgender rights or his rhetoric. “His position has never changed, and his record reflects this,” wrote a spokesperson for Moulton, emphasizing his support for the Transgender Bill of Rights in 2023, ahead of the 2024 election. He co-sponsored the bill again in 2026.
But Bailey Kelly, a student at Tufts University and secretary of the College Democrats of Massachusetts, said they view Moulton as a fair weather friend on the issue.
“We see through that flip-flopping,” said Kelly, who co-runs the College Democrats of Massachusetts’ digital operations in support of Markey, after the senator won their endorsement. “And it’s insulting that he thinks we don’t see it.”
Authenticity is key for younger voters, said Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something. “People are allowed to grow and change,” said Litman, “but it has to come from a place of truth by the candidate, or they’re not gonna be able to compellingly sell it. And I think that is the challenge for [Moulton].”
In January, both College Democrats of America and College Democrats of Massachusetts announced they were endorsing Markey after he won their internal vote in a landslide. Seaton said Moulton’s comments were “of the utmost importance” in the group’s decision not to support him.
Redemption for candidates like Moulton is possible, Chestnut said. “There is nothing more powerful than some humility, and saying ‘you know what, I was wrong.’”
But to date, Moulton has not apologized for his comments, although he has stated that he “may not have used exactly the right words,” in an interview with CNN.
“Clarification is one thing, but walking back is another. And he has not done either up until this point, and Markey is going to seize on this,” said Nteta, the political science professor. “If Moulton is going to win, he is going to have to assuage the concerns of people in the state about how he is going to govern when he gets to the Senate.”
The post Seth Moulton Saw Trans Rights as a Political Liability. It Could Doom His Senate Campaign. appeared first on The Intercept.
Amid Trump threats, Copenhagen also sent over explosives intended to blow up runways, according to Danish media
Denmark reportedly readied itself for potential attack from the US in January – flying bags of blood to Greenland and explosives to blow up runways in case of a battle with its former closest ally.
During the tense days when Donald Trump threatened to take over Greenland – a largely autonomous territory that is part of the Danish commonwealth – “the hard way”, Copenhagen was so shaken that it started preparing for US invasion, according to Danish public broadcaster DR.
Continue reading...Here's where you can watch Yellowstone, The Madison and more.
Walmart has secured patents for systems that use machine learning to forecast demand and automate pricing decisions, "pushing the U.S. retail behemoth into a debate over the use of algorithms to adjust product costs," reports the Financial Times. From the report: In January Walmart obtained a U.S. patent for a "system and method for dynamically and automatically updating item prices" to carry out markdowns in its ecommerce unit, a rapidly growing division that generated more than $150 billion in sales last year. Last week it received another patent for using machine learning to predict demand and recommend prices for goods. [...] Walmart said that both patents were "unrelated to dynamic pricing," as the patent issued in January was specific to markdowns and last week's patent was designed for merchant teams to make decisions, not the technology. The patent granted in January involves an "end-to-end price markdown system" for ecommerce platforms such as Walmart.com based on data including predicted demand and consumers' price sensitivity. Last week's approved patent outlines ways to forecast demand and set prices at levels that will move stock over periods such as a week, a month or a quarter. "Example categories may include, for example, a food item, outdoor equipment, clothing, housewares, toys, workout equipment, vegetables, spices," according to the filing. The "demand forecasting and price recommendation" tool envisaged in the patent would incorporate sources including purchases, prices, methods of payment and customer ID, such as a passport or driver's license number. "Dynamic pricing or anything that smells like it is playing with fire," said Matt Hamory, a grocery industry consultant at AlixPartners, who cited "the goodwill that you can lose by getting customers to think or suspect or worry even slightly that you are doing things with pricing that are to your benefit and their detriment."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Attacks on facilities by both sides in the conflict this week threaten grave consequences for the global economy
The escalating attacks on key oil and gas projects in the Middle East are expected to fuel a new phase of the ongoing conflict, with profound consequences for the world’s energy supplies and the global economy.
The Iran regime has vowed to target a string of key energy infrastructure across the region after warning that an Israeli strike on a production facility for its largest gasfield at South Pars on Wednesday had ignited a “full-scale economic war”.
Continue reading...Even after accounting for record-high detention populations, the rate of deaths per 10,000 ICE detainees was the highest in 2025 than in any year since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
Foreign minister claims Israel convinced Donald Trump to make ‘grave miscalculation’ of waging war on Iran
Oman’s foreign minister has claimed the US has “lost control of its own foreign policy” and accused Israel of persuading Donald Trump’s administration to go to war with Iran – a conflict he described as a “catastrophe” and a “grave miscalculation”.
Writing in the Economist, Badr Albusaidi, the Omani minister who mediated the latest nuclear talks between Iran and the US, offered an unusually damning assessment of events leading up to the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran and the war it has triggered across the Middle East.
Continue reading...This week, the Senate is expected to start an extended public debate about the SAVE America Act, a proposed bill that would require photo identification for voters in federal elections and proof of citizenship to register to vote in person or by mail.
A version of the bill passed in the House on Feb. 11, 2026, in a 218-213 vote along party lines, with one Democrat, Henry Cuellar of Texas, voting with House Republicans in favor of the bill.
It is widely expected that the chamber’s filibuster rules will prevent a full vote on the floor, but the act and debate process itself will touch on several constitutional issues.
What is the SAVE America Act?
In its current form, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act seeks to amend Section 3 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. The changes include requiring a passport, REAL ID card, military ID card, or other forms of identification that list the applicant as a citizen of the United States when applying to register to vote in elections for federal office. The act also requires documentary proof of United States citizenship when a person applies for the National Mail Voter Registration Form.
The SAVE America Act also requires that a “state shall remove an individual who is not a citizen of the United States from the official list of eligible voters for elections for Federal office.” For states that don’t require advance voter registration, such as North Dakota, they must establish “a system for confirming the citizenship of individuals voting in an election for Federal office prior to the first day for voting.”
In addition, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 would be amended to require that people who want to vote in person present an official valid physical photo identification at the polls. For people not voting in person, a copy of a valid photo identification or a state-approved affidavit with the last four digits of the individual’s Social Security number must accompany a remote ballot for federal office elections. Exceptions to the remote ballot ID requirement include absent uniformed services voters and people covered under the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act.
The Constitution and subsequent voter eligibility laws
In Article I, Section 4, of the Constitution, the ability to establish and regulate elections for federal office is divided between state governments and the federal government. The Elections Clause reads, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations ….”
In general, the Constitution delegates the powers to conduct and administer voter registration to states and territories. However, Congress has passed laws under Article I, Section 4, using its ability to “make or alter” federal election regulations to add additional conditions. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 established some requirements for voter registration applications for federal elections, which included a statement specifying eligibility requirements, including citizenship.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 also required registration applications for federal elections include information such as a current and valid driver's license number, the last four digits of a Social Security number, or a unique identification number provided by the state for voter registration purposes.
Also, Section 611 of Title 18, U.S. Code, generally prohibits “any alien to vote” in an election for federal candidates with some exceptions, including if an “alien’s” parents is or was a U.S. citizen by birth or naturalization, if an “alien” permanently resided in the United States prior to attaining the age of 16, and if an “alien . . . reasonably believed at the time of voting” that they were a U.S. citizen.
Congress has various election enforcement powers under several amendments, which include banning discrimination at the ballot box based on race (15th Amendment) and on sex (19th Amendment). And Congress has passed statutes like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to protect these rights.
The filibuster and congressional debate
The Senate voted 51-48 on Tuesday to move the House-approved SAVE America Act for consideration, with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joining the Democrats in objecting to the motion. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has indicated that the bill’s supporters could debate as long as possible until he calls for a cloture vote. In interviews, Thune has acknowledged publicly that enough votes don’t exist to overcome a filibuster for a vote beyond the debates.
The filibuster is a tactic that dates back to the 1840s in the Senate. The Senate’s website defines a filibuster as “a loosely defined term for action designed to prolong debate and delay or prevent a vote on a bill, resolution, amendment, or other debatable question.”
The modern version requires that at least 60 Senate members vote for cloture, or to end a debate if a member threatens a filibuster, to get a final floor vote to pass a law. The Senate currently uses a “silent” filibuster system where a member only needs to threaten a filibuster via a message to the Senate Majority Leader. A cloture vote is then required, with a 60-vote majority, to override the filibuster, limit debate time, and have a floor vote.
Another possibility is that Majority Leader Thune could allow for a “talking filibuster” that could extend for weeks by getting 51 votes to force Senate’s Democrats to conduct lengthy floor speeches against the SAVE America Act while requiring constant in-person attendance by the Republicans. In such a scenario, the Senate could not consider most other business until the filibuster ends. Thune has already stated he doesn’t plan to pursue a talking filibuster due to a lack of votes.
Thune also has not supported efforts to eliminate the filibuster entirely, an idea frequently championed by President Donald Trump. The president and some members of the Republican caucus want a talking filibuster to force a vote. How that plays out remains to be seen, but there will be considerable attention to the filibuster’s future in coming weeks.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
March 19, 2026 — NERSC invites proposals for projects that will leverage the Perlmutter supercomputer to push the state of the art in AI for science and produce novel science outcomes.
The Perlmutter supercomputer
NERSC is looking for teams with expertise in deep learning for science, a deep understanding of the scientific domain, and demonstrated proof-of-concept results.
