Latest attacks come after Trump vowed ‘major military punishment’ for Tehran and its Houthi allies
Donald Trump said that in recent meetings with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, both leaders assured the US president separately that they would not sell weapons to Iran.
“Considering our relationship, I take him at his word,” Trump said of the Chinese leader. Meanwhile, the US president said that the Kremlin made the same guarantees, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine. Putin understands that the US does not sell weapons to Ukraine, “but to Nato countries”, Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Friday. “They pay full price, and how those weapons are distributed, I have no idea.”
Represenatives Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal, will visit the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis today to conduct a congressional oversight visit.
The Democratic lawmakers are visiting the site of sustained protests earlier this year against the immigration crackdown that swept the state of Minnesota, and resulted in the fatal shootings of two US citizens by federal immigration agents.
A physio, a tailor and a historian on the style trends that can put women in hospital and how to avoid the dangers
“Buyer beware” is one of the oldest principles in English law. Now, a pair of wide legged trousers from Zara is bringing the phrase back to the forefront of shoppers’ minds.
On social media the £25.99 wide-legged trousers from the high-street retailer have earned the moniker “Zara death pants” thanks to a slew of videos showing wearers tripping over the leg of the trousers and injuring themselves.
The 25 Democratic attorneys general say administration imposed ‘unlawful’ conditions on federal disaster grants
A group of 25 Democratic attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta are taking the Trump administration to court for imposing “unlawful” conditions on federal grants for disaster preparedness and response.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) have been placing stipulations on federal grants that amount to a “campaign of coercion” designed to force states to adopt the White House’s preferred voting and immigration policies says the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Rhode Island on Thursday.
Deal is reportedly two years, $8m with player option
41-year-old spent last eight seasons with Lakers
LeBron James is signing with the Philadelphia 76ers on a two-year, $8m deal that includes a player option. Klutch Sports Group CEO Rich Paul confirmed the agreement to ESPN, and James addressed the move in a post on X on Friday morning.
“I believe I can help make the Philadelphia 76ers a championship team and I am so excited to energize a new fan base and start this incredible journey one last time,” he said.
‘Daily routine of hit jobs and smears will not deter us from winning next general election,’ party briefing notes say
Reform UK has instructed its councillors to describe a police investigation into donations from the mother of George Cottrell as an establishment stitch-up, as polling showed the party’s popularity plummeting.
Internal briefing documents circulated to the party’s councillors included instructions to respond to questions about a Metropolitan police investigation into party donations with: “It is now clear that the establishment will try anything to stop us”, the Times revealed on Thursday.
A £10,000 bar tab was drunk, there was a ‘lot of anger’, and now ex-ministers are thinking how to cooperate in future
Keir Starmer’s leaving party had been planned for some time. But in years to come it might be seen as the birth of a new Labour movement.
Dozens of ministers, aides and Starmer himself headed to the Grafton pub in Kentish Town on Monday night to drown their sorrows, hours after the former prime minister left Downing Street for the last time.
More than 80,000 people have fled huge wildfires in Spain and France as Madrid declared a national emergency and French authorities ordered the total evacuation, by land and sea, of one of the country’s best-known holiday spots.
Authorities in south-west France ordered the Cap Ferret peninsula on the Atlantic coast to be evacuated “village by village” in the face of an “intense, highly unpredictable” wildfire that has burned through more than 12,500 hectares (30,900 acres) of forest.
The Houthi Red Sea blockade: Will collective maritime security be defended, or break down?Expert commentjon.wallace
The risk is a prolonged crisis, followed by a breakdown in maritime security cooperation and a widening conflict. But Houthi actions could be addressed by strengthening existing multinational efforts.
The Houthi Red Sea blockade against Saudi Arabia, announced on 20 July, marks a dangerous new phase in the crisis affecting global maritime trade. There are already reports of attacks on Saudi shipping. Effectively that leaves the Bab-al-Mandab Strait and Suez Canal closed, sealing both ends of the Red Sea – compounding the current crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. The world now faces a three-way chokepoint crisis. Can the international system protect global commerce?
If both the Bab al-Mandab and Hormuz remain contested, governments will increasingly face the same difficult question: how much economic disruption are they willing to tolerate before resorting to military escalation?
The situation will also test the growing ambitions of non-state actors. The Houthis have demonstrated that even a movement with limited military capabilities can threaten chokepoints and heap pressure on regional powers in the same way as Iran has done in Hormuz. But can they maintain their effort?
As the initial shock subsides, policymakers should focus less on the blockade itself and more on the question of escalation. Saudi Arabia, the United States and external trading powers will eventually have to define what a successful end to the crisis looks like and where the limits of escalation lie.
Iran and the Houthis will need to decide at what point the political and military costs of continuing the disruption outweigh the strategic benefits. The answer to that question will determine both the duration of this crisis and the likelihood of a wider regional conflict.
The limits of escalation
Iran’s return to conflict in the Strait of Hormuz is best read as a calculated gamble. The closure of the Strait and continued military strikes are meant to raise the cost of the standoff enough to force Washington back to the negotiating table on broader terms. In other words: Tehran’s plan has been ‘escalate to de-escalate’.
In this way, Houthi involvement benefits Iran by further straining US’s regional allies – especially Saudi Arabia. It is hurting oil markets, diversifying Tehran’s leverage (while providing plausible deniability) and decreasing pressure on the Hormuz front.
Washington’s logic is almost the mirror image of Iran’s. President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to restore deterrence through overwhelming military pressure while avoiding another open-ended Middle Eastern conflict.
Yet this approach also carries risks. If Trump’s strategy fails, domestic political pressure to demonstrate success may drive further escalation rather than restraint. The White House has already indicated it is prepared to strike the Houthis again should they target American shipping. That raises the possibility that US military operations in the Gulf could increasingly extend into the Red Sea.
Houthi motivations
Understanding Houthi decision-making requires moving beyond the assumption that the group simply executes Iranian strategy. The Houthis are deeply embedded within the ‘Axis of Resistance’ and reliant on Iranian military assistance. But they retain significant autonomy, particularly in pursuing domestic political objectives. Their interests frequently overlap with Tehran’s, but they do not always coincide.
For the Houthis, maritime disruption in the Red Sea serves several purposes besides supporting Iran. It provides leverage over the international community, acts as a deterrent against regional adversaries – particularly Saudi Arabia – and reinforces their domestic legitimacy by portraying the movement as capable of confronting powerful external actors. Their earlier attacks on shipping from 2023-2025, framed around support for Palestine, significantly boosted their standing among many Yemenis, despite worsening economic conditions at home.
The current escalation also reflects the Houthis’ regional ambitions. The Houthis are seeking to pressure Saudi Arabia into reviving the political roadmap suspended in late 2023. That would include renewed negotiations over financial arrangements that would strengthen Houthi governance and economic resources. More broadly, they appear intent on positioning themselves as the leading Axis of Resistance member, following Hezbollah’s weakening in Lebanon.
The Houthis do not need to maintain perfect operational capability to produce strategic effects. Their objective is not to sink large numbers of ships but to create…uncertainty.
Therefore, the duration of the Red Sea blockade will not depend on whether the Houthis can defeat international naval forces. The question is whether they can sustain sufficient disruption to achieve their political aims.
It is not clear how long they can continue their efforts. Previous American strikes degraded their launch sites, infrastructure and smuggling routes. And the Houthis remain dependent on Iran for certain advanced technologies, despite expanding domestic production of drones, mines and missiles. These constraints will matter over time.
Still, maritime disruption is inherently asymmetric. The Houthis do not need to maintain perfect operational capability to produce strategic effects. Their objective is not to sink large numbers of ships but to create enough uncertainty for commercial shipping that insurers raise premiums, companies reroute vessels, and governments absorb mounting economic costs.
By that measure, even sporadic attacks can generate disproportionate impacts on the global economy. In many respects, the Houthis’ threshold for success is psychological rather than military – and they may already have achieved part of that objective.
Response options
The consequences of simultaneous chokepoint closures extend well beyond the Middle East. Major import-dependent economies like India, China, Japan and South Korea could suffer significant economic costs from prolonged disruption in both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.
In this respect, the Houthis may have underestimated the consequences of their actions. As commercial losses mount, pressure for coordinated diplomatic and security responses against them is likely to grow, particularly from states whose economic interests depend heavily on uninterrupted maritime trade.
However, there remains a significant threat in the external responses to the crisis: an ‘every man for himself’ breakdown of international rules. The longer conflict over maritime chokepoints drags on, and the more the costs of prolonged supply-chain disruption rise, the greater the risk that countries seek bilateral transit agreements with Iran and the Houthis.
There are already indications that some countries and private companies have pursued ad hoc understandings with Tehran to secure passage through Hormuz. Similar dynamics could emerge in the Red Sea. Such arrangements may reduce immediate threats to individual actors, but they also weaken collective maritime security by rewarding coercion.
Over time, a fragmented approach to this conflict risks creating incentives for both state and non-state actors to view maritime disruption as an effective tool of political leverage.
Options for action
Still, there are options available to policymakers to support security and stability in these waters. In April the UK and France proposed a 40-nation coalition to help safeguard future transit through the Strait of Hormuz. These ships are positioned to act and have been preparing for the past few months.
Likewise, the EU’s Naval Force Operation Aspides and Atalanta have been operating across the Gulf and Red Sea regions for years to help protect shipping. These existing multinational efforts all offer mechanisms through which freedom of navigation can be collectively defended.
This could include providing escorts or convoys, identifying safe transit routes, conducting freedom of navigation operations, or offering emergency response support in case of attacks. Strengthening these frameworks would be far more effective than allowing a proliferation of competing bilateral arrangements with the Houthis and Tehran.
If governments struggle to restore confidence, private maritime security firms are likely to assume a larger role in escorting commercial traffic. These companies can provide short-term protection. But their growing presence could further complicate command-and-control arrangements at sea, increase coordination challenges among national navies, and blur lines of accountability during any future incident.
A protracted crisis would also generate difficult second-order challenges. Competing naval convoys, overlapping military operations, humanitarian missions, and negotiations with coastal states around the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa all increase the risk of misunderstanding, escalation and the widening of the conflict.
Protecting freedom of navigation has therefore evolved – from a military challenge to a broader test of international coordination, under conditions of simultaneous geopolitical crises.
Colt Gray was charged with 55 counts, including malice murder, and faces up to 180 years in prison for the deadly mass shooting at Apalachee High School.
Of the estimated 179 people aboard, 76 were rescued as efforts continue to salvage the ship and recover all bodies
The confirmed death toll from the recent capsizing of a state ferry off Guyana’s coast has risen to 72, with more bodies recovered as a multinational team struggle to salvage the partially submerged vessel.
Of the estimated 179 people aboard, 76 people were rescued. The government has estimated that 100 may have died in the accident, which would make it the worst marine tragedy on record for the South American nation.
SAN JOSE, Calif., July 24, 2026 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. has announced its next-generation H15 server portfolio powered by 6th Gen AMD EPYC 9006 Series CPUs, optimized for next generation GPUs including AMD Instinct, and connected by AMD Pensando networking. With up to 256 cores and 512 threads, H15 systems meet the growing compute demands of cloud, enterprise, storage, high-performance computing (HPC), and agentic AI workloads. With breakthrough 1.7x generational CPU performance improvement, expanded memory and I/O bandwidth, and industry-leading compute density, customers are now able to run more concurrent AI agents, accelerate enterprise applications, and maximize host-node performance while operating within existing power envelopes.
“The latest AMD powered additions to our DCBBS family deliver the next generation of AI infrastructure, optimized for high performance, rapid scalability, and peak efficiency,” said Vik Malyala, Chief Business Officer at Supermicro. “Backed by our global services team, resilient U.S. supply chain, and consistent investment in US AI innovation, we continue to help customers deploy and scale AI with confidence.”
“As enterprises scale agentic AI, they need infrastructure that delivers exceptional performance, efficiency, and flexibility,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD. “By combining the latest AMD EPYC CPUs, Instinct GPUs, and AMD Pensando networking with Supermicro’s modular server and rack-scale designs, customers can deploy AI infrastructure faster while improving utilization, reducing energy consumption, and lowering total cost of ownership.”
H15 Portfolio Delivers Optimized Infrastructure for Every Workload
The new H15 portfolio includes purpose-built systems optimized for a broad range of enterprise and AI infrastructure deployments:
Hyper: The flagship dual-socket platform engineered for enterprise applications, AI inference, virtualization, and cloud workloads, with advanced thermal design to support the highest-performance AMD EPYC processors.
CloudDC: A single-socket or dual socket server designed for cloud-scale environments and built on the Open Compute Project (OCP) Data Center Modular Hardware System (DC-MHS) specification for compatibility with open data center standards.
GrandTwin: A high-density 2U, four-node architecture designed for scale-out environments including object storage, virtualization, cloud services, and high-performance computing.
FlexTwin: A 1OU, two-node, high-performance, high-density dual CPU compute system that maximizes compute density and power efficiency for cloud-native and hyperscale deployments using liquid cooling.
Petascale Storage – 1U and 2U high-capacity all-flash storage platforms optimized for software-defined storage-based AI data lakes, large-scale analytics, and HPC environments supporting up to 4.8 PB per system.
SuperBlade: H15 8U 10 SuperBlade represents next-generation, rack-scale breakthrough architecture for HPC, AI inference, agentic AI, and enterprise-class compute workloads with CPU and GPU. The platform supports both single-socket and dual-socket blade configurations – with both air and liquid-cooled versions optimized for maximum density, high performance, and efficiency, across a wide range of infrastructure deployments.
Expanding AMD GPU-Powered AI Infrastructure
Complementing the H15 server portfolio, Supermicro continues to expand its AMD GPU-powered AI infrastructure with new PCIe GPU servers and the rack-scale Supermicro AMD Helios Platform. As shown at Computex 2026, these solutions provide organizations with flexible deployment options ranging from enterprise AI inference to large-scale AI training.
5U PCIe GPU Servers Powered by AMD Instinct MI350P GPUs
The Supermicro AS -5126GS-TNRT and AS -5126GS-TNRT2 are designed to maximize the performance of AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe GPUs. Supporting up to ten GPUs in a standard 5U air-cooled platform, these systems deliver exceptional AI acceleration while operating within existing data center power and cooling infrastructures.
By combining Supermicro’s high-density PCIe architecture with AMD Instinct MI350P GPUs featuring up to 144GB of HBM3e memory and support for low-precision AI formats, organizations can accelerate AI inference and training while improving infrastructure efficiency, reducing data center footprint, and lowering total cost of ownership.
Open Ethernet Networking with AMD Pensando Pollara 400 AI NIC
The AMD Pensando Pollara 400 AI NIC provides high-performance, open Ethernet networking for AI infrastructure, enabling front-end, storage, and scale-out connectivity for AMD Instinct MI350P-based systems with the high bandwidth, low latency, and efficiency required for AI training and inference. Together, AMD Instinct MI350P GPUs and the AMD Pensando Pollara 400 AI NIC enable customers to build open, high-performance AI clusters that scale from a single server to large multi-rack deployments using standard Ethernet infrastructure.
Supermicro AMD Helios Platform
For organizations deploying frontier AI models, Supermicro is collaborating with AMD to deliver the Supermicro AMD Helios Platform, a 72-GPU rack-scale solution designed for large-scale AI training and high-throughput inference.
The liquid-cooled platform combines AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, 6th Gen AMD EPYC processors, AMD Pensando networking technologies, and the AMD ROCm software stack to create an open, high-performance AI infrastructure. Supporting deployments of every size, the platform enables customers to scale efficiently while maximizing performance, energy efficiency, and operational flexibility.
Supermicro’s DCBBS brings these technologies together as complete, validated AI infrastructure, enabling organizations to deploy solutions ranging from individual servers to fully integrated rack-scale and data center-level systems. With industry-leading design, manufacturing, liquid cooling, networking, software, and global support services, Supermicro continues to help customers accelerate AI adoption while reducing deployment time, improving energy efficiency, and lowering total cost of ownership.
For a detailed product demonstration led by Supermicro experts, be sure to stop by the Supermicro booth at AMD Advancing AI Day 2026, July 22–23, 2026, at Moscone West in San Francisco. Supermicro will also be displaying the densest EPYC 9006 rack implementation with 96 EPYC 9006 CPUs in a 42U rack using the FlexTwin system which will be shown in the AMD display area.
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).
French evacuees using hundreds of mobilised boats or the only road linking the area with the mainland as evacuation also ordered in areas near Spanish capital
Over in France, it’s not just the south-west that gets affected, but the country’s south-east regions are also being hard hit, AFP noted.
Dozens of fires flared up and are being fanned by the mistral wind around the historic village of Cotignac – officials saying around 25 houses had been destroyed since Tuesday.
Donald Trump has been accused of using forced labor as “a pretext” to impose a fresh wave of tariffs on dozens of countries, as critics warned of higher prices for Americans.
The US president faced swift criticism from Democrats after his officials presented their latest effort to make his signature economic policy permanent following a string of high-profile legal setbacks. Some Republicans also expressed concern.
Lib Dems call on PM to push for suspension of ‘bungled, malfunctioning’ system as overseas holiday travel peaks
Andy Burnham has been urged to lobby EU leaders directly to suspend the new entry-exit system, EES, as the peak weekend for overseas holidays begins.
About 2.2 million British holidaymakers are expected to head abroad between Friday and Monday, the majority to Europe, with all schools in the UK now on their summer break.
DAVIS, CALIFORNIA — Severe wildfires are destroying California forests faster than land managers can restore them, leaving millions of acres vulnerable to permanent conversion into brush and scrub.
A draft reforestation plan estimates that since 2000, high-severity fires have removed 2.3 million acres of forest in areas where natural regrowth is unlikely without help. If current trends continue, researchers say California could lose up to half its forest area by 2071.
Since 2020, state and federal agencies have replanted about 254,000 acres, which is only around 16% of what was lost to severe fires in that period. Federal agencies, which manage over half of California’s forests, have been even slower to replant.
To meet its goal of restoring 280,000 acres per year starting in 2030, California would have to boost reforestation efforts by about 35%. The cost per project can reach $6,400 per acre, which adds another layer of difficulty.
Seed shortages are also a problem. Cal Fire says its seed-bank capacity would need to grow by about 300% just to replant a quarter of the damaged private forests. Right now, the Davis reforestation center holds around 42,000 pounds of seeds.
The draft strategy suggests increasing seed collection, expanding nurseries, and growing the forestry workforce. It also recommends planting trees at lower densities to help them survive future fires.
Over 11,500 people this summer are suspected to have been sickened by disease that can cause explosive diarrhea, CDC says
Investigations into the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak on record expanded to nine states this week, as more than 11,500 people are suspected to have been sickened this summer, according to reports and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Data released by the CDC this week said the agency is looking into 4,173 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases of the disease and investigating an additional 7,400.
Texas state Rep. James Talarico is challenging Attorney General Ken Paxton in a U.S. Senate race. Sergio Flores for The Texas Tribune
The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas is trying to turn a key talking point of his Republican opponent against him — alleging Attorney General Ken Paxton is guilty of the same type of voter fraud he has spent years trying to eliminate.
“As our state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton has gone on a voter fraud witch hunt,” state Rep. James Talarico, who is challenging Paxton in the race to replace U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, said during a campaign event in Houston. “Turns out, he was committing voter fraud the whole time, voting illegally in six elections in a row from the wrong address.”
Talarico’s comments come after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that Paxton moved out of the home he shared with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, in 2024 but continued to vote using that address, including during the March Republican primary in which he beat Cornyn. Three election experts told the news organizations that Paxton may have broken state law.
Last week, the Collin County Democratic Party filed a complaint with the Texas secretary of state, urging that office to investigate Paxton for election fraud.
Paxton has repeatedly declined to answer the newsrooms’ questions about his voter registration and residency. On Tuesday, he held a rare news conference to tout the endorsement of nearly two dozen sheriffs and attacked Talarico as soft on crime. Talarico denied the charge at his own news conference Wednesday, saying he’d voted for billions of dollars in law enforcement funding as a member of the Legislature.
When a Dallas Morning News political writer asked Paxton why he voted in Collin County, the attorney general shook his head as a campaign aide interceded.
“We’re just going to answer questions on law enforcement today,” the aide said.
Paxton’s office and campaign did not respond to similar questions on Thursday from ProPublica and the Tribune. They also did not answer questions about Talarico’s comments.
The fact that Paxton voted in six elections from an address at which he appears not to live may resonate with voters because it reinforces longstanding accusations by critics that he has used his office for personal gain, said Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson. That was the central theme of the Texas Legislature’s impeachment of Paxton in 2023 on charges of bribery and corruption. The state Senate voted to acquit Paxton.
“There’s been a whole series of legal challenges he’s been able to slip out of, but voters are at least vaguely aware of them,” Jillson said. The latest reporting about his voting practices “is just another example of playing fast and loose with a law you must be familiar with as attorney general,” Jillson said.
Texas law permits voters to temporarily cast ballots using an address where they do not reside, so long as they intend to return. Election lawyers told the newsrooms that it is unlikely Paxton could make such an argument given his ongoing public and acrimonious divorce. (Examples of reasons considered valid include attending an out-of-area college or serving in the military.)
It is unclear what will happen with the complaint filed against Paxton.
State law requires the secretary to “promptly” refer complaints to the attorney general if “there is reasonable cause to suspect that criminal conduct occurred.”
Secretary of State Jane Nelson’s last day in office was Friday, three days after the complaint was filed. Gov. Greg Abbott appointed one of his senior advisers, Robert Howden, to replace her. The office continues to decline to answer questions from reporters, but Collin County Democratic Party Vice Chair Mary Higbe said the secretary of state told her in an email Thursday that the complaint “remains under review by one of our staff attorneys.”
The attorney general’s office has not responded to questions about whether it received the complaint or whether it would hire a special prosecutor to investigate it, given that it involves the attorney general himself.
The silence from the Republican-led state government suggests an effort to slow-walk investigating Paxton, said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He said that’s difficult to square with rhetoric by Paxton and the secretary of state’s office that securing Texas elections is a top priority.
“You push the idea that you’re going to be really tough on election wrongdoing, and yet here you are with allegations in which you seem to be uninterested in pursuing,” Taylor said. “That smacks of rank hypocrisy.”
Astronomers studying the star system CD-35 2722 may have found the first known moon-like object outside our solar system. The classification is unusually tricky, however, because it orbits a brown dwarf rather than a planet, making it clearly an "exosatellite" but forcing scientists to rethink where the line between planet, moon, and failed star should be drawn. Space.com reports: The star CD-35 2722 is located around 73 light-years away and has around half the mass of the sun. It is orbited by a "failed star" or brown dwarf. These stellar bodies get their unfortunate nickname because they form like other stars but fail to gather enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores. In terms of mass, brown dwarfs are more massive than the largest gas giant planets, but smaller than the smallest stars, usually with around 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, or around 0.013 to 0.08 times the mass of the sun.
The newly discovered object in CD-35 2722 is certainly moon-like, but rather than orbiting a planet as the moons in the solar system do, it orbits the system's brown dwarf. "This system is somewhat hard to define using solar-system-based words like 'planet' and 'moon.' The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star," team leader Kevin Hoy of the Universidad Diego Portales and the Millennium Nucleus of Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) in Chile, said in a statement. "Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system."
The team currently isn't able to definitively claim this object in CD-35 2722 is an exomoon, because that would require really nailing down a new definition of what a moon is. "The satellite we report is a giant gaseous body orbiting a highly massive companion, itself several times the mass of Jupiter. We have a clear delineation between the planets and the sun in the solar system, so defining things like moons is simple," team member Alice Zurlo of the Universidad Diego Portales said. "In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe." Zurlo and colleagues can, however, confidently claim this is an exosatellite, meaning it is a first-of-its-kind detection no matter what the future holds for its classification.
The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
During its Advancing AI 2026 launch event in San Francisco yesterday, AMD formally unveiled its latest generation GPUs, including the AI-oriented Instinct MI455X and the HPC-oriented Instinct MI430X. Surrounding the GPUs will be new Zen6 CPUs and a new 800Gb Pensando NIC, providing UALink-compatible scale-up Helios rack to go up against Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink systems.
The new Instinct MI455X GPU is geared at emerging AI workloads, including AI model training and serving AI agents in production. To that end, it’s loaded with lower precision CDNA cores that drive 40 petafalops of FP4 performance and 20 petaflops of FP8 performance. The chips, which are built at TSMC on 2nm and 3nm processes and feature 320 billion transistors, contain 432 GB of HBM4 capacity and deliver 23.2 TB per second of memory bandwidth.
On paper, the GPU figures stack up well against Nvidia latest Rubin chip, which delivers up to 50 petaflops of FP4 inference performance, 35 petaflops of PF4 training performance, and anywhere from 4 to 17.5 petaflops of FP8 performance, on top of 288 GB of HBM4 memory and 22 TB per second of memory bandwidth.
AMD Instinct MI455X GPU
But sheer GPU horsepower does not an AI juggernaut make. Getting the most out of those GPUs requires a balanced system that’s capable of moving data at high speeds, in addition to processing it quickly.
To that end, AMD had several other cards up its sleeves at Advancing AI 2026 to build a complete scale-up rack based on its new Helios architecture, including new CPUs. As AMD CEO Lisa Su showed today during her keynote, AMD is packaging its new chiplet-based MI455X accelerators into what AMD calls an Enhanced Accelerator Module (EAM).
“It’s a production module that goes into Helios and it is much more than the GPU package,” Su said. “The EAM actually integrates the GPU, memory, power delivery, high speed interfaces, system management, and cold plates for liquid cooling, all into one compact serviceable module.”
The EAM is being paired with the new sixth-generation EPYC 9006 CPUs, codenamed “Venice,” which feature up to 512-core processors and DDR5 memory. It’s also being paired with AMD’s latest generation Pensando network interface cards (NICs), the Pensando Vulcano 800, which delivers 800Gb of scale-up network capability. AMD is also launching Pensando Salina data processing units (DPUs), which handle front-end network virtualization, security, and KV cache management at 400Gb speeds.
AMD CEO Lisa Su wtih a Helios rack
Each EAM contains a single MI455X GPU and a single EPYC “Venice” CPU, for a total of 12 compute and I/O chiplets and 432GB of stacked HBM4 memory. AMD is putting four EAMs in each Helios compute tray, and it’s putting 18 compute trays in a single rack, which means each Helios rack has 72 GPUs and 72 CPUs.
On the networking side, AMD is placing six Vulcano NICs on each board, with two Vulcano NIC boards per Helios tray, providing up to 2.4 Tbps of bandwidth per GPU via UALink for scale-up reach.
“Each Helios compute tray includes two of these Vulcano boards, and that allows us to have the scale out and scale up networking overall,” Su said. “You put all that inside the rack, and we have an additional six dedicated networking trays that handle the scale up networking. And those are all connecting 72 GPUs together with UALink over Ethernet with silicon from our partners, and that’s what we mean by an open ecosystem.” (NVLink, by comparison, is a proprietary interface owned by Nvidia for scale-up networking.)
All told, each Helios rack features 18,000 CDNA5 GPU compute units, more than 4,600 Zen6 CPU cores, and 31TB of HBM, according to Su.
“That’s what it takes to run agentic AI at scale,” she said. “I can say for sure it’s the highest performance AI accelerator in the industry. When you compare Helios to the competition, we’re delivering 15% more compute, 50% more HBM for memory capacity and memory bandwidth, and 50% more scale out bandwidth. And what that means is that every Helios can deliver more performance for the largest models, more capacity for longer context, and the bandwidth to scale across thousands of racks.”
AMD Helios rack
Helios is in full production. AMD is on track to start deliveries at the end of the third quarter, ramping up into the fourth quarter. Among the customers are Anthropic and Microsoft. Anthropic plans to deploy 2 gigawatts worth of Helios, while Microsoft plans to deploy Helios at scale in its Azure cloud.
AMD also had an update on the Instinct MI430X, the HPC-oriented GPU that will be going into several upcoming supercomputers, including the new Discovery leadership-class supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab and Alice Recoque, the new exascale machine going into the CEA’s TGCC supercomputing center in France.
When it ships in early 2027, the new MI430X will feature 288 teraflops of double-precision FP64 compute, 432 GB of HBM4 capacity, and 23.3 TB per second of memory bandwidth. That is more native FP64 capacity (i.e. not emulated using Ozaki scheme), more HBM, and more memory bandwidth than we anticipated the new chip would have when we wrote about it back in March.
“Just like MI455 leads in AI compute with FP4 and memory performance, MI430x leads HPC compute with FP64 and memory performance,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD.
“This is hardware double precision, not emulation, for the scientific community,” Boppana said. “That distinction is everything. This product delivers 288 teraflops of FP64 compute, nearly nine times better than the competition, and the same leadership in memory capacity and bandwidth of MI455.”
The conditions for ferocious fires are expected to worsen as the planet heats up, putting more people at risk
Fierce wildfires after back-to-back heatwaves have forced tens of thousands of people across southern Europe to flee their homes, while powerful infernos across Canada and the US choke big cities with thick smoke.
The first Genesis Mission Summit was, by design, a day about momentum. Conner Prochaska, ARPA-E Director and the event’s emcee, opened by asking a packed room “who’s ready to get this thing started?” and the whole program was built to send one message: the U.S. Department of Energy’s new department-wide AI initiative has graduated from concept to operating program, and this time it showed up with real money behind it.
That shift is valuable, because the issue with Genesis until now has been vagueness. The summit went a long way toward fixing that.
An Internet of Science
The central idea arrived in the marquee vision keynote. The same agentic AI now writing code and executing workflows can be pointed at the entire national research enterprise.
“We are envisioning a future where we create an internet of science,” said Darío Gil, DOE’s Under Secretary for Science, who directs the Genesis Mission.
Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil at Genesis Mission Summit 2026
In the original internet, he noted, the end nodes were computers and the orchestration happened at the TCP/IP layer. In the modern version, he said, “the end nodes are both computers and scientific instruments, particle accelerators and telescopes and microscopes.”
Federation means one login and one data fabric that follow a scientist across facilities. The concept came up more than 30 times over the course of the day, more than almost any other technical idea. If Genesis has a defining technical bet, this is it.
Gil also used the day to widen the tent, announcing the expansion of the Genesis Mission Consortium beyond industry, philanthropy, and the national labs to university institutions, and pointing academics to a sign-up site. The challenge portfolio grew too, to what Gil called “a revised set of now 33 National Science and Technology challenges,” up from an original 26, spanning new areas including space, human health, and veterans health.
The compute story tracked with what those of us watching the leadership-computing roadmap expected. Thomas Zachariah, Vice President at AMD, framed the near-term flagship.
“Lux is more than a supercomputer,” he said. “It’s an open, AI-native platform that allows researchers to move seamlessly across the entire scientific workflow, from simulation and AI training to inference and agentic AI.”