This is an open call. It is not necessary to be a current NERSC user to submit a proposal.
Awards
Initially, up to 10,000 Perlmutter GPU node hours will be awarded to accepted projects (each Perlmutter GPU node contains four A100 GPUs) with associated storage quotas on NERSC’s file systems. Additional computer time and data storage may be available for projects that can demonstrate their ability to use them effectively.
NERSC staff assistance will be available for consulting on running effectively at NERSC, but not generally for model development.
NERSC also encourages applications to use Perlmutter’s CPU-only nodes to generate AI-ready datasets, with the expectation that these datasets will be publicly available. Up to 20,000 CPU node hours per project will be awarded to successful applicants, possibly more depending on resource availability.
All awards are for the NERSC 2026 Allocation Year, which runs through January 19, 2027.
Guidelines
Proposals should include the following:
Awardees will be required to report progress and summarize achievements to NERSC.
Criteria
Projects will be evaluated based on the following criteria:
Apply Now
Proposals are now being accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis until all resources are awarded.
Submissions made by April 30, 2026 will be given full consideration.
Submit a proposal online here.
Contact
Please email your questions to the NERSC AI team.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the mission computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), NERSC serves 11,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials sciences, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. An average of 2,000 peer-reviewed science results a year rely on NERSC resources and expertise, which has also supported the work of seven Nobel Prize-winning scientists and teams. NERSC is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.
Source: NERSC
The post NERSC Issues 2026 Call for AI for Science Proposals appeared first on HPCwire.
I review a lot of laptops and have been doing so for decades. These are the best Windows laptops that CNET has tested.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. has struck more than 7,000 targets across Iran since the war began.
US defense secretary suggests Thursday will be ‘largest strike package yet … death and destruction from above’
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said on Thursday there is no “timeframe” for ending the US war against Iran and did not deny reports that the Pentagon could seek an extra $200bn in taxpayer funding.
The military US-Israeli offensive began three weeks ago and continues to widen. Donald Trump threatened on Wednesday to “massively blow up” the world’s biggest gasfield after Israeli strikes on the Iranian site prompted Tehran to escalate strikes on oil and gas facilities around the Gulf.
Continue reading...ABILENE, Texas, March 19, 2026 — Natura Resources LLC (Natura), a developer of advanced liquid-fueled molten salt reactors, continues to make progress advancing the reactor physics and safety analysis underpinning its reactor technology through high-performance computing simulations at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) of The University of Texas at Austin (UT).
Lonestar6 delivers HPC power to researchers across Texas. Supported by the University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) initiative and partners across the state’s leading research institutions, the supercomputer enables scientists to tackle complex challenges and accelerate discovery. Photo credit: TACC.
Reactor physics analyses are being performed by leading researchers and graduate students using UT’s advanced supercomputing resources. These simulations model the fundamental physics of Natura’s reactor design — specifically, the behavior of neutrons that sustain the fission chain reaction within the liquid fuel salt.
“By leveraging TACC’s supercomputers and experts, we’re able to model the core physics that governs reactor performance, safety characteristics, and operational strategy,” said Dr. Jonathan Scherr, Director of Nuclear Systems at Natura Resources. “These simulations support the technical foundations essential to our progress in developing our commercial-scale reactor.”
“The UT research team develops and uses predictive computer codes to model the reactor performance, which was used to support the construction application for Natura’s demonstration reactor and obtain Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval,” said Dr. Kevin Clarno, Associate Professor at UT.
The work being done with UT supports all phases of Natura’s development process, from early-stage concept ideation and optimization through final safety analyses and long-term operations support. The simulations directly inform Natura’s safety analysis methodology, including analysis of the reactor’s built-in safety characteristics that automatically slow the reaction if operating conditions change.
Supercomputers give Natura’s team the computing power needed to run highly detailed simulations of how the reactor operates and how radiation is managed. The result is improved confidence in how the reactor will operate in a variety of conditions.
For advanced reactor developers, rigorous reactor physics modeling is the backbone of the safety, design, and licensing process. Natura’s simulations provide the quantitative foundation for nuclear safety analysis, materials selection, fuel strategy, and long-term operational planning.
Natura’s continued advancement of reactor physics analysis reinforces its commitment to delivering a safe, commercially deployable liquid-fueled reactor to meet growing demands for energy, clean water and medical isotopes.
About Natura Resources
Natura Resources LLC is a leading advanced small modular reactor developer committed to answering increasing domestic and global demands for reliable energy, medical isotopes, and clean water. Natura’s reactors are liquid-fueled and molten salt-cooled, which enhances safety and reduces waste. With the first construction permit for a liquid-fueled reactor from the NRC, Natura has established itself as a leading force in the advanced nuclear industry, fueled by a commitment to support America’s energy future. The company is privately owned and has secured more than $120 million in private funding and a commitment of $120 million from the State of Texas. For more information, www.naturaresources.com.
About the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
The Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin is the nation’s leading academic supercomputing center. Since 2001, TACC has advanced discoveries across scientific disciplines by providing world-class systems, software, and expertise to researchers addressing society’s greatest challenges. TACC offers high performance computing, AI at scale, storage, visualization, training, and workforce development, fostering innovation that transforms science and improves lives. As home to the U.S. National Science Foundation Leadership-Class Computing Facility, TACC will drive the next decade of breakthroughs in computational research and discovery. For more information, visit www.tacc.utexas.edu.
Source: Natura
The post Natura Resources Advances Reactor Physics and Safety Analysis Through TACC Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.
Republican senator’s nomination will now be considered by full Senate, where the GOP appears poised to confirm him
A key Senate committee on Thursday advanced Markwayne Mullin’s nomination to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on a near party line vote, a day after the Republican senator faced questions at his confirmation hearing about his approach to Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and accusations of encouraging violence.
Nearly all eight Republicans on the Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs voted to advance Mullin’s nomination, with the sole exception of the panel’s chair, Rand Paul of Kentucky, who the day prior had harshly criticized his colleague for comments he made about a neighbor who assaulted Paul in 2017, and an incident six years later in which Mullin readied himself to fight a witness at a committee hearing.
Continue reading...State-run QatarEnergy says Iranian attack on its facilities has wiped out 17% of its LNG capacity for up to five years
Gas prices jumped to four-year highs and oil prices rose again after an escalation of attacks by Israel and Iran on gasfields heightened fears of prolonged disruption to international energy supplies.
QatarEnergy told Reuters on Thursday that Iran had damaged facilities that produced 17% of the state-owned company’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity and that it would take three to five years to repair them.
Continue reading...Iran war and its impact on energy and fertiliser costs is the main risk to the global economy, report says
An extended period of high oil prices as a result of war in the Middle East could “crimp” the AI boom, the World Trade Organization’s chief economist has warned.
The war and its impact on energy and fertiliser costs is the main risk to the global economy identified in the WTO’s latest Global Trade Outlook.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 19, 2026 — DDN and Zadara have announced a strategic technology partnership to deliver high-performance AI infrastructure for sovereign clouds and multi-tenant AI factories, built on NVIDIA Reference Designs for multi-tenant clouds.
This partnership is a key component of DDN’s enterprise AI strategy, which is built around two pillars:
By partnering with innovators like Zadara, DDN is accelerating its mission to make enterprise AI accessible, affordable, and fast – not just for hyperscalers, but for service providers, telcos, regulated industries, and global enterprises that need sovereign control, predictable performance, and secure multi-tenant operations.
As NVIDIA accelerates the global evolution of AI infrastructure through standardized reference architectures, enterprises, service providers, and telcos are increasingly focused on deploying software-defined AI factories that deliver predictable performance, rapid time-to-value, and secure multi-tenant operations across sovereign, private, and hybrid environments. The DDN–Zadara partnership directly addresses these requirements by combining Zadara’s AI-optimized, cloud-native orchestration and GPU-aware infrastructure platform, built-on NVIDIA Reference Designs for Multi-Tenant Clouds, with DDN EXAScaler’s proven performance for large-scale AI training and inference.
Together, the two companies will enable service providers, telcos, and enterprises to deploy NVIDIA-powered, AI infrastructure quickly, securely, and efficiently—while maintaining full control over compliance, cost, tenant isolation, and performance SLAs.
A Unified Foundation for Sovereign AI and Multi-Tenant AI Factories
Zadara’s platform is designed to abstract the operational complexity of AI infrastructure while preserving the performance and governance requirements demanded by sovereign and multi-tenant environments. The company supports secure GPU networking, policy-based orchestration,
and strong and secure tenant segmentation with native alignment to NVIDIA guidance on best practices for GPU virtualization and allocation.
Through this partnership, DDN EXAScaler will serve as the high-performance AI data layer for Zadara’s AI Factory and sovereign cloud deployments – enabling consistent throughput, massive concurrency, and predictable scaling for GPU-intensive workloads.
Making Enterprise AI Practical: Accessible, Affordable, and Fast
Enterprise AI adoption is accelerating—but many organizations still face the same core blockers:
This partnership directly addresses those barriers by delivering an integrated, production-ready foundation for real-world AI factories- where the AI stack is not only powerful, but also operationally scalable.
While many AI factory strategies remain theoretical, Zadara and DDN are focused on delivering real-world deployments that customers can operationalize immediately, including containerized AI stacks, high-performance GPU networking, and multi-tenant controls required by regulated industries and national AI initiatives.
NVIDIA GTC Launch + Go-To-Market
“AI factories are the new operating model for modern enterprises and service providers—but they only succeed when the data layer can keep GPUs productive at scale,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder at DDN. “Partnering with Zadara is part of DDN’s broader enterprise AI strategy and ecosystem commitment—making AI infrastructure more accessible, affordable, and fast for enterprises that need sovereign control and multi-tenant performance. Together, we’re delivering a proven path to deploy NVIDIA-powered AI factories with performance, security, and operational confidence.”
“NVIDIA reference designs are accelerating the broad adoption of AI factories. Yet organizations need a cloud-native platform that can operationalize them simply and efficiently in real-world, multi-tenant environments while complying with data sovereignty regulations,” said Yoram Novick, CEO at Zadara. “DDN EXAScaler brings the high-performance AI data foundation needed to meet demanding sovereign and enterprise requirements while Zadara delivers the orchestration, isolation, and policy control required to deploy AI infrastructure quickly, securely, and efficiently.”
Why This Partnership Matters
Together, DDN and Zadara deliver a production-ready foundation for sovereign, multi-tenant AI factories—combining the high-performance AI data layer required to keep GPUs fully utilized with the cloud-native orchestration, policy control, and tenant isolation required to operate AI infrastructure securely at scale.
The joint solution enables customers to deploy AI infrastructure powered by NVIDIA to:
More from HPCwire
About DDN
DDN is the world’s leading provider of AI data storage and data management platforms, powering over 20 years of innovation across HPC, enterprise, and the largest AI deployments on Earth. With its EXA, Infinia, and intelligent data management platforms, DDN delivers unmatched performance, scale, and business value for customers building next-generation AI factories, hyperscale clouds, and Sovereign AI initiatives. DDN is the trusted partner for thousands of the world’s most data-intensive organizations, including the leading national labs, research institutions, enterprises, hyperscalers, financial firms, and autonomous vehicle innovators. For more information, visit www.ddn.com.
About Zadara
Zadara is a leading provider of sovereign AI edge clouds offering a revolutionary distributed cloud platform that simplifies operational complexity and enables seamless multi-tenancy through automated end-to-end provisioning of compute, storage, and networking. With over 500 edge cloud locations worldwide and with the ability to deploy a cloud in any location, Zadara’s clouds are uniquely positioned to meet the unique demands of various cloud-based use cases, including sovereign cloud and AI inference at the edge for service providers and the modern enterprise. Zadara clouds are AWS compatible and feature consumption-based pricing with zero data egress fees. Zadara’s fully-managed clouds are designed to accommodate any workload, anywhere – whether on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud or at the edge. Zadara operates worldwide with a highly skilled team that provides 24/7 follow-the-sun support and services. Zadara is headquartered in Irvine, California.
Source: DDN
The post DDN and Zadara Power Sovereign, Multi-Tenant AI Factories Built on NVIDIA Reference Architecture appeared first on HPCwire.
Carriers warn they cannot hold off passing on costs for long, while some airlines plan to increase flights via Asia
Europe’s biggest airlines have said the rise in fuel prices caused by the war in the Middle East will drive up fares and are advising passengers to book early.
While carriers have partly hedged the price of jet fuel, bosses said they could not avoid passing on additional costs to passengers for long.
Continue reading...ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, March 19, 2026 — The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has announced the direct integration of its recently released Quantum Computing Cloud Platform with the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform for hybrid quantum-classical computing.
This integration enables researchers and developers worldwide to submit quantum jobs directly to TII’s physical quantum hardware and simulators, available at https://q-cloud.tii.ae, using the NVIDIA CUDA-Q programming interface. By bridging TII’s cloud-based quantum infrastructure with NVIDIA’s hybrid quantum-classical programming model, the integration significantly lowers technical barriers to entry and enables high-performance experimentation across quantum computing workflows.
The integration delivers a “write-once, run-anywhere” experience, offering two distinct pathways for job submission:
Dr. Leandro Aolita, Chief Researcher of TII’s Quantum Research Centre, said: “Our goal is to make quantum computing on our in-house QPUs both accessible and performant for the global research community. By enabling CUDA-Q users to submit jobs directly to our cloud platform, we are not just providing a service; we are integrating the UAE’s sovereign quantum-technology capabilities into the global fabric of hybrid high-performance computing (HPC).”
Through this integration, CUDA-Q developers can select TII as a target backend with a simple configuration change, accelerating the development of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms in fields such as materials science, cryptography, and optimization. In doing so, the integration strengthens TII’s quantum ecosystem by enabling global developers to access its in-house quantum hardware through a widely adopted hybrid computing framework.
More from HPCwire: TII Launches Cloud Service Providing Access to In-House Quantum Processing Units
Source: TII
The post TII Scales Quantum Access Through Integration of Its Quantum Computing Cloud Platform with NVIDIA CUDA-Q appeared first on HPCwire.
Should the Gulf Arab states join the war against Iran? Expert comment jon.wallace
Saudia Arabia and the UAE have capable air forces that could complement Israeli and US strikes on Iranian missile and drone infrastructure. But the risks are considerable.
Despite getting struck repeatedly by Iranian missiles and drones, the Gulf Arab states have shown remarkable restraint in the war between the US/Israel and the Islamic Republic. Collectively, so far, they have chosen to pursue a defensive strategy.
The chances of the Gulf Arab states reconsidering and going on the offensive are low. But they could go up should Iran escalate its attacks against critical infrastructure and civilian areas, causing casualties and more serious economic damage.
As always with states contemplating the use of force, it’s a matter of willingness and ability. Some Gulf Arab states – namely, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – are capable of joining the fight against Iran using their formidable air power assets. But would doing so make a difference in the war, or be strategically wise? Neither is clear.
The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) operates 449 aircraft including some of the best air power platforms in the world, such as advanced versions of the American F-15, Eurofighter Typhoon, and Tornado, armed with a variety of missiles. And it performs a range of missions – aerial and ground combat, airborne early warning and control, electronic intelligence, and tanker and transport operations. The Kingdom has a slew of Chinese drones too.
The Saudi aerial arsenal is superior to Iran’s in terms of modernity, flexibility, and lethality – and is in fact the envy of many advanced air forces around the world including those of NATO countries. However, it is how the RSAF has employed this tremendous equipment that leaves much to be desired.
The RSAF has some experience in conventional air and ground combat. During the 1980-1988 Iran–Iraq War, the RSAF played primarily defensive and deterrent roles, especially against the Iranian military.
The RSAF didn’t pursue offensive strike missions inside Iran or Iraq. Rather, it was merely entrusted with defending Saudi airspace and regional maritime security.
For the most part it did well, establishing an air defence identification zone over parts of the Gulf (also known as the ‘Fahd Line’) to secure its airspace. This was during a tense period in the Iran–Iraq War where the belligerents targeted each other’s merchant shipping and in particular oil tankers.
One famous incident in June 1984 saw two Saudi F-15s intercept a small formation of Iranian F-4 Phantoms near Arabi Island in the Gulf. The Saudi fighters reportedly shot down either one or two of the Iranian aircraft, which were allegedly crossing into or near the Saudi air defence identification zone. Iran responded by dispatching 11 more F-4s into the skies over the Gulf, but after a brief standoff they returned home.
The RSAF’s first extensive operational experience was in Desert Storm in 1991, flying combat missions from day one. That mattered a lot symbolically and politically, although less so operationally for the US campaign. The RSAF flew 6,852 sorties (ranking second to the US Air Force) and struck Iraqi targets in Kuwait and southern Iraq.
Saudi crews engaged in air-to-air combat and achieved several kills, which was an impressive achievement. But two Tornado jets were shot down either by an Iraqi Mig-29 or by Iraqi air defences during low-level strike missions.
After Desert Storm, Saudi Arabia began to deepen its security cooperation with the United States, with the RSAF a major beneficiary. Today, the RSAF and the US Air Force engage in bilateral drills with various mission sets on a periodic basis, including regular participation in the famous US Red Flag exercise in Nevada.
The RSAF’s most recent combat experience, during the Yemen intervention of 2015-2022, was not successful. In its campaign against the Iran-backed Houthis, it struggled tremendously with its targeting techniques, causing significant collateral damage and bringing heavy international opprobrium against Riyadh.
But that would be the wrong example to consider. In Yemen, the RSAF had to locate and strike mobile targets that were hiding among civilians and inside mountains. Even the most capable NATO air forces face difficulties with such dynamic targeting.
In Iran, the RSAF would be tasked with striking fixed and open targets. And Iranian air defences have been massively degraded by US and Israeli fighters.
The UAE Air Force has less operational experience than Saudi Arabia, but it fared better in Yemen and other conflict zones. And UAE pilots train intensively, participating in Red Flag since 2009.
The UAE has utilized US military assistance over the years more effectively than any other US Arab partner. That showed in combat operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and especially in Yemen.
Against the Houthis, the UAE’s F-16 Block 60 fighters (more advanced than US F-16s) were more lethal and precise than any in the Saudi-led coalition, leveraging superior intelligence with the help of NATO-certified Emirati Joint Terminal Attack Controllers on the ground, which the Saudis didn’t have.