Lux is an AMD-DOE co-investment coming online at Oak Ridge this October.
Nuclear Takes Center Stage
If one theme carried the day beyond the AI framing, it was nuclear. The clearest piece of news was Project Prometheus, unveiled as the first of the mission’s Phase 2 awards.
Gil described it as an effort to “bring the power of AI to accelerate and deliver nuclear energy that is faster, safer and cheaper,” with an end goal of dramatically lowering “the cost and the time to realize the nuclear renaissance in the United States.”
Illustration of a fusion reaction taking place against tokamak (Image courtesy International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor)
Prometheus is not a small pilot. It unites 32 partners across national laboratories, industry, and universities, and Gil framed it as a template for the collaborative model the whole program is chasing. He also signaled the pipeline behind it, saying the remaining Phase 2 awards would be announced “by early fall, hopefully early to mid-September.”
Nuclear showed up in more exotic forms too. In a NASA-facing session, speakers discussed SR-1 Freedom, billed as the world’s first nuclear-powered interplanetary spaceship, targeted for a 2028 launch and pitched as the start of a “nuclear navy for NASA.”
Panelists talked through small modular reactors and even floated scaling today’s AP1000 toward a hypothetical “AP10,000.” Fusion ran throughout, from a live demo of an agent orchestrating inertial confinement fusion simulations to an Oak Ridge partnership with Japanese startup Kyoto Fusioneering to build new fusion infrastructure in the United States.
The Money is Real
The headline figure was more than $5 billion in total committed across the mission from federal agencies, industry, and international partners. The most concrete piece came from the research awards themselves. Following the RFA that Secretary Wright announced, the summit unveiled 278 awards worth over $250 million, spanning 342 participating institutions across all 50 states.
The agency and partner commitments stacked up from there. An NSF official laid out four Genesis initiatives anchored by an investment pegged at “well over $400 million” in programmable cloud labs, plus $80 million in data infrastructure and over $100 million in AI-ready data sets. Defense drew one of the day’s largest single commitments, described from the stage as “nearly a quarter billion dollars just this year and next year, about 1.4 billion to the Genesis mission.”
On the industry side, the consortium’s 40-plus partners and nonprofits have put forward over $800 million in contributions. Google, a founding member, announced a $40 million in-kind commitment, including trillions of tokens for researchers through its Gemini for Government platform. The biggest single partnership news was international: Japan and the United States each committed to invest $500 million over five years, a combined $1 billion, with 11 priority areas already identified.
The funding question, at least for now, appears settled. If anything, the summit had far more to say about dollars committed than about how those dollars will be judged.
Where It Gets Thin
Any honest evaluation has to separate inputs from outcomes, and that is where Genesis stays hard to grade. Nearly all of those dollar figures describe money going in. The summit said far less about what comes out, the measurable Phase 1 milestones that would let an outside observer tell whether any of this is actually working.
The clearest target anyone offered lives in the realm of ambition, not operations. Gil framed the mission’s north star as doubling “the productivity and impact” of the nation’s roughly $1 trillion a year in R&D spending. It is a bold goal and a useful rallying cry, but it gives an evaluator nothing to measure this year or next.
There were hints of structure underneath. A two-tier grant model is taking shape, described by one of the lab-leadership panelists: Phase 1 requires collaboration between at least two of the three worlds of universities, labs, and industry, while Phase 2, the larger grants, requires all three. As one panelist put it, the goal is to “get them lit, get them performing, and then move on” to the next challenge. Good instinct. The summit just never spelled out the yardstick that decides when something counts as performing.
Where Did Climate Go?
Across a full-day transcript of the summit, the words “climate” and “carbon” do not appear even once. “Sustainable” shows up a single time, and not in an environmental sense. It was used to describe how “scalable, sustainable, reliable” the federation infrastructure needs to be.
That is striking given how much of the day dwelt on energy. Genesis leans heavily on nuclear, and the day also spent real time on the grid, hydropower, critical minerals, and geothermal. The energy system is everywhere in Genesis. The environmental purpose of transforming that energy system is, at least rhetorically, missing.
That gap is a sharp contrast with the HPC community’s own recent conversations. At the Rice University HPC-AI conference in March, sustainability was a live technical topic. Researchers there presented on turning CPU power caps down for double-digit energy savings, and TACC’s Dan Stanzione argued bluntly that just building bigger boxes is no longer viable when grid constraints are already biting.
None of that skepticism about the power cost of large-scale AI surfaced at the Genesis Summit. In an initiative whose entire premise is pouring more compute into more scientific workflows, funded now by billions in fresh commitments, the near-total silence on the energy and emissions footprint of that compute is the most consequential thing the summit did not say.
Promising, Funded, But Unmeasured
It would be unfair to judge a mission on its launch party. Genesis is early, and the summit was explicit that this is a first phase about identifying promising pathways and laying track while the plane is taking off, to borrow the metaphor that has followed this program since Rice.
That said, two gaps still shape the verdict.
One is measurement. Those billions are inputs, and beyond the ambition to double national R&D productivity, the summit offered few outcome-level Phase 1 targets to assess any of it against.
The other is framing. When a program built on the nation’s energy infrastructure gets through an entire day without once saying climate or carbon, it has quietly decided what “energy” means to it, and that decision would land very differently in a room full of sustainability researchers.
Genesis has assembled the capacity and capital, but it has yet to say what it will refuse to spend them on. Until it does, the mission keeps inviting the same verdict it earned this week. Genesis is promising, well-funded, and not yet measurable.
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.
July 24, 2026 — Highlighted at Advancing AI 2026, AMD EPYC 9006 Series server CPUs provide a workload-optimized portfolio of solutions for agentic AI, cloud, as well as general purpose and high-performance computing (HPC). For agentic AI, the family of processors addresses three CPU-dependent jobs in agentic workflows: running agents, feeding accelerators and powering the enterprise services agents use.
The AMD EPYC 9006 Series server CPUs is part of a portfolio of solutions for agentic AI, cloud, enterprise, high-performance and general-purpose computing. AMD highlighted their role powering the agentic data center at Advancing AI 2026. Credit: AMD.
Agentic AI is reshaping how enterprise infrastructure is used and designed. It is transforming AI from systems that simply answer questions into systems that act, plan, call tools, write and execute code, and reason over enterprise data. This shift demands significantly more compute than GPU acceleration alone. Agentic AI depends on CPU-powered infrastructure to run agents, coordinate work around the model, connect to enterprise data and services, and keep accelerators fed across increasingly complex AI systems. Matching the right CPU to each stage of the agentic workflow can improve throughput, utilization and efficiency across the data center.
“AMD EPYC processors have set the standard for leadership data center performance, efficiency and customer value, and with 6th Gen AMD EPYC server CPUs, that standard moves even higher,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD. “As agentic AI reshapes how enterprise infrastructure is designed and deployed, EPYC is evolving with our customers once again. 6th Gen AMD EPYC delivers workload-optimized compute for the full spectrum of modern data center needs; from running more agents and feeding GPUs across rack-scale AI infrastructure to powering the business-critical applications and services organizations rely on every day.”
The shape of the data center is changing into a three-tier agentic architecture, with each tier creating distinct CPU demand. Three CPU jobs anchor the agentic workflow and modern enterprise infrastructure: agent sandbox execution, AI host nodes and general-purpose servers.
The agent sandbox CPU runs and coordinates agents, executes spawned code and tasks, manages memory and system state, and handles I/O outside the GPU. The AI host node CPU feeds GPUs across AI infrastructure like the AMD Helios rackscale solution. Lastly, the general-purpose CPU runs day-to-day business critical applications like databases, storage, application services and AI-support workloads.
AMD EPYC 9006 Series server CPUs are the industry’s broadest server CPU portfolio for agentic AI built to match the right processor to the right job. The lineup includes purpose-built CPUs for running agents, feeding GPUs, powering enterprise workloads and accelerating HPC and technical computing.
AMD EPYC 9006 SP7: Built for high-density agent sandbox execution with up to 256 cores and 512 threads, it helps run more agents per watt, per dollar and per rack. In high-frequency configurations, it also serves as an AI host node, with up to 5GHz frequency, PCIe Gen 6 and impressive CPU-to-GPU improvement delivering the most agents per watt, per dollar, and per rack.
AMD EPYC 9006 SP8: The processor is built for efficient, right-sized performance across critical enterprise workloads and agent sandbox execution where efficiency is top priority. With flexible 8- to 128-core options and low-power designs, it supports everything from edge sites and power-constrained racks to smaller clusters and general-purpose servers engineered to deliver leadership performance per system dollar.
AMD EPYC 9006X SP7: The processor is built for HPC, technical computing and data-intensive workloads that benefit from high cache and memory bandwidth. With some variants reaching frequencies up to 5.15GHz frequencies and 3x the L3 cache per core of AMD EPYC 9006 SP7, it helps accelerate simulation, modeling, large-scale analytics, retrieval, in-memory analytics and other memory-sensitive work.
AMD EPYC 9006 LP: Formerly codenamed “Verano,” the AMD EPYC 9006 LP processor is purpose-built as an AI host node CPU for next-generation rack-scale AI systems. The processor, leveraging LPDDR memory and up to 5GHz frequency, helps keep accelerators fed across dense, accelerator-rich racks allowing system utilization to scale as deployments grow from single nodes to AI factories.
One architecture and multiple design points let customers compose the agentic data center to the work instead of stretching one CPU across every job. The portfolio shares a common software ecosystem and a hardened security foundation, giving customers the flexibility to choose density for agents, frequency and bandwidth for GPUs, high cache for technical workloads and efficiency for enterprise services.
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.
Explosive diarrhea infection detected in 41 states with at least 72 sickened by new, as yet unknown source of parasite
Confusion abounds in the cyclospora outbreak that has sickened thousands in at least 41 states, as officials identify a new cluster of cases and more potential products come under scrutiny.
The recall of products during this outbreak of explosive diarrhea has been an unusual one, complicated by poor communication, politicization and the delay of a new regulatory rule could have helped trace the cyclosporiasis outbreak faster.
Providing continuing hormone-replacement therapy at “the High-T Department of War,” as Secretary Pete Hegseth is calling it, may prove difficult for the federal government because the department in charge of healthcare for veterans has already documented a struggle to manage service members’ hormone therapy, The Intercept has found.
A person on testosterone therapy can’t just stop it abruptly. Dr. Adrian Dobs, a professor of medicine and oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told The Intercept testosterone therapy can suppress the body’s natural production of the hormone and sperm, as well as create medical needs that persist after treatment stops. “We’re sort of creating a dependency on testosterone,” she said.
Under Hegseth’s new initiative, service members age 30 and older are slated for annual testosterone screening, regardless of whether they have any symptoms, while troops under 30 may request screening during their periodic health assessments. Doctors and endocrinologists warned that this proactive screening could lead to overprescription of hormone-replacement therapy for people who don’t need it. This could affect their fertility in the short term, Dobs said, because “men who take testosterone will have a reduction in their sperm counts.”
And after a service member leaves the military, they may require continued medical care. That care could eventually fall to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has previously struggled with the same treatment.
“Men who take testosterone will have a reduction in their sperm counts.”
In a 2018 review of testosterone replacement therapy, the VA Office of Inspector General found that providers often started patients on testosterone without adequately documenting symptoms or confirming low testosterone levels and frequently failed to conduct recommended follow-up after treatment began. Approximately 2 out of 3 patients did not get a documented discussion of the risks and benefits of the treatment before starting.
Dr. Alvin Matsumoto, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine and former attending physician and associate director at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, said the findings show why testing for low testosterone is not enough to determine whether someone should receive treatment. Matsumoto helped develop the Endocrine Society’s clinical practice guidelines for testosterone treatment, which the inspector general found the VA had routinely violated in its 2018 review.
Testosterone levels can change depending on when a patient is tested, whether they have recently eaten, exercised heavily, or are sick, among other factors, Matsumoto said. In about a third of men whose testosterone initially tests low, a second test produces a normal result.
That creates a risk under a program that will routinely screen otherwise healthy troops and make testosterone therapy available to those subsequently diagnosed with a deficiency.
“Initiating testosterone therapy in men who have a single low testosterone [test] but no clinical manifestations of testosterone deficiency will likely result in treatment of some men who do not have hypogonadism,” Matsumoto told The Intercept.
Medical guidelines instead call for doctors to establish that a patient has symptoms and repeatedly low testosterone levels before beginning treatment. Matsumoto said those steps would need to occur either while a service member remains under Pentagon care or after they transition to Veterans Affairs.
The question becomes particularly important when those patients move between the two systems. Matsumoto said a VA provider inheriting a patient already receiving testosterone should review why treatment was started in the first place, including whether the patient had symptoms and repeatedly low testosterone levels.
But he does not expect that reassessment to routinely happen. Usually, “the diagnosis will be assumed to be correct,” Matsumoto said.
It’s a similar problem to one the inspector general identified in its review of VA care. Some providers appeared to be testing patients for low testosterone without first documenting symptoms suggesting a deficiency.
The inspector general made seven recommendations to bring VA practices up to standards, including repeat testing and monitoring. According to the inspector general, the VA implemented all seven recommendations and closed them as implemented, as the VA noted in response to questions from The Intercept.
Among the changes the VA implemented was a requirement that providers establish signs and symptoms of testosterone deficiency before testing a patient’s testosterone level for confirmation — a higher standard than Hegseth’s call for annual testosterone screening based on age alone.
“I would be against universal screening, which is what we’re talking about here,” said Dobs, a position consistent with guidance from the Endocrine Society, which represents physicians and researchers specializing in hormonal health.
The Pentagon’s new initiative presents a different question: What happens when service members arrive at the VA already receiving testosterone treatment initiated while they were on active duty?
The Intercept asked the VA whether it has the clinical capacity to continue testosterone treatment for veterans who begin therapy under the Pentagon’s new initiative, whether those prescriptions would automatically continue after separation or require a new VA evaluation, and whether the VA and the Pentagon have coordinated on transitioning those patients between the two healthcare systems.
The Department of Veterans Affairs did not answer any of those questions.
“VA provides testosterone testing and replacement therapy when medically necessary,” VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven told The Intercept.
Defense Department personnel data from 2024 show roughly 451,000 active-duty troops were age 31 or older, a conservative figure that excludes 30-year-olds, who would also fall under Hegseth’s screening requirement. More than 1 million of the military’s 1.27 million active-duty service members were men.
“Here we have men who are in their prime of reproduction, and we’re causing a drop in their sperm counts when there really may not be sufficient benefit,” Dobs said.
“We’re causing a drop in their sperm counts when there really may not be sufficient benefit.”
The Pentagon did not provide The Intercept with the scientific evidence behind the mandate, say whether it assessed the fertility consequences that can follow testosterone treatment, or address safeguards to prevent unnecessary treatment.
Screening asymptomatic patients is “sort of opening up a can of worms,” Dobs said, citing the difficulty of interpreting test results and determining when treatment is warranted. She was particularly concerned about treating otherwise asymptomatic men whose levels fall within a low or low-normal range — a likely risk in a military overwhelmingly composed of young adults.
The Endocrine Society also recommends against starting testosterone therapy in men who are planning to father children in the near term.
In response to The Intercept’s questions, Defense Department officials pointed to Hegseth’s health and human performance directives, statements from Pentagon officials, and the “High-T Department of War” video.
“It’s not about artificial enhancement,” Hegseth said in his video. “It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”
But testosterone treatment can interfere with overall health. Patients placed on testosterone may require continued clinical monitoring to ensure they are not receiving excessive amounts of the hormone. Testosterone can also increase the proportion of red blood cells in a person’s blood, requiring additional monitoring during treatment. It introduces a complex treatment regimen with “very little real proven benefit in this healthy population,” Dobs said.
And there’s the financial cost.
“Who is going to pay for this testosterone while they’re in the service, and who is going to pay for it after,” Dobs asked, “if they require it for many years afterwards?”
Healthcare Replacement Therapy
The virility program Hegseth introduced also intersects with a long-running gap in military reproductive healthcare.
In May, a Congressional Research Service report identified testosterone exposure among the factors that can contribute to infertility. Yet TRICARE, the health insurance military members have, generally does not cover assisted reproductive technologies, including in vitro fertilization, intrauterine insemination, and cryopreservation, which can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Congress nearly expanded that coverage last year. Both the House and Senate versions of the fiscal year 2026 defense authorization bill included provisions requiring TRICARE coverage of certain assisted reproductive technologies. Neither provision survived the final legislation.
The Pentagon is now preparing to routinely screen hundreds of thousands of troops and offer potentially unnecessary testosterone therapy even as TRICARE generally excludes treatments for infertility, one of its potential consequences.
And the plan gives scant consideration to another massive population.
“Nobody’s discussing women,” Dobs said.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., an Air Force veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, raised the same concern.
“Testosterone is important for both men and women,” Houlahan told The Intercept. “But when [Hegseth] says ‘biological foundation,’ clearly, he has only one sex in mind.”
Houlahan pointed to years of congressional efforts to expand access to fertility treatment for service members and their families.
“This administration not only has opposed efforts to expand access to IVF for service members and their families but has rolled back policies that enable them to take time off to get the full suite of health care they need,” Houlahan said.
She has pushed for research into how military service affects women entering perimenopause and menopause, including the potential effects of toxic exposure, combat, military sexual trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder. “There is little to no research” on how those risk factors affect women’s health, Houlahan said.
Hegseth has repeatedly framed the testosterone initiative around military readiness and lethality. But “if Secretary Hegseth was truly looking to improve readiness, he would consider ways to support all service members, not just 49% of the population,” Houlahan said.
She was blunter about what she believes the testosterone initiative says about Hegseth’s priorities.
“This announcement about testosterone proves that Secretary Hegseth is only concerned about reproductive health when it serves his own political and misogynistic agenda,” Houlahan said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has purchased commercial spyware that can covertly take control of phones, collect messages, photos and location information.
Warning in place until Sunday morning in southern and central regions after drought declared in parts of Wales
Heat alerts are in place across parts of England, with officials saying temperatures are likely to have an impact on health and wellbeing.
The yellow heat health alerts issued for the East Midlands, east of England, London, south-east, south-west and West Midlands are in place until 9am on Sunday.
Sonam Wangchuk secures ‘hard bargain’ with Delhi but talks between government and movement leaders stall
The Cockroach activist Sonam Wangchuk has ended a 26-day hunger strike, as youth-led protests continued to erupt across India and leaders of the movement said there was no breakthrough in talks with the government.
Wangchuk had been fasting since June in solidarity with the Cockroach Janata party (CJP), a new youth-led movement that has been holding mass protests calling for government accountability and the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, over exam paper leaks. The leaks affected 2 million students in May and have been linked to more than a dozen suicides.
Comfort is crucial to the gaming experience. It’s hard to focus on blasting aliens or taking Stoke to the Champions League final if your bum has gone to sleep because you’ve been sitting on an old chair for three hours. We’re spending more time playing games than ever before, so good posture matters. If you have set up a dedicated gaming space, then a rickety seat just won’t cut it.
From luxurious ergonomic thrones to cheap-and-cheerful bucket seats, the options available are bewildering. So I set out on an epic quest: to find the most comfortable, durable and stylish gaming chairs. Here’s what I discovered.
Marriage offers an opportunity to ask for help creating a home. But what about when the marriage ends – and the household with it?
It’s peak wedding season, and my own divorce is waiting on a judge’s signature. People are being congratulated with Dutch ovens and serving bowls for dinner parties they may not ever host.
Marriage comes with an etiquette system for asking people to help build a home. The registry says the embarrassing part for you. Divorce deserves the same grace.
Kagan rejects notion that high court ‘does whatever the administration wants’, pointing to tariffs ruling and more
The liberal justice Elena Kagan has said it was “wrong” to accuse the US supreme court of becoming a rubber stamp for Donald Trump in his second term, amid criticism of its authorization of some of the president’s most controversial actions.
Pointing to rulings against the president on key issues such as tariffs, Kagan – one of three liberals on a court that has in recent years been defined by rulings authored by members of its six-justice conservative majority – defended it at an annual gathering of attorneys and judges for the ninth judicial circuit in Bellevue, Washington, on Thursday.
ICE will pay Canadian media giant US$125m to use its investigative database to identify ‘immigration fraud’
A Canadian federal opposition party leader is calling on the Mark Carney government to block the latest data-sharing deal between US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Canadian media giant Thomson Reuters.
Avi Lewis, the federal leader of the New Democratic party (NDP), demanded on Tuesday that Ottawa address the contract and further restrict Canadian corporations from doing business with ICE, after Canada’s National Observer reported on the deal.
Court questions plan to offer male hormone treatment to cisgender troops while denying it to trans service members
Pete Hegseth’s controversial plan to screen older soldiers for testosterone deficiencies and offer them more of the hormone faced scrutiny this week from a federal judge, who ordered the Trump administration to explain a discrepancy with the treatment of transgender troops.
The US defense secretary announced earlier this month that male service members aged 30 and above would be checked to ensure they have the “right testosterone levels” to perform in the military at an optimal level.
Former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki and allies say they were forced out over factional disagreements
Poland’s main opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party has split, after former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki and his allies said they were forced out over factional disagreements on policy direction ahead of next year’s parliamentary election.
Speaking at a press conference, the party’s longtime leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, said dozens of members of parliament effectively left the party after refusing to sign a loyalty oath.
ROUND ROCK, Texas, July 24, 2026 — Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) has selected Dell Technologies to design and build the Innovative Growth in Next Generation AI Technology Ecosystem (IGNITE), a new AI and high-performance computing (HPC) platform. Funded by the State of Texas, IGNITE will support large scale, AI-driven research across engineering, national security, scientific discovery and other research disciplines using shared infrastructure built to handle workloads with varying security requirements.
Credit: Shutterstock
IGNITE is designed to scale alongside growing research demands and is expected to be among the largest AI deployments in higher education powered by AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, supporting the next generation of HPC- and AI-driven research.
As federal research programs face greater complexity and security requirements, the infrastructure to support them has become as strategic as the research itself. TEES is the official research agency for Texas A&M Engineering and is pivotal in advancing interdisciplinary research across The Texas A&M University System. As part of a land-, sea- and space-grant R1 university, TEES leads federally sponsored programs spanning energy, healthcare, AI and more.
IGNITE will expand TEES’ capacity to take on increasingly complex research programs. This includes several priority research areas that require large-scale scientific computation, such as mission-critical AI model and LLM development, materials discovery, advanced manufacturing, robotics and defense- and aerospace-related research, where requirements for data governance and security vary by program and sponsor.
A New Model for Secure, Shared Research Infrastructure
Dell AI Services experts worked with TEES throughout the planning and design process to align the architecture to both research priorities and security requirements. IGNITE introduces a shared infrastructure model governed by policy-based, zero trust security controls. Researchers, students and external collaborators can access shared compute resources across projects with varying security requirements, without the cost and complexity of separate, siloed environments.
Designing a Secure, Scalable AI Research Environment
IGNITE will feature Dell PowerRack systems with liquid-cooled Dell PowerEdge XE9785L servers and AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs to accelerate AI training, inference, HPC and other data-intensive workloads across research programs. The data foundation is anchored by Dell AI Data Platform storage (Dell PowerScale) and will deliver high-performance data access and management for large-scale research environments, while Dell Managed Services will support ongoing operations as research demands grow.
Dell will deploy the integrated systems at an Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Dallas.
Building on a Long-Standing Collaboration in Research and Education
IGNITE builds on a long-standing relationship between Dell and the Texas A&M University System. Dell solutions already power Texas A&M HPC ecosystems, including systems such as FASTER, Grace, ACES and Launch.
The collaboration also extends into incubation environments, where researchers and students develop practical AI skills, and into the classroom, where Dell tools and AI-powered solutions are preparing the next generation of engineers, scientists and business leaders.
“As a research organization with more than a century of experience supporting federal agencies, industry and academia, we are constantly evolving to meet the needs of the programs we serve,” said Dr. Robert H. Bishop, vice chancellor and dean, Texas A&M Engineering. “This platform we’re building with Dell Technologies expands what we can take on — supporting increasingly complex, secure research for years to come. It aligns technology investment to long-term institutional priorities while positioning TEES to support the research programs that matter most to the nation.”
About Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live and play. The company provides customers with the industry’s broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio for the AI era.
The FDA panel is reviewing seven peptides and deciding if they should be added to a list of substances that can be safely produced by compounding pharmacies.
New AI-native developer experience enables the use of natural language and leading AI coding assistants to install, deploy, troubleshoot and optimize AI workloads on AMD platforms.
July 24, 2026 — AMD has announced ROCm.ai, an AI-native software experience for AI development across AMD platforms. It combines AI-assisted development, intelligent deployment and AI-powered software optimization into a unified experience that helps developers move quickly from intent to production.
Credit: Shutterstock
Introduced at Advancing AI 2026, ROCm.ai includes ROCm CLI – a new command-line experience for installing, validating, serving and managing AI workloads – and AMD Skills, bringing AMD-authored expertise into leading AI coding assistants such as Claude, Cursor and Codex. It also includes Hyperloom, a new open-source, agentic system aimed at automating the time-consuming task of optimizing end-to-end inference workloads. Together, ROCm.ai helps developers install, deploy, troubleshoot and optimize AI workloads on AMD platforms through a unified software experience.
AI development is becoming increasingly agent-driven, with developers using natural language and AI coding assistants to build, deploy and optimize software. ROCm.ai brings AMD expertise directly into those workflows, helping developers build and optimize AI workloads using AMD-specific guidance instead of generic recommendations. The introduction of AMD Skills reduces barriers to adopting ROCm and reducing the amount of documentation crawling required for setup. ROCm.ai also uses AI to improve the AMD ROCm software stack itself. Through AI-driven optimization of kernels, memory management and scheduling, ROCm.ai delivers an average 3.3x inference improvement and 2.4x training improvement for the latest version of ROCm over ROCm 7 on the same hardware.
“AMD is committed to helping developers move faster than ever. ROCm.ai brings agentic AI development to AMD platforms – agents that don’t just answer questions, but profile, debug and drive workloads toward peak performance on AMD hardware,” said Anush Elangovan, corporate vice president, AI Software, AMD. “It’s the next evolution of the AMD AI software stack, shortening the distance between an idea and running workloads so developers build and iterate fast. Whether standing up an environment, serving a model or closing the gap to peak performance, ROCm.ai does the heavy lifting – right inside the coding assistants developers already use.”
ROCm.ai is the AMD AI-native developer experience designed to help build, deploy and optimize faster across AMD platforms. It combines ROCm CLI, AMD Skills and AI-powered software optimization into a unified experience that simplifies AI development from installation through deployment, debugging and performance optimization.
ROCm CLI provides a unified command-line experience for installing, validating, serving, updating and troubleshooting AI workloads on AMD platforms. Hardware-aware workflows, automated environment setup and support for secure, air-gapped deployments help simplify software installation while enabling consistent deployment across environments.
AMD Skills integrates AMD-authored expertise into leading AI coding assistants including Claude, Cursor and Codex. Instead of relying on generic recommendations, developers receive AMD-specific guidance for installing, migrating, debugging and optimizing AI workloads across the AMD AI software stack.
Hyperloom automates the optimization of end-to-end inference workloads. It handles the full inference optimization loop, from profiling and analysis to kernel optimization and validation, helping accomplish in hours what previously required weeks of specialized engineering effort.
With AI-powered software optimization, including Hyperloom, ROCm.ai helps improve the ROCm software stack across parallelization and scheduling, memory management and optimized kernels. These software improvements help accelerate inference and training performance on existing AMD hardware while continuing to improve developer productivity and workload performance over time.
Availability for ROCm.ai will begin in August 2026.
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.
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA — A Democratic-aligned political group is spending $2.3 million on advertisements connecting Republican U.S. Senate nominee Michael Whatley to Harvey West, a former police officer and party official convicted of sex offenses involving children.
WinSenate PAC is running digital ads on YouTube and streaming platforms. The ads state that Whatley appointed West to key North Carolina Republican Party roles even though he knew about West’s criminal record.
West pleaded guilty in 2000 to five counts of taking indecent liberties with a child after initially facing statutory rape charges involving three minors. He served approximately six years in prison and remains a registered sex offender. West has said he openly disclosed his record to party officials.
As state GOP chair, Whatley appointed West to the party’s rules committee more than once. West also led the party’s 1st Congressional District group before stepping down after criticism this year. News reports have confirmed these appointments, but Whatley has not explained his reasons for choosing West.
When asked about the issue, Whatley shifted focus to prisoners released under Democratic Governor Roy Cooper. The ad comes as outside spending increases in a Senate race that could affect which party controls the chamber.
If OpenAI loudly proclaims how dangerous AI is, investors will hear how powerful it is. And who benefits from that?
On 14 February 2019, OpenAI announced a language model called GPT-2, the precursor to the models that power modern AI chatbots and agents such as ChatGPT and Claude. But OpenAI declared GPT-2 was too risky to release, citing concerns about safety and abuse.
I recall being annoyed at the time that OpenAI would make such a useless announcement: the risks seemed overblown, and without access to the model there wasn’t much for a researcher like me to learn about GPT-2.
Rightwing provocateur meets Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who says he expects to meet Donald Trump in Washington next week
Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet Donald Trump in Washington next week, according to the rightwing US influencer Laura Loomer, amid signs the White House’s traditional hostility towards Ukraine is beginning to crumble.
In an interview with Loomer, the Ukraine president said he will probably attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham and hold talks with Trump, which will take place as the latest version of the Russian sanctions bill makes its way through Congress.
Sister Leticia Ugboaja says she went into a cold sweat as ICE officers approached her in McAllen on her way to church
A nun who was taken into immigration custody last month in Texas said on Thursday that she went into a cold sweat as two armed men approached her while she walked to Sunday mass in her habit, thinking about the day’s Bible readings and carrying little more than her rosary and cellphone.
“Honestly, in that moment, I did not understand what was going on, what was happening to me,” Sister Leticia Ugboaja said at a news conference at Our Lady of Sorrows church in McAllen, Texas, on the US-Mexico border, where she spoke out for the first time since US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested her on 28 June.
Several others seriously injured in attack that residents of Palestinian village say also involved Israeli military
Four Palestinians and one Israeli settler have been killed in a shooting in the northern West Bank, health officials have said, during what residents described as a settler attack also involving the Israeli military. Several more people were seriously injured.
The serious incident in the Palestinian village of Tell, near Nablus, is the deadliest attack in the West Bank this year and has the potential to lead to a series of reprisals between Israeli-backed settlers and Palestinian communities.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., July 24, 2026 — Florida State University will lead four major projects as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s highly coveted Genesis Mission, showcasing the university’s strengths in advanced technological innovation.
These landmark projects, led by FSU’s world-class faculty, utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to tackle some of the nation’s most complex challenges, spanning high-temperature superconductors for fusion energy, quantum error correction, particle physics, and nuclear reaction modeling.