If Riyadh and Abu Dhabi give the order to their militaries to retaliate against Iran, their air forces are capable of operating as part of a US-led coalition – striking military facilities and energy installations in Iran and flying back to their bases.
But what would their objectives be? And what are the risks?
For the Gulf Arab states, the immediate goal of fighting back would be to force Iran to stop its attacks against them, and in the long term to establish a modicum of deterrence against future Iranian strikes.
After all, if Gulf Arab states continue to rely exclusively on defence, they are essentially signalling to Tehran that it can cause them tremendous harm without suffering any consequences.
Equally, playing defence will exhaust their defensive systems well before Iran runs out of drones and missiles. The US can replenish Gulf defences, but Israel is a US priority and according to reports it is facing a shortage in interceptors.
Economic strain is also an important factor: it costs Iran a lot less to wage war with cheap missiles and drones than it does the US, Israel and Gulf Arab states to defend against them. Economic attrition is core to Iran’s strategy in this conflict.
For these reasons, going onto the offensive makes strategic, economic, and operational sense for Gulf states.
However, the risks are considerable.
First, it could lead to more intense Iranian bombing of the very assets the Gulf Arab states are trying to protect including oil fields, airports, data centres, and desalination plants.
Second, President Donald Trump could yet decide to stop military operations against Iran and declare ‘victory’, leaving Israel and the Gulf Arab states alone in the fight and reducing the likelihood of the Iranian regime falling.
Third, joining the war against Iran will tremendously complicate if not completely sever relations between Iran and the Gulf Arab states. Those relations were never built on trust to begin with, and Iran will have a lot to answer for whenever the dust settles, but a direct military confrontation will deepen mistrust.
Fourth, going to war is never an easy proposition for any nation, let alone politically fragile ones as the Gulf Arab states. Internal political stability is paramount for those authoritarian countries. Fighting an external enemy could strengthen patriotism. But some countries like Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia have to worry about entities and cells that can be activated by Iran and threaten their internal security.
Perhaps the greatest security risk in joining the war is that it would mean choosing to fight alongside Israel. Even before the war in Gaza, any such move would have been politically perilous for a Gulf leader. Choosing to join this fight, alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, could fatally undermine leaders’ credibility with swathes of their populations. That factor more than any other may enforce restraint.
If Iranian strikes against the Gulf Arab states escalate, a defence-only approach to security could quickly become unsustainable. But if the Gulf Arab states decide to join the US-Israeli campaign, it could backfire.
This is an incredibly hard decision, fraught with risks, and one the Gulf Arab states feel they have to make on their own – with little confidence that Washington can be counted on as it once was.
Report shows how minerals critical to defense readiness have seen a ‘near total’ disruption in seaborne trade
The closure of the strait of Hormuz is causing a “paralyzing, real-time problem” for any prospective manufacturing surge in the US defense industrial base, and even for the repair of defense equipment damaged by Iranian attacks, according to analysis published by West Point’s Modern War Institute.
In particular sulphur, a vital upstream input in the extraction of critical minerals including copper and cobalt, has seen a “near total” disruption of seaborne trade in the straits, which makes up half the world’s total shipments, and prices have spiked nearly 25% since the war began, and seen a 165% rise year on year, the report said.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
The growth of data centers has become a hotly contested topic in Delaware and nationally, because the facilities, which power the technology of the future, require huge amounts of electricity. New regulations on the industry approved by New Castle County are the first of their kind in the state.
New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry signed new data center regulations into law Wednesday, a week after the county council’s near unanimous approval of the legislation.
In a statement, Henry described the regulations as a “thoughtful compromise.”
It followed months of bitter debate within the council that included one meeting during which a council member flipped the middle finger at another. At stake is the potential for thousands of future construction jobs and property tax proceeds, but the projects come with significant concerns, principally how they would impact energy rates and water capacity for consumers.
“This ordinance is the result of people coming together, listening to one another, and doing the hard work of finding common ground,” Henry said in his statement.
The sweeping legislation includes new rules that require data centers to maintain buffer zones around them, and to use energy-efficient backup generators, among other regulations.
Councilman Dave Carter first proposed the regulations last summer amid a backlash to a developer’s plan to build a massive, power-hungry data center on about 580 acres north of Delaware City.
Many residents and elected officials feared the facility, if built, would harm the local environment and exacerbate an energy crunch that was already impacting the region.
While the newly passed regulations are, in part, an effort to respond to those concerns, the Delaware City data center will not be subject to them. The council’s compromise included a provision that made the rules only apply to newly proposed projects – not ones already in the development pipeline.
In the final amended ordinance, Carter included concessions on noise regulations, and on lighting regulations by deferring to existing standards for industrial projects rather than imposing stricter rules.
The final rules also clearly outline how data centers are allowed to use water to cool their supercomputers. The ordinance states that data centers must use a closed-loop cooling system, which is designed to reuse as much water as possible. By mandating such systems, Carter said data centers could reduce their water and energy use.
The regulations also require data center projects to be at least 1,000 feet from the nearest residential dwelling, unless a developer submits a noise study to the county. They could then build them within 500 feet of a home.
Data center developers also must set aside funds to decommission the data center if they decide to no longer operate it.
The regulations approved Tuesday will not impact the handful of data center projects that have already been proposed – including the facility near Delaware City, dubbed Project Washington.
Still, that massive project does face other obstacles. Last month, Delaware environmental regulators ruled that half of the two-part plan is not allowed under the state’s Coastal Zone Act, because of its proposed use of 516 diesel generators for back-up power.
The developer, Starwood Digital Ventures, has appealed that ruling with a challenge that could take months, or years, to be fully adjudicated.
A hearing of Starwood’s appeal will take place next Tuesday.
Get Involved
The public is free to attend the hearing of the Starwood appeal, which is scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday at the auditorium of the Richardson and Robbins building, located at 89 Kings Highway in Dover. DNREC said a link for virtual attendance will be listed here. Those wishing to provide public comment must register by emailing the address DNREC_CZICB_Appeals@delaware.gov no later than Monday.
For another possible data center development project near the St. Georges Bridge, the Coastal Zone Act could also become an obstacle. But it is unclear whether the new county regulations would apply to the proposal. The development was introduced to the county prior to the passage of the new rules, but those original plans called for a warehouse not a data center.
The project’s engineering firm, Verdantas, indicated in recent documents filed with the county that the developer may now be planning to build a data center.
New Castle County’s Land Use Department did not respond to a request for comment about whether the regulations would apply to the St. Georges Bridge project, and Carter said he is not sure.
“We have to work that out and see where it goes,” Carter said.
A third proposed data center site near Newark has, perhaps, the easiest path now that the regulations, and their effective start date, have been determined.
That project would see the redevelopment of the White Clay Corporate Center into a three-building data center. Its zoning already allows data center projects, and it does not lie within Delaware’s designated Coastal Zone.
The post New data center regulations go into effect, but not for Delaware City proposal appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Easier logins are a key reason customers are happier with apps, according to a JD Power study.
On March 17, the Senate began debate on the SAVE America Act, a Republican-backed voter identification and registration bill that passed the House last month. Here, we answer several questions about the legislation, many of them asked by our readers.
Previous versions of the bill, called only the SAVE Act, died in the Senate, where the measure hasn’t garnered 60 votes to overcome a filibuster and force a final vote. The new legislation could well face a similar fate — eventually — but the Republican leadership is holding a weeklong (or so) debate in an effort to attract support.
David Becker, founder and executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, which works with election officials throughout the country, said in a March 18 media briefing that it was “extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that this passes.” He predicted that “next week, we’re not going to be talking about this.”
But this week, the Senate is going to be talking about it a lot. On the opening day of debate, Senate Majority Leader John Thune called the bill “a package of commonsense measures” that was about “ensuring that those who are registered to vote are eligible to vote – and that those who show up to vote at polling places are … who they say they are.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it “in every sense a voter suppression bill” that could “disenfranchise” millions of American citizens.
The SAVE America Act (or Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act), passed the House on Feb. 11. The bill aims to prevent voting in federal elections by people who aren’t U.S. citizens — something that election experts say is a rare occurrence. Unlike last year’s SAVE Act, the bill also would require voters to present photo identification before casting a vote, whether by mail or in person. And states would have to use a Department of Homeland Security system to check the citizenship status of people on their voter rolls.
President Donald Trump has demanded that other measures be added to the legislation, including abolishing most mail-in voting.
We’ll explain more about the bill below.
There’s no requirement in the bill for all registered voters to reregister. However, if a voter did need to reregister for other reasons, such as moving or changing their name, they would have to show documentation proving their citizenship. “Under any method of voter registration in a State, the State shall not accept and process an application to register to vote in an election for Federal office unless the applicant presents documentary proof of United States citizenship with the application,” the legislation says.
Ceridwen Cherry, legal director of VoteRiders, a nonpartisan group that helps people get an acceptable form of identification so they can vote, told us that “any change to the registration would require documents to prove citizenship under the SAVE America Act. The statute is drafted broadly enough to encompass all changes to registration.”
VoteRiders’ mission is “to eliminate ID barriers to the ballot box so every eligible voter can cast a ballot that counts,” and as such, it opposes this legislation.