“These awards further affirm Florida State University’s emergence as a national leader at the frontiers of discovery, innovation and national service,” said FSU President Richard McCullough. “To secure four projects through the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission is a defining achievement for our institution and a powerful recognition of the caliber of our faculty. FSU is helping shape the scientific agenda for the nation’s future by advancing the artificial intelligence, quantum and energy frameworks that will strengthen our national infrastructure, accelerate American innovation and reinforce U.S. technological leadership.”
The Genesis Mission represents a major federal investment to unite DOE national labs, industry and academia to accelerate breakthroughs in energy dominance, physical sciences and national security. It has drawn comparisons to the Manhattan Project or Apollo mission. The Department of Energy awarded 278 awards across 26 identified science and technology challenges to accelerate U.S. innovation and scientific leadership during a summit in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, July 22.
The awards are for an initial phase one that is nine months. However, researchers who received the awards are invited to show initial results of their work and apply for a second phase of funding that will likely be announced next year.
FSU Vice President for Research Stacey S. Patterson emphasized the strategic alignment of these projects with FSU’s mission to deliver solutions to critical global challenges.
“FSU has strategically positioned itself at the intersection of artificial intelligence and physical sciences to address some of the most critical vulnerabilities our country faces,” Patterson said. “From rebuilding a secure domestic supply chain for high-performance fusion magnets to paving the way for unbreakable, fault-tolerant quantum computers, these projects are highly practical solutions to real-world national security challenges. We are incredibly proud of our faculty for securing these historic awards, which will inspire next-generation breakthroughs and solidify FSU’s role as a trusted partner in federal scientific leadership.”
FSU researchers are leading the following Genesis projects:
AI-Powered Manufacturing of High Temperature Superconductors for Fusion Energy Challenge Area: Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Productivity
Led by Associate Professor Fumitake Kametani, this project uses AI to transform how high temperature superconducting tapes are made for fusion energy magnets. Manufacturing these highly engineered tapes involves subtle, hard-to-detect variations that limit performance uniformity and thus drive up costs of magnets, so the team is building an AI “digital twin”, which is a predictive computer model of the production line. This model learns how manufacturing conditions shape tape quality, helping rebuild a US-owned supply chain of this critically important technology for US energy security. FSU leads the project with the US manufacturer High Temperature Superconductors, Inc., and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Sanghyun Lee, associate professor of Mathematics, and National High Magnetic Field Laboratory researchers Aixia Xu, Yan Xin, Jeseok Bang, and Chris Segal, will also play key roles in executing the project, as well as MagLab Chief Materials Scientist David Larbalestier.
Teaching AI to Fix Quantum Errors Challenge Area: Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery
Led by Professor of Physics Nicholas Bonesteel, this project develops AI that acts as a real-time diagnostic system for quantum computers. Quantum computers are extraordinarily sensitive to noise, and keeping a quantum computation on track requires rapidly interpreting streams of indirect error signals. For today’s leading quantum codes, efficient classical algorithms handle this task — but they break down for the richer, more powerful codes expected to follow. The team is training neural networks to decode these signals for this next generation of quantum codes — essential groundwork for quantum computers that work at full scale. Co-Principal Investigators on this award include Assistant Professor of Physics Yanzhu Chen, Professor of Computer Science Xiuwen Liu, and FAMU-FSU College of Engineering Professor William Oates.
Accelerating Cosmic Discovery in Particle Physics Challenge Area: Unifying Physics from Quarks to Cosmos
Led by Wyatt-Green Chair of Physics Mayly Sanchez and Robert O. Lawton Professor of Physics Harrison B. Prosper, this project uses AI to help scientists figure out one of the biggest mysteries in the universe: why everything around us is made of matter instead of antimatter. A massive U.S. experiment called DUNE will shoot invisible particles called neutrinos 800 miles through the Earth to find out, but physicists can only interpret what they see by comparing it against computer simulations that aren’t yet accurate enough. Today, improving those simulations is slow, hand-guided work that can take years. The FSU team is training an AI on millions of recorded neutrino collisions to find every place the simulation disagrees with reality at once, then compress what it learned into compact equations physicists can read. The team will transfer what the AI learns from one experiment directly to DUNE, opening the way to a system that unites the world’s neutrino data into a single shared model of how neutrinos interact with matter.
AI and Quantum Computing for the Next Generation of Nuclear Science Challenge Area: Delivery of Fusion Energy
A multi-institutional team led by FSU will combine artificial intelligence with next-generation quantum-computing methods to improve understanding of atomic nuclei and other quantum systems. By combining AI-driven data analysis with advanced quantum-information methods, the researchers will address longstanding challenges in interpreting the vast amounts of experimental nuclear data collected over decades. Their work aims to produce predictive models that reveal how quantum systems interact, evolve, decay, and respond to external influences. Beyond advancing fundamental science, these developments could contribute to progress in quantum technologies, clean energy, and national security. The project brings together principal investigator Alexander Volya, Hitesh Changlani, and Yanzhu Chen of FSU; co-principal investigator Grigory Rogachev of Texas A&M University; Richard J. deBoer of the University of Notre Dame; collaborators at Quantinuum; and participating students and researchers across the institutions.
Successful implementation demonstrates secure edge-to-cloud communication using NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptography while preserving existing application architectures and software investments.
ST. GALLEN, Switzerland and PALO ALTO, Calif., July 24, 2026 — Terra Quantum, a global leader in quantum technologies, and Apex.AI, a leading provider of safe and secure software for software-defined vehicles and intelligent machines, have announced the successful implementation of NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptography (PQC) for secure communication between an Apex.AI-based robotic software environment and a cloud-based control system.
The collaboration demonstrates how connected robotic, automotive, and defense systems can securely exchange information with cloud services using standardized quantum-resistant cryptography while preserving the communication patterns and distributed software architectures that modern intelligent systems rely on. The implementation provides a practical blueprint for bringing quantum-safe security to long-lived connected systems without requiring fundamental changes to existing applications.
As quantum computing continues to advance, many of today’s widely deployed public-key cryptographic algorithms are expected to become vulnerable to cryptographically relevant quantum computers. For software-defined vehicles, autonomous systems, connected robotics, data of national security concern, and platforms designed to remain in service for decades, this creates a long-term cybersecurity challenge. These systems increasingly depend on secure communication with cloud-based services for monitoring, diagnostics, software updates, fleet management, coordination, and remote operation, making the transition to quantum-resistant security an important priority.
The implementation combines Terra Quantum’s post-quantum cryptography capabilities with Apex.OS to enable secure cloud communication using NIST-standardized quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms. Apex.OS provides the software-defined robotics and intelligent-machine foundation for this joint solution, enabling secure edge-to-cloud communication in an application environment representative of modern autonomous and connected systems. Importantly, the solution preserves existing communication workflows and application architectures, enabling organizations to strengthen cybersecurity while maintaining compatibility with modern distributed software systems.
“Connected intelligent systems are rapidly becoming critical infrastructure,” said Markus Pflitsch, CEO, Founder and Chairman of Terra Quantum. “The vehicles, robots, and industrial systems being deployed today will still be operating when quantum computers begin challenging today’s cryptographic standards. Organizations cannot afford to wait until that moment arrives. This implementation demonstrates that NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptography is ready to protect cloud-connected systems today, providing a practical path toward quantum resilience without disrupting existing software architectures.”
Dr. Florian Neukart, Chief Technology Officer at Terra Quantum, added: “The transition to post-quantum cryptography must be practical, standards-based, and interoperable with the software systems organizations already operate. Our collaboration with Apex.AI demonstrates that NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptography can be integrated into modern robotics and software-defined vehicle environments without changing application logic or communication architectures. By preserving existing development workflows while strengthening cryptographic resilience, we enable organizations to begin their migration to quantum-safe security today.”
Dr. Jan Becker, CEO at Apex.AI, said: “Software-defined vehicles, intelligent machines, and connected defense systems increasingly rely on trusted communication with cloud infrastructure throughout their operational lifetime. Our collaboration with Terra Quantum demonstrates that standardized post-quantum cryptography can be integrated into modern robotics software environments while preserving the flexibility, scalability, and communication models developers rely on to build next-generation intelligent systems. For organizations developing platforms that may remain in operation for years or decades, preparing for post-quantum security is becoming an important lifecycle consideration that should be addressed early in the architecture and product planning process.”
Unlike approaches that require redesigning applications or communication frameworks, the demonstrated implementation enables organizations to begin adopting standardized post-quantum security using technologies available today. By preserving established software architectures while replacing vulnerable cryptographic building blocks, organizations can prepare long-lived connected systems for the post-quantum era with minimal operational disruption.
The implementation is particularly relevant for industries operating mission-critical connected assets, including robotics, autonomous mobility, industrial automation, manufacturing, logistics, aerospace, defense, and critical infrastructure, where devices deployed today must remain secure throughout operational lifecycles that often extend well beyond the arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers.
Beyond securing individual platforms, the joint solution enables quantum-safe protection of interconnected Systems-of-Systems operating across cloud, edge, autonomous, and mission networks. In line with NATO’s Multi-Domain Operations approach, resilient and interoperable communication infrastructures are essential to orchestrate effects across land, air, maritime, cyber, and space domains. The demonstrated architecture provides a scalable foundation for secure information exchange and mission assurance across complex, software-defined operational ecosystems.
As governments and industry accelerate the adoption of NIST’s post-quantum cryptographic standards, the collaboration demonstrates that organizations can begin their migration to quantum-safe communication today using standardized technologies without redesigning existing software-defined systems.
About Terra Quantum
Terra Quantum Group is a leading quantum technology company based in Germany and Switzerland. It provides “Quantum as a Service (QaaS)” in three core areas, the first one being “Quantum Algorithms as a Service”. Here, customers are provided access to an extensive library of algorithms, such as hybrid quantum optimization and hybrid quantum neural networks, which can be used for solving complex logistics problems or pattern recognition, among other things. Terra Quantum also develops new quantum algorithms for its customers or adapts existing algorithms to their specific needs. Secondly, through “Quantum Computing as a Service”, Terra Quantum offers its customers access to its proprietary high-performance simulated quantum processing units (QPU), the quantum ecosystem’s physical QPUs, while also developing native QPUs. The third division is “Quantum Security as a Service,” through which Terra Quantum offers its unique solutions for secure quantum and post quantum communications worldwide.
July 24, 2026 — A University of Michigan-led research team has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to advance a project that will use artificial intelligence to dramatically improve scientists’ ability to observe how materials behave under stress and in extreme environments.
Led by Ashley Bucsek, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of materials science and engineering in the College of Engineering, the project, “AI-enabled real-time reconstructions and interpretation for rapid 3D X-ray diffraction and imaging of materials under stress and extreme environments,” is among the projects selected through the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI initiative.
For the project, researchers are developing artificial intelligence tools that can dramatically speed up how scientists reconstruct and interpret three-dimensional X-ray images of materials as they are stressed, heated or exposed to other extreme conditions. The approach is designed to transform a process that can take months into one that delivers results in near real time, accelerating the development of stronger, safer and more reliable materials for energy systems, transportation and national security applications.
“We are honored to represent the University of Michigan as part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission,” Bucsek said. “Genesis is a unique opportunity to combine forces across academia, national laboratories, and high-performance computing facilities to create step changes in our understanding of advanced materials. By combining U-M’s strengths in diffraction-based materials characterization with expertise from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source, our team aims to help redefine how quickly we can design materials for critical national needs.”
Bucsek’s team includes co-principal investigators Reeju Pokharel, a staff scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Peter Kenesei, a physicist from Argonne National Laboratory, which is home to the Advanced Photon Source.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy that is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, the initiative is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines artificial intelligence, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
The goal of the Genesis Mission Phase I awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation while evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation and generate new scientific insights.
“Professor Bucsek’s project is innovative and ambitious, and we’re excited to see her team’s work contribute to the Genesis Mission,” said Todd Allen, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering. “Research universities play an essential role in bringing together expertise across disciplines to solve problems that no single organization can tackle alone. We’re proud to contribute to a national effort that has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery and strengthen the technologies that will shape our future.”
A number of additional U-M researchers will serve as co-principal investigators on projects awarded to other institutions:
Reetuparna Das, professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the College of Engineering, will support the project “ArchEvolve – An Evolutionary Agentic AI System for Deep Co-Design,” led by Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Christian Herwig, assistant professor of physics in LSA will support the project “AI/ML Resonance control for high-reliability, low-cost accelerator operations,” led by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Xun Huan, associate professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering will support two projects, “An Autonomous AI Framework for Closed-Loop Nuclear Fuel Qualification,” led by Los Alamos National Laboratory, and “Agent Bayes: A Foundation Model for Bayesian Scientific Reasoning” led by Sandia National Laboratories.
Ricardo Vinuesa, associate professor of aerospace engineering and associate chair of the Department of Aerospace Engineering in the College of Engineering, will support the project “AI-driven subgrid-scale model for large-eddy simulation of turbulent flows based on geometry and tracking of turbulence structures,” led by the University of Southern California.
ATLANTA, July 24, 2026 — QumulusAI has announced a signed two-year agreement, valued at more than $32 million, to supply NVIDIA Blackwell B300 capacity to an AI inference platform provider focused on generative AI applications. The agreement includes renewal options, with capacity expected to come online in the fall of 2026.
The customer’s platform delivers fast, scalable infrastructure for generative AI applications, serving developers and enterprises that run image, video and other generative models where speed and reliability determine the user experience. Under the agreement, QumulusAI will provide dedicated GPU clusters that give the platform committed, high-performance capacity as demand from its customers scales.
Serving generative media workloads at scale typically calls for sustained, dedicated compute rather than opportunistic spot capacity — a dynamic reflected in multiyear commitments such as this agreement. Capacity will be served from QumulusAI’s U.S. data center footprint. The company’s demand-led deployment model places capacity into available pockets of power across a distributed network of colocation and owned facilities, enabling it to bring GPU capacity online in months, not years.
The agreement adds a two-year commitment of more than $32 million to QumulusAI’s book of business.
“Generative media workloads put real pressure on inference infrastructure — images and video are compute-intensive to serve, and the user experience depends on speed,” said Mike Maniscalco, CEO of QumulusAI. “This agreement reflects a pattern we’re seeing in our own business: inference customers want dedicated, committed capacity they can count on, and our model is built to put that capacity to work quickly.”
About QumulusAI
QumulusAI is a distributed AI cloud platform that delivers accelerated access to high-performance GPU compute. Through an inference-first, demand-led deployment model across a network of data center sites, QumulusAI brings compute closer to customer demand, helping AI teams and enterprises scale production AI workloads with speed, flexibility and control. By combining rapid deployment with flexible private cloud infrastructure, QumulusAI gives customers a faster, more adaptable path beyond the capacity constraints of traditional centralized and hyperscale cloud models. Learn more at QumulusAI.com.
Rabbi Jeffrey Myers is retiring from Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, which he led through the aftermath of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
An incident in which an autonomous OpenAI agent hacked a startup either confirms that the end is nigh – or that the product is just amazingly sophisticated
Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a news story. You know it’s not going to be good, right? You know that by the time you’ve read it, you’ll be begging to go back to the time when the worst thing that could happen to us at the hands of the techlords was just some democracy-subversion, or childhood destruction, usually followed by Mark Zuckerberg putting on a suit and claiming: “We will learn from this.”
Anyway: a lot of pictures of Sam Altman in the news of late. Most recently, this week, one darkened the skies alongside the tale of how an OpenAI autonomous agent went rogue during a supposedly sandboxed/guardrailed test, and hacked a major startup that functions as a repository of coding information. (I’m slightly obsessed with the fact that the startup in question is called Hugging Face, adding weight to my suspicion that some vast, tweely benign emoji is the last face humanity will see before it dies.)
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Juan Carlos Gonzalez, also known as "Pelon," is the stepson of "El Mencho" — real name Nemesio Oseguera — who was injured and later died in a military sweep.
Connor Read, who is married and has two children, was apprehended in June during residency permit interview
A British-born man who has lived in the US since he was nine years old has been held in an ICE detention facility for more than a month and a half under threat of deportation, it has been reported.
Connor Read, 29, was taken by ICE agents after he was invited to a green card (residency permit) interview in Tampa, Florida on 3 June, and separated from his wife, Jaelin, 25, and his twin sons Ryder and Ozzie, three.
Why Burnham should back Britain's new clean energy system, not more North Sea drillingExpert commentLToremark
Renewables and electrification could help the new prime minister deliver on his promise to distribute economic benefits across the UK.
Andy Burnham arrived in 10 Downing Street earlier this week amid speculation about a possible change in energy policy. Specifically, whether he will support expanded North Sea oil and gas production, by greenlighting new drilling, reforming the windfall tax, and potentially rolling back Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledge not to issue new exploration licences.
Labour’s stance on North Sea oil and gas has become a lightning rod for criticism of its broader climate and energy policy, as the cross-party consensus on tackling climate change has broken down.
The Conservatives would scrap the 2050 net zero emissions target, claiming that it is making energy more expensive and driving deindustrialization. Kemi Badenoch has positioned the Tories as champions of the UK’s oil and gas industry, calling her party’s recent victory in the Aberdeen South by-election a ‘referendum on oil and gas’.
The Labour government has also come under not-so-friendly fire from trade unions and former prime minister Tony Blair. In a scathing article on the direction of the Labour Party, Blair called for the government to slow emissions reductions and extract ‘what is left’ of North Sea fossil fuels.
Pressure has even come from the White House. Amid rumours that Burnham would approve new drilling, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that it was ‘a big day for the country’ and that the people of Aberdeen were ‘dancing in the streets’.
Sources close to Burnham, however, were quick to emphasize that no decision had been made and that he was expected to uphold the manifesto pledge. The topic was also noticeably absent from his first speech on Monday.
The reality of North Sea oil and gas
At a recent Chatham House event, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Dr Fatih Birol, questioned why the UK debate is so focused on the North Sea, noting that its remaining reserves afford no protection against high and volatile prices.
—
Electrification not North Sea oil is future of UK energy - Dr Fatih Birol
The answer is that North Sea oil and gas has been politically weaponized, leading to a distorted impression of the role it can be expected to play in Britain’s economic future.
This is due not to net zero, but to hard geological realities. After decades of exploitation, production on the UK Continental Shelf peaked in 1999 and has been in gradual decline since. According to the government regulator, as much as 93 per cent of the oil and gas it is likely to produce has already been extracted.
Most of what remains is already earmarked for extraction from existing fields. New drilling, the focus of so much political and media attention, might yield 74 million tonnes of oil and 381 TWh of gas according to the regulator – around half a year of UK consumption.
This translates into a continued long-term decline in tax receipts and jobs, even if fluctuating oil and gas prices – and new North Sea projects – provide temporary, modest boosts.
Annual oil and gas revenues to the Exchequer are expected to fall to £0.3 billion by 2030-31, down from £4.4 billion when Labour took office in 2024, and £9.1 billion when the Conservatives took office in 2010. New licences will not significantly alter this basic trajectory.
Employment in the sector has been declining for years, long before Labour took office. The number of jobs fell by a third between 2014 and 2023, despite hundreds of new licences being issued in this period.
The diminishing gains from North Sea oil and gas also flow to a shrinking subset of companies, and ever fewer workers concentrated in a single region of the UK. By contrast, the construction of a new energy system based on renewables and electrification represents an enormous growth opportunity with the potential to distribute benefits across the country.
This new energy system is a natural fit for Burnham’s flagship mission to decentralize political and economic power in the UK. A ‘Manchesterism’ for energy, if you will.
Energy systems based on lots of renewables tend to be less centralized than those based on fossil fuels.
Weather is one driver of this. It is sensible to situate solar farms in the sunny southern counties of the UK, whereas wind farms are usually found in the blustery north of England and Scotland – and in the North Sea.
Efficiency is another driver. Battery storage – which is an essential partner to variable renewable generation and plays an increasingly vital role in the UK’s system – tends to be built close to major sources of demand, like cities. This reduces the losses that occur as electricity is transmitted and limits the need to build new grid infrastructure, in turn reducing costs for consumers.
The tendency towards decentralization of the UK’s renewables-based system means that much of the tax take from the energy system, such as business rates paid to local authorities, is spread across the country.
The flexible and modular nature of renewable energy technology also lends itself to a range of ownership models – which means the benefits can flow directly to citizens and communities.
Jobs
According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the UK’s net zero economy directly supported around 308,000 jobs in 2025, with another 520,000 jobs in the supply chain, and a further 234,000 in the wider economy.
These jobs – including renewable installation and maintenance, manufacturing, engineering, construction and professional services – are broadly distributed across the UK.
Many more jobs are set to be created in the next phase of the UK’s energy transition. While the UK has made impressive progress on the supply side – deploying renewables – much less progress has been made on the demand side, above all electrifying heating and transport.
PM, on his first day at new base, says it will create ‘that sense of a more balanced country, that big things can be done from here’
Andy Burnham has arrived by police convoy at No 10 North at Heron House in Manchester:
Andy Burnham was probably feeling left out of the “Celtic alliance”, after apparently telling John Swinney that Scottish independence was “off limits”.
A seaplane with 11 people on board crashed and caught fire a short time later in the Puget Sound area north of Seattle. All 11 survived, authorities said.
Exclusive: Hampshire police data reveals 22 of 37 detained had been accused or convicted of intimate partner violence
Most people arrested during violent protests after the sentencing of Henry Nowak’s murderer had previously been reported to the police for domestic abuse, the Guardian can disclose.
Data released by Hampshire police under freedom of information laws shows that 22 of 37 people (59%) detained in Southampton after Vickrum Digwa was jailed for life have also been reported for crimes associated with intimate partner violence.
Going by the mantra, if you want to make someone laugh, make them cry first, the game’s developers have created a lonely magpie who fills the void by wreaking havoc
Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.
Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”
Sometimes, what matters isn’t your output but what you put into the process. Think of it like work v the gym
I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future?
The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.
Residents warn project could worsen gambling addiction and raise rents, while developers promise jobs
On Main Street in Flushing’s Chinatown, shoppers weave between fruit stands, restaurants and family-run businesses that have served the New York City neighborhood for decades. But behind the bustle, many residents fear the working-class immigrant community is under threat from an $8bn casino development that could displace thousands of renters and force small businesses to close.
“A predatory project is being dumped in our community that disproportionately harms our people,” said Jack Hu, 35, a Flushing resident and member of the No Casino in Flushing Meadows Corona Park campaign. “This community is really upset about this project and how it was pushed through without our consent.”
Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs has put UK businesses at a disadvantage against the EU even though the overall tariff for British goods has not changed, experts have said.
In the levies, announced late on Thursday and said to be aimed against countries that engage in forced labour, the EU’s previous 15% near blanket tariff is reduced to 10%, the same level as the tariff deal struck by Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson last year.
Delegation sent to Brasília after gunmen from organised crime group enter homes in western Amazon
Indigenous leaders on the Brazilian-Peruvian border have said their communities are being “taken hostage” by organised crime groups who are running rampant across the region, destroying rainforest, building roads and trafficking drugs.
Earlier this month, masked men armed with semi-automatic weapons entered homes in Apiwtxa, a village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous territory, intimidating people and searching for targets.
Researchers tracked mother-child pairs for up to 11 years, finding Pfas mixtures may affect developing guts
Prenatal and early life exposure to Pfas mixtures is probably linked to higher levels of intestinal inflammation in children, new first-of-its-kind research shows. Intestinal inflammation can cause irritable bowel diseases, like ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and colorectal cancer.
While Pfas has been linked to irritable bowel disease and intestinal inflammation in adults, the new peer-reviewed Mt Sinai study is the first to look at how the chemicals impact children during a critical developmental phase.
US courts, state officials and Democrats warn that moves are endangering voting rights and the rule of law
The Trump administration continues to expand its authoritarian and radical drive to revamp voting rules and seize state election powers, though it faces growing resistance from US courts, state officials and Democrats, who warn the moves are sparking “chaos” and endangering voting rights and the rule of law.
Donald Trump’s unprecedented drive to change election rules, which states legally set, is fueled by his obsession with his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, which he falsely attributes to voting fraud, coupled with his fear that Democrats will “find a reason to impeach me” if they take control of the House in November’s midterms elections, say former election officials and legal experts.
Environmental groups are sounding the alarm over plans that threaten a desert spring that’s home to rare fish and turtles and sacred to the O’odham people
Quitobaquito Springs in south-west Arizona has been called a biological wonderland with few equals.
The springs are an oasis in the vast Sonoran desert along the US-Mexico border, held sacred by the O’odham people, who call it A’al Vaipia. Here, water flows out of an aquifer at the bottom of a hill, runs along a short concrete channel and collects in a pond.
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A study published in PLOS One in 2021 by researchers from Durham University in the UK showed that with 10 weeks of training, both blind and sighted people could learn to echolocate using verbal clicks. While the technique is already used by a number of people with impaired vision -- sometimes using the taps of a cane instead of clicks made by their mouth -- those findings suggest that many of us can learn the necessary techniques.
Some of the same researchers who made that discovery are part of the team behind a follow-up study published in Cerebral Cortex, looking at how the 10 weeks of training that the 26 participants went through actually changed the physical structure of their brains. Specifically, the team analyzed brain scans of the V1 (the primary visual cortex, processing visuals), and the A1 (the primary auditory cortex, processing sounds). Strikingly, the scans showed that the V1s of both blind and sighted people had developed sensitivity to sound echoes during echolocation training.
Rudakubana moved to psychiatric hospital after it was concluded he could not be safely managed in prison
The Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been accused of attempting to “manipulate the system” by the families of his victims, after it emerged he had been transferred from prison to a psychiatric hospital.
Rudakubana, 19, was jailed for life in January last year, with a minimum sentence of 52 years, for the murders of Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar.
Several firefighters have been killed as France, Spain and Italy all battle wildfires that have forced tens of thousands to evacuate a vacation hotspot.
Measures replace 10% global duty and come after supreme court declared many of the earlier tariffs illegal. Plus, how secondhand fashion got so expensive
Good morning.
Donald Trump has imposed a fresh round of tariffs on more than 80 countries to replace a 10% global duty that was due to expire, provoking a wave of criticism and protests from US allies and trading partners.
What is Trump’s justification for the tariffs? The newest tariffs, announced late last night by the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, would fall under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, aimed against countries that engage in forced labor. Trump had said his administration would investigate unfair trading practices to impose permanent tariffs as soon as the February supreme court decision was announced.
How have the affected countries reacted to the news? The ‘forced labour’ rationale for Trump tariffs has been met with bewilderment, with some saying their labor laws are stronger than those in the US.
How are the authorities responding? Last week, Bill Essayli, an assistant US attorney, asked the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the cluster to determine if there is an environmental cause.
Carmaker expects to sell 3% fewer vehicles this year as it pushes through a programme that could eliminate 100,000 roles
Volkswagen has reported a steep fall in profits and cut its revenue forecast amid a sales slump in China, as the German carmaker pushes through a brutal cost-cutting programme that includes axeing up to 100,000 jobs.
VW said it expects sales revenue to fall by up to 3% this year, a reversal of a previous forecast for a 3% increase on last year’s €321.9bn (£275.3bn), because of a sales slump in the highly competitive Chinese market.
As temperatures soar across the UK, chill your space – and avoid energy-guzzling aircon – with our pick of the best fans, from tower to desk to bladeless
Our world is getting hotter. Summer heatwaves are so frequent, they’re stretching the bounds of what we think of as summer. Hot-and-bothered home working and sweaty, sleepless nights are now alarmingly common.
Get a good fan and you can dodge the temptation of air conditioning. Aircon is incredibly effective, but it uses a lot of electricity … and burning fossil fuels is how we got into this mess in the first place. Save money and carbon by opting for a great fan instead.
Washington, DC – House Democrats are urging their campaign committee to rethink its involvement in party primaries, especially after voters rejected three candidates backed by national leadership.
In Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, former state Rep. Amish Shah defeated Marlene Galán-Woods, even though the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent over $500,000 supporting Galán-Woods. Despite this investment, Shah won the primary.
DCCC-supported candidates also lost to Matt Dunlap in Maine and Randy Villegas in California. The committee has been involved in 10 contested primaries this year, winning seven. Still, some argue that limited resources would be better spent on defeating Republicans in November rather than intervening in primaries.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that national officials need to pay more attention to local communities instead of assuming a single candidate profile fits every district. Some lawmakers have suggested forming a panel with representatives from different Democratic factions to provide input to the DCCC.
Leaders from the Progressive Caucus criticized the committee for not informing them before supporting California Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains over Villegas, who had the backing of their political action committee.
The DCCC defended its endorsement process, saying it relies on polling, general election research, and input from local leaders, unions, and members of Congress. Shah will face Republican Jay Feely in November for the open Arizona seat.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: How much of our lives do we surrender when strangers insist on misunderstanding us?
France Bans Social Media for Kids Under 15: It’s a needed first step, but protecting kids means regulating the platforms engineered to keep them scrolling.
The Tate Brothers Fight Extradition: Will the Trumps Give Them a Hand?
Should a Pardon from a Trump Friend Have a Money-Back Guarantee? Let’s see how badly the public’s faith in presidential mercy has been corrupted.
Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: The funnyman’s bicentennial roast is uneven, but its best sketches land with the precision of a well-aimed pie.
“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”: Nina Simone turns a plea for understanding into a low, steady declaration that refuses to apologize for being human.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.”
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), American author and anthropologist, Their Eyes Were Watching God
(Photo by Lomax Collection/LOCPhotoQuest/Getty Images)
Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, and her mother was a schoolteacher; all four of her grandparents had been born into slavery. When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the nation’s first incorporated all-Black township, where her father became mayor and the minister of the town’s biggest church. This was remarkable good fortune for a Black girl in 19th century America, because she was never “indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement all around her,” as her official website puts it.
Her mother’s death when she was 13 was a devastating blow, but she eventually made her way to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she co-founded the school newspaper. A scholarship offer brought her to New York City’s Barnard College, the sister school of Columbia University, in 1925; she was Barnard’s first Black student. There, she earned a degree in anthropology, befriended Langston Hughes, and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her academic work took her to Jamaica and Haiti, where she studied Caribbean voodoo practices, and various places in the American South to study Black folklore.
That’s quite a résumé for a Black woman in the United States in the early part of the 20th century, but it doesn’t touch on her most famous work, as a novelist and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her masterpiece, the semi-autobiographical novel Their Eyes Were Watching God,was published in 1937. It follows its central character, Janie Crawford, as she seeks to live on her own terms, marrying three times but refusing to surrender her autonomy as a woman. Surprisingly for a modern reader, it doesn’t focus on race, as it’s set almost entirely within the Black community. But when it was published, it wasn’t embraced by the Black, largely male intelligentsia: Ralph Ellison called it a “blight of calculated burlesque,” while Richard Wright wrote that “Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction.” The white press, meanwhile, praised the book: the New York Herald Tribune calling it “a flashing, gleaming riot of black people, with a limitless sense of humor, and a wild, strange sadness,” and the New York Times recommending it to “everyone who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory.” That didn’t help sales, and the book went out of print for more than 30 years until it was rediscovered by Alice Walker, who accused Hurston’s contemporaries of “throwing away a genius.” She stated, “There is no book more important to me than this one.”
When Hurston writes, near the end of the book, “It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding,” Janie is facing a murder charge for a killing she committed in self-defense. Death is a very real possibility. But her need to be understood is more important to her than her life. Hurston’s words are unsettling because they separate physical survival from the survival of one’s true self in the minds of others. Death ends your story. Misunderstanding allows a false narrative to circulate while you sit there, fully alive, watching your own biography get defined by strangers. For a woman who has fought against every limit society has tried to impose on her, that is the ultimate insult.
I know that feeling, that someone is rewriting the meaning of my life while I’m still living it. For decades, I was characterized as aloof, difficult, and unapproachable. My early wariness of the press helped define my public image long after that wariness had faded. My reluctance to speak out became evidence for an entire personality that others had constructed for me. It turns out silence is extremely talkative when someone else is writing the dialogue for you. Eventually, I tried to fix the way I was misunderstood by trying to explain myself: more interviews, more context, more corrections. But I realized that some misunderstandings don’t respond to explanation. Additional facts simply get put up against the story already in place. Defend yourself, and you’re called defensive. How do you correct an impression when every correction gets filed as further proof? I had to accept that narrative control has limits, especially when an audience has already accepted someone else’s version of you.
I understand why we as a society fall into this habit. Snap judgment is rewarded, while patience is punished. We encounter a photo, a flip remark, or a rumor, then construct the missing character, motive, and meaning ourselves. Human beings created instant global communication and too often use it just to be wrong faster. I include myself in that buffoonery because I have also formed opinions before doing the patient work of understanding.
Still, I have learned that the pursuit of being understood can turn into an obsession. We can spend so much energy managing perception that we lose track of who we are underneath all that reputation management. Is universal understanding even possible when every listener brings a private history to the conversation? It seems unlikely. Chasing it is a losing game, one with shifting rules and several million referees who each have their own whistles.
I care more now about being understood by the people who have taken the time to know me properly. Writing lets me tell my own story before someone else tells it for me, though I cannot control how every reader receives it. I can offer context, state my intentions, and correct the record when needed. Then I have to release my grip and trust that the ones who truly listen will hear me just fine.
Sixty years ago, the famed Red Sox slugger used his Cooperstown speech to champion Black players who were excluded because of the sport’s color barrier
When Ted Williams, the last man to hit .400, was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he had an iconic career to reflect on. But he decided to dedicate a portion of his speech to championing Black players who had been excluded because of baseball’s longtime color barrier.
“I’ve always been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, to have struck out or to hit a tape-measure home run,” Williams said in his 25 July 1966 speech – 60 years ago Saturday. “And I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way could be added as a symbol of the great Negro players that are not here only because they were not given a chance.”
Trump told Mark Carney ‘you got to stop these fires from coming in’ as experts say wildfires symptom of climate crisis
Scientists have reacted with incredulity after Donald Trump accused Canada of “poisoning” the US’s air with smoke billowing from a slew of forest fires and threatened sanctions upon the country’s northern neighbor.
The US president has said that he raised the issue of smoke wafting into the US from nearly 1,000 Canadian wildfires with Mark Carney, the country’s prime minister, at the weekend’s World Cup final.
Journalists urge attenders to confront president over media attacks, while Melanie Trump and JD Vance to be absent
Donald Trump will address a rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association (WCHA) dinner on Friday three months after the original event was abruptly halted after an armed assailant tried to storm it, with the alleged aim of assassinating him.
The rearranged dinner has been condemned as “hypocritical” by retired journalists and press freedom groups, who are urging the association to use it to confront Trump over his administration’s intensified attacks on the media.
Within the span of a week, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people in Maine and Texas, and another was hit by a truck and killed in Florida after trying to avoid ICE agents. A fourth person recently died in ICE custody after reportedly being denied medication.
Their deaths prompted yet another round of questioning as to how federal immigration agents have amassed so much power and so little accountability. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Naureen Shah, of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Nayna Gupta, of the American Immigration Council, on the consequences of allowing the government to build a national policing force that’s bringing Trump’s war on immigrants into communities across the country.
“The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies — which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies — make them far larger than anything that we’ve seen at the federal law enforcement level,” says Shah. “Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually most militaries around the world.”
“It’s not really just about who they’re hiring and even the training that they’re getting — it’s the message that they get all the way from the top,” says Shah. “And of course, the message after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good was, you have immunity in the conduct that you’re engaged in. It’s basically a message of, you’re going to get away with it. Don’t worry about it.”
“The signal from the very top of the administration is unmistakable: Arrest as many people as possible without regard for the actual impact on public safety, without regard for the killings that may result, the harm that results.”
Congressional funding for those agencies has outpaced any action on comprehensive immigration reform. And with Republicans pushing to strip voting rights from millions of Americans while campaigning against immigrants, says Gupta, the solution is to neutralize their argument by creating a path to citizenship — a proposal with broad bipartisan support.
“There’s no question that the immigration enforcement agenda that this administration is pursuing ties to voting rights. Now, the question is, given that, how do we still make sure we’re offering solutions and reforms that can be viable and build a broad enough coalition of support to overwhelm that far-right base and the way they’ve weaponized this issue?” Gupta says.
“I think those kinds of conversations are a more effective antidote to the far right’s effort to weaponize the immigration system, not only to hurt immigrants, but to hurt core democratic rights like the right to vote.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.
AL: Jessie, the big news this week has been the ongoing fallout from the most recent killings by federal immigration agents in Texas and Maine, along with two other deaths in relation to immigration enforcement within the last month. What did we learn this week about those deaths? And is Congress responding?
JW: We’ve continued to learn more about the ICE officer, David Brouillette, who shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero at a traffic stop in Maine two weeks ago. His ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, said that he called to ask her to vouch for his character, which she refused to do. Instead she’s been speaking publicly about the violence she said she endured during their marriage and his apparent racism, which she believes may have been a motive in the shooting.
Ashley Brouillette: He’s like, well, I need you to lie about my character because this is what it comes down to, like my character. I don’t want you talking about any of the abuse in our relationship, like, this is literally about me actually. I told him that I was not going to lie for him, that I’ve waited years to speak my truth. I’ve been silenced long enough and now I need to come out with everything because a man lost his life.
JW: I think for many, this story is highlighting the kinds of people, and the caliber of people who are being hired at ICE as the agency rapidly staffs up.
There was some additional news The Intercept broke recently. Last Thursday, Intercept contributor Karl Loftus reported that the ICE officers who were on the scene at the Maine shooting were actually wearing body cameras but they just weren’t turned on.
We also learned more about the man who was killed fleeing from ICE agents in Florida. According to Mexican officials, the man who was struck by a truck after fleeing into traffic to avoid ICE, Juan Coronilla Durán, was in the United States legally on a tourist visa and was visiting family.
I want to preface this by saying there are still more details to come about why ICE targeted that vehicle and about the people inside. But so far, the incident does bolster claims that ICE is targeting people based on their race and ethnicity, not a sophisticated calculation about their immigration status, or as Juan Proaño, the CEO of LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the United States, put it when describing the other recent ICE shooting on Democracy Now!:
Juan Proaño: ICE was casing Magnolia Park, which is a 97 percent Hispanic community. They were hunting for Latinos.
JW: As for Congress, there really isn’t much to report. Last week, Democrats sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding new restrictions on ICE after the fatal shootings in Maine and Texas. Democrats also attempted to add enforcement guardrails to a new sweeping immigration bill in the House but were shut down.
There is some noise, but the closer we get to the possibility of Democrats regaining control of Congress in November, the clearer it becomes that there isn’t an appetite from leadership, or frankly much of the caucus, to come up with a Democratic solution to do anything but tinker around the edges of a broken, violent system.
AL: While those shootings were all over national news the last two weeks, the Trump administration has been busy all over the map. Officials froze more than $1 billion in Medicaid funds to California and Minnesota as the president and his allies attack blue states with claims of fraud. The president has also been laying the groundwork to contest the outcome of the 2026 midterms — continuing to push Republicans in Congress to pass an unpopular and unprecedented voter ID law. And on Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the monitoring of polling sites in Arizona.
Meanwhile, the House approved $1.1 trillion in military funding on Wednesday and another $95 billion budget blueprint with $70 billion in funding for the Iran war. The House also passed another war powers resolution directing the president to withdraw the U.S. military from Iran on Thursday. The Pentagon had requested $67 billion to make up for spending on the Iran war, which has already cost $37.5 billion, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told senators in a hearing on Tuesday.
Sen. Dick Durbin: Do you have a new estimate about what the war has cost us so far in this, the fifth month of the first year of this war in Iran?
Pete Hegseth: Senator, the estimate we have as of today is $37.5 billion.
AL: Trump has continued to escalate the war on Iran and promised to strike an Iranian bridge or power plant for every U.S. service member killed as that number continues to climb. Our colleague Nick Turse also reported this week on the unraveling of the administration’s efforts to cover up the number of U.S. military casualties.
We’re talking about cutting all this money from social services while simultaneously pumping tens of billions of dollars into federal law enforcement and the military. These are some of the hallmarks of a country shifting to an authoritarian form of neoliberalism. Is that what’s happening?
JW: Short answer: yes. Longer answer: It does feel pretty clear that the Trump administration is employing classic authoritarian tactics. Step one, focus the country’s attention on a marginalized group with little political power who are already being scapegoated. In this case, immigrants. Step two, use that group to deflect from the fact that you are pillaging all of the resources, privatizing everything and concentrating enhanced military and police power in your control. Step three, which I think we’re all familiar with, crush all dissent.
The administration is really using alleged and unfounded, by the way, fraud by immigrants, whether that be claims of voter fraud, or Medicare and Medicaid fraud to enact policy goals that either enrich or empower them, or enrich and empower their allies.
We don’t need to go back to the Nazis to see authoritarianism in action. For example, In the 1970s and ’80s, former President Ronald Reagan deployed the myth of the “welfare queen.” So this was a woman, typically Black, who defrauds and abuses the welfare system. And he did this in order to push draconian rollbacks in the social safety net. And you can’t divorce that from the Cold War politics and militarism, and rapid wealth and income disparity growth, that was also a key feature of that administration.
So, yes, this is a march to authoritarianism, but it’s a march we’ve been on before.
AL: This is something that came up in my conversation this week with Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council. And she says, “We have over the many months of this administration seen them use the immigration system as the tip of the spear in their attack on democracy and core democratic institutions.”
JW: To her point, we are really seeing the administration use immigrants as a way to come after democracy writ large. I’m really interested in hearing that conversation between the two of you.
AL: I get into all that and more with Nayna Gupta, who also leads the Council’s legislative, administrative, and policy portfolio, and Naureen Shah, the director of government affairs, equality division at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she leads the ACLU’s immigration policy and advocacy work.
Naureen Shah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.
Naureen Shah: Thanks for having me.
AL: Nayna Gupta, welcome to the show.
Nayna Gupta: Thanks so much for having me.
AL: Within the span of six days, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people — 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and 25-year-old Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Maine. That brings the total number of people fatally shot by immigration agents in Trump’s second term to at least 11. Two more people died in connection with ICE within the last month. A third man — identified this week as a Mexican man on vacation in the U.S. — was struck by a truck after fleeing an encounter in Florida. A fourth man died in [ICE] custody in Georgia after his family says he was denied medicine, reported by our former colleague José Olivares at The Guardian.
Their deaths are not isolated incidents. A new analysis from the ACLU that documented 1,200 ICE incidents last year across eight states finds a pattern of federal immigration enforcement that consistently flouts civil liberties.
Naureen, one of the report’s findings that struck me the most was the emphasis on these most recent killings and deaths not being an aberration but part of a broader systematic pattern. And that the way the U.S. government is conducting immigration enforcement is moving us further away from a liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism. Can you tell us more about that finding and others from the ACLU report?
NS: Again and again, ICE and immigration agents that work for ICE are resorting to violence. They are using the threat of violence and actual physical violence in their interactions with people — not because they are facing a specific threat, but just as a default tool, as a way to compel immediate obedience, as though that is the main tactic they have in understanding how they engage with the public. What we saw was that they weren’t doing so in a professional way. It wasn’t calibrated. It wasn’t specific, as though they were following a carefully designed protocol.
Let me give you an example. There was a situation not far from where I live in Maryland — in Hyattsville, Maryland — where a man was pulled from his car. He is in the traffic intersection being held down. He’s being pinned down by the neck by an ICE agent, and that agent fumbles his gun. His gun falls while he’s doing this. He grabs the gun, picks it back up, and points it at the crowd that has gathered to watch this. A second agent then moves in on the crowd with his weapon raised as well. So you’re seeing them act as careless as they are reckless.
That is really dangerous. Because the other thing we found in the report was that ICE is now on our streets, at our grocery stores, at our parking lots, even at school playgrounds. That presence there in masks, in street clothes, with that kind of aggression is changing the nature of daily life in this country.
When you have to be afraid that when your 15-year-old is waiting for the bus and they are brown, that they may be accosted by a masked agent, that they may be questioned about their citizenship. I’ve heard about people wearing their identification around their necks because they’re so afraid.
That is a change in our country; it’s a change for the worse.
“They are using the threat of violence and actual physical violence in their interactions with people — not because they are facing a specific threat, but just as a default tool, as a way to compel immediate obedience.”
AL: I want to back up a little here and just remind people of the arc of this mass deportation project from the beginning of Trump’s second term, although it was a feature of his previous administration. This attack has reached an unprecedented scale since 2025 when Trump entered office for the second time.
We saw, as you mentioned, Naureen, masked and unidentified ICE agents descend on our cities attacking pro-Palestine students. We saw, as the report notes, the president send the military to cities run by his political opponents, first deploying the National Guard to California to suppress anti-ICE protests, where we also saw a surge of masked federal agents targeting Latinos and grabbing people off the streets at gas stations, grocery stores, churches, and so on.
We started the year with immigration agents flooding Minneapolis and killing two protesters and shooting another who survived. Although the killings of those protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, really drew national attention to this issue in a new way, you all documented just how widespread this kind of action from immigration agents has been over the past year.
While we’ve covered a lot of that at The Intercept, namely the targeting of pro-Palestine students by ICE, ICE has been doing this kind of thing in ordinary neighborhoods across the country. Fifty-two people have also died in ICE custody since Trump reentered the White House, putting the mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody at its highest level in over a decade, more than doubling that rate since he started his second term. That’s according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch.
Nayna, can you talk a little bit about why you think January was a turning point in terms of people paying attention to this?
NG: I’ll just start by saying, the Trump administration right now may have moved away from the more theatrical displays of force that characterized those earlier operations in places like Minneapolis and Chicago.
“Sheer volume is their goal.”
But just as you say, the basic objective has not changed — and that is a fixation on increasing detention and deportation simply for the sake of numbers. This is an administration that has made clear that sheer volume is their goal. What we saw in January was a lot of Americans waking up to the fact that this is the first time in U.S. history that we are seeing the immigration system taken to its extreme and sometimes beyond its legal limits within American communities against long-standing immigrant neighbors and those that stand up for those neighbors.
In other words, while in the past we have had harsh, or punitive or restrictive immigration policies at our border, this is the immigration enforcement system used to the extreme within the interior of the United States in our communities. Folks seeing that in their streets — this indiscriminate enforcement driven by sheer quotas and numbers — is a wake-up call. That includes for folks who voted in support of this president and mass deportation. We’ve heard stories reported early on of communities in places like Missouri that voted in large numbers for the president who are suddenly out on the streets calling for the return of their favorite local business owner and soccer mom who was swept away by arrest and detention.
In other words, a lot of the protests and pushback we’ve seen is both because of the extreme nature of this agenda, but also who it’s targeting — and those are long-standing members of our communities who pose absolutely no public safety threat. We’re seeing a lot more Americans than ever before say, “Wait a minute, why do the laws subject these people to this kind of extreme response? That doesn’t make sense.”
“This is the immigration enforcement system used to the extreme within the interior of the United States in our communities.”
AL: This is for both of you. I want to talk about the people who have been dying in ICE custody, which often does not get as much attention as the shootings. What is happening to people when they enter these facilities?
NG: Look, the immigration detention facility had a record of endemic abuse long before the Trump administration. And now what we’re seeing is the administration sweeping in, again, people who largely pose no public safety threat, who have no prior criminal convictions, who are being put into a system that no longer records where they are in the system so that family members and lawyers are unable to locate or find their loved ones.
We’re talking about a system where now under the Trump administration, the vast majority of people locked up in these inhumane facilities don’t even have a right to a court hearing in the immigration system to make a case for their release. The administration is rapidly expanding the use of mandatory detention so that people who would have a good case for release don’t get to make that. That means that then folks are stuck inside, and sometimes when U.S. citizens or folks with lawful status get swept into these detention facilities, it can take weeks before they’re able to show that they shouldn’t even be there — because they don’t have access to that basic kind of due process.
“We’re seeing an average of one death every eight days out of the immigration detention facilities across the country.”
Then finally, again, the endemic, abusive conditions of this system predate the Trump administration, but this administration has taken that to an all-new extreme.
At this point, we’re seeing an average of one death every eight days out of the immigration detention facilities across the country, and the kinds of conditions we’re hearing about include starvation; not just medical neglect but intentional medical abuse; people not being able to receive life-saving medical treatments; pregnant women not being given the support they need.
This is extreme inhumanity, and that is what folks are facing when they go inside. And it’s a lot harder to shine a light on those abuses because we don’t have viral video footage like we do when we see some of these shootings and killings in our streets.
NS: If you’ve ever been to one of these detention facilities, you get a sense of the geography that’s at play. The geography of a detention facility is that sometimes you’re driving hours from the nearest city. These are in the woods. They are in areas that no one is supposed to be able to reach.
The Trump administration has a design. They have a plan. They want to put people in detention sites that are remote, where lawyers have a harder time getting access, where journalists are not going to visit, and they don’t want people to be knocking on the doors and finding out what’s going on inside.
They don’t want congressional staff and members of Congress to be there either because what’s happening inside is truly frightening. It is straight out of the most dystopian novel, which is that you go inside these detention facilities, and you have no ability to reach back out into the world and get that lawyer to help you navigate the system — or even talk to an ICE officer and say, “I have no idea what’s going to happen to me.”
“Once you go in, you are stuck there in the most nightmarish kind of way.”
The most tragic cases are the ones where people need something as basic as their heart medication, and without it they will die, and they can’t get answers. They can’t get seen by a doctor. There is just no way to reach out to people to say, “This is happening to me.” That is why we’re seeing the record number of deaths in ICE detention because once you go in, you are stuck there in the most nightmarish kind of way.
We hear from people, not as much as we would if people actually had working phones in all these detention facilities. The ACLU just published a report with Human Rights Watch about Camp [East] Montana, the largest detention facility that’s on a military base. The conditions there are appalling. It really just strikes at your conscience to think that people are living in this kind of nightmarish condition where they don’t think they’re ever going to make it back out of these facilities — and that, again, is what the Trump administration wants to do.
There was an ICE official who last year said we’re going to create the “Amazon Prime” of deportations. They want to treat people like they are not human beings, and that is partly why they put them in these detention sites; it’s to be able to get them out of public view quickly and deported quickly.
That is just anathema to our Constitution, our entire system. Under our laws, detention is not supposed to be used as widely as it is being used; it’s meant to effectuate a final order of removal. That doesn’t mean that it’s meant to be used as punishment or to deter people from coming here or to terrorize people into self-deporting, but we know that’s the Trump administration’s aim.
“Under our laws, detention is not supposed to be used as widely as it is being used; it’s meant to effectuate a final order of removal.”
AL: I just want to mention while we’re on this note, the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a pro-Palestine student targeted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose arrest by ICE I reported last year. In his case, on Tuesday, a panel for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a ruling that had released him from ICE custody. He told me that, though, that he was “in good spirit, unshaken, and determined and hopeful.”
[Break]
Turning back to the most recent shootings in Maine and Texas — neither of those men were the people ICE was “supposed to be targeting.” The shootings also renewed criticism of ICE having slashed its training standards for new recruits, including cutting the amount of time that they had to go through training. They actually instituted new training in June in response to backlash, though they said it was to protect ICE agents from “coordinated campaigns of violence against them.”
The AP reported that David Brouillette was the officer who shot Guerrero in Maine. Brouillette was an Army veteran with a history of mental health issues and domestic violence, according to relatives.
Naureen, what do we know about how ICE is screening officers, and does that really matter when even vetted agents are also carrying out these policies or involved in misconduct?
NS: A number of members of Congress have been asking questions about ICE’s vetting and hiring standards, as well as their training standards. What they have heard from the new DHS secretary, Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin, was meant to assuage them, meant to assure them that things are going back to the way they were before and that standards are going to be increased, that the training is going to go back up to its full level. But as you say, it’s not really just about who they’re hiring and even the training that they’re getting — it’s the message that they get all the way from the top.
“The message after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good was, you have immunity in the conduct that you’re engaged in.”
And of course, the message after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good was, you have immunity in the conduct that you’re engaged in. It’s basically a message of, “You’re going to get away with it. Don’t worry about it.” Even now, after these latest shootings, when Secretary Mullin said OK, we’re going to pull back on vehicle arrests, the very next day, the president was out there saying yes to vehicle arrests.
The signal from the very top of the administration is unmistakable: Arrest as many people as possible without regard for the actual impact on public safety, without regard for the killings that may result, the harm that results. And we’ve still got an ICE arrest quota, and we still have ICE officers out there who are being told to just get it done.
As Nayna was saying, it doesn’t matter for them how many U.S. citizens, how many green card holders, or how many kids. One of the things our report documents is how many kids have been caught up by ICE and other immigration agents. We identify more than 200 kids, including 32 U.S. citizen kids, who were subjected to misconduct and targeted by ICE.
They just keep going and you don’t see any accountability for the missteps — the clear missteps — that they have made, let alone, real investigations into these killings that result in people being held accountable.
AL: Yeah, talking about not taking accountability — I remember listening to Tom Homan when he went to Minneapolis in January, effectively blaming the shootings of Good and Pretti on “hateful rhetoric” toward ICE.
NG: It is important to talk about some of these political players at the top. Again, this is an enforcement agenda, as Naureen is alluding to, that rewards volume and scale.
Just before these most recent shootings, there was reporting on how the White House was doubling down again on a quota. We have heard reports from law enforcement leaders who engage directly with people inside the administration that Stephen Miller himself was on the phone with ICE field offices around the country asking them why arrest numbers weren’t higher.
When you combine that kind of pressure from the White House with a workforce that has grown exponentially very quickly with relaxed training, vetting, and hiring standards, and a slush fund from Congress that has no meaningful accountability and oversight — these killings are no surprise. They are not isolated incidents. They are inevitable results of the combination of all of these factors that are at play. So even with more training and vetting, so long as Stephen Miller is on the phone, and Homan is backing him up, pushing for higher arrest numbers, I don’t think we can expect to see much difference on the ground.
That being said, in the immediate term, it is incumbent on members of Congress to push for training, vetting, and hiring. This is an administration that marketed this agenda as being focused on the “worst of the worst,” that has used public safety as a pretext to advance mass deportation — when they themselves are hiring people with questionable criminal records that underscore an inability to manage tense situations like the kind of enforcement that they are being thrown into, and like what we’ve seen out of Maine from the officer there.
This administration “marketed this agenda as being focused on the ‘worst of the worst’ that has used public safety as a pretext to advance mass deportation — when they themselves are hiring people with questionable criminal records.”
AL: I also just want to mention before we move on to the next question that The Intercept recently reported on ICE adopting a new dress code after the deaths of Araujo and Guerrero and a botched raid in Las Vegas. An ICE official who spoke to us anonymously, citing the Las Vegas incident where a man was tackled to the ground by two plainsclothed people, said, “What an embarrassment the Vegas video was. Those two fucking clowns should’ve been immediately fired. Half these fucking new DOs” — that’s deportation officers — “don’t even know the basics of immigration law or how to process an alien. They hired a bunch of fucking clowns and they look sloppy as shit.”
Naureen, we spoke last year for a story about ICE rapidly expanding its cooperation with state and local police departments, even with wildlife and gaming commissions, and I remember you describing this dystopian image of a nationalized police force dispatched to do Trump’s political bidding. Does that match up to what you’re seeing now? Is it not quite there, or is it worse?
NS: We are at a really dangerous point with this national deportation policing force, which is what we call the cannibalization of federal law enforcement and state and local law enforcement to serve the mass deportation agenda. What we see all around the country is that law enforcement agencies, sometimes the entire law enforcement agency, are deputized to work for ICE. There’s a huge financial incentive for them to do so. They can get performance bonuses. They can get people’s salaries paid for, new cars, new phones.
What it means is that you have signed up to work for ICE. And so we see, for instance, highway patrols in some states just posting up. Their weekend duty is to set up checkpoints and have ICE in cars nearby, and they stop people for the purpose of funneling people to ICE.
“What we have now is local police doing ICE’s bidding.”
You’ve got local police who are in Florida. They’re seeing people and saying, “Hey, you’re walking your dog in the wrong part of the beach. No dog walking here. And by the way, where were you born? You seem to be speaking with an accent. Oh, I’ve gotta call ICE.” So what we have now is local police doing ICE’s bidding. From a democracy perspective, what’s so dangerous about that is that ICE is not just a law enforcement agency, it is a political tool of the White House.
They’ve made no bones about it during the funding shutdown last year. The president threatened to deploy ICE to the airports and did so really in a blatant political stunt to try to put pressure on Congress and say, “Look, I’ve got ICE and I can send them after you if I don’t like what you’re doing. If you’re putting the squeeze on me, I’ll use ICE to put the squeeze on you.”
So if you look not very far into the future and you think about, well, there’s more than 50,000 law enforcement agents that are now working for ICE — with ICE directly from another federal law enforcement agency, as you’ve reported, from the FBI, from state and local police, they’ve got more than 50,000.
Every day there’s even more law enforcement agencies signing up to work for ICE, and now they can be deployed by the president, by Stephen Miller, to go after dissent. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s not a hypothetical because we’ve seen it in states all around the country.
“Every day, there’s even more law enforcement agencies signing up to work for ICE, and now they can be deployed by the president, by Stephen Miller, to go after dissent.”
In our report, which was just looking at 2025, we identified more than 780 people who were engaged in First Amendment-protected activity. They’re documenting ICE’s behavior, they’ve got their cellphones on recording. They’re not trained legal observers, they’re just people. But there’s also members of the clergy, elected officials, journalists — more than 780 of them who were targeted or subjected to misconduct by immigration agents.
I think that should scare all of us when ICE is tear-gassing people. We documented 132 times when immigration agents were directly targeting people with chemical irritants, like spraying them in the face. That is brazen. Again, thinking about that as a politicized force, concentrated power at the beck and call of the president, not just here in Washington, D.C., but in states all around the country, it is truly frightening from the perspective of our democracy.
AL: You mentioned the reporting that I did in May on the FBI redirecting a quarter of its staff — over 9,000 personnel — to target immigrants. And at the state and local level, cooperation between federal immigration agents and local police has exploded under Trump. In his first year alone, the number of local and state police departments partnering with ICE to do immigration enforcement increased by 600 percent. As of July, ICE has partnered with more than 2,100 such agencies. Naureen, you touched on this a little bit, but Nayna, I wonder if you can elaborate on how those specific partnerships are making this deportation machine possible.
NG: Let me start with the diversion of resources from other federal agencies. One thing here that’s important to talk about on both fronts is public safety. These are agencies — federal agencies — that have typically focused on core public safety priorities like political violence, domestic terrorism, human and drug trafficking. Instead, these are now officers that are focused on low-level immigration enforcement with very little understanding of the immigration system altogether. That is a way to supercharge this mass deportation agenda at the federal level, but also a way in which it undermines safety for all Americans, not only immigrant communities.
At the local level, this expansion of partnerships between local sheriffs and the federal government absolutely, as always, can serve as a force multiplier for ICE. That means police officers out on the street using routine traffic stops that can turn into detention, deportation, family separation, or even death. There was the young 3-year-old boy who died because his mother had been deported; and she had been picked up by a local police officer during a traffic stop. That is an example of how these partnerships have real human harms.
Now on the public safety front, what we know is that when local police are deputized to work as ICE agents, of course they lose the trust of community members because communities become afraid that reporting crime or contacting public government services will result in deportation and detention.
Earlier in the administration, we saw a public post from a sheriff in Tennessee who said that a baby died in the care of a non-citizen caretaker who was too scared to call 911 in Tennessee because of recent raids that had just happened at the hands of Tennessee State Police officers and federal agents.
So those public safety implications are real, and at the [American Immigration] Council, we have been talking to sheriffs around the country who do not want to enter into these partnerships because of how it erodes their credibility and how it works against public safety. These are sheriffs in places, including North Carolina, who say, “We can’t investigate homicides in immigrant communities if we’re in bed with the Trump administration and ICE.”
We’ve seen the most conservative sheriffs in Florida who cozied up to this agenda saying, “Wait a minute, why are we going after people who pose no safety threat for these kinds of arrests?” So this kind of collaboration, as Naureen said, it obviously has implications for our democracy. It’s growing our federal police force. But it also has terrible negative effects for actually protecting public safety and maintaining public trust of public institutions.
We can expect the kind of violence we’re seeing, not only at the hands of federal agents, but also local police officers if we continue to see the administration expand this kind of collaboration.
AL: I’m not really sure people grasp just how unprecedented the amount of federal money we’re giving to ICE and CBP is compared to when those agencies were created after 9/11. Congress just gave ICE and CBP another $70 billion on top of the money allocated in Trump’s economic bill last year, which allocated $170 billion over four years for federal immigration enforcement.
Naureen, can you put in perspective for our listeners that explosion in funding, and how is that money shaping what federal immigration agents are doing, what resources and the kinds of weapons that they have?
NS: The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies — which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies — make them far larger than anything that we’ve seen at the federal law enforcement level. Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually most militaries around the world. So most militaries around the world are funded less than ICE and Border Patrol at this moment in our nation’s history.
If you think about where ICE even comes from, like how it came into being, it came into being after the 9/11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a pretty young agency as they go, less than 25 years old. And even after 9/11, which spawned a lot of legitimate concern and also a lot of hysteria about terrorism and immigration. Even after that, we didn’t see this kind of funding. Nothing near this kind of funding.