Becker, who said the legislation would “expansively … alter voting in every single state,” costing “tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars,” said voters would need to prove citizenship under the bill “any time you conduct what we call a registration transaction, which usually comes from a life event, a move or a change of name.” (He also said that “in talking with election officials across the country, I have yet to find really any election official who supports this on either side of the aisle. It would make their jobs extremely more difficult” while primaries are occurring and months away from the general midterm elections.)
Current federal law requires those registering to vote to attest that they are citizens under penalty of perjury. The SAVE America Act would require people to present citizenship documents in person to election officials, even if they are registering by mail.
For most Americans registering to vote, proving citizenship would mean presenting either only a U.S. passport, or a certified birth certificate along with a driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID. The legislation lists requirements the birth certificate must meet, such as including the full names of at least one parent, the signature of an authorized government official, and the seal of the state or local/tribal government that issued it.
The Bipartisan Policy Center noted in a March 16 post that not all birth certificates include all of the criteria. About 53% of the U.S. population has a U.S. passport, according to Department of State data.
These are other types of documents besides a passport that would suffice to prove citizenship under the bill: a REAL ID driver’s license that indicates citizenship (five states have such “enhanced” driver’s licenses that include citizenship); a military ID and service record that says the person was born in the U.S.; or a government-issued photo ID that shows a U.S. birthplace. If presenting a government-issued photo ID that doesn’t say the person was born in the U.S. or has citizenship, a registrant would also need either the certified birth certificate or a hospital birth record, adoption decree, a consular birth report, a naturalization certificate, or an American Indian card with the classification “KIC,” which designates U.S. citizenship for Mexican-born members of the Kickapoo tribes of Texas and Oklahoma.
The Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed the 2024 Survey on the Performance of American Elections conducted by the MIT Election Data + Science Lab and found that 12% of registered voters lacked either a passport or a birth certificate along with a government-issued photo ID — the most common ways people would prove citizenship under this bill. The analysis also found that “wealthier and more highly educated voters are more likely to have documentary proof than others.” It found that “registered Democrats are more likely to have a valid passport than registered Republicans” and “Republicans are more likely to have a birth certificate than Democrats.”
According to a 2023 survey by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and other groups, more than 9% of Americans of voting age, or 21.3 million people, didn’t have easy access to citizenship documents, meaning they wouldn’t be able to “quickly find” such documents if they “had to show it tomorrow.” The percentage was 11% for Americans who did not identify as white.
In a summary of the bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service explains that if people lack valid documents, “the bill would require states to establish a process whereby applicants could submit other documentation and sign an attestation under penalty of perjury that the applicant is a U.S. citizen and eligible to vote in federal elections.” If the person lacks documentation, the bill also would require the election official to sign an affidavit saying the registrant sufficiently demonstrated citizenship.
We received several questions from readers who are married, or divorced, and have changed their names, asking about how they can prove citizenship and ensure they can vote, should this bill become law. We wrote about these concerns last year as well. The bill includes a provision on name discrepancies, requiring states to establish a process for those registrations. (Again, voters who are already registered wouldn’t need to prove citizenship under legislation unless they needed to reregister.)
Cherry, with VoteRiders, told us that “if a voter has experienced a name change they would not be able to use their birth certificate as their only proof of citizenship as this document does not get updated if someone changes their name through marriage or divorce. They also could not use any of the other listed documents (e.g. passport) as their sole proof of citizenship if their name on the document does not match their current legal name.”
The bill requires states to set up a process to accommodate this. “Voters will either be able to provide ‘additional documentation as necessary to establish that the name on the documentation is a previous name of the applicant’ or ‘an affidavit signed by the applicant attesting that the name on the documentation is a previous name of the applicant,'” Cherry said. “The bill text does not lay out exactly what this process will be or what additional documentation would be accepted. It also leaves open the possibility for inconsistent rules between states.”
In general, the bill calls for the federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency, to issue guidance to states on implementing the legislation within 10 days of its enactment.
When we wrote about the SAVE Act last year, Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center, raised concerns about criminal penalties in the bill for election officials. That provision remains in this year’s legislation. Weiser told us, “Any state process would be severely undercut by another provision in the bill making it a federal crime for election officials to register anyone who does not present ‘documentary proof of citizenship.’ How many election officials would be willing to risk incarceration and steep fines to register someone whose documentation does not match their current name?”
In a statement to us last year, Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who introduced the SAVE Act in the House and this year’s SAVE America Act, said concern over married women not being able to register to vote was “absurd armchair speculation.” He said the bill “provides a myriad [of] ways for people to prove citizenship and explicitly directs States to establish a process for individuals to register to vote if there are discrepancies in their proof of citizenship documents due to something like a name change.”
New in this year’s legislation is a nationwide voter photo ID requirement. Those voting in person would need to present “a valid physical photo identification” in order to cast a ballot. Those voting by mail would need to provide a copy of the photo ID.
Those who don’t have an ID for in-person voting could cast a provisional ballot and then would have three days to present their ID to election officials — or sign an affidavit “attesting that the individual does not possess the identification required … because the individual has a religious objection to being photographed.”
For by-mail voters, they also could submit the last four numbers of their Social Security number and an affidavit “attesting that the individual is unable to obtain a copy of a valid photo identification after making reasonable efforts to obtain such a copy.”
A valid photo ID for this purpose includes: a state-issued driver’s license or ID card issued by the motor vehicle agency that includes a photo and expiration date, a U.S. passport, a military ID, or a photo ID issued by a tribal government that includes an expiration date.
The National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state legislation, has said that these voter ID requirements “are stricter than those that exist in most states.” In a Feb. 19 post, NCSL staff wrote, “While 36 states currently have voter ID requirements to vote, state approaches vary. Just 10 states fall into the strict photo ID category, as defined by NCSL.”
An acceptable ID for these 36 states “often includes student IDs, hunting and fishing licenses or other state-specific identification cards.” Thirteen states accept non-photo identification, such as a bank statement. That’s broader than what the SAVE America Act would accept.
There are exceptions to the by-mail ID requirements for overseas uniformed services members and those who have the right to vote absentee via the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act.
We’ve written about this issue a few times. Last April, we explained that detailed audits of voting records by some states had found instances of noncitizens casting votes to be relatively rare. In some cases, officials in those states found hundreds of noncitizens on voter registration rolls, a fraction of whom also voted.
Noncitizens convicted of voting in federal elections face fines, jail time and deportation.
“The evidence is that the number of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extremely low, not high enough to have changed the party outcome of any federal election in recent years,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute told us. “Audits and investigations in states like Ohio, Nevada, and North Carolina have found the numbers to be tiny in relation to votes cast. … The consistent experience has been that very few persons in this category mistakenly or deliberately vote.”
For instance, the Ohio Secretary of State announced in May 2024 that it found 137 people on the state’s voter registration rolls who had twice confirmed their noncitizenship status to the state motor vehicles bureau. The announcement didn’t say whether any had tried to actually vote. A grand jury indicted six people who legally and permanently immigrated to the U.S. for voting illegally as noncitizens between 2008 and 2020. In Georgia, a 2022 review found that 1,634 people had attempted to register to vote between 1997 and 2022 and could not be verified as citizens. None had voted. In October 2024, the Associated Press reported that Georgia election officials said 20 out of the 8.2 million on the state’s voter registration rolls were not U.S. citizens, and that nine had voted in previous elections.
The Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed a database of fraud cases compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation and found “only 77 instances of noncitizen voting between 1999 and 2023.”
Last April, we were writing about unsupported claims from Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to have found evidence of large-scale voting by noncitizens. DOGE said it provided data to federal prosecutors for investigation. But nearly a year later, nothing has been made public about that investigation.
More recently, a systematic review of claims about noncitizen registrants and voters in all 50 states by the Center for Election Innovation & Research, updated in February, found that “sweeping allegations about noncitizen registrations or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data. In every examined case, when claims about large numbers of noncitizens on voting rolls are subject to scrutiny and properly investigated, the number of alleged instances falls drastically.”
Numerous states recently have used a Department of Homeland Security program called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to check the citizenship status of people on their voter rolls — something that the SAVE America Act would require. The bill says that states should use the system “for the purposes of identifying individuals who are not citizens of the United States and taking the necessary steps to remove such individuals who are not citizens from the official list, after notice is given to such individuals and such individuals are given the opportunity to provide documentary proof of United States citizenship.” The legislation doesn’t provide more information on how these notices and opportunities to fix a mistake would be carried out.
Recent reporting shows the SAVE database has flaws.
According to a January New York Times article, 49.5 million voter registrations have been checked in several states, and the Department of Homeland Security referred about .02%, or 10,000 cases, to investigators. The Times found that when some counties began looking into the cases, it turned out that only a fraction of them were potentially noncitizens. There was no indication of how many of those who may have improperly registered to vote actually voted.
Texas, too, found there were errors in DHS’ SAVE database. In October, the state said the database identified 2,724 potential noncitizens in its voter rolls of more than 18 million people, and it referred the cases to Texas counties. Many of those counties found U.S. citizens were among those flagged.
In February, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune wrote that their examination of the SAVE system “reveals that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while it was still adding data and before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information.
“As a result, SAVE has made persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing the status of people born outside the U.S., data gathered from local election administrators, interviews and emails obtained via public records requests show. Some of those people subsequently become U.S. citizens, a step that the system doesn’t always pick up,” the news organizations wrote.