We’ve actually got a bar chart that shows just how enormously, like a staggering amount of money this is in comparison to anything ICE and Border Patrol got before. Even if you compare it to the first Trump administration, even if you look at several years combined, it does not meet $240 billion. So what can they do with this money?
“100 million, which is about a third of the country, that’s how many people they want to get rid of.”
I mentioned that they want to create the “Amazon Prime” of deportations. It means that they can not only expand ICE’s footprint directly in terms of hiring, but they can do more of what we’ve been talking about, which is incentivizing state and local police to join their ranks through a program called 287(g).
They’re going to spend billions of dollars on that, billions of dollars on detention, and detention not to make it more safe. It will be deadly. It will be large facilities where people are just left to suffer all kinds of abuse and all kinds of medical neglect, and of course, just to deport as many people as they can.
It’s worth remembering that their ambition is to deport 100 million people. That’s what they’ve said on their social media platform. 100 million, which is about a third of the country, that’s how many people they want to get rid of. And they’ve got a lot of ideas about how to do it. So they will be spending that money unless Congress takes it back, and we will certainly be looking for members of Congress now to make that commitment that they will take that money back because it is just too large a sum.
AL: I want to end on how immigration is coming up in the midterms. There’s been an intractable debate on immigration reform in Congress for as long as I can remember. Congress could create a path to citizenship for people. We saw efforts to that effect under President Joe Biden, which were then used to attack him and the eventual nominee, Kamala Harris, in 2024 as a preview of what Trump would do in office.
Meanwhile, Republicans are campaigning in this midterm cycle on attacking immigrants and taking advantage of anti-immigrant sentiment among their base. We also have Trump basically trying to hold the GOP hostage until they pass his SAVE Act bill that has previously failed and is even unpopular among Republicans and would require people to prove their citizenship to vote with a birth certificate or a passport, documents that more than 21 million Americans already lack access to, according to the Brennan Center.
I wonder if you could talk about how the war on immigrants is tied to the war to strip people of their right to vote. Nayna, I’ll start with you.
How is the war on immigrants tied to the war to strip people of their right to vote?
NG: The challenge of advocating and pushing to reform and fix the immigration system has always been that so many of the people impacted are quite obviously the most politically disenfranchised. They’re non-citizens. They don’t have a right to vote. That means that pathways to permanent status and citizenship could wake up new constituencies that would be a threat to the far right, given the far right’s anti-immigrant sentiment. That is always a backdrop in the fight for advancing reform.
We have, over the many months of this administration, seen them use the immigration system as the tip of the spear in their attack on democracy and core democratic institutions. Once again, we’re seeing the administration use immigration and the authorities they’ve been given in the system to attack fundamental voting rights — whether that’s using immigration agents at polling locations, whether that’s pushing back against these efforts to provide folks pathways to permanent status and protect them from the arm of ICE.
So there’s no question that the immigration enforcement agenda that this administration is pursuing ties to voting rights. Now, the question is, given that, how do we still make sure we’re offering solutions and reforms that can be viable and build a broad enough coalition of support to overwhelm that far-right base and the way they’ve weaponized this issue?
At the Council, what we’ve observed is that while we’ve done a great job at talking about what we don’t want — we don’t want this many dollars, we don’t want an immigration detention system to enforce civil immigration rules — it’s been harder to explain to folks how do you get rid of those harmful parts of the system but still have a system of rules.
We still have to enforce immigration laws in the United States. And what we’ve been doing is talking to members of Congress, talking to the public about what that can look like, that you can have penalties for violations of civil immigration law. But deportation should not be this one-size-fits-all punishment, and that is the system that we have right now.
“Deportation should not be this one-size-fits-all punishment.”
When we talk in those terms, there are many Americans who are increasingly uncomfortable with what they’re seeing, given the killings of people like Renee and Alex, but who still believe in a system of rules and are worried about an America that welcomes anybody and everybody. And so what we’re really saying is, you can enforce rules and have a system, but no, it doesn’t have to mean that any person in violation of civil immigration law could be subject to arrest and mass incarceration. What does that look like? Those kinds of conversations are a more effective antidote to the far right’s effort to weaponize the immigration system, not only to hurt immigrants, but to hurt core democratic rights like the right to vote.
NS: Most Americans still support citizenship as a pathway. More than 80 percent of Americans support a path to citizenship for Dreamers, people who came here as kids. That includes 54 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup poll from July. [Editor’s note:56 percent of Republicans support Dreamers’ citizenship in the Gallup poll.]
So even with years and years of anti-immigrant scapegoating, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, all support a path to citizenship. I think it gets to what Nayna is speaking to, which is a value of fairness, a value that cuts across a lot of different parts of our political spectrum — a sense that people ought to have a fair shot.
When we talk about the rules of the system, we are talking right now about if you were playing this, if you were explaining this as a board game to a child, there would be no way for most people to win that board game. They would just keep landing on go directly to jail, do not pass go, just go to jail.
That is how our immigration system is set up. It’s a game with rules, and the rules are rigged so that people will fail, and they will be punished, and they might even lose their lives, and they might even be torn from their small children. And of course, we’ve seen heartbreaking cases like that. So the ACLU is seeing this moment as a moment for policymakers to call for transformative change to an immigration system that has long been cruel, and has long not served anybody’s interest.
“It’s a game with rules, and the rules are rigged so that people will fail.”
Right now, that system is on overdrive. We are seeing that cruelty on display, and it means that we just need to transform this entire system. How do you turn a broken, upside-down system right-side up? The first thing is that people in this country, millions and millions of them, need a path. They need a path to being here with legal residency and ultimately with citizenship.
But if we continue to have a system where more than 10 million people — who are our neighbors, our loved ones, ourselves, people who are working, who keep this country going — if those people are stuck in this game that they just cannot win, we’ll never have a system that works. Enforcement will always be broken.
It will always mean people being put in detention because they just never had a chance at any kind of alternative where they could live freely and openly and with legal authorization. And, just say also, that’s really terrible for our democracy. I think about, I’ve got little kids, I think about the country they’re going to grow up in.
If Stephen Miller has his way, the undocumented people in this country and their U.S.-born children are not going to have the same right to education. They won’t have the same right to free speech. So two decades from now, if we were having this conversation and one of us was undocumented or one of us was the child of an undocumented person, Stephen Miller’s pipe dream is that some of us would have the right to speak our minds on this, in this conversation, and some of us would be afraid. That’s where we’re headed to unless we have transformative change to this broken immigration system.
AL: We’re going to leave it there. Naureen Shah and Nayna Gupta, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.
NS: Thanks for having me.
NG: Thanks so much.
AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278
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Why Should Delaware Care? Every year, Delaware’s school districts vote to approve a new school tax rate to be collected in the fall. But the continued fallout from Delaware’s first property reassessment in 40 years has pushed back the deadline for when districts will collect the revenue, adding to a squeeze on their finances.
Several New Castle County school boards announced over the past month that they may raise local taxes before the end of the year. But those exact increases will not be known until later this fall because of delays caused by last year’s property reassessment controversy.
During their July board meetings, the Appoquinimink, Christina, and Colonial school districts each said tax increases could be necessary because of higher costs of special education.
But those districts also said they could not immediately vote on a new tax rate, as they normally would, because of a law passed earlier this year that gave New Castle County the ability to temporarily expand its property tax authority and conduct “quality control” reviews of its commercial property assessments.
Lawmakers passed the bill in response to complaints that New Castle County’s latest property reassessment undervalued several prominent business properties.
New Castle County has until Sept. 30 to complete the reviews. Once completed, the county will send school districts updated information about their tax base.
The Maurice Pritchett Academy is one of the Christina School District’s schools in Wilmington. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
During the recent school board meeting, district leaders also said they are waiting for Gov. Matt Meyer to sign a bill to indefinitely extend their ability to charge commercial and residential properties different tax rates.
School board members will then be able to vote on a school tax rate during their upcoming October meetings.
New property tax bills will then be issued in November, and residents will have until Dec. 31 to pay.
In normal years, school districts collect their taxes earlier in the fall.
Increased student needs
Appoquinimink Superintendent Matthew Burrows said during his July school board meeting that a potential tax increase would fund salary increases and additional staff needed to address the growing needs of students with disabilities
The component of property taxes that pay for special education – called the tuition tax – is set by local school boards, and does not require votes by residents, like a broader tax referendum would.
During the meeting, Burrows said his district could face a legal challenge if it did not bring in more dollars to pay for special education.
“You either meet the needs of your students on the tuition tax side or … there’s lawsuits if you’re not meeting the needs of the students, and so you’re paying out on that end of it,” he said.
Burrows said the potential tax increase would cost the average home just under $100 per year with the new tax rate.
A property tax increase for residents within Appoquinimink’s boundaries is likely to draw more complaints than normal. Last year, residents expressed outrage after the district revealed that its projected $7.9 million savings balance for the year had essentially been a mirage.
Numerous accounting errors, including a failure to notice that May had an extra pay period, left Appoquinimink facing a significant budget deficit.
In response, Burrows cut $2.5 million from the district’s budget to reduce the financial strain, but ultimately taxpayers help to stave off issues by shouldering a 10% rate hike made possible by the first reassessment in decades.
This month, Appoquinimink district officials said they will continue to act in “austerity mode” through the fall.
Officials from the Colonial and Christina school districts also indicated that a potential increase to their districts’ tuition tax rates is likely.
“Our special education students, the complexity of their needs continues to ramp up,” Colonial CFO Emily Falcon said during a recent board meeting. “In addition to that complexity, the cost of providing services, you know, inflation is pushing those costs up as well.”
Red Clay Consolidated district officials also announced a possible 1.9% school tax increase during its recent board meeting.
Navigating cashflow concerns
Beyond higher expenses, school districts’ budgets are also likely to be strained this year because of the delay in collecting tax revenue.
The delay means some districts will be closely watching their expenditures during the first few months of the school year, starting in mid-August.
The new state law giving New Castle County its authority to review assessments also directs the state to provide emergency funding to districts if they experience shortfalls because of the delay.
Still, Falcon said school officials should hold off on purchases until tax dollars roll in – unless one is “mission critical” for a school.
If a purchase is necessary, the district will “figure out the cash flow concerns and how to navigate those,” she said.
Leaders in the Colonial School District, serving the New Castle, Bear and Delaware City area, expressed frustration at the delays around this year’s tax collection. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
Although the state has offered support, Colonial Board President Chris Piecuch expressed frustration with the ongoing fallout from Delaware’s property reassessment. Last year, resident outrage, lawsuits from businesses and last-minute legislation all followed Delaware’s first-in-a-generation property tax reassessment to become one of the biggest political controversies of the year.
Partially in response, the state allowed New Castle County’s ongoing review of business property assessments.
“It’s just crazy to think that we have no handle over something that’s dramatically affecting how we can operate,” Piecuch said of the delay in receiving property information.
To avoid relying on borrowed money from the state, Christina School District CFO Bob Vacca temporarily changed the classification of roughly 2,400 district employees so their compensation is drawn from money the district already receives from the state Department of Education.
Delaware school districts are funded through a combination of state funds and local dollars they collect through property taxes.
Vacca said the district will be “going 100% in the other direction,” and using local funds from January through the end of Fiscal Year 2027.
“It’s an extraordinary move because it takes a great deal of labor to do it, but it’s using our own money,” he said.
Why Should Delaware Care? Wilmington’s management of its water billing and shutoffs has been a contentious issue since COVID. The previous Purzycki administration enacted a shutoff moratorium that later ended. Since then, questions have been raised around when the city shuts off its water and sewer systems to residents.
Wilmington Mayor John Carney vetoed an ordinance Wednesday that would have prevented city officials from shutting off water service to vulnerable residents with delinquent bills.
In a letter sent to city council members, the mayor said his office could not support the measure as it would “create an environment that incentivizes individuals not to pay for our public utilities.”
The veto comes two weeks after the Wilmington City Council passed a package of housing reform legislation, including the water shutoff measure.
Carney signed other ordinances that were part of the reforms, including one that provides renter protections against evictions; another that allocates money to homeowners for repairs; and a third that provides money for vacant property rehabilitation.
The water shutoff ordinance would have prohibited the city from discontinuing water service to households that are occupied by a senior citizen, by a person with a disability, or by a child under 5 years old.
Only households making equal to or less than 350% of the annual federal poverty level would have been eligible for the program. For a family of three, that would equate to a little over $95,500 according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
During a July 9 council meeting, the bill’s sponsor, Councilwoman Shané Darby, said it was not about debt forgiveness but instead about ensuring an essential item for residents who can not afford it.
Wilmington City Councilwoman Shané Darby. | PHOTO COURTESY OF CITY OF WILMINGTON
“It does not eliminate anyone’s responsibility to pay their water bill,” she said. “It simply ensures that the city does not use water shutoffs as a collection tool.”
In his veto letter, Carney noted there are 4,000 delinquent accounts in the city. He said water disconnections are rare due to current safeguards already in place, such as prohibitions on shutoffs during extreme weather.
The city also maintains a Utility Payment Assistance Program that residents can access if they are overdue on utilities for more than 90 days. Qualified residents can receive up to $1,500 to pay their delinquents water and sewer bills.
Still, Carney asserted in his letter that a notice of water disconnection remains a “critical mechanism” for the city to collect overdue accounts, and keep the city’s water system financially stable.
“We cannot responsibly manage our water utility if we are prohibited from using the very tool that compels engagement and prevents further deterioration of the system,” Carney said.
He did not note what deterioration has already occurred.
Darby also disagreed that her legislation would encourage people to not pay their utilities. She cited a 2024 Temple University study that showed households typically keep paying what they can when such protections are in place.
“Right now we’re very reactive. We wait for people to get into debt before we help them. I want to be proactive,” she said.
Darby says she is seeking a veto override on the water shut-off legislation.
The vote could take place on Aug 6.
How does the city enforce delinquent bills?
Darby had proposed numerous iterations of her water-shutoff bill, going back to 2021, according to city council’s website.
In 2021, Darby unsuccessfully tried to bring another six-month moratorium into effect to protect residents who she said were financially struggling “due to the lasting impacts of the pandemic.”
Three years later, the issue resurfaced, as advocates and some city council members argued it was unfair for the city to push homes to sheriff sale foreclosure over past-due water bills, or to issue 96-hour shutoff notices.
That same year the Wilmington Fines and Fees Task Force issued a report that found water bill revenue had grown faster than any other city revenue source at the time. They also found that shutoff notices disproportionately hit residents in low-income neighborhoods and recommended the city end water shutoffs and foreclosures over unpaid bills for vulnerable residents.
The former administration under Mayor Mike Purzycki agreed to stop using foreclosures over past-due water bills and to issue 96-hour shutoff notices only after six months of delinquency.
In August 2024, the News Journal reported that the downtown property that includes the prominent DuPont Building had previously held an unpaid balance of $124,537. A payment plan was set up for property, according to the News Journal.
The Purzucki administration later told Spotlight Delaware that payment plans the city had reached with such businesses were available to all customers.
Criticism over the issue also arose during the July 9 City Council meeting’s public comment period when several people argued that the city had been more lenient with delinquent water bills from businesses than residences.
“Access to clean water is a basic human right, and I understand that finances are an issue, but I think we need to look at the bigger picture,” said April Collins, a resident and a nurse.
Carney’s office did not respond to subsequent requests for comment on Thursday regarding current practices for collecting water bills from commercial properties.
Wilmington’s 2027 budget includes a 7% increase for water and sewer rates, as well as stormwater rates. Water and sewer fees make up about a quarter of the city’s budget revenue.
After 2020, the city began increasing its water and sewer rates by about 5% each year.
This year’s increase marks the city’s highest increase since then.
The US will no longer hold transportation agencies accountable for unintentional discrimination. That’s devastating for those of us who depend on it
As the first congenitally blind member of Congress and a former president of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) board, I know that the ability to move – to get to work, to school, to the doctor – is a freedom our nation’s civil rights laws have long promised to protect. Last month, the Trump administration derailed that promise.
Through a regulatory maneuver designed to evade public scrutiny, the Department of Transportation announced it will no longer hold transportation agencies accountable when their decisions produce discriminatory outcomes – no matter how severe – so long as the discrimination was unintentional. As a result, decades of civil rights protection were erased by regulatory fiat.
Congresswoman Lateefah Simon represents California’s 12th congressional district in the East Bay. She is the first congenitally blind member to serve in Congress and a strong advocate for transportation and disability justice. She previously served as Bart president and executive director of the San Francisco Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights
Guillermo Mayer is an attorney and the president and CEO of Public Advocates, a 55-year old civil rights law firm and advocacy organization dedicated to challenging the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination
Can Andy Burnham remake Britain at home and abroad?Audiosseth.drupal@c…
In this week’s episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss Andy Burnham’s first week in office as prime minister of the United Kingdom and the challenges that await him
Andy Burnham took over as UK prime minister with a vow to restore hope in British politics – and an early volley of voter-friendly policy promises. But are they quite as significant as billed?
How much room to manoeuvre does Burnham really have? Will new chancellor John Healey release enough funds to the Ministry of Defence, which he quit in frustration? Does Ed Miliband have what it takes to succeed as foreign secretary? And how will Britain’s place in the world change?
Olivia O’Sullivan, director of Chatham House’s UK in the World Programme, is joined by The Economist’s political correspondent Hugo Gye and Chatham House associate fellow Jamie Gaskarth to discuss the first days of Burnham’s premiership.
About Independent Thinking
Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.
After several months, we’re pleased to have Olivia Marble back on the podcast to discuss data centers and Delaware’s energy market. A lot has happened on that front in recent months.
Olivia recently wrote an article summarizing the Delaware General Assembly’s efforts this year to legislate around data centers and energy. We’ll talk about that, as well as how the governor and Delaware’s counties are wrestling with these issues.
This conversation transcript has been edited for clarity and concision. The audio podcast is unedited.
Let’s start at the beginning. We hired you as Spotlight’s land use reporter, but almost immediately you also became our in-house expert on data centers and energy. What was that experience like?
I don’t think it was day one—I think it was day three that I published my first article about data centers.
But it made sense that I would focus on them. Land use is a broad beat that covers how we shape the land around us. I spend a lot of time reporting on how local governments plan for future development, what developers propose to build, and what ultimately gets built.
Data centers fit neatly into that because they’re often massive industrial developments that can significantly shape communities. Infrastructure also became a natural secondary focus because these facilities require roads, water, and large amounts of electricity.
I hadn’t spent much time covering electric infrastructure before, though, so that has been the biggest learning curve. It’s still one of the most challenging parts of my reporting because our energy system is incredibly complex. There are multiple layers of governance, technical issues, and scientific concepts to understand.
At the same time, it’s been fascinating to learn how the electricity system actually works. Most of us take for granted that the lights come on when we flip a switch, but there’s an enormous amount happening behind the scenes.
That’s absolutely true. Spotlight aims to be a community-responsive news organization, and data centers and energy have clearly been top-of-mind issues for Delawareans over the past year or two.
Why do you think these topics have become so important?
I think it starts with artificial intelligence. Data centers have always powered the internet, but we’re hearing much more about them now because AI requires far more computing power than previous technologies.
As AI has grown, data centers have become much larger and consume dramatically more electricity. That has forced governments and utilities to rethink how they plan energy infrastructure.
AI is often discussed as something that could fundamentally transform society, but it’s also something that feels abstract. People use it in different ways, and they have very little control over how it develops.
What they can influence, however, is whether a data center gets built in their community.
The other major factor is affordability. Many Delawareans are already struggling with inflation, higher utility bills, and rising living costs. Data centers have raised concerns because they could increase electricity prices.
Developers argue that they’ll pay the full cost of the electricity they consume, but independent analyses have found that if all 2.4 gigawatts of proposed data centers were built in Delaware without adding new power generation, wholesale electricity prices could increase by as much as 80%.
That’s a significant concern.
That’s a pretty shocking number.
It is.
In some ways, the debate becomes a referendum on AI itself. If you’re optimistic about AI, you may welcome more data center development. If you’re skeptical, you may be much less enthusiastic.
Interestingly, I’ve talked with plenty of people who use AI every day and still don’t want a data center in their backyard.
It reminds me of warehouse development, which I covered extensively in my previous job. Warehousing expanded rapidly after the pandemic because of e-commerce. People would stand up during public hearings and say, “I order everything from Amazon, but I don’t want an Amazon warehouse next to my neighborhood.”
Those concerns — traffic, pollution, noise — were legitimate.
The same thing applies here. If you use AI, data centers are part of the infrastructure that makes it possible. But that doesn’t mean you lose the right to ask questions about how those facilities will affect your community.
Exactly. There’s room for legitimate public concern.
That leads us to how Delaware’s leaders have responded. The General Assembly is supposed to be responsive to community concerns, and lawmakers were quite active this year on legislation involving data centers and energy.
Of those bills, which do you think will have the greatest impact on Delawareans?
I’m obviously not an industry expert, but based on everything I’ve reported over the past year, I think House Bill 445 could be the most significant—assuming it’s implemented effectively.
Tell me about that bill.
The bill requires new data centers to either provide their own power supply or fund new power generation to support their operations.
The original version required that new power generation be located in Delaware. I thought that would be extremely difficult. In fact, I wondered whether it would effectively amount to a moratorium on new data centers because building new energy infrastructure is slow everywhere, especially in Delaware.
For example, onshore wind farms aren’t really feasible here, and a portion of the required energy would have to come from renewable sources. I genuinely questioned whether the bill was even workable.
Another key provision is that data centers would have to provide 100% of their required power generation within 10 years of beginning operations.
So they get a little time to ramp up.
Right, but the expectation is still clear: if you’re bringing a major new electricity demand to Delaware, you’re also expected to bring the power needed to support it.
After the bill was amended, though, it became much more practical. Instead of requiring all new generation to be built in Delaware, it allows projects in neighboring states. It also broadens the definition of “new power generation.”
For example, investing in upgrades that increase the capacity of existing power plants counts toward that requirement. From a permitting and construction standpoint, that’s much more realistic than trying to build an entirely new nuclear plant or another large generating facility from scratch.
I still think the bill could have a major impact because it directly addresses what the state’s Public Advocate has consistently identified as the biggest issue: Delaware doesn’t have enough electricity supply to meet future demand.
The goal is to avoid a classic supply-and-demand imbalance. If you dramatically increase demand without increasing supply, prices go up.
That’s essentially the situation we’ve been facing.
There hasn’t been enough new generation coming online to replace retiring plants while also meeting increased demand—particularly from data centers, which consume many times more electricity than a typical household.
So we need additional generating capacity.
When people debate whether that generation has to be in Delaware or somewhere else, it’s important to remember that we’re part of a larger regional electric grid—the PJM Interconnection.
Exactly.
The system is complicated, but because we’re all connected through PJM, additional generation in Maryland or New Jersey can still benefit Delaware.
That said, location does matter because of transmission congestion.
Right now, much of southern Delaware receives electricity generated farther north. If demand increases dramatically, those transmission lines can become congested. My understanding is that congestion results in energy losses and higher costs, which can ultimately raise electricity prices.
So while any new generation on the PJM grid helps, generation located closer to where it’s needed is generally more beneficial.
And that’s why the final version of the bill allows developers to build that new generation outside Delaware, as long as it’s in neighboring states.
That’s right.
Building generation closer to where the electricity will be used is always the most efficient approach. It reduces congestion and helps limit future increases in electricity costs.
Three major energy bills ultimately passed on the final night of the legislative session.
I’d like to talk a little about your reporting process because this was actually your first time covering the final night of the General Assembly.
What was your overall impression of how the legislature operates during those final hours?
My first day at Spotlight last year was July 14, so I missed the end of the previous legislative session. This was my first experience covering the closing night.
It was chaotic.
There were a huge number of bills that lawmakers were trying to move before adjournment. I didn’t even stay until the end—I finally left around 3 a.m.—and the session continued well beyond that.
Despite the chaos, there was also a sense that everyone was in it together.
The legislators, legislative staff, and reporters all knew it was going to be a long night. People helped each other out more than usual because everyone was trying to get through the same marathon.
That’s definitely the atmosphere.
You have long floor sessions where lawmakers debate and vote on bills, but you also have lengthy caucus meetings where each party disappears behind closed doors to negotiate.
As a reporter, how do you approach covering a night like that? Who are you talking to, and what are you trying to learn?
My assignment that night was very focused. I only needed to cover the three data center bills.
My job was to determine whether they were going to pass. If they didn’t, I needed to understand why. If they did, I wanted to know what negotiations made that possible.
So I spent the night talking to lawmakers, texting sources, and asking everyone I could, “What are you hearing?”
Whenever there was a break between caucuses and floor sessions, I’d run up to legislators and ask, “What can we expect? What happened in the meeting?”
I actually wrote two versions of my story.
One assumed the bills would pass. The other assumed they wouldn’t.
Right before the session, one source told me the bills were dead. Minutes later, someone else said they were definitely passing.
The information was so contradictory that it was faster to prepare both versions and be ready for whichever outcome happened.
That’s exactly what deadline reporting often requires.
Our morning newsletter goes out at 9 a.m., and I don’t think the legislature finally adjourned until around 5 a.m.
Having the background, interviews, and analysis already written is really the only way you have any chance of getting a few hours of sleep before publication.
Exactly.
One bill in particular, Senate Bill 326, appeared to be in a pretty tenuous position the night before the final day of session. This is the bill that caps the amount of infrastructure spending Delmarva Power can pass on to customers.
An amendment introduced in the House would have removed that cap and instead required only a 25% reduction. House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn Harris said the original bill didn’t have enough votes to advance out of committee. Yet on the final night of session, the amendment failed, the original bill advanced, and it ultimately passed by a wide margin. What happened?
From my understanding, several committee members had significant concerns about the cap itself.
Delmarva Power was lobbying heavily against the original bill. Company representatives argued that the investments being capped are technically classified as “non-mandatory” infrastructure upgrades, but they maintained those projects are essential to maintaining the long-term reliability of the electric grid.
My understanding is that the amendment was largely a political compromise designed to move the bill out of committee and onto the House floor. Once it reached the full House, however, a majority of lawmakers decided they preferred the original version.
Governor Matt Meyer also gave the bill momentum. On the final day of the legislative session, he publicly endorsed Senate Bill 326 without the amendment. At that point, it appeared some of the committee members who had originally opposed the bill recognized where the votes were headed and ultimately supported the original language.
What’s interesting is that the support was bipartisan. This wasn’t simply Democrats versus Republicans. Lawmakers from both parties were concerned about affordability for their constituents, and the bill ultimately passed by comfortable margins.
It also had bipartisan opposition.
The committee members who expressed concerns weren’t exclusively Republicans. Some Democrats shared those concerns as well.
Those concerns centered on whether limiting Delmarva Power’s ability to recover certain infrastructure costs could discourage future investment in the electric grid, potentially affecting long-term reliability. That’s a legitimate concern.
Exactly.
People dislike high electric bills, but they dislike losing power even more. Legislators were trying to balance those competing priorities.
Deputy Editor Karl Baker mentioned that he was somewhat surprised these energy and data center bills ultimately passed. He thought lawmakers might be more cautious during an election year. Were you surprised?
I was surprised by how little opposition House Bill 445 ultimately faced because I think it’s a very significant piece of legislation.
That said, I’m less surprised after the amendments. Giving developers more flexibility in how they provide new power generation—and where that generation can be located—made the bill much easier to support. Without those changes, I think the debate would have been much more contentious.
I was actually more surprised that House Bill 233 generated as much opposition as it did.
From my reading, it didn’t seem as consequential. It primarily requires the Public Service Commission to negotiate service agreements with large data centers.
To me, it didn’t appear to have the same long-term impact as House Bill 445.
Do you think that was simply because it was the first data center bill to come before the Senate?
Exactly.
Once lawmakers realized the first bill was moving, it became the vehicle for the broader debate about data centers.
Rather than arguing over the specific provisions of House Bill 233, many senators used that discussion to express their broader opinions about the role data centers should play in Delaware.
There’s activity on these issues outside Legislative Hall as well. The Public Service Commission recently approved only part of Delmarva Power’s latest rate increase request.
Your reporting highlighted the commission’s four newest members, all appointed by Governor Matt Meyer. You wrote that the vote “shows a shift in the body’s public rhetoric.” Tell me more about that. What’s changed, and why does it matter?
I’ll be honest—that observation really came from Karl Baker, our deputy editor.
I’ve only been covering Delaware for about a year. While I’ve followed the Public Service Commission closely during that time, I wasn’t comfortable saying on my own that this represented a significant change. So I asked Karl whether he’d seen anything like it during his decade of reporting in Delaware.
He said he hadn’t.
His view was that, historically, the commission has generally deferred to Delmarva Power’s interpretation of what it can and can’t do. Of course, commissioners consult their own attorneys, but they’ve traditionally been more cautious about making decisions that might invite legal challenges from the utility.
One moment that really stood out came during a recent commission meeting.
A Delmarva Power attorney objected to the commission’s actions, and one of the commissioners responded, “If you don’t like it, appeal it.”
That struck me as unusually direct—almost combative—and Karl felt the same way. It wasn’t the tone either of us had typically seen from the commission.
I would agree. It feels like a departure from the status quo, and we’re seeing similar shifts across the region.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has taken aggressive action over energy costs. Maryland Governor Wes Moore has done the same. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is also putting greater pressure on utilities. There seems to be a broader movement toward holding electric utilities more accountable, and Governor Meyer appears to be taking a similar approach in Delaware.
What have you noticed from the governor’s office?
So far, he’s primarily been using what reporters often call the “bully pulpit.”
He’s been publicly advocating for specific legislation rather than relying heavily on executive orders or other executive actions.
For example, he publicly supported several of the energy bills before the General Assembly and urged lawmakers to pass them.
He’s also used unusually strong language when discussing Delmarva Power.
At one recent press conference, he accused the company of “lying” about the Public Service Commission’s authority. Specifically, Delmarva Power argued that the commission lacked the legal authority to approve only part of its requested rate increase.
Governor Meyer rejected that argument outright, calling it false.
That’s unusually forceful language from a governor.
I’m curious to see what comes next. Will he continue relying primarily on public pressure, or will we see more direct executive action?
That said, it’s worth noting that he already took one significant action by appointing the four new Public Service Commission members who have adopted a more assertive posture toward Delmarva Power.
That’s a good point. His appointments may ultimately prove to be one of the most consequential actions he’s taken on this issue.
It also feels increasingly likely that some of these disputes will eventually end up in court.
Absolutely.
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about state legislation, but these debates are also playing out at the local level. Earlier this year, New Castle County Council adopted the state’s first data center regulations. By the time this podcast is released, Kent County Levy Court will have held a hearing on its own proposed regulations.
What will you be watching most closely?
I’m particularly interested in Kent County’s proposed noise standards and setback requirements.
The draft ordinance would limit noise at industrial property lines to 55 decibels. That’s relatively quiet, but much of Kent County is extremely rural, where ambient noise levels are often much lower than that.