Yes, according to a February Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, which found that 71% of the registered voters surveyed said that they supported the SAVE America Act, including 91% of Republicans, 69% of independents and 50% of Democrats.
The online poll conducted Feb. 25-26 asked 1,999 registered voters, “Do you support or oppose the proposed SAVE America Act that would: Require proof of citizenship to register to vote, Require voter ID, Require states to remove non-citizens from their voting rolls, Require states to share unredacted voting rolls with the Department of Homeland Security.”
Three out of the four proposals mentioned in that description of the bill appealed to an even larger group. A press release about the results of the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll said, “The majority of voters support specific requirements of the Act, including proof of citizenship (75%), voter ID (81%), states removing non-citizens from voter rolls (80%), and states sharing redacted voting rolls with the Department of Homeland Security (61%).”
Past polls have revealed similar levels of support for some of those policies.
A Pew Research Center poll from August found that 83% of those asked were in favor of a requirement for everyone to show government-issued photo identification before voting, including 95% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats.
In addition, a Gallup poll from October 2024 found that 84% of surveyed adults supported “[r]equiring all voters to provide photo identification at their voting place in order to vote,” while 83% backed “[r]equiring people who are registering to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship.” About two-thirds of Democrats supported both ideas, more than 8-in-10 independents did, and nearly all Republicans were on board with each.
Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, noted that the results of these surveys depend on what questions are asked. “If you just ask the regular question in polls, do you support voter ID, you do see vast majorities of Americans say yes, including majorities of Democrats. If you ask people, should eligible voters without voter IDs be disenfranchised, you get very different responses.”
The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll also asked, “Which of the following is more important?,” giving two choices. A little more than half, 54%, said, “That we do everything possible to stop voter fraud and illegal immigrants from voting,” and 46% said, “That eligible citizens aren’t denied the ability to vote.”
Trump has proposed that the final version of the bill also eliminate mail-in voting with limited exceptions.
“We don’t want mail-in ballots,” Trump said while talking about his proposal during an interview with a Cincinnati news station on March 11. “We don’t want to have ballots coming from all different corners of the world. We want to have it accurate, and you can’t do that with mail-in ballots.”
In multiple posts on social media in March, the president has written, “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!).”
As is, the House-passed bill would not abolish mail-in voting, but it would require identification to both request and submit a mail-in ballot.
As we’ve reported, mail-in voting is used widely throughout the U.S. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In addition, 28 states allow “no excuse” mail-in voting, which means that voters don’t need to provide a reason when requesting a mail-in ballot.
In the August Pew Research Center poll, 58% of respondents said they supported allowing any voter to vote by mail.
Elections experts have told us for years that while fraud is slightly more prevalent with mail-in voting than in-person voting, it is still relatively rare and not widespread.
More recently, Trump has said that he wants the legislation to address two non-election-related issues.
“I added on no men playing in women’s sports, and I added in no transgender surgery, the mutilation of our children,” Trump said from the Oval Office on March 16, referring to his proposed ban on transgender women playing in women’s athletics and gender-affirming surgery for minors.
Those are the last two of Trump’s five-point plan for the bill, and Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri has introduced an amendment to include all five parts in the final legislation.
“I’ve worked closely with President Trump and the White House to introduce a substitute amendment that will save our elections, save women’s sports, and save our children from gender mutilation surgeries. It’s time to get this done,” Schmitt said in a March 17 statement.
In all, Schmitt said his amendment would: “Require all voters to show ID,” “Require proof of citizenship to vote,” “End mail-in balloting with exceptions for military, illness, travel, and disability,” “Keep men out of women’s sports,” and “Protect children from transgender mutilation surgeries.”
Robert Farley contributed to this article.
Clarification, March 20: We made clear that the REAL ID “enhanced” driver’s licenses available in five states indicate citizenship.
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The post Q&A on the SAVE America Act appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Foreign minister Anita Anand says she has drafted principles to reduce risk of regional spillover and wider shocks
Canada is pushing for a collective G7 and Middle East approach to de-escalating the Iran war, including off ramps that could bring an end to the conflict, the Canadian foreign minister, Anita Anand, has said.
In London to meet the UK foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, after talks with her Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, Anand told the Guardian she hoped a G7 meeting chaired by France, this year’s president of the group, might start to build a broader collective approach to the crisis.
Continue reading...To secure critical minerals supply governments need to take a stake in industry Expert comment jon.wallace
To establish some measure of control of minerals supply, market-oriented governments are starting to directly invest in mining projects. Governments that don’t are placing their manufacturing sectors, energy security, and national defence at risk.
The scramble to secure critical minerals has reignited a wave of resource nationalism, with states intervening in private entities across the mining sector.
This is part of a decisive shift, as market-oriented economies move from incentivizing private actors towards taking a direct financial stake in their operations – in order to influence supply.
The traditional drivers of state intervention have been to protect the mining industry, get projects off the ground, or expectations that governments can benefit economically from extraction.
New drivers of intervention are far more concerned with control over minerals flows – to address vulnerabilities caused by the dominance of China in supply chains and the volatility emanating from intervention from other players.
The US is acting with remarkable urgency to increase production and secure supply. That means that governments that do not have an equity stake in supply chains risk being left behind in the race for material security, placing their manufacturing jobs, many of which rely on supply of minerals, in jeopardy – consigning themselves to trajectories of deindustrialization.
Countries like the UK and blocs like the EU are following Washington’s example by accepting the need for relatively risky minerals investments. In doing do, they must be guided by a desire for control as much as – if not more than – a search for the best value, especially given current low prices.
The geopolitical vulnerability of minerals supply is clear. China is the world’s biggest miner and dominant processor of critical minerals. Beijing’s use of export controls, soft barriers to trade such as export licensing requirements, and trade dumping to reduce prices mean that consistent supply is no longer guaranteed.
US action to counter this dominance will mitigate their own supply risks, but at high cost. The US is leveraging several funding mechanisms, including $15 billion in letters of interest from its Export Import bank EXIM, and $7 billion in loans from the department of energy. The pentagon has also committed $2.8 billion in equity and debt to eight mining and refining projects.
The US is distinct from other partners as they have a higher risk appetite, and they are strategically leveraging Gulf State sovereign funds. Their goal is control, via significant shareholding in mining concerns, seats on their boards, and through that the ability to control flows of critical minerals.
For example, the agreement for the US Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and UAE-backed Orion consortium’s 40 per cent share of Glencore’s copper operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was tied to them being able to choose the export destination for the copper.
Similarly, the US Department of War provided support measures lasting over a decade to MP Metals for Neodymium-Praseodymium oxide and manufactured magnates – while including an offtake agreement to ensure that it could have access to the finished product.
This US policy is a major political risk. Even if these efforts mitigate supply risks, they will still fall far short of overtaking China as a dominant producer of critical minerals.
Other countries, such as the UK, EU countries and others, cannot match the scale of what the US is attempting and have a difficult ask of their taxpayers; to pour money into an industry with low project success rates and high environmental costs.
But government investment is what is required to get mining projects off the ground and establish some measure of control over mineral supply flows. That in turn will ensure national access to industry-critical materials and protect jobs. But it will also likely cause further volatility, as states pressure companies to serve national needs in addition to market forces.
State involvement can influence companies’ decision making. In February 2026 French firm Imerys Lithium placed its project in Cornwall, UK, on care and maintenance due to financing constraints. At the same time, the Banque des Territoires, acting on behalf of the French government, acquired a minority stake in another Imerys Lithium project located in France. The French project with state support pulled through.
The UK’s National Wealth Fund has similarly put money into domestic critical minerals projects. That includes Cornish Lithium, a separate project close to the Imerys site.
However, to genuinely protect supply, the scale of financing must increase, and equity ownership strategies cannot only take place within national borders. Countries like the UK must mobilize politically guided capital instruments to gain direct influence in mining operations across the global supply chain.
Funds such as British International Investment should seriously consider taking investment positions overseas that complement other instruments such as UK Export Finance – so that the UK has a stake in – and access to – mineral production it cannot achieve domestically.
If the UK and EU are serious about improving minerals access, then they must also seek to increase control through equity.
There is precedent: shared private/ government ownership structures are commonplace in the oil industry. The mining industry is moving towards this model, and governments should take advantage of the shift. Representatives of national oil companies that sit on boards and engage in corporate governance as non-operating partners bring significant skills and knowledge. For the UK, EU and others, there is a need to bring technical skills into government, that can then be deployed into such positions.
Government investment at an early stage has other benefits: It can de-risk mining projects by providing patient capital and committing to purchase a portion of the mine’s future production. This can make projects more economically viable and attractive to others. But governments must also go into projects with their eyes open. They are not picking winners seeking short term gains. Rather, they are giving projects an improved chance of long-term success.
Countries like the UK and EU member states can also provide important means for greater democratic oversight of Environmental, Social and Governance criteria and responsible performance standards in the mining sector. They can also be important representatives of indigenous peoples’ rights, while promoting environmental protections, and pushing for more sustainable practice.
However, government intervention should not be guided by a desire for profit or job creation. A measure of long-term control of supply chains should be the objective for industrial EU countries and the UK, serving the more pressing need: to protect critical industries and manufacturing jobs that depend on mining sector products.