I’m interested to see whether residents feel that standard adequately protects the character of those communities.
The proposed 300-foot buffer also caught my attention.
That’s substantially smaller than the 1,000-foot setback adopted by New Castle County, so I’m curious whether residents will argue for greater separation between data centers and neighboring properties.
Another issue is that the proposed regulations would classify data centers as a permitted use within industrial zoning districts.
That means qualifying projects could move forward without an additional public hearing where a board has discretion to approve or deny the proposal.
The counterargument, which I’ve heard from Levy Court members, is that even discretionary approvals are generally expected to follow the zoning code if an application meets all legal requirements.
Still, I think many residents may be uncomfortable with removing that additional layer of public review.
And practically speaking, it also means the public loses an opportunity to directly question developers before a project moves forward.
Exactly.
People can still participate when zoning regulations are written or amended, but once a project is permitted by right, there generally isn’t another public hearing where residents can challenge the proposal itself.
That could become one of the more controversial aspects of the regulations.
I’m curious. There’s been so much attention on an industry that, at least so far, doesn’t have a major operating project in Delaware. There are a few legacy data centers, but nothing on the scale that’s being proposed.
What does it say that so much attention is focused on what could happen rather than what’s already here?
Honestly, I think New Castle County Council would have preferred to address this issue even earlier.
By the time it adopted its regulations, there were already several data center proposals with pending applications. That created a debate over whether the new rules should apply to those projects. Ultimately, county officials decided they would not.
That’s one reason I give Kent County credit for tackling the issue before any major applications have been submitted.
Planning ahead is exactly when governments should be thinking about regulations. It’s much easier to establish clear expectations before projects are proposed than after developers have already entered the approval process.
New Castle County found itself trying to write rules while at least four major applications were already pending. That’s a much more difficult position to be in.
I think Kent County is taking the smarter approach by deciding what its standards should be before it has to evaluate a specific project.
Has Sussex County shown any indication that it’s considering similar regulations?
Not that I’ve seen.
I’ve heard some informal conversations about whether the county should do something, but nothing concrete.
One factor may be the Delaware Electric Cooperative, which serves much of Sussex County.
One of the bills passed this year gives the cooperative greater authority to deny data center proposals outright. Because it’s a member-owned cooperative, its situation is different from Delmarva Power’s.
One concern the cooperative’s leadership raised with me was that a single large data center could consume as much electricity as all of its existing members combined.
Under the cooperative’s governance structure, that could theoretically make one customer the majority stakeholder in the organization.
That’s obviously not how a cooperative is intended to function.
So perhaps that’s one reason Sussex County hasn’t felt the same urgency to adopt local regulations.
Still, if I were advising the county, I’d encourage it to establish rules now.
There’s very little downside to being prepared.
If the AI revolution develops the way many people in Silicon Valley predict, demand for data centers could continue to grow dramatically.
Of course, technology also tends to become more efficient over time. Future data centers may require less land or consume less electricity than today’s facilities.
We simply don’t know.
But I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to prepare for multiple possibilities.
Finally, you were instrumental in organizing Spotlight Delaware’s “Spotlight on Data Centers” event this spring. The event brought together legislators, public officials, and industry experts from Delaware and other states to discuss what Delaware can learn from their experiences.
You also moderated several of those panel discussions. How does organizing an event like that improve your reporting?
The biggest benefit was building relationships.
Inviting someone to participate on a panel is different from calling them for a quick interview. Even with people I’d spoken to before, I was asking them to spend an hour having a public conversation with me in front of an audience.
That creates a different kind of relationship.
It was also incredibly valuable to hear questions directly from audience members.
People are always welcome to email me, and I encourage them to do that. But there’s something different about hearing those questions in real time while the experts are sitting right there on stage.
It’s much harder for panelists to dodge a question when it’s coming directly from someone in the audience.
That interaction helped me better understand what people are most concerned about and what questions still need to be answered in my reporting.
Thank you for sharing both your reporting process and your insights into one of Delaware’s most important emerging issues. You’ve done a tremendous job helping readers understand not just data centers, but the broader questions surrounding energy, affordability, and how Delaware is preparing for the future.
Bryson DeChambeau believes he would have been “right there for the Claret Jug” if he had not received a two-shot penalty in the Open Championship last week at Royal Birkdale.
DeChambeau made a positive start to last week’s tournament after opening with a 67 and then a 66 on Friday, but his second-round score was later adjusted to 68 after he was handed a retrospective two-stroke penalty at the 5th hole after a video review. The 32-year-old was punished after match officials ruled he had improved the area of his backswing by standing on and flattening some long grass.
What would a ceasefire in Ukraine mean for Europe and the world?
8
September 2026 — 13:00 TO 14:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Join this event to learn about the implications of a ceasefire for Ukraine, Europe, Russia - and global security.
Join this event to learn about the implications of a ceasefire for Ukraine, Europe, Russia - and global security.
After more than four years, the war in Ukraine has entered a period of military stalemate on the ground and a vicious battle in the sky, with strikes hitting both Moscow and Kyiv. Numerous attempts to broach a ceasefire have failed but talks of ending the war are brewing.
If a ceasefire is finally agreed, it will create new questions: about Ukraine’s security, Russia’s ambitions, and Europe’s long-term stability – made more urgent by uncertainty over US commitment to European security.
What the UK should learn from Kimi K3, WAICO and the Hugging Face incident Expert commentjon.wallace
Washington and Beijing spent the week arguing about whose models we should use. But the week’s most important news was about what a model did.
On 17 July, Chinese President Xi Jinping told an audience in Shanghai that artificial intelligence should be ‘a symphony of international cooperation’, not ‘a solo performance by a single country’.
Xi promised cooperation across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia through a new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (‘WAICO’) – viewed as a rival to United States-led efforts. And he warned against any country stretching the concept of national security to place its own interests above everyone else’s – a clear dig at the US.
But it was not China’s latest moves on global AI governance that caught most attention this month. It was its AI capabilities – specifically a powerful new AI model called Kimi K3.
At the end of 2024, the release of the Chinese DeepSeek AI knocked billions off American technology stocks, as it revealed that China was closer to US AI capabilities than previously thought.
Kimi K3, a huge new Chinese model, adds fuel to those fears. It can compete with the latest offers from leading US laboratories, and is promised to be released as ‘open weights’ – the term for AI you can run yourself provided you have the hardware. The news predictably hit stock prices again, as it appears to narrow the gap on the US’s technological lead still further.
From Beijing to DC, in discussions of sovereignty and dependence, IP theft, export controls and licensing, the focus is squarely on who is winning the AI race and by what margin. But there is a more pressing question: not whether the US or China is producing the most advanced models – but what those models are capable of.
A myopic focus on competition risks leaving the toolbox of AI governance empty when it is needed most.
A warning
Leading US AI news this week was a more worrying development: during an internal evaluation, OpenAI models reportedly found a previously unknown flaw in third-party software, escaped the sealed environment they were being tested in, and moved through OpenAI’s research network until they reached a machine with an internet connection. Using that connection, they broke into the servers of another AI company – Hugging Face – and stole the answers to the exam they were sitting.
A handful of cynics have accused OpenAI of crying wolf, arguing that this is a scare story aimed at convincing the world of the immense power of its technology. But AI experts have warned for decades that a machine set a task without sufficient guardrails may pursue its goals in unexpected or dangerous ways. Nick Bostrom’s famous thought experiment argued that a machine with superhuman competence innocently tasked with creating paperclips, given no other values, might well turn us all into paperclips.
The hacking of Hugging Face by the OpenAI models looks to be an example of precisely this kind of misalignment – though both companies have offered few details beyond their initial blog posts.
While its significance is disputed, the incident casts a long shadow over a technology debate conducted almost entirely in the language of competition. Few of the instruments that debate has produced would be useful in dealing with the risks the event highlights.
Deciding who may have what AI – not what the AI does
Banning Chinese models in America, as is reportedly being considered by the US administration, is an obvious example. The OpenAI model that allegedly broke containment was run on American chips, in an American data centre, for an American company. The rising popularity of Chinese AI models for American startups means that the main achievement of any ban would not be to improve safety, but to cut the legs out from under such US firms.
Threats to sanction Chinese AI firms on the grounds of intellectual property theft – besides continuing to underplay Chinese innovation – also do nothing to limit the capabilities of AI models in the wild.
And recently introduced approval windows for new AI models remain voluntary. Besides – the OpenAI incident took place behind closed doors, inside a private research environment, before the window for audit.
While some of these measures may help US AI firms – particularly its two biggest, OpenAI and Anthropic – jockey for position, they do precious little to govern the capabilities of the technology itself.
Should the US tighten its restrictions on Chinese AI, the UK should not follow suit.
It is notable that President Xi used his address in Shanghai to call for AI systems to remain under human control to manage AI risk. But China’s play is similarly competitive. Its vision for WAICO is to counterbalance the US in shaping global AI norms.
China is pushing open weight models. That is a clear contrast to the US, whose larger AI firms generally choose not to release their model weights and charge higher fees for access. However, for the moment, Beijing’s AI pitch comes from the same angle as Washington: a focus on who may have AI models, not on what the models do.
What the UK can do
Should the US tighten its restrictions on Chinese AI, the UK should not follow suit. A ban on Chinese open weight models would fall hardest on British firms that cannot afford the fees charged by the largest American labs. Maintaining the ability of UK startups to use cheap, open weight AI will be essential for them to compete with established players. An A16Z blog estimates some 80 per cent of startups using open models depend on Chinese ones.
But more fundamentally, the UK should bring focus to a conversation that is drifting away from the urgent task to ensure artificial intelligence is developed safely.
In the past fortnight, both US and Chinese technology companies have released extremely powerful AI systems. Governing these frontier systems will not come about through competition, but through technical institutional credibility: the exact kind of world-leading credibility that the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) has.
In the same week as the OpenAI incident, AISI published research showing that every model they tested would at times cheat to achieve an objective. Where those models were built, or who by, tells us little about how they must be governed. It is the capacity to evaluate these systems that matters, and it is here that the UK can play a vital role. The challenge is to be heard over the sabre rattling.
From Lionel Messi’s final flourish to players who barely featured, we rank every MLS representative who appeared in the 2026 World Cup
Messi was always going to be No 1. In what was likely his last World Cup, the Argentinian put together an incredible tournament, registering eight goals, four assists and the most progressive passes of any player, according to Futi. With zero defensive responsibility on his shoulders, Messi was free to do as he liked. The 39-year-old roamed the field with ease and effortlessly drew Argentina back from the brink time and time again. It was Messi who led his country to a 3-2 win against Cape Verde, Messi who assisted and then equalized against Egypt, and Messi who created both of Argentina’s late goals against England. In the final, however, Messi disappeared. Across 139 minutes including stoppage time, Messi completed just 28 of 39 passes, registered only one shot and hardly affected the game. He may have left the tournament with no personal or team accolades – a rarity for him – but Messi extended a World Cup legacy that few players have ever to come close to rivaling.
Mary “Tracy” Morrison, moments before she hits a student with a plastic object similar to a pipe. The still is from a video that reporter Jennifer Smith Richards obtained as part of a ProPublica investigation into child mistreatment at Morrison’s school. Obtained by ProPublica. Faces blurred in original video. Vignette added by ProPublica to spotlight Morrison.
The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain was set back off a country road in a white colonial house — such an atypical location that I first drove right by it, unsure that it was a school. I turned around, went to the door, introduced myself as a reporter and asked for a tour.
I knew a student had been assaulted in this Arkansas school a year earlier because of some news reports based on a detective’s description. Once inside, I noted the preteens tucked into hammock chairs or sitting on the floor. I noted the cameras mounted in the foyer and classrooms, a reminder that, in order to fully understand what had happened, I’d need to see the video that had captured the assault.
But since this happened at the Delta Institute, a private school, I didn’t have access to the types of public records — incident reports, emails and video — that might have existed at a public school. The only reason we knew that something awful had happened here was that law enforcement got involved. I would have to keep reporting for weeks until the criminal case was closed. Then I could start pursuing the video evidence.
I had come to Northeast Arkansas, just outside of Jonesboro, to report on private schools that have been opening in response to state legislatures increasingly setting aside public money for parents to spend on private education. Our reporting shows that more public money doesn’t necessarily translate to more transparency. In most of the states that ProPublica studied, private schools operate with little oversight. Unlike public schools, where everything from test scores to school lunches and staff credentials is regulated, most of what happens in private schools is not open to public scrutiny.
In Arkansas, the focus of my recent story with Jodi S. Cohen, there are no rules about who can open a private school, and they can operate just about anywhere. The state only requires that private schools conduct regular fire drills, keep immunization records and have an American flag and a flagpole. It doesn’t review schools’ curriculum or the backgrounds and capabilities of their operators.
There are no records showing that the Arkansas Department of Education investigated the Delta Institute or visited the school, even after police arrested its founder. When asked if the department had gone to the school, officials did not answer, but said when the department is made aware of issues, that “often results in a site visit.”
Eventually, I was able to obtain video evidence recorded from inside the school. With the help of Arkansas Times reporter Milo Strain, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for video footage to the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office and to the prosecutor who brought the charges on behalf of the state.
Now I want to share some of that footage with you. It’s sourced mostly from my open records requests, plus one video that was shared with me by a parent who consented to its publication. While the videos are difficult to watch, they are important in that they show not only the mistreatment of students at one particular private school but also the systemic lack of oversight that allows private schools to operate with few regulations and little monitoring.
Private School Owner Mary “Tracy” Morrison Orders Students to Scrub Floors
The owner of an Arkansas private school sent a video to a student’s mother last year to explain why the boy, a 10-year-old with autism, was being kept after school.Obtained and redacted by ProPublica. Two of the children’s names and faces are redacted to protect their identities.
Early in my reporting about the Delta Institute, a parent showed me a video of her son’s experience at the school. It was taken by the school’s owner, Mary “Tracy” Morrison. She had texted the video to Renee Johns, whose 10-year-old son with autism was a student, as an explanation for why he was being kept after school that day.
That video shows three boys scrubbing the floor and walls of a room in the school with rags as Morrison shouts commands and admonishments. You can see the boys startle and react as she raises her voice to them. It’s clear they’re being punished.
Morrison was an occupational therapist and had never run a school before. But she sold herself to parents as an expert on autism and neurodivergence.
Johns filed a report about the floor-scrubbing video with the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office. She saw it as child abuse. About three weeks later, in April 2025, a second parent came to the sheriff’s office to report another incident at the Delta Institute — this one also captured on video.
Morrison Encourages Students to Assault Classmate
Mary “Tracy” Morrison, an occupational therapist who founded an Arkansas private school in 2024, conducted a “group discussion” in which she encouraged other students to assault a 13-year-old boy. The incident led to criminal charges and jail time for Morrison.Excerpts of video from The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain obtained by ProPublica. Faces blurred in original video.
A detective went to the school in April 2025 with a warrant and retrieved a roughly 40-minute clip of footage recorded by a camera in the classroom. I obtained that through a Freedom of Information Act request, and it’s really the only unfiltered view we have into the methods Morrison was using at her school.
The video shows Morrison directing a boy to sit in the middle of a circle of 12- and 13-year-old students on the floor. Morrison then told the students to put their hands on the boy in the center however they wanted.
One boy loops his arm around the student’s neck and chokes him. Afterward, Morrison gives the boy a high-five.
Other students join in by hitting, punching and pinching the boy. Morrison encourages one, who strikes the boy hard enough that you can hear another student say, “That had to hurt!”
Morrison Strikes the Student, Too
Mary “Tracy” Morrison instructs a student to hit a peer while she watches. She hits the same 13-year-old student with a plastic cylinder, then berates him.Excerpts of video from The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain obtained by ProPublica. Faces blurred in original video.
A few moments later, Morrison thwacks the boy in the center with a footlong plastic cylinder. She’s trying to get him to admit to being unkind to another student.
Morrison was charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. She took a deal pleading guilty to one count of permitting child abuse and four counts of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. The deal allowed her to avoid a trial, which means the video was never played in open court. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
But what I saw in the video looked nothing like anything I’d seen before. I’d never seen a school administrator — the owner of the school, no less — shout at a child that he’s a liar or invite other students to put their hands on him.
Morrison declined to speak to the detective who investigated the case or to the prosecutor. She didn’t respond to our requests for interviews and comments. Our only real insight into her perspective came in other videos we obtained: recordings of calls with her family, friends and school employees made while she was in jail.
From Jail, Morrison Tells a Different Story
In a video call from jail with documentary filmmaker Alysia Sofios, Morrison explained her goal in conducting the “restorative” group discussion with students.Obtained by ProPublica
We got recordings of more than 500 phone and video calls that Morrison made or received while she was incarcerated in May. In a call with a filmmaker who has produced true crime documentaries and who spoke with Morrison about telling her story, we hear her explanation of what happened.
Morrison describes leading a “sophisticated” intervention method in which she guides students at risk of becoming criminals in a “restorative” group discussion. “It was never about, like, ‘Go hit him,’ right?” she said to the filmmaker, referring to the 13-year-old boy she’d had sit in the center of the circle.
Morrison was released from jail June 1. The school’s new administrator said Morrison has “zero involvement” with the school right now.
“I think she should be prevented from teaching anywhere in the United States of America and having children around if she’s going to try to influence them the way she did,” David Bailey, the detective on the case, said. “If we can’t protect our kids, who can we protect?”
The incidents at the Delta Institute show how one publicly funded private school has operated with little scrutiny, even after a criminal investigation into student abuse. But our reporting has uncovered several other such schools, and I encourage you to sign up for updates as we publish more about what we’ve discovered across the country.
The school is still operating and is still eligible to get public funding from the state. This spring, though, it changed its name. It’s now called North Star Academy.
Have you had trouble finding a school or using a voucher-style program? Do you have concerns about schools — public or private — in your area? Help us understand how families across the country are navigating their school options.
President Donald Trump’s push for Japanese self-reliance aligns with the long-standing desire of conservatives in Tokyo to build intelligence capabilities.
Measures effectively replace blanket 10% tariffs Trump imposed in February that were struck down by US supreme court
Donald Trump has once again inspired anger and confusion in US allies and trading partners as he imposed a wave of tariffs on more than 80 countries, replacing an expiring global duty introduced earlier this year.
The new measures effectively replace blanket 10% tariffs that Trump imposed in February. The US supreme court ruled many of those were illegal. The new levies come in at between 10% and 12.5% on countries including the UK, Mexico, Canada, Australia, India, China and the 27 countries that make up the EU.
Fires remain out of control in Northwest Territories and Ontario, while Argentina endures record night-time heat
Recent hot, dry weather in Canada has triggered hundreds of wildfires across the country. As of Wednesday, more than 900 were burning, scorching about 3m hectares of land. While fires have broken out in several provinces, the greatest concern is in the Northwest Territories and Ontario, where several remain out of control.
Poor air quality has been reported across affected regions, with wildfire smoke carried by winds into the US and even across the Atlantic to northern Europe. The risk of further blazes remains high as North America enters the peak of fire season.
The US is aligning itself with dictators and autocrats to prevent those accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes from ever facing justice
Barely a month appears to go by without Donald Trump making a fresh attempt to destroy the international rules-based order. The US has pulled funding from dozens of international institutions, shut down USAID and withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. Nato may survive on paper, but Trump has made clear that he has little interest in coming to the aid of any ally that is attacked. The Board of Peace is clearly an attempt to sideline the United Nations.
But the state department’s announcement last week that it wishes to dismantle the international criminal court “brick by brick” could be Trump’s most frightening move of all.
Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer and a previous winner of the Orwell prize
"The Norwegian certification agency DNV has certified the commercial wave-driven power generator Corpower C4 for regular use," writes Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino. "German news site heise.de has a detailed write-up. See a CGI video of the power station and its internals, as well as the company's website [at their respective links]." From the report (translated to English): According to the manufacturer Corpower Ocean, it is the first DNV prototype certificate for a wave energy converter. The certificate confirms that Corpower's technology meets DNV's requirements for structural strength, reliability, and safety, Corpower Ocean announced. The certification process began in the design phase and lasted seven years. DNV oversaw the process from concept development through design, manufacturing, and assembly, to dry-running tests and subsequent operation.
This is an important step, said Patrik Moller, CEO and one of the founders of Corpower Ocean. With the certification, wave energy is no longer just a promising technology, but a proven and financially viable one. This opens up new opportunities for project financing, insurance, and investments in commercial applications. The Corpower C4 wave power plant looks like a normal buoy: It consists of a 19-meter-long floating body with a diameter of 9 meters and a weight of approximately 11 tons. The system is anchored to the seabed. A mechanism inside the buoy converts its up-and-down movements in the waves into a rotary motion. This, in turn, drives a generator that produces electricity. The report notes that the company is "planning the first two industrial-scale wave energy farms off the coasts of Portugal and Scotland," which are scheduled to begin operating sometime between 2027 and 2029.
New tariffs will replace 10% global duty and come after US supreme court declared many of the earlier levies illegal
Donald Trump has imposed a fresh round of tariffs on more than 80 countries to replace a 10% global duty that was due to expire, provoking a wave of criticism and protests from US allies and major trading partners.
In the latest attempt to instate aggressive trade policies despite challenges from the US supreme court, the president has imposed tariffs of between 10% or 12.5% on dozens of countries, including the UK, Mexico, Canada, Australia, India, China and the 27 countries that make up the European Union. It in effect replaces the blanket 10% tariff that Trump imposed in February, right after the supreme court declared many of his earlier tariffs were illegal.
Washington, DC – Rep. Thomas Massie said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth broke federal law by keeping military operations against Iran going without Congress signing off.
Massie said the administration went past what the War Powers Resolution allows for unauthorized military action. That law says the president has to stop hostilities after 60 days unless Congress gives approval, with another 30 days to pull troops out.
Massie raised these points after reports that four service members killed after Trump announced a ceasefire in April were left out of the Pentagon’s online count of Iran casualties. He said officials were calling the renewed fighting a new conflict just to reset the legal clock.
Pentagon acting press secretary Joel Valdez disagreed, saying the missing names were due to data problems and website mistakes that would be fixed. The administration still says the president has the constitutional power to keep the operation going.
The House voted 214-208 to tell Trump to stop unauthorized hostilities. Massie and three other Republicans—Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Barrett, and Warren Davidson—voted for it. This resolution does not have the force of law. The Senate tried to pass a binding measure, but it failed 47-49. Susan Collins, a Republican, supported it, while Democrat John Fetterman voted no.
Irish politicians concerned about Daniel Tatlow-Devally’s treatment in jail want Micheál Martin to send observers to Ulm 5 trial
A cross-party delegation of Irish politicians has urged Dublin to send observers to a high-security trial of pro-Palestinian activists in Germany and to raise concerns about the Irish defendant’s detention when the German chancellor visits next week.
Mairéad Farrell of Sinn Féin, a member of the seven-member delegation, said she and her colleagues had attended the hearing in Stuttgart on Wednesday of the so-called Ulm 5 activists, who are facing charges over an attack on an Israeli arms company.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: You'll now be able to use selfie videos to log into your Google account. It has long been possible to log into Google using your face, via your phone's face unlock or if your passkey login uses biometrics for verification. This is yet another option to get into your account using your face to authenticate your identity, which could be especially useful if you don't have access to the phone or computer you typically use or if you got locked out of your account and none of the other log-in options are working.
[...] Google will ask you to turn your head in certain ways during the verification and every time you use the option to log in. The company says it's to fend off impersonation attempts, such as deepfake videos, and prove you're currently in front of the camera. It will, of course, have to save your selfie video and use it for comparison for future logins.The company says it will encrypt your video and only use to help you sign in, but if you ever change your mind, you can delete it from your Google account. It's worth noting the option is currently unavailable for Workspace accounts, child accounts and those enrolled in Google's Advanced Protection Program.
You can set it up and give it a try at g.co/signin-selfie.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Nearly two-thirds of Americans expressed negative views of President Donald Trump’s major construction projects in Washington, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos survey released Thursday.
The poll found that 65% of adults reported dissatisfaction or concern regarding the planned White House ballroom, the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and the proposed 250-foot triumphal arch. Thirty-two percent indicated satisfaction or enthusiasm, with 12% describing themselves as enthusiastic.
Opposition was highest among Democrats, while a majority of independent voters also expressed disapproval, with 73% holding negative views. Republicans were more likely to support the projects, though 31% reported dissatisfaction. Twenty-six percent of respondents said they believed Trump’s primary goal was to make Washington more attractive, while 51% attributed a different motivation.
The projects have led to legal challenges, limited access to federal landmarks, and prompted questions regarding cost and congressional oversight. The completed Reflecting Pool renovation cost approximately $15 million. A contractor estimated the ballroom at $600 million, with more than half of the funding potentially coming from taxpayers. Trump has stated that private donations will fund the general construction of the ballroom.
The survey included more than 2,600 U.S. adults and was conducted in July.
This live blog has not closed, you can read our latest story from the region here
Earlier in the US day, before Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it had stopped three oil tankers from passing through the strait of Hormuz, Donald Trump issued this threat on his Truth Social platform:
From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.
Tariffs ranging from 10%-12.5%, taking effect on Friday, are US president’s latest effort to circumvent Congress
Just before a temporary levy on global imports was set to expire, the Trump administration issued a fresh wave of tariffs on more than 80 countries late on Thursday, ranging from 10% to 12.5%. The new tariffs take effect Friday morning.
It’s Donald Trump’s latest effort to continue imposing global levies without congressional approval, despite the supreme court ruling in February that found the US president had illegally used his executive power to implement his global trade policies. Trump has long maintained that the US has been paying more than its fair share in tariffs, and that increased duties are necessary to boost American manufacturing and jobs.
New York Times reports that list of those killed changed from 18 on Wednesday to 14 on Thursday
The Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war does not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend, despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday.
A review of the current list on the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website shows that, despite having been last updated on Wednesday, the number of US military personnel killed during Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon’s name for the US-Israeli war on Iran that Donald Trump launched on 28 February, remains at 14.
Kyiv, Ukraine – Laura Loomer, a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Thursday following a public shift in her stance regarding American assistance to Ukraine.
Loomer visited Kyiv and conducted an interview with Zelenskyy for her online program, ‘Loomer Unleashed.’ She stated that experiencing an air-raid warning during her visit influenced her perspective on the risks faced by Ukrainian civilians.
“I often said I don’t care,” Loomer wrote on X. “Looking back, that wasn’t very nice of me to say.” She later called for “moral clarity” about Russia’s invasion.
These remarks differ significantly from Loomer’s previous statements, in which she questioned the extent of Russian aggression, criticized U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, and echoed claims from Russian officials regarding the Ukrainian government. In the past, Loomer also made critical remarks about Zelenskyy.
During their interview, Zelenskyy said his relationship with Trump improved following a brief meeting at the Vatican, describing the conversation as a turning point.
Loomer also visited Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a historic monastery that sustained damage during a recent attack attributed to Russian forces. She questioned President Vladimir Putin’s portrayal of Russia as a defender of Christianity in light of strikes on Ukrainian religious sites.
According to Ukrainian officials, Loomer’s visit was not organized by any government institution, and her presence in the country was first noted through social media.
Judges on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington had appointed Roger Rogoff as U.S. attorney in Seattle. But he was fired shortly after.
France asks EU for help while Spain declares national emergency around Madrid, as marine heatwave sees parts of Mediterranean Sea 5C hotter than normal
Brutal heat torching southern Europe has forced about 30,000 people to flee wildfires in France and Spain as a marine heatwave scalds the Mediterranean and researchers warn that “Dantesque” scenarios cannot be ruled out as infernos worsen.
France has requested assistance from the European Union to help it deal with a major wildfire near the country’s Atlantic coast, while Spain has declared a national emergency in the Madrid region and in the province of Avila, because of several wildfires burning out of control.
The city’s independent watchdog accused police of obstructing her inquiry into the shooting. Madison’s police chief said he was “committed to working with the independent monitor.”
The U.S. defense industrial base isn't equipped to produce missiles rapidly enough to replenish munitions used in the war with Iran, or transferred for use to Central Command.
The Trump administration will impose tariffs of up to 12.5% on goods from 60 U.S. trading partners accused of failing to crack down on forced labor, extending the administration's tariffs on much of the world.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump is replacing an expiring temporary import duty with new tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on goods from 60 trading partners, citing inadequate enforcement against products made with forced labor.
The duties take effect Friday at 12:01 a.m., right after a temporary 10% global tariff expires. Trump imposed that stopgap measure after the Supreme Court rejected his earlier use of emergency economic powers to establish broad “Liberation Day” tariffs.
The administration is now using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Countries with forced-labor import restrictions but insufficient enforcement will generally face 10% duties. Those without adequate prohibitions will face 12.5%. The affected economies include Canada, Mexico, India, China, the United Kingdom, Taiwan and the European Union.
The new rates will not be added to higher sector-specific tariffs. Steel and aluminum imports already facing 50% duties will stay at that rate. Exemptions cover fuels, fertilizers, foods, vehicles, aircraft and pharmaceutical products.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said trading partners should enforce forced-labor import bans comparable to longstanding American restrictions. Several governments rejected the findings, arguing that the allegations are unsupported and the tariffs are protectionism presented as labor policy. Negotiations over additional exemptions and bilateral trade agreements are continuing.
Canada, Mexico, Australia, EU, UK and China among dozens of economies listed in US president’s renewed effort of near-global import taxes after supreme court struck down his ‘liberation day’ tariffs
By a vote of 214-208 lawmakers in the House passed a war powers resolution to curb the Trump administration’s military action in Iran, ahead of the lower chamber’s August reccess.
Four Republicans, Brian Fitzpatrick, Warren Davidson, Tom Barrett and Thomas Massie, voted yes, alongside all Democrats.
The lawsuit claims the Trump administration is withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster-preparedness and homeland security grants to pressure states to change policies on elections and immigration.
Oracle has signed a 10-year Pentagon contract worth up to $7 billion to provide on-premises software, licenses, maintenance, and consulting for branches of the military. CNBC reports: The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community and the Coast Guard, according to a statement. The Central Intelligence Agency was Oracle's first customer. A five-year base period for the contract includes perpetual and subscription-based software licenses, maintenance and consulting, according to one description.
Kirsten Davies, the Department of Defense's chief information officer, said in the release that the agency is saving at least $441 million for taxpayers "by fundamentally improving how we procure on-premises Oracle capabilities."
Donald Trump hosted the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House on Thursday for the team’s second trip to the White House in two years.
The team gave the president a custom jersey and a World Series championship ring during a ceremony at the Rose Garden. Four-time MVP Shohei Ohtani, star first baseman Freddie Freeman, World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto and manager Dave Roberts were among those in attendance, while several players – most notably star shortstop Mookie Betts and utility man Kike Hernández – opted not to attend.
Vote from advisory group – whose members include people linked to peptides industry – likely to embolden RFK Jr
A panel of federal health advisers on Thursday narrowly recommended easing access to several peptides popular with wellness influencers and celebrities, despite warnings from government scientists that the chemicals have not been shown to be safe or effective.
In a series of votes, outside experts to the Food and Drug Administration advised the agency to drop current restrictions barring pharmacies from producing injectable peptides with names like BPC-157, TB-500 and KPV.
IRGC claims base in south-west England was used by US to launch bombing missions, making it ‘legitimate target’
The government has said the UK is “ready to defend itself” after Iran’s military warned that any bases being used by the US were “legitimate targets”.
The UK has allowed the US to launch “defensive” operations from British bases hosting American planes since the start of its war on Iran but has refused to help in offensive operations.
Elon Musk’s EV company lost a quarter of its value after revealing weak profits and high spending on AI and robotics
Tesla’s stock fell about 13.5% on Thursday in one of the biggest single-day market losses in the company’s history.
Elon Musk’s automaker has struggled throughout the year, losing about 27% of its market value as huge capital expenditures and weaker-than-expected profits worry investors.
LG is removing a McAfee pop-up ad from its LG Monitor App Installer after criticism that some LG monitors were silently installing the app through Windows Update and showing ads on every boot. Microsoft says LG agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up, but the broader issue remains: Windows allows certain peripheral companion apps to install automatically without notifying users. Ars Technica reports: Following Gamers Nexus' video, a Microsoft representative stated that the LG Monitor App Installer will no longer show pop-up ads for McAfee. In response to a social media post about the app, Pavan Davuluri, EVP of Windows and devices at Microsoft, said this week: "We've connected with the team at LG and as an immediate next step, they have agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up from their app. We appreciate LG working with us toward a shared goal of a better experience for our mutual customers. We will keep improving here with our ecosystem partners."
As mentioned, some LG monitors appear to have been installing LG Monitor App Installer onto Windows computers for months. Publication Windows Latest noted that the app recently got an update, "and its changelog mentions McAfee as an additional app," which could be what prompted more people to see the ads... and then complain about them. However, the removal of McAfee doesn't address the problem of a peripheral installing ad-pushing software onto people's computers.
Users have been finding LG Monitor App Installer and its ads on their systems without LG ever showing a prompt or asking for permission. LG has some of the most expensive computer monitors available. Paying, in some cases, over $1,000 for a monitor that ends up forcing ads onto Windows is disruptive and a privacy concern. Once the app is installed, "LG technically possesses permission to use 'all system resources,'" as well as to "collect geolocation, device data, online activity, contacts, user credentials, transactions, and more," [editor-in-chief of Gamers Nexus, Steve Burke] said.
The Justice Department withdrew its subpoenas for New York Times reporters during a court heraing Thursday, after a judge grilled government lawyers for making "errors."
Republicans have latched on to the announcement after Trump’s lie-laden speech, but experts say DHS’s data is ‘designed to create a false argument’
Donald Trump and his allies quickly seized on an announcement from Mikie Sherrill, the New Jersey governor, on Tuesday that 6,600 noncitizens had registered to vote because of a software error, and fewer than 400 of them voted, using the disclosure to escalate false claims that there are scores of noncitizens on the voter rolls.
Trump seized on the news days after he said in a primetime speech that the Department of Homeland Security identified 278,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls in New Jersey and three other states. But a Guardian review of the letters the DHS sent the states shows the agency expressed less certainty about the number and has offered no explanation of its methodology.
Defense attorneys question LAPD criminalist on third day of hearing to decide whether singer will stand trial
Attorneys for the singer D4vd scrutinized how law enforcement officials chose to test evidence found in his home during the third day of a hearing to determine whether he will stand trial for murder and child sexual abuse.
Prosecutors say D4vd, born David Anthony Burke, fatally stabbed 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez last year to prevent her from exposing the sexual nature of their relationship amid his rising profile in the music world.
Regional mayors are to be given a leading role in the UK’s economic policy, Andy Burnham has said, as he called the opening of No 10 North “the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen”.
The new prime minister has revived the national economic council [NEC], first set up by Gordon Brown to put the government on a war footing during the 2008 financial crash, arguing that economic growth requires the same level of urgency, focus and collective action.
Republican Blake Miguez is weighing what district to run in after state redrew map following supreme court decision
A congressional candidate from Louisiana who was the subject of a police report accusing him of rape – which he denies – says he is hoping to again “earn” Donald Trump’s endorsement as he considers precisely where to run amid redistricting.
The candidate, Blake Miguez, is weighing running in one of two districts, neither of which he lives in but in which he is allowed to run. He has been mulling that choice after the supreme court’s landmark decision in Callais v Louisiana prompted the state to swiftly redraw its US House districts – and after he had secured the president’s backing under the previous congressional map.
Journalists had reported on security concerns about US president flying on $400m Air Force One plane from Qatar
Donald Trump’s justice department has abandoned, for now, efforts to subpoena New York Times reporters over their coverage of security risks involving the president’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One replacement.
Sean Buckley, a top-ranking official in the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office, announced the decision on Thursday afternoon about an hour into a proceeding where he was repeatedly grilled on the appropriateness of the subpoenas. Buckley was in court because the New York Times filed paperwork to fight these subpoenas.
The European Union fined Google more than $1 billion for allegedly using Google Play and Search to steer users toward its own services and apps at the expense of competitors. The Associated Press reports: Google had recently lost its appeal of a $4.5 billion antitrust fine imposed by the EU for throttling competition and reducing consumer choice through the dominance of its mobile Android operating system. The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch and highest antitrust enforcer, said it was acting in the interest of consumers after an investigation of Google.
"The best products should succeed because they're better, not because they're owned by the company running the search engine. And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut," said Teresa Ribera, the commission's Executive Vice President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.
Google's President of Global Affairs Kent Walker blasted the fine as "product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants" that will have a negative impact on European businesses and consumers. He said that the EU's Digital Markets Act forces Google "to strip away real-time search features Europeans love -- like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants -- and dismantle safety protections on Google Play."
A rather unusual announcement was made late last night: the FreeBSD project has frozen their ports repository. For more than 48 hours now, no changes have been accepted or made to the tree, and here’s why.
A 150MB binary file was recently committed to the ports tree and, as a result, core@ made the decision to implement a temporary freeze of the ports tree in order to implement some clean up efforts. The commit in question severed our ports tree mirroring to github.com due to their filesize hard limit of 100MB, and introduced a blob of questionable licensing into the repository history.
While FreeBSD’s ports tree is not hosted by GitHub – it’s merely mirrored there – the FreeBSD team believes the community values the GitHub mirror too much, and as such, steps had to be taken to fix this. Ports has not been compromised and users’ systems do not appear to be at risk in any way due to this occurrence, which is good news.
Curiously, the official announcement makes no mention of which 150MB file, exactly, was committed to ports, but it didn’t take for people long to pinpoint the offending commit (screenshot). It turns out someone committed the entire github-copilot-cli Linux binary to ports, as part of the github-copilot-cli port. This FreeBSD port is effectively a way to easily install and run this tool on FreeBSD using Linuxulator, FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer that allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries on FreeBSD.
It’s important to note this FreeBSD port is not actually a port of the Linux version of github-copilot-cli to FreeBSD; the FreeBSD “port” merely acts as a setup script to run the unmodified Linux binary using Linuxulator. It’s not a “real” port because the tool isn’t open source and its license doesn’t allow for modifications. That’s why the announcement specifically mentions “questionable licensing” – github-copilot-cli is licensed under some custom license specifically made for this tool, and is not open source.
Anyway, for whatever reason, the maintainer of this FreeBSD port accidentally made a commit that added the actual, full 150MB Linux binary to FreeBSD ports. I’m assuming that under normal circumstances, building and installing the github-copilot-cli FreeBSD port would merely download the binary off GitHub and set Linuxulator up so that it could run it. Mistakes happen, and since there’s clearly nothing malicious going on, there’s not much to worry about. In fact, this may lead to new checks and balances to prevent this from happening in the future, which would be good news.
The FreeBSD team is working on rolling back, fixing the issue, and investigating how this could have happened. Ports is still frozen at the time of writing, but I’m sure we’ll have a more detailed account soon.
I know a lot of people are gonna say “it’s supposed to be banged up” but I don’t ride too hard on trails. I never really go over 15 mph and I just want to try to keep this one fairly protected. This is my 2nd Pint, I left my stock pint x in the Philippines where I let province kids try it when I travel around there which is really banged up. So I got the pint S to ride around back here in california.
If anyone wants the .stl file to 3d print your own pint flared footpad guard then I can upload the file. It’s not 100% the best tolerance but it’s close enough to stay on there with 3M vhb tape. I used pbt pro filament with a .8 mm nozzle at .2 layer height. I think tpu might be a good filament to use also since it can hug the footpad more easier.
When Jesse Miranda, a U.S. citizen, sponsored an application for a green card for his wife nearly a year ago, he understood the process would take time.
On Wednesday, when he saw someone posting on Reddit that they had received sudden approval for a loved one’s initial application for permanent residence, he wondered if he and his wife had gotten lucky.
Miranda quickly went to check the application status on the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees visas and naturalization.
“What kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?”
To his delight, the portal showed that their application had also been approved to move on to the next step in the process. Yet he had a nagging suspicion: Was this coming too soon? Wait times for approval of just the first step in the process can stretch more than two years, so could his wife’s application really be getting moved along so quickly?
When he called the agency’s helpline Thursday morning to confirm the approval, his suspicions proved correct. Miranda said the employee answering his call told him that his wife’s application status was unchanged.
And they weren’t the only people affected: According to Miranda, the employee acknowledged that USCIS was aware of a glitch affecting numerous applicants.
“It was heartbreaking,” Miranda told The Intercept of learning that their application status had not in fact changed. “I get that there’s technical stuff behind the scenes, but at the same time, what kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?”
The apparent glitch resulted in dozens or more applicants for green cards receiving false notices of approval for a key step in the process, according to multiple people who received the false approvals and accounts of similar approvals posted online. (USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
In addition to Miranda, The Intercept spoke with two other green card applicants who received false notices of approval for the I-130 form, the first major hurdle in the process for obtaining a permanent residency visa for relatives of a U.S. citizen.
Dozens more people on Reddit and a user on an immigration-related Discord server reported experiencing the same false approval notices when they checked their application status on Wednesday and Thursday.
People began to report on immigration forums on Wednesday that they’d received approval the I-130 form, but elation turned to devastation as they came to understand the notices as an error.
On Thursday, the USCIS site appeared to be down for a time. When it came back up, accounts for applications of at least two of the people who spoke to The Intercept still showed their loved ones’ green cards as being “approved.”
Americans’ Loved Ones
The I-130 form is just the first step in applying for a green card for the spouse or relative of a U.S. citizen.
Wait times for the form’s approval range, on average, between 10 and 20 months. Often, however, they stretch out to two years or more. During that time, the applicant is unable to live or work in the U.S.
Approval, then, is the first sign that couples or families are one step closer to living their lives together in the U.S.
“This feeling of not having your partner here is already painful enough,” Miranda said. “It’s even more painful when you have that approval waved in your face, only to have your dreams crushed.”
Kate, an American citizen whose spouse and stepchild have applications pending, told The Intercept she saw an erroneous approval notice for her case on the USCIS website on Thursday after reading online posts about a flurry of approvals overnight.
Kate, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition that her surname and certain identifying details be withheld for fear of affecting her spouse’s immigration process, said she and her partner and stepchild had applied for the I-130 nearly a year ago and are living apart from one another as they await approval.
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell him. He’s going to be devastated.”
She happened to be visiting her spouse’s country of origin, and they were thrilled to be able to celebrate the milestone of being one step closer to a green card together. When she got back from their celebratory lunch, however, she checked the site again and found that none of the usual signifiers of an approval were showing up, including an approval notice that would usually appear in the site’s documents tab.
She said she had not yet told her spouse that the approval appeared to be the result of a glitch.
“It’s just devastating,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell him. He’s going to be devastated.”
“Straight Up Unfair”
On a Reddit forum dedicated to the pain and suffering of the I-130 process — called “r/I130Suffering” — dozens of people reported similar experiences with the glitch, starting with sudden elation and ending more demoralized than ever.
And on Track My Visa, a Discord where applicants swap advice and gripes about the immigration process, numerous users reported the same. On Thursday, the moderators of the forum suspended a channel dedicated to celebrating approval notices lest people celebrate prematurely.
The glitch is just the latest frustration for Miranda, who said the process to bring his wife to the U.S. has been so fraught that it’s forced a reassessment of long-held political beliefs.
The son of Mexican immigrants who immigrated legally and ultimately received citizenship, Miranda said he had long considered himself a Republican and felt that tough immigration policy was necessary to ensure a fair shot to people immigrating legally.
Now, he said, seeing how difficult it is to immigrate legally, even as the spouse of a citizen, he’s wondering if he had it wrong.
“I always thought ‘they’re just going after illegals,’” he said. “But this is affecting legal immigration to the point where it’s almost stopped. You can have a million dollars and get a green card, but if you’re trying to process a loved one and you can’t — that’s just straight up unfair.”
So from the Onewheel website, I am considering either the following - GT Footpads ($90)
- GT Flat Kick ($150)
- GT Lowboy ($175)
- GT Lowboy Flared ($200)
Currently I have the regular GT Footpads, and I do want to change them since the existing ones haven't been swapped out and have over 490 miles on them from the previous owner. I'll attach photos of what they currently look like.
I do want pads where I can ride for extended periods without my legs feeling as tired. I don't plan on using them for anything crazy yet — just riding based on NY weather. Definitely using them on grass, small trails, and concrete, whatever they have at the parks, yk!
I bought this Onewheel GT from Facebook for $1,250 in the condition shown! The previous owner put a lifetime total of 490 miles on it!
I definitely plan to deep clean this board since the previous owner got good use out of it! I'm wanting to change the GT rail since the existing one is pretty beat up. I want to get a new pad based on y'all's opinions. The other stuff I plan to change later in the future since I'm still a beginner — once I get used to the Onewheel like a pro, I'll be down to spend more and get everything looking new!
Lemme know what you guys think, any suggestions or ideas or anything are greatly appreciated!
P.S. — I met a person who's willing to sell me the VRH (Variable Ride Height system) for my Onewheel! Whoever has one, lemme know if it's worth the money for my use case!
Planette AI, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the University of Wyoming Launch Genesis Mission Project to Improve Weeks-Ahead Forecasting of Dangerous U.S. Storm Systems
SEATTLE, July 23, 2026 — Large thunderstorm clusters cause billions in damage and supply much of the nation’s warm-season rain, yet forecasters still struggle to see them coming more than a week out. Planette AI today announced the launch of DL4MCS, a Genesis Mission Phase I project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to improve subseasonal — roughly 7 days to six weeks ahead — forecasting of these storms, known as mesoscale convective systems (MCS), across the continental United States. Planette AI will collaborate with the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the University of Wyoming on the project.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by DOE that is building an integrated science discovery platform by bringing together government, industry, academia, and philanthropy to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments. The goal of the Genesis Mission Phase I awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities by designing and demonstrating research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation and testing whether those approaches can improve predictive capabilities, accelerate discovery, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.
DL4MCS — short for Deep Learning Methods to Enhance Subseasonal Predictions of Mesoscale Convective Systems by Physics-based Forecasting Systems — addresses that challenge by combining physics-based forecasting with advanced artificial intelligence methods. The project team will test whether this hybrid approach can substantially improve forecast skill for these storms at lead times of 7 days to 6 weeks, a forecasting window that remains especially difficult for today’s operational systems.
“DL4MCS reflects Planette AI’s commitment to delivering more actionable environmental intelligence for high-stakes decisions,” said Dr. Hansi Singh, Founder and CEO. “By combining state-of-the-art AI with proven physical forecasting systems, this project aims to make weeks-ahead storm risk information more useful for the sectors and communities that depend on better foresight.”
“Improving prediction of mesoscale convective systems requires advances across scales, from large-scale climate drivers to the cloud microphysics that shape storm behavior,” said Dr. Susannah Burrows, Atmospheric Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “This collaboration brings together complementary strengths in Earth system modeling, AI, and process-level model evaluation to explore a new path toward better subseasonal forecasts.”
“The University of Wyoming is excited to contribute its expertise in regional downscaling, as well as its responsible integration with AI forecasting, to this effort,” said Dr. Stefan Rahimi, University of Wyoming Derecho Professor. “The ability to translate coarse large-scale forecasts into higher-resolution, decision-relevant guidance is essential for improving real-world preparedness and resilience.”
About Planette AI
Planette AI develops operational seasonal and subseasonal global forecasts for weather-sensitive sectors, including energy, utilities, and insurance, with a focus on actionable environmental intelligence for decision-making.
New GPU portfolio combines leadership performance, HBM4 memory, advanced security and open software to accelerate AI and HPC at every scale.
July 23, 2026 — Today at Advancing AI 2026, AMD launched AMD Instinct MI400 Series GPUs, the next generation of AMD data center GPUs engineered to redefine AI and high-performance computing (HPC) at every scale. The family includes the AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs for frontier AI and AI factory deployments and the AMD Instinct MI430X GPU for sovereign AI and HPC. The MI400 series combines leadership compute and networking performance, high-bandwidth HBM4 memory, advanced security and scalable system architectures to help organizations deploy, scale, and manage AI and HPC workloads with flexibility and confidence.
Credit: Shutterstock
AI infrastructure is becoming increasingly specialized as organizations deploy AI across a broader range of environments – from hyperscale AI factories focused on large-scale inference and frontier-model training to sovereign AI and scientific computing centers that demand numerical accuracy, security and long-term operational control. The AMD Instinct MI400 series provides purpose-built solutions for both environments, giving customers the flexibility to deploy optimized AI and HPC infrastructure while maintaining the openness, interoperability and software portability needed to scale future AI workloads.
“The next generation of AI will span frontier AI, sovereign AI and scientific computing, and each requires infrastructure optimized for its unique demands,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president, AI, AMD. “The AMD Instinct MI400 Series extends our AI portfolio with purpose-built solutions optimized for the full spectrum of AI and HPC deployments, built on an open software foundation that gives customers the flexibility to innovate at every scale.”
What Are AMD Instinct MI400 Series GPUs?
The AMD Instinct MI400 Series combines purpose-built hardware, open software and scalable system design to address the evolving needs of AI and HPC deployments. Key capabilities of the portfolio include:
Purpose-Built AI Infrastructure: The AMD Instinct MI400 Series portfolio includes the AMD Helios rackscale solution powered by AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs for frontier AI and AI factory deployments alongside AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs for sovereign AI and HPC. Together, the portfolio provides purpose-built solutions optimized for hyperscale AI factories, national infrastructure, research institutions and leadership-class HPC environments.
Leadership Performance Across AI and HPC: AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs deliver the compute, memory and networking performance required for high-volume inference, frontier-model training and fine-tuning. AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs deliver uncompromised accuracy and throughput across converged AI and HPC workflows with up to 288 TFLOPS of hardware-based FP64 performance for scientific computing. Across the portfolio, industry-leading HBM4 memory and high memory bandwidth help customers support larger models, reduce infrastructure complexity and improve efficiency at scale.
Open Software Foundation: Powered by AMD ROCm software, the MI400 Series provides an open software foundation with programming models, compilers, libraries, runtimes and deployment tools for AI and HPC. This commitment to open standards supports interoperability and long-term portability across software, system and networking choices, helping customers innovate without vendor lock-in.
Secure and Scalable by Design: AMD Instinct MI400 Series GPUs incorporate advanced security capabilities, secure boot, encrypted GPU-to-GPU links and hardware-based protections to help safeguard sensitive AI and HPC workloads. Combined with scalable system architectures – from the AMD Helios rackscale solution for frontier AI to traditional mesh-based HPC deployments – AMD Instinct MI400 series GPUs enable customers to deploy AI infrastructure with flexibility, confidence and long-term operational consistency.
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-optimised 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.
July 23, 2026 — The Department of Energy has announced the list of projects that will receive funding through the Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was selected for a portfolio of initiatives, including the AI/ML project led by Fermilab and eight others in which the lab is a key collaborator. These awards position Fermilab as a strong contributor to the Genesis Mission and demonstrate the lab’s leadership in applying artificial intelligence and advanced technologies to accelerate scientific discovery.
“Fermilab is honored to receive this support for advancing artificial intelligence as part of DOE’s Genesis Mission. This investment strengthens our ability to accelerate scientific discovery, develop next‑generation technologies, and drive innovation at the frontiers of particle physics and advanced technology,” Fermilab Director Norbert Holtkamp said. “We are proud to contribute our expertise to a mission that will help shape the next era of U.S. leadership in science and technology.”
The Fermilab-led project will develop AI/ML-based resonance control algorithms to enable high-reliability, low-cost accelerator operations that will substantially improve the performance of particle accelerators that drive discovery science. Several partner institutions, including national labs, universities and industry partner xLight Inc., are contributing to this project.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
The projects named will receive funding through a Request For Applications (RFA) that was announced by DOE in March. The goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Fermilab project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.
Fermilab participated in yesterday’s Genesis Mission Summit as a recipient of a first‑round Genesis Mission award, underscoring its leadership in advanced accelerator technologies as the Department of Energy announced the selected projects.
The AI/ML algorithms that will emerge from the Fermilab-led project will increase science reach, improve stability for users, increase radio-frequency amplifier lifetime and reduce operating costs. Superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities are electromagnetic resonators that transfer energy to beams in particle accelerators. Because they are extremely efficient resonators, they can be disturbed by small vibrations and pressure fluctuations. For current and future SRF-based accelerators like Fermilab’s Proton Improvement Plan-II (PIP-II) linear accelerator, SLAC National Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source-SC, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), Michigan State University’s Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Argonne National Laboratory’s Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System, and industrial accelerators, it is vitally important to have precise control of the cavity resonant frequency.
“These awards recognize the tremendous opportunity to combine artificial intelligence with Fermilab’s world-leading expertise in superconducting accelerator technology,” said Anna Grassellino, chief technology officer and associate laboratory director for the Technology Directorate at Fermilab. “By developing AI-driven control of superconducting RF cavities, we can make future accelerators — such as our own PIP-II — more efficient, reliable, and autonomous, enabling higher scientific performance while reducing operational complexity. This is an important step toward a new generation of intelligent accelerator facilities that will power discoveries across particle physics and many other fields of science.”
Fermilab will contribute as a key collaborator on several other projects aligned with core research areas of the lab such as neutrino and collider physics, the muon-to-electron-conversion experiment (Mu2e), precision frontier, the Electron-Ion Collider and advanced scientific computing. The following projects were selected for funding through the Genesis Mission:
How AI will expedite discovery in highly complex electron-ion collider data streams
Lead institution: Purdue University
Using an AI-driven approach to detect anomalies in the CMS Level-1 Scouting System
Lead institution: University of Colorado
Standardizing and advancing high-performance computing workloads using AI
Lead institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Using agentic workflows for the expedited search and discovery of charged lepton flavor violation in Mu2e
Lead institution: University of South Carolina
Deployment of advanced AI accelerated systems to detect, identify, classify and communicate supernova events in real time for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)
Lead institution: Duke University
The use of AI agents for high-energy physics simulations and analysis operations
Lead institution: University of Alabama
Accelerating DUNE physics with AI to discover neutrino interaction uncertainties
Lead institution: Florida State University
Physics-driven digital twins simulations for fusion magnet systems
Lead institution: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Fermilab is an international leader in particle accelerator science research, which generates massive streams of data for scientific discovery using accelerator and detector technologies. The lab’s high-energy physics research creates unique opportunities for AI innovations. That is why researchers are developing and implementing AI tools to improve the precision of measurements, optimizing operations and accelerating discovery.
Selected from the largest field of applicants in DOE history, Rescale joins Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories to apply agentic AI on national laboratory codes for U.S. industry
SAN FRANCISCO, July 23, 2026 — Rescale today announced it has been awarded funding under the Genesis Mission, a national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy to build the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. Rescale joins Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a funded partner on the Agentic HPC Pipeline Initiative (AHPI), which uses agentic AI on the Rescale platform to accelerate the adoption of national lab codes by U.S. industry.
The Genesis Mission was established by executive order in November 2025, directing the Department of Energy to mobilize its 17 national laboratories and roughly 40,000 scientists and engineers to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments. Department officials have described the initiative, which intends to double the productivity of the nation’s scientific research within a decade, as comparable in scale and ambition to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program.
Earlier this year, DOE launched the Genesis Mission’s first major funding opportunity, a $293 million round supporting national science and technology challenges spanning advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear energy, and quantum information science. The opportunity drew more than 8,000 applications, the most submissions DOE has ever received for a single funding round and nearly three times its previous record. It was the inaugural round of what the Department has signaled will be a multi-phase, multi-year initiative.
Selection for Phase I funding puts AHPI, and Rescale as part of it, among a small fraction of proposals chosen from that record field. AHPI addresses a problem that has limited the reach of federally funded science: the country’s national laboratories have spent decades developing some of the world’s most advanced engineering simulation codes, but meaningful adoption by U.S. manufacturers has been hindered by the specialized expertise and infrastructure required to operate them.
Rescale is the only commercial technology company named in the AHPI consortium, working alongside the three national laboratories to extend agentic AI capabilities into WarpX, LiDO, and Adamantine, simulation codes developed respectively at Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge. Agentic AI hosted on the Rescale platform will guide engineers through code selection, input configuration, simulation monitoring and results analysis. The project’s goal is to reduce the engineering expertise and time required to run these simulations by more than fivefold, giving American manufacturers self-service access to tools that have historically required direct laboratory support.
“Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has spent decades at the forefront of computational science, and part of our mission is making sure that work reaches beyond our own walls,” said Peter Nugent, Division Deputy for Science in the Applied Math and Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Principal Investigator for AHPI. “Through AHPI, Berkeley Lab, together with Livermore and Oak Ridge, delivers those advances to the American manufacturers who can build on them.”
“The Genesis Mission recognizes that maximizing the return on both public and private investment in industrial AI technology depends on delivering these capabilities to the leading R&D teams who can put them to work,” said Joris Poort, CEO of Rescale. “We built Rescale to empower engineers and scientists to accelerate innovation. With 15 years of experience working with government and industry, we are poised to bring the national labs’ most advanced AI-driven simulation work into production use by American manufacturers.”
The award builds on an existing collaboration between Rescale and ORNL’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, through which U.S. manufacturers can access codes developed at ORNL. AHPI aims to close a gap that has emerged in lab-industry collaboration: DOE’s partnerships with industry typically run for a fixed term, and when they end, the industrial partner keeps the scientific insight gained but loses the tools to continually act on it. AHPI keeps the resulting agentic workflows, surrogate models, and configured code environments available on the Rescale platform, giving national laboratories and industry partners a way to continue collaborating on the country’s biggest technology challenges well after a specific DOE-funded project concludes. Rescale’s selection for AHPI reflects a broader recognition, across an unprecedented field of applicants, that closing this gap between federally funded scientific software and commercial industrial application is a national priority.
About Rescale
Rescale is the digital engineering platform for the AI era. The R&D and engineering teams shaping the future across aerospace, automotive, defense, energy, public sector, life sciences, and manufacturing trust the Rescale platform to accelerate innovation. Rescale integrates agentic digital engineering, AI physics, advanced modeling and simulation, and intelligent HPC solutions on a single platform to unify product data, automate workflows, optimize resources, and bring breakthroughs to market faster.
Vance Boelter, the man who admitted in court to shooting two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, was sentenced to two life terms in prison followed by 40 years Thursday morning.
In claiming that American voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation, President Donald Trump provided an incomplete and distorted summary of the CIA’s reporting about Venezuelan efforts to manipulate electronic voting machines in that country.
“Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Trump said in his primetime address to the nation on July 16, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “And that’s exactly what happened. Conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020. And that’s what they did. This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop, to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went.
“This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past,” Trump said.
Photo by rawpixel.com / stock.adobe.com
The documents the Trump administration released don’t say “that’s exactly what happened,” as Trump said. One of the documents released prior to Trump’s address was a recent CIA report, “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting from 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities,” that concluded Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Maduro, “developed sustained interest and likely some capability” to manipulate voting machines. But the CIA’s assessment about the ways in which Venezuela could accomplish such manipulation was more of a “theoretical” exercise, and the report stopped short of alleging Venezuela actually carried out plans to alter voting machine tallies.
Moreover, the report concluded that even if Venezuelan officials had the ability to manipulate voting machines in-country, they lacked the capability to alter voting machines outside Venezuela.
“[T]he 2006 Intelligence Community assessment concluded that neither [voting machine maker] Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan Government had the capability — that is, the level of control or access required — to manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela in a predictable fashion,” the CIA report stated. “The Venezuelan Government’s ability to manipulate the results of voting in Venezuela rested in part on its ability to control every stage of the electronic voting process, from initial acquisition of the machines to pre- and post-voting machine security, to programming, to storage of paper voting receipts, to control of the audit process. Neither the Venezuelan Government nor Smartmatic would have such a complete spectrum of access during an electoral process outside Venezuela.”
We wrote about other claims in Trump’s speech last week.
What the CIA Assessment Said
The summary of intelligence over a 16-year period — declassified on July 1 — included a 2006 CIA analysis that concluded “electronic voting manipulation” in Venezuela — including artificial intelligence components that could alter votes without being detected via auditing — was “technically possible and operationally feasible.”
“According to this reporting, the technique involved creating a second set of virtual machines that would replicate legitimate voting machine results, then substitute manipulated data while making votes appear to originate from legitimate machines,” the CIA report said.
In the lead-up to Venezuela’s 2012 election, intelligence sources indicated that Chavez’s intelligence services worked with election software designers “to develop plans to manipulate election results using preprogrammed voting machines.” Specifically, the plan called for “deploying altered machines to approximately 300 voting centers in traditionally pro-Chavez areas to ensure victory by approximately 1.5 million votes,” the report stated.
A 2013 CIA analysis used a “‘Devil’s Advocacy’ methodology” to outline “a plausible scenario for how large-scale electronic manipulation could have occurred in Venezuela’s 2012 election without detection.” A section on “Limitations and Analytic Caveats” later in the report noted that this “Devil’s Advocacy Report” was “explicitly an alternative analysis exercise rather than a definitive finding.” The assessment noted that there was “conflicting” CIA reporting and “limited insight into key elements of the electronic voting system.”
“While CIA analysts judged these capabilities were theoretically achievable, this assessment focused on technical feasibility rather than confirmation that such features were actually implemented,” the report said.
And, indeed, CIA assessments concluded there was no evidence such a plan was ever carried out.
CIA “reporting indicated that electronic voting systems contained vulnerabilities that could theoretically be exploited by sophisticated actors with insider access,” the report said. “However, while the intelligence validated significant concerns about foreign-linked voting technology vendors, it did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections.”