Governments that take stakes in critical minerals ventures in developing countries must strike a careful balance. In many cases their investments will be welcome, as the financial liability of investing in mining is even greater for developing nations and is normally not the most effective way to invest their money. But international partners should work to build triangulated state-backed joint ventures, balancing their desire for security of supply with exporting countries’ demands for control over national resource wealth.
The Iran war should boost security cooperation by US Pacific allies like Japan, the Philippines and South Korea Expert comment jon.wallace
The war is fuelling worries about US commitment to its Pacific partners. The ‘triangle’ of US-aligned countries must use the moment to strengthen their mutual defence.
The US war with Iran is shaking up security in the Indo-Pacific. Earlier this month, it was reported that the US had begun pulling THAAD and Patriot missile-defence systems from South Korea to boost its defences in the Middle East – even as North Korea continued cruise missile tests.
The Pentagon also redirected around 2500 marines and an amphibious warship from Japan to the Arabian Sea – at a time when Tokyo’s relations with Beijing are under significant strain.
Such moves raise questions in the wider region about the US’s reliability as a security partner. For decades, the US invested time, money, and troops to develop a strong web of security relationships across East Asia that countries have come to rely on – particularly Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. As President Donald Trump wages war in the Middle East, that carefully constructed Pacific web is overshadowed by significant uncertainty. US allies in the region should meet this new security environment by boosting their interoperability.
For now, the new liberal leadership in Seoul is presenting a strong front about US redeployments. But missile defence systems like THAAD are a vital buffer against ever growing aggression from their northern neighbour. Reportedly, concerns were raised strongly to the US but were overruled, highlighting the vulnerability of relying upon easily movable US assets.
This has caused additional consternation as these missile systems came at significant political and economic cost to South Korea. Following the purchase of THAAD, China punished Seoul with economic sanctions, indicating its displeasure at having US capabilities so close.
US and Korean forces are continuing to carry out military drills as scheduled. And for now, Washington has reaffirmed its commitment to helping to maintain peace on the peninsula. But any US move to redeploy assets away from South Korea will feed anxieties about a US administration that has repeatedly criticized Seoul for its defence spending.
In Tokyo, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has signalled interest in further cooperation with the US, by getting involved in Trump’s ambitious Golden Dome initiative.
Takaichi has also promised to accelerate an increase in Japanese defence spending, acknowledging US pressure for allies to do more on defence. But the Iran war is creating economic pressure for the prime minister at a time when she is trying to move forward an ambitious reform agenda. And Trump’s recent call for Japanese warships and others to help secure the Strait of Hormuz sits uneasily with Japan’s pacifist constitution – creating a rather complicated picture for Takaichi to navigate.
The Philippines is yet to see any US deployments change as a result of the Iran war. But concerns are rising. The longer the war continues, the more pressure will grow on US munitions stockpiles. That could yet affect the Philippines. As tensions continue with China over sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, reliance on US for defence essentials is coming to be viewed as more of a risk, and anxiety is starting to grow in Manila.
Meanwhile, all three countries are facing increasing economic pressure caused by skyrocketing oil prices.
The war, and US deployments, also create domestic political issues. The head of Japan’s main opposition party, Junya Ogawa, signalled frustration following the US redeployment of assets, saying that Japan did not allow US troops on to their territory ‘so they can sortie from those bases to fire missiles towards the Middle East’.
In South Korea, where President Lee Jae-Myung is striving to rebuild trust in Korean democracy following an attempted coup by his predecessor last year, some conservative news outlets are anxious that recent US actions have diminished the country’s ability to defend itself.
In the Philippines, dependence on the US has long been a point of attack used against the administration of President Ferdinand ‘BongBong’ Marcos Jr – who is currently battling corruption allegations. And the war has ignited worries that ties with the US place a target on Filipino soil, should Iran choose to attack US assets in Asia.
The war in Iran also cuts more personally for the Filipino public. Around one in four seafarers are Filipino, and many now face danger and uncertainty as tensions continue to flare in the Strait of Hormuz.
Yet, even as these leaders share a common security challenge and domestic pressures, they also have a unique opportunity to overcome this predicament – together.
Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines have been described by US military commanders as forming a security ‘triangle’ in the Indo-Pacific because of their strategic locations and important role in balancing Chinese power.
Yet, for all their mutual interests, the three allies do not have a trilateral security arrangement, only numerous bilateral agreements.
Japan, South Korea and the US undertook naval exercises in 2025. And Japan and the Philippines conducted joint naval exercises in June the same year. But ‘triangle’ joint naval exercises have not taken place without a US presence. More and better integration is needed.
In order to bridge the gap the US might leave in coming years, a formal and binding trilateral security arrangement is necessary to ensure strong interoperability, intelligence sharing, advanced military tactics and good munitions supplies.
There is a clear foundation for such an agreement: the three countries’ mutual cooperation with the US exhibits commitment to shared norms and principles, providing them with an excellent basis for multi-layered and trust-based cooperation.
The Philippines has enjoyed good bilateral relations with Japan and South Korea. And although Tokyo and Seoul have had a difficult history, their current leaders have shown commitment to bettering relations, sealed by a drum duet earlier this year. This foundation of friendship and respect will certainly smooth the process of integrating into a shared security community. Expanding current bilateral agreements to include a third country would accelerate this process as well.
For example, by extending the current Japan–Philippines reciprocal access agreement to include South Korea, waters within the triangle would see smoother movement of military vessels and more frequent joint training exercises. Disaster response would also likely improve.
Footage of women walking between bars and clubs in UK city centres, often filmed covertly, is proliferating online – attracting thousands of views and profits for those who post them. Can anything be done to stop the creepshots?
‘My friend just sent me this video, told me she’d found me in it,” read the text. “As I was looking for myself, I noticed you’re in it too. I didn’t know I was being filmed, guess you don’t either, just wanted to let you know …”
When Nancy Naylor Hayes received the message in November 2023, she felt a twinge of fear. It was from an acquaintance she hadn’t heard from in years. “I was panicking,” she says. The text pointed her to a Facebook link, which led to a montage of clips of women filmed on the streets of Manchester during nights out.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
Roughly a quarter of Delaware’s land mass is made up of wetlands – marshy ecosystems saturated with water that improve water quality, prevent floods and store carbon. But not all wetland types are afforded the same legal protections. Environmental rule changes at the federal level are prompting state lawmakers to find local solutions to protect some of the most vulnerable — and valuable — wetlands left behind.
As the Trump administration continues efforts to roll back environmental regulations, a gap in policies at the state level could leave some of Delaware’s most vulnerable wetland habitats protected only by the owners of the land where they are found.
State Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown) is hoping to change that.
For months, the chair of the Senate’s Environment, Energy & Transportation Committee has been workshopping a bill that would create a new regulatory committee tasked with developing a program within the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) that would oversee the state’s nontidal wetlands – the kinds of marshy ecosystems found across the state that are not connected to rivers or bays but can still help improve water quality and prevent floods.
“This is a bill that’s going to set the bones of a wetlands program for the state of Delaware,” Hansen said.
The idea, she added, is to combine the state’s existing tidal wetlands program — for marshes that do connect with rivers or bays — with a yet-to-be-created non-tidal program.
While it will be up to a regulatory advisory committee to actually create the new program, the idea is that it would govern how non-tidal wetlands are identified and protected if, say, a development were being proposed for the same spot.
These marshy areas can be home to some of the rarest state species, like the Eastern tiger salamander in northern Delaware, but also can be found on the fringes of some of the state’s southern farmlands.
But Hansen’s proposal could fall squarely in the midst of a decades-long struggle between environmentalists and private land owners.
Generational Delaware farmers like Jay Baxter understand what is at stake. The father of four said some of his best times are spent with his boys exploring the outdoors. But he also worries about state regulators overstepping future farming and property rights. Farmers and developers alike have raised alarms about giving DNREC too much additional regulatory discretion.
And since marshy spaces are widespread in a coastal state like Delaware, figuring out exactly how to appropriately regulate — and even how to accurately identify and rank — certain types of wetlands means contending with those competing land use interests.
Not only do wetlands provide habitats to unique plants and animals, but they also can act as sponges during storms to absorb floodwaters and filter pollutants. That has become increasingly important as more and more of the state, particularly in Sussex County, sees increased development and greater flood risks due to increased impervious surfaces, climate change and rising sea levels.
But Sussex County has historically fought more stringent protections along its waterways. In 2008, the county sued state regulators who tried to set buffers along Inland Bays waterways as part of a pollution control strategy. The county prevailed in court, with the Delaware Supreme Court ruling it was up to the county to develop land-use policies.
At the federal level, the Trump administration has nixed efforts by Democratic predecessors to apply more protections to “Waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act. The public comment period for the newly proposed rule, which would exclude protections for many of America’s seasonal and nontidal wetlands, closed in early January.
This also is not the first time Hansen has introduced a freshwater wetlands program bill. In 2024, she introduced Senate Bill 290 to regulate non-tidal wetlands, but it did not make it out of committee.
That bill’s fiscal note ranged from about $1.5 million to $3 million annually to create, grow and administer a program that would have processed an estimated 700 permit applications each year.
Securing funding may not be the only hurdle this new bill would face. During stakeholder group meetings about the issue, local farmers and developers have continued to raise concerns about future regulatory restraints that could apply to how they have already been using the land for years.