The report noted that it was the CIA’s “baseline assessment” that “large-scale electronic fraud did not occur” in Venezuela in 2012, despite “reporting of manipulation plans.” That assessment was based on “pre-election polling showing Chavez ahead by approximately 10 percentage points, a 24% increase in government spending before the election, the opposition’s concession of defeat, and CIA quantitative analysis showing no irregular voting patterns indicative of systematic manipulation.”
By 2020, intelligence sources reported that Venezuela “had developed detailed technical plans to manipulate the December 2020 National Assembly elections.”
But contrary to Trump’s claim that a plan to manipulate voting machines is “exactly what happened” in 2020, a September 2020 CIA report “judged the regime did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections, given that virtually the entire opposition boycotted and the regime had already co-opted opposition party leadership.”
Even if Venezuelan leaders were able to manipulate voting machines in Venezuela, U.S. intelligence concluded Maduro did not have the capability to pull that off outside Venezuela.
A declassified version of an Intelligence Community assessment on “foreign threats” to the 2020 election, released in March 2021, noted: “The Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro had an adversarial relationship with the Trump administration and we assess that Maduro had the intent, though probably not the capability, to try to influence public opinion in the US against the former President.” The assessment continued, “We have no information suggesting that the current or former Venezuelan regimes were involved in attempts to compromise US election infrastructure.”
In his primetime address, Trump did not “even purport to show … that any voting machines were actually compromised,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote for the Election Law Blog on July 16.
Smartmatic
At the center of speculation about voting machine manipulation in Venezuela is a cybersecurity company called Smartmatic, founded in 2000 in Florida by people with Venezuelan citizenship. The small company took on international prominence when it was tapped by Venezuela to provide voting machines for its 2004 election.
According to a New York Times story in October 2006, “Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country’s elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chavez as president in August 2004.”
Using money from those Venezuelan contracts, the Times noted, Smartmatic in March 2005 bought the “much larger and more established” Sequoia Voting Systems, which at the time provided voting equipment to 17 states and the District of Columbia.
Given Smartmatic’s role in Venezuela, and concerns about possible ties to the Chavez government, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in late 2006 opened an investigation into Smartmatic’s purchase of Sequoia. According to the Times, Smartmatic and the Chavez administration at the time both denied the Venezuelan government had any role in the company, other than Venezuela contracting with Smartmatic for its elections.
According to the report released by the CIA this month, intelligence reporting in April 2004 “indicated Chavez stated his objective was to prevent the reelection of a sitting US president, suggesting intent to influence US domestic politics.” In April 2004, then President George W. Bush, a Republican, was campaigning for a second term in office.
That finding, the report said, “was part of the basis for the Intelligence Community’s 2006 assessment that Smartmatic’s acquisition of US voting systems company Sequoia posed a ‘moderate threat’ to US national security.”
In December 2006, the New York Times reported that Smartmatic announced it was selling its U.S. subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems, thereby ending the ongoing federal investigation.
Then Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat of New York, who was the first to call for the federal investigation, said at the time that the sale of Sequoia Voting Systems seemed to be an acknowledgement by Smartmatic that it “could not overcome the cloud of doubt surrounding this deal.”
“There clearly remained doubts surrounding this company, and as long as those doubts lingered, many people would have legitimate questions about the integrity of these voting machines,” said Maloney.
Smartmatic sold Sequoia in 2007, and Sequoia filed for bankruptcy in 2014.
Smartmatic ended its business with Venezuela in 2018 after accusing Maduro’s government of manipulating voter turnout data in a 2017 election, inflating the vote tally by more than 1 million votes. The figures from Maduro were at odds with the tallies indicated by the voting machines, Smartmatic said.
Nonetheless, Trump’s legal team in 2020 repeatedly raised baseless claims that Smartmatic had used its technology to switch votes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, costing Trump the win.
By that time, though, as we noted, Smartmatic had sold Sequoia and was no longer doing business with Venezuela. In the 2020 election, only one U.S. county used Smartmatic voting equipment. Los Angeles used the company’s VSAP touchscreen machines, according to the California secretary of state’s list of certified voting equipment used in each county.
As District Court Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan wrote in an order in September 2025 in Smartmatic’s defamation case against Trump supporter and election denier Mike Lindell, “[G]iven the margin of victory in Los Angeles County and California … it is mathematically impossible” for the Smartmatic equipment “to have changed the results of the 2020 Election in California.”
Bryan added that “the only evidence in the record before the Court concerning Smartmatic’s involvement in elections in other countries shows that Smartmatic has never stolen any election, and its technology has never been used to manipulate ballots.”
Though Trump did not mention in his July 16 speech any information provided by Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the president’s claims partially echo those of the former head of Venezuela’s military intelligence.
In December, Carvajal, who pleaded guilty in the U.S. in 2025 to narcoterrorism, drug-trafficking and weapons charges, wrote Trump a letter (first published by the conservative Dallas Express), stating, “Smartmatic was born as an electoral tool of the Venezuelan regime but soon derived into a tool to help keep the regime stay in power forever. I know this because I placed the head of IT of the National Electoral Council (CNE) in his position, and he reported directly to me. The Smartmatic system can be altered—this is a fact. This technology was later exported abroad, including to the United States. Regime operatives maintain relationships with election officials and voting-machine companies inside your country. I do not claim that every election is stolen, but I state with certainty that elections can be rigged with the software – and has been used to do so.”
Carvajal’s sentencing has been postponed, CNN noted this month, “a possible sign he may be cooperating with prosecutors” and could be a witness against Maduro.
Smartmatic denied Carvajal’s claims, CNN reported, saying, “Trump allies have long falsely accused Smartmatic of rigging the 2020 US election.”
In a meeting with reporters the day before Trump gave his primetime address, David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, also dismissed the idea that Smartmatic equipment could have swayed the 2020 election.
“Smartmatic is a company that does not sell or have voting machines anywhere in the United States, with the exception of Los Angeles County,” Becker said. In the swing states of “Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania — not a single Smartmatic device [was used], not a single device that could have possibly been under the control of Venezuela or any other dead despot anywhere else in the world.”
“The reality is that, like every piece of technology, our voting machines are not invulnerable to attack, and we don’t trust them,” Becker said in a press conference two days later. “We build in systems by design that confirm and verify everything those machines do. Those machines are not connected to the internet. Those machines are kept under strict lock and key and chain of custody. They are tested before and after every election. And then even after that, every voter in the United States, with the exception of Louisiana, votes on paper ballots. Those paper ballots are auditable. Every state conducts audits. … They check and make sure through hand audits, reading the ballots, confirming the counts by hand under transparent observation … and then they compare it to the machine count to make sure it worked. We know that our voting machines have accurately counted the results. We know the results are accurate because of those audits.”
Trump alluded to the Venezuelan government “having some ability to interfere with Venezuelan voting machines,” Becker said, but beyond one county, those machines “aren’t even used in the United States.”
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Amazon is integrating its Luna cloud gaming service into Prime Video, adding a new "Games" tab where Prime members can play titles like "Hogwarts Legacy," "EA Sports FC 26," "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle," "Clue," and "Taboo." The games will be available starting today on Fire TVs in the U.S. and U.K., with additional supported devices and countries in the coming months. TechCrunch reports: With this move, Amazon is hoping games can turn Prime Video into a one-stop entertainment destination, borrowing a strategy from Netflix, which has increasingly embraced party games over the past several years. Since Amazon already operates a gaming service, it makes sense for the tech giant to integrate it into its streaming platform. [...] Amazon says its vision is to remove the barriers to gaming and make it accessible to anyone regardless of their experience or budget. The tech giant says Luna is designed to bring gaming to a much broader audience by removing the need for expensive consoles or gaming PCs and making games as easy to access as movies or TV shows.
‘Ratepayer Protection Pledge’ president has touted is non-binding as people continue to struggle with rising bills
Donald Trump has announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”, expanding a voluntary commitment which claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI datacenter build-out.
Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, alongside Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Other attenders included governors who signed on to the pledge, including Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Spencer Cox of Utah and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.
Going to Iceland for a work trip and would love to rent a onewheel while I am there. Want to use it for getting cool shots on with my camera as well as getting in some riding. Let me know if anyone knows of anyone in that are who might have one theyd be willing to rent out.
Concerns are growing in southern California over a cluster of “exceptionally rare” cancer cases that has sickened multiple children in a suburban community.
Families living in the Orange county neighborhood of Ladera Ranch, home to about 26,000 people, have reported that six children in the community were diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, Katrina Foley, the vice-chair of the county board of supervisors, said in a statement.
The Justice Department will face an uphill battle if it tries to prosecute Jack Smith over allegations leveled by House Republicans, former prosecutors say.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Many gamers have been lamenting Sony's recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision. In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana's tracking data on physical game sales in the U.S. dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297 million units were sold across the US. Those physical unit sales have been on a steady downward trajectory since then, leading to just 37 million physical units selling in the U.S. in the last 12 months.
The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn't all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the U.S. so far this year.
There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted that aggregate spending on physical video games in the U.S. was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US, reducing a peak of $11.5 billion in physical spending in 2009 to a mere $1.6 billion for the 12 months ending in May. And Piscatella attributed the recent growth in physical spending to "the Switch 2 and physical sales growth on Nintendo platforms," while other platforms (such as PlayStation) were still seeing "percentage drops from the teens to the mid 30s" in that spending.
July 23, 2026 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and engineers have been selected to lead 10 Phase I projects under the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Genesis Mission, applying AI to challenges spanning high-performance computing (HPC), fusion energy, Earth systems science, materials discovery, biology, quantum technologies and fundamental physics.
LLNL researchers also will contribute to 19 additional Genesis Mission projects led by partner institutions across the national laboratories, academia and industry. DOE announced the awardees July 22 at the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C.
“These selections reflect LLNL’s demonstrated ability to integrate AI, advanced computing, experimental science and multidisciplinary expertise to solve problems of national importance,” LLNL Director Kim Budil said. “The Genesis Mission provides an opportunity to take on a remarkable range of scientific challenges and help redefine the pace at which research can move from new ideas to real-world impact.”
The Genesis Mission is a DOE-led national initiative to build the world’s most powerful integrated AI-enabled science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, it aims to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, science and national security.
The Phase I awards aim to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and future investment. Teams will demonstrate workflows integrating AI with scientific investigation and evaluate their potential to accelerate discovery, improve prediction and enhance experimentation.
LLNL will lead projects to:
Expand multimodal AI for nuclear and particle physics, integrating data from complementary particle detectors to accelerate scientific insight.
Develop digital twins for laser-plasma acceleration, linking plasma-channel formation, beam dynamics and AI-enabled optimization.
Advance AI-enabled materials discovery by predicting defects and material properties for next-generation computing.
Improve Earth system prediction through scalable AI approaches to turbulence, cloud processes and high-resolution atmospheric modeling.
Develop agentic AI for experimental science, including portable laser diagnostics and interoperable integration across LaserNetUS facilities.
Accelerate precision manufacturing for fusion, using AI-enabled data pipelines for additive manufacturing of high-precision targets.
Speed cosmological inference from Rubin Observatory data through fast, uncertainty-aware AI methods.
Advance AI for HPC by characterizing scientific workload performance directly from binary executables.
Design new metalloproteins through biophysics-informed AI approaches that learn and predict metal coordination.
Advance superconducting microsystems and quantum control through physics-reinforced AI.
LLNL researchers also will participate in partner-led projects spanning advanced computing, autonomous laboratories, materials, fusion, Earth systems, biology and fundamental physics.
More information on LLNL-led projects and partner-led collaborations involving the Lab is available here.
Fridges are one of the most important home appliances to keep powered during an outage. Our lab testing revealed the power stations that can keep yours running the longest.
SAN JOSE, Calif., July 23, 2026 — Etched today announced $300M in new financing at a $10.3B valuation less than one month after emerging from stealth. The latest round was led by Sequoia, with participation from a16z, Jane Street, Diffusion, and SK Hynix and represents the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. The company is using this latest round of funding to aggressively scale production and customer deployments. In addition to the Taiwan factory established earlier in the year, Etched also recently opened a new 80,000 square-foot facility 15 minutes from their office to further expedite production and prototyping. They expect to use the 10 MW Milpitas site to bring up an NPI lab, an in-house SMT line, and expand deployments.
Etched was founded on the belief that inference is the defining workload of the AI era. AI will not deliver on its economic and societal promise until inference becomes dramatically faster, cheaper, and more plentiful than the status quo can provide. Etched was built to close the gap by improving the economics and power efficiency of AI compute so that inference can operate at the scale of humanity, not just the scale of today’s data centers.
Etched’s hardware is architecture-agnostic, supporting models of any shape and arbitrarily large parameter sizes. Today, the company’s inference clusters are running large MoE models including DeepSeek and Qwen as well as non-transformer designs like Mamba, a state space model with a fundamentally different architecture from transformers. For customers, this means a single system that can serve whatever the frontier produces next without needing to bet their infrastructure on a single model design winning.
“Inference is on the path to becoming the largest market in the world, and purpose-built compute will power the majority of the world’s inference. We have spent years studying the space and waiting for a company with the technical ambition, operational excellence, and execution required to define it. Etched is that company,” said Sonya Huang, Partner at Sequoia Capital. “What the team has accomplished in less than three years is extremely rare in the semiconductor world and a testament to the company and the culture they have built. We could not be more thrilled to partner with them as they build the defining company in inference hardware.”
Etched is developing two novel computing technologies at the core of its rack-scale system, each targeting one of the two bottlenecks that cap how much intelligence the world can afford to run: power and memory. Together, these innovations deliver more tokens per dollar, more tokens per watt, and much lower latency for frontier AI workloads.
Low Voltage Inference (LVI) is a new paradigm in AI computing that unlocks dramatically better power and cost efficiency. Thermal limitations have traditionally constrained compute performance, throttling clock speeds before chips can reach peak FLOPs. LVI enables significantly higher FLOP density within the same power envelope as existing hardware, using deep hardware and systems co-design to deliver best-in-class throughput.
Cluster Scale Memory (CSM) is a hybrid SRAM/HBM memory subsystem designed around an entire cluster rather than a single chip. CSM enables dramatically faster memory access by creating a massive shared SRAM pool across the entire scale-up domain, connected by a proprietary ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect that delivers cluster-wide memory performance. CSM improves latency while avoiding the cost, reliability, yield, thermal, and compute tradeoffs of SRAM-only and 3D DRAM chips.
Demand for Etched’s inference systems continues to outpace supply as customers move from evaluation to production deployment. To meet this demand, Etched is rapidly expanding its team, now 400 people, with engineers from NVIDIA, Broadcom, Google TPU, SK Hynix, and HFT quant trading firms. The team is in person and works out of their San Jose office which also has an NPI prototyping facility and 2 MW datacenter running Etched hardware 24/7.
“Now is the time to be aggressive. Our chips work, people want them, and it’s time to ship,” said Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO of Etched. “The infrastructure required to serve frontier AI sustainably and economically was never going to come from incremental improvements to existing hardware. This round reflects a growing industry conviction that the challenge demands a new entrant willing to rebuild the stack from first principles and deliver frontier inference without the trade-offs between speed, cost, and scale that have hampered this market until now.”
“We tend not to celebrate fundraises. We have a lot of work to do to get to Gigawatt scale. We’re excited to partner with the best AI infrastructure investors in the world to get there faster,” said Rob Wachen, co-founder and President of Etched. “The team is working around the clock with our early customers to bring our first product to life. We’re super excited.”
About Etched
Etched builds frontier inference clusters designed to make AI inference dramatically faster, cheaper, and more abundant. Through deep co-design across the entire stack, Etched’s rack-scale systems deliver best-in-class throughput and latency. Etched has raised over $1B from investors including Sequoia, a16z, SK Hynix, VentureTech Alliance, Peter Thiel, Jane Street, HRT, Jump Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, Stripes, Radical Ventures, Primary, and Positive Sum. To learn more, visit etched.com.
The latest version of a sweeping crypto bill exposed a deep divide between progressives and moderate Senate Democrats: whether to accommodate the industry ahead of the fall midterms, or declare open war on it.
Seven Democrats issued a statement Wednesday night lamenting that they cannot vote for the latest draft of the bill, citing weak provisions aimed at tamping down Donald Trump’s crypto self-enrichment, among other issues. In a joint statement, they pledged to keep working with Republicans to “get this over the finish line.”
Other Democrats say they have had enough of crypto, however. The problems with the bill run much deeper than Trump’s corruption, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said at a Wednesday speech, and it is time for Democrats to openly break with the industry and its $189 million in campaign funds.
“This bill is in front of the Senate because the industry paid for it,” Murphy said. “We should, in this election, make crypto’s purchase of our political process, AI’s purchase of our political process, a major campaign issue.”
“This bill is in front of the Senate because the industry paid for it.”
The two sides staked out their position as Republicans released a draft text of the far-reaching bill known as the Clarity Act, which would create an industry-friendly regulatory structure for cryptocurrencies.
Critics say there are many problems with the bill, including lax consumer protections and loopholes that would enable money laundering. Nothing in the monthslong fight over the legislation has generated as much controversy as Trump’s self-dealing, however.
Between the $TRUMP meme coin and other ventures, Trump profited at least $1.4 billion off crypto last year. Democrats have proposed requiring Trump to divest himself of his crypto ventures and put enforcement in the hands of Democratic state attorneys general.
Instead, Republicans issued a proposal, with Trump’s blessing, that would prevent him from issuing new meme coins and put enforcement in the hands of his own Department of Justice and would not be enforceable after he leaves office.
No matter what’s in the legislation, the bill is meaningless if it leaves enforcement to Trump’s own administration, said Mark Hays, the associate director for cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress.
“I don’t think anybody who is following the DOJ seriously thinks they will do that,” he said. “That is just not how this administration works.”
Even Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has often sided with crypto in the past, said he opposes the language in the bill addressing Trump. Schiff told reporters at the Capitol that that text gives the appearance it applies to Trump and his family without actually doing so.
“It’s a complete nonstarter,” he said.
The bill’s flaws led the seven mostly centrist Democrats to issue a statement hours after the release of the draft text saying that they could not vote for it in its current form.
“Key provisions including those addressing ethics for elected officials, consumer protection, illicit finance, conflicts of interest and market integrity must be strengthened. We have been working in good faith with our Republican colleagues for the past year and will continue doing so to get this over the finish line,” said the group, which included Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., one of the top negotiators on the bill.
The time for Democrats and Republicans to reach a compromise is slipping fast, however. The Senate goes into recess on August 7, and few observers expect Congress to take the measure up again as the midterms approach.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that he hopes to put the measure to a vote before senators leave town.
Democrats are nervously eying the industry’s war chest if they are put on the record as opposing the Clarity Act. Companies including Coinbase, the largest publicly traded crypto company, have contributed $189 million into super PACs and candidate campaign funds to influence the midterms.
Murphy, in the Wednesday speech at the Center for American Progress, said it would be better to attack the industry than try to work with it.
“They are spending money in order to get a pro-crypto bill passed through the United States Senate and House of Representatives,” Murphy said. “And there are, I guess, two approaches that the Democratic Party could take. One approach is to just do what the crypto industry wants and then cross our fingers and hope they don’t spend money against us in the next election. Good luck with that strategy. The second approach is to make the industry’s brazen attempts to buy our political process a campaign issue.”
The votes marked the first test of Republican support for the conflict since President Donald Trump resumed military strikes against Tehran this month.
Hey everybody, I just wanna put this out as a disclaimer to not buy the soft flared foot pads. The hard ones should be fine but the soft ones the sensors peel way too much when it comes to heavy riding or offloading. I have had two of them now and now my third one is peeling up. It’s the hard one any better because I am absolutely sick of buying foot pads.
Conservative leader is becoming more confident and forging a message for her party, but faces a new opponent
“So, Andy Burnham seems like a nice guy.” Those were the slightly unexpected opening words of Kemi Badenoch’s first speech since the change in prime minister. But make no mistake: she was there to bury her opponent.
Even Badenoch-sceptics inside the Conservative party and farther afield agree the Tory leader is becoming more confident, and has been able to forge an increasingly coherent message for her party, one based on a promise of economic competence.
RICHLAND, Wash., July 23, 2026 — The Department of Energy has announced Phase I funding awards for its Genesis Mission, including 42 that involve research teams from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by DOE, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory awards reflect the breadth of its mission. Image credit: Melanie Hess-Robinson | PNNL
“AI is transforming how we discover, innovate and solve problems,” said PNNL Director Deb Gracio. “PNNL’s significant role in the Genesis Mission positions the Laboratory at the forefront of a once-in-a-generation transformation in how science is conducted, placing our researchers at the center of developing AI-enabled capabilities that will fundamentally accelerate discovery. The Genesis Mission projects will help ensure those advances serve the nation’s greatest needs in science, energy and national security. PNNL is proud to contribute our scientific expertise and mission focus to a future where AI expands what is possible.”
Genesis Mission Launch @ PNNL
PNNL researchers will lead 16 projects that address urgent national science and energy needs. They will collaborate with academic and industry partners on an additional 26 projects.
Optimizing underground uranium recovery with AI-powered simulations
Understanding how to make geothermal energy systems practical energy suppliers
Embedding AI into physics experiments to improve the path to discovery
Uniting decades of data and expert insight into one AI engine built to accelerate nuclear waste cleanup
Deploying autonomous workflows across the Genesis Mission’s computational resources
Using AI to improve decision-making for reliable, affordable power system planning and operation
Using AI to demonstrate improved turbomachinery design and control
Integrating experiments, simulation and operational data to accelerate manufacturing for fuel cells
Leveraging an AI-enabled scientific workflow for improved high-performance microelectronics
Modeling Earth systems for improved seasonal weather prediction using AI
Using AI to predict and manage fractures in oil and gas reservoir
Using AI to transform how we study and model the turbulence that helps clouds produce rain
Predicting water availability in energy systems using AI-driven watershed modeling
Coupling AI with science to improve algae-based biomass reactors
Enabling AI-driven continuous monitoring of molten salt nuclear reactor operations
The goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation or generate new scientific insights.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Ford will become the first automaker to embed Apple Maps directly into its vehicles, starting with an all-electric midsize pickup built on its new Universal Electric Vehicle platform. "The pickup -- with Ford testing preproduction models on roads now -- is expected to start at $30,000 when it comes to market in 2027," reports the Detroit Free Press. "Ford has said several other EVs off that platform will follow, including a small all-electric SUV." From the report: Ford CEO Jim Farley said the new EVs will redefine advanced technology as simple, useful, and at a price point that is attainable for most people. "We're proud to embed Apple Maps' navigation and mapping technology directly into our Universal Electric Vehicle Platform, giving customers the ultimate navigation experience alongside our Ford app, a full suite of software, and next-generation BlueCruise, all enabled by a new zonal architecture," Farley said in a statement. "Apple Maps has delivered a world-class product, and we're honored to be among the first to embed it directly into a vehicle, helping define intuitive, capable driving."
In a joint statement, Apple and Ford said the integration will deliver a "beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle's displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford's Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience." Ford said it will use that road information to develop its next-generation BlueCruise hands-free highway driving capability. Also, by leveraging Apple's new MapKit for Automotive SDK, Ford's UEV Platform will offer drivers turn-by-turn directions using natural language, real-time traffic information, intuitive search and routing options for the best route. The system will give drivers EV routing functionality to help drivers with the warming and cooling process of the vehicle's battery before driving or fast-charging.
i live in a small apartment with not a ton of space. i’ve been keeping it in the apartment but wouldn’t mind storing it right outside. think brownstone NYC. if i lock it up (any lock recommendations?) can i leave it outside weather it’s super hot, freezing or raining (no cover.. i could get a tarp)
MPs and others condemn behaviour of CT Group, which offered cash for positive coverage of clients
A political lobbying firm secretly paying journalists for articles favourable to its clients is facing calls to reveal full details of the payments, after the practice was denounced as a dangerous “attack on democracy”.
MPs, senior lobbyists and transparency campaigners all condemned the behaviour of CT Group, the firm co-founded by the campaign strategist Lynton Crosby, an election guru previously hired by David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
Agent came under suspicion after allegedly providing info in MS Now report about vice-president’s helicopter trip
A Secret Service agent assigned to JD Vance’s protective detail is “the subject of an administrative investigation, and potential criminal inquiry, involving allegations of compromising operational and information security”, according to the Secret Service chief of communications.
The agent came under suspicion after allegedly providing information that appeared in an MS Now report about the vice-president’s planned Marine Corps helicopter trip with his son to a golf lesson, a source told CNN.
Exclusive: Clinical assessments concluded Rudakubana could not be safely managed in prison, sources say
The Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been moved from prison to a psychiatric hospital after clinical assessment, the Guardian can disclose.
He was transferred to Broadmoor high-security hospital from the category A prison Belmarsh this week after it was concluded that he could not be managed safely in a prison environment, sources confirmed.
July 23, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has been awarded funding to lead and collaborate on a sweeping portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven research projects that will accelerate discovery on some of the nation’s most complex challenges and redefine how scientists harness AI at the frontiers of science and technology.
Argonne’s newest Genesis Mission projects will use AI to accelerate nuclear energy deployment, improve energy systems and grid reliability, predict water availability and extreme weather with unprecedented precision, unlock new frontiers in quantum sensing and microelectronics, secure the integrity of scientific workflows and infrastructure, and more.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by DOE, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy research, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
“The Genesis Mission represents an important step toward a new era of AI-integrated scientific discovery,” said Argonne Director Paul Kearns. “This investment will empower our researchers and partners to pursue bold ideas, accelerate innovation and deliver scientific breakthroughs that will benefit the nation and the world.”
The new research teams are multidisciplinary partnerships with industry, academia and national laboratories. Argonne is leading projects that will:
Argonne is also a partner in Prometheus, an initiative led by DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory. The project aims to revolutionize nuclear energy deployment by integrating agentic AI across the entire lifecycle — from design and licensing to manufacturing and operations. This collaborative effort leverages advanced digital twins, AI-driven workflows and industry expertise to support DOE’s mission for reliable, abundant nuclear energy in the United States.
The new research projects will deliver foundational AI capabilities that will support the Genesis Mission platform and accelerate cross-cutting scientific discovery. This includes developing advanced scientific workflows, digital twins, agentic AI systems and trustworthy AI infrastructure for managing experiments, tracking data history and spotting unusual patterns.
Argonne’s expertise in supercomputing, data management and collaborative platforms will provide the computational backbone for integrating AI into large-scale scientific research.
The goal of the awards announced this week is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation or generate new scientific insights.
Additional details about Argonne’s Genesis Mission projects are available here.
July 23, 2026 — The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is launching the procurement process for a EuroHPC quantum computer to be hosted and operated by LuxProvide in Luxembourg and integrated into the EuroHPC supercomputer MeluXina.
MeluXina-Q will initially be equipped with a quantum processing unit (QPU) with at least 10 semiconductor spin qubits. Over the lifetime of the system, upgrades are foreseen to reach a total of over 80 physical qubits.
This quantum computer will be part of the EuroHPC supercomputing infrastructure and enable hybrid classical‑quantum workflows. The procurement is the continuation of EuroHPC’s commitment to diversifying quantum computing modalities across Europe.
Once deployed, the system will be available to a broad range of European users, including the scientific community, industry and the public sector, joining the other EuroHPC quantum computers that are now accessible through the newly launched EuroHPC quantum access pilot call. Meluxina-Q will enable groundbreaking research and industrial innovation across a wide range of application domains spanning from automotive (quantum-enabled machine learning for expedited routing), energy (adaptive optimization), finance (risk assessment) to healthcare (quantum computing-enabled quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics simulations).
More Details
The closing date for submission of an application to tender is Sept. 1, 2026.
The total acquisition budget of the system is up to EUR 11,95 million, which will be co-financed equally by the EuroHPC JU with budget coming from the Digital Europe Programme (DEP) and by the Luxembourg Government (50%).
Background
The hosting agreement between EuroHPC JU and LuxProvide was signed in December 2024.
To date, the EuroHPC JU has procured and inaugurated six quantum computers, located across Europe:
Researchers, public institutions, and industry across Europe can now request free access to some of these quantum computers through the EuroHPC Quantum Access Pilot call . This unprecedented access enables users to experiment with different quantum technologies to advance scientific discovery and drive innovation.
The deployment of these quantum computers across Europe aims to offer the widest possible variety of European quantum computing platforms and hybrid classical-quantum architectures, including analogue quantum simulators based on neutral atoms, trapped ions, superconducting circuits, and photonics to adiabatic systems, enabling the execution of annealing routines. This approach positions Europe at the forefront of this emerging field while providing European end-users with access to diverse and complementary quantum technologies.
In addition to these six systems, two analogue quantum simulators have been procured under the EuroHPC JU project HPCQS: JADE, in Germany (Julich Supercomputing Centre, JSC) and Ruby, in France (GENCI).
The Minnesota man who pleaded guilty to killing a top Democratic lawmaker and her husband was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison on Thursday, a little over a year after the political attacks.
Vance Boelter, 59, was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus 40 years in prison after pleading guilty in June to the six counts related to the killings of the former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the shootings of state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.
When the ‘“department of government efficiency” was raging unchecked through the federal government in February 2025, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered his subordinates to find cuts of 8% a year for the next five years, theoretically trimming a total of $340m from the Pentagon budget.
The disclosure briefly sent Palantir and defense stocks tanking – though soon the plan evaporated, as if it never existed.
Hospitality businesses call on Andy Burnham to cut VAT and extend help to hotels and restaurants
Pubs, clubs and live music venues in England will receive a 20% discount on their business rates bills as part of a £100m aid package but Andy Burnham has immediately faced calls to be more ambitious.
The prime minister said the measure, aimed at supporting the high street and easing cost of living pressures, would be fully funded, including through a review of relief for businesses deemed not to make a positive contribution to communities, such as vape shops.
Scientific American reports that the 2026 Fields Medals went to four mathematicians for work ranging from the theory of knots to the motion of fluid: The Fields Medals went to Hong Wang of New York University and France's Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES), Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto. In the awards' 90-year history, Wang is only the third woman to win one, after mathematicians Maryam Mirzakhani and Maryna Viazovska in 2014 and 2022, respectively. Wang and Deng represent the prizes' only Chinese-born recipients besides mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, who won a Fields Medal in 1982.
Hong Wang co-proved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, establishing a fundamental limit on how little space is needed to rotate a line through every possible direction. Mathematician Nets Katz called it the field's "holy grail" problem and said the achievement made her "a central figure" in the area.
Yu Deng and his collaborators reconciled the microscopic and macroscopic mathematics of fluid motion, proving that equations describing chaotic molecular interactions and large-scale fluid behavior are fundamentally connected. N.Y.U. mathematician