“Work needs to be done to make it something palatable,” said Baxter, who grows a variety of vegetables, including corn and soy, and chickens.
He pointed to historic drainage pathways as being a potential sticking point in the proposed legislation. Such areas, which fill with water in storms but may otherwise be dry, were a major sticking point for critics of the federal WOTUS rule.
“This is very important to future generations of agriculture in the state of Delaware,” Baxter said after a late January meeting. “We must have proper drainage. The rules as they stand don’t allow us to maintain drainage.”
In Delaware, state-level protections are already afforded to tidal marshes — those connected to tidally influenced bodies of water like rivers or the Delaware Bay — as well as large freshwater wetlands with over 400 contiguous acres, which largely only applies to the Great Cypress Swamp stretching across Delaware’s southernmost border into Maryland.
County-level protections can be more stringent. Both Kent and New Castle counties have mandatory buffers for all waterways and wetlands.
In Sussex, there’s a maximum 100-foot buffer required for developers building along tidal waterways. Delaware is also alone in the mid-Atlantic region when it comes to its lack of state-level protections. Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and even Pennsylvania all have varying levels of non-tidal wetland programs.
Meanwhile, most of Delaware’s wetlands are on private land; only about 20% are owned by the state or federal government, according to DNREC.
“The analogy is we’re standing out in the middle of the woods naked as it relates to our protection of non-tidal wetlands here in Delaware,” said Christophe Tulou, executive director of the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays, which advocates for the protection of the Rehoboth, Indian River and Little Assawoman bays in Sussex County.
Tulou said efforts to protect Delaware’s freshwater wetlands date back decades, even before he formerly served as DNREC secretary in the 1990s.
“This is not new,” he said. “And the reason it’s not new is because people have known for a long, long time that freshwater wetlands are hugely important.”
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story used an outdated figured for Sussex County’s required waterway buffers. It was extended to 100 feet in 2022.
Transparency Notice
Maddy Lauria previously worked for the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays from 2020 to 2021. She is currently an independent journalist based in Dover.
The post Sen. Hansen wants state protections to extend to non-tidal wetlands appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Brexit was ‘a colossal mistake’, says President Stubb of Finland – but Europe should build a flexible partnership with the UK News release jon.wallace
During a speech at Chatham House the president outlined why the EU must embrace ‘flexible integration’ to forge closer relations with the UK and countries like Ukraine.
President Alexander Stubb visited Chatham House on 17 March 2026 to discuss EU–UK relations, EU enlargement, ‘flexible integration’, Brexit and other issues. Describing a world in which Europe is squeezed between an aggressive Russia and a US in transition, he addressed the impact of Brexit and the opportunities for Europe and the UK.
After outlining his personal links to the UK, President Stubb said:
‘I think Brexit was a colossal mistake… I do think it’s not only shooting yourself in the foot,’ he said, ‘but it’s like amputating your leg without a medical reason for doing it’.
But, he added, there was ample space to forge a more flexible partnership between the EU and the UK.
‘We need to get out of the mindset which I quite often see on extremes on the continent and here – whereby you need to continue to punish the UK for having this self-inflicted pain.’
He said there was a need for a pragmatic closening of ties in areas such as security, technology and the economy, including customs and the internal market.
‘Get out of the mindset that the UK should not be part of the customs union or the UK should not be part of the internal market. Think about a flexible way of dealing with it,’ he added.
President Stubb speaks at Chatham House.
‘The world is changing, our interests in Europe and the UK are the same. Our values in Europe and the UK, are the same. We need a UK voice in Europe – we really miss you guys, I’m serious, we really do. On the internal market, on competition, on reform, all on these things – on climate change. That’s why I think we should be pragmatic.’
During his speech, President Stubb also discussed the end of an era of peace in Europe, the weaponization of trade, energy and currency, Ukraine peace negotiations – and how best to exploit the EU’s changing economic and political power.
Tinubu’s UK state visit: diplomacy alone won’t fix Nigeria’s problems Expert comment thilton.drupal
The Nigerian president’s visit is his latest high-profile foreign policy moment on the world stage. But his diplomatic engagements have not produced concrete benefits for most ordinary Nigerians.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s state visit to the UK this week is the first by a Nigerian leader since General Ibrahim Babangida in 1989.
Hosted by King Charles III, a state visit is the UK’s highest level of diplomatic visit and uses royal ceremony to signal and strengthen relations with key partners. It is being framed in Abuja as a landmark moment, showcasing the ‘unique bond’ between the two countries and inaugurating ‘a new era of cooperation’.
Tinubu’s visit will provide an opportunity to further operationalize the Nigeria-UK Strategic Partnership, signed in November 2024 during Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s visit to Nigeria, and the February 2024 Enhanced Trade and Investment Partnership (ETIP).
The visit is also in line with Tinubu’s embrace of a foreign policy approach that centres high-profile meetings and visible diplomacy. Tinubu’s foreign policy has been rhetorically polished and sometimes strategically astute; it reflects Nigeria’s profile as a regional power and a key Commonwealth state, and has opened channels for deeper economic and security cooperation.
But nearly three years into Tinubu’s presidency, the key question is whether this visibility-driven foreign policy has delivered domestic gains. So far, the president’s prominent international profile has not largely translated into improvements in material conditions for most Nigerians.
Tinubu has engaged in frequent presidential travel, maintaining a visible presence at summits across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. His trips – and those of senior officials – have drawn criticism for their cost amid rising poverty, hunger and falling purchasing power back home.
Foreign minister Yusuf Tuggar has articulated a ‘4D Foreign Policy’ – built on democracy, development, demography and diaspora – and advocated for Nigeria’s strategic autonomy. But in practice, Nigeria’s diplomatic capacity has lagged behind its rhetoric. Ambassadorial appointments have been slow or seen as politicized, weakening diplomatic capacity to implement the administration’s agenda.
Tinubu’s administration has also sought international validation for its key domestic reforms – fuel subsidy removal, naira devaluation and tax reform. His team cites various policy achievements as proof of success. These include headline inflation falling from above 30 per cent in 2024 to around 15 per cent last month; a stabilizing naira; Nigeria’s removal from the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) grey list; S&P raising its outlook to ‘positive’; and renewed investor interest.
However, for many Nigerians, the combination of subsidy removal, devaluation and tougher taxation with weak safety nets recalls the ‘shock therapy’ of the late 1980s, when IMF-aligned reforms under General Babangida produced lasting social costs.
Poverty remains high, food insecurity has risen, household spending remains weak and credit remains expensive for small firms. Growth is concentrated in capital-intensive sectors such as finance and ICT, while agriculture remain constrained by insecurity and structural bottlenecks. Nigeria’s deficits in education, skills and health are having a more negative impact on future earnings than in other comparable economies.
Tinubu’s London visit will likely focus on leveraging the UK-Nigeria ETIP to attract investment in energy, infrastructure, technology and services – sectors where UK firms are competitive. However, any potential investments are unlikely to fix Nigeria’s struggling economy or reverse the structural drivers of migration, such as rampant insecurity and weak public services.
UK-Nigeria trade is significant, but not top-tier. It reached £8.1 billion in figures for 2025, up 11.4 per cent on the preceding year. Nigeria is the UK’s 36th largest trading partner, with the balance of trade in the UK’s favour. In comparison, Nigeria’s trade with China exceeded $22 billion (around £16.5 billion) between January and October 2025.
The UK is also a major source of FDI and a key destination for Nigerian migrants. Nigerians were one of the largest non-EU nationalities to immigrate to the UK in 2025, and remittances form an important element of Nigeria’s external accounts.
However, much of Nigeria’s non-African commerce is still dominated by hydrocarbons and imported manufactured goods, rather than higher-value non-oil exports. This pattern leaves the country vulnerable to commodity price swings and reflects structural constraints at home: roughly 85 million Nigerians still lack access to grid power. Despite a new Electricity Act in 2023, outcomes remain poor, with frequent outages.
Nigeria’s trade with other African countries also remains low. Nigeria earned roughly $478 million from exports to ECOWAS markets in 2025 – a comparatively modest amount. Despite Abuja’s vocal support for the African Continental Free Trade Agreement and its plans to host the fifth Intra-African Trade Fair (IATF) in 2027, African markets remain underexploited.
While Tinubu may secure UK investment during his visit, these deeper patterns raise doubts about whether this economic diplomacy is reducing Nigeria’s reliance on non-African trade or its exposure to global shocks. Instead, more focus is needed on tackling long-term structural challenges – especially in electricity, education and health.
Security should also be a key focus of the visit. Nigeria remains locked in conflicts across multiple fronts. The jihadist insurgency in the northeast continues, while organized criminality and kidnappings plague the northwest and central Nigeria. Nigeria ranks 6th on the 2025 Global Terrorism Index.
In early February, Nigeria’s Ministry of Defence announced the deepening of defence cooperation with the UK, building on existing training, intelligence, counterterrorism and maritime cooperation. The state visit is expected to formalize and expand this agenda, potentially improving operational capabilities.
So far, security partnerships with the UK and others have improved technical capacity – particularly in maritime security, counter-IED work and some aspects of air operations. But they have not produced discernible improvement in everyday security.
Killings, kidnappings and displacement remain widespread. ACLED data indicates at least 12,860 people were killed in political violence in the past year.
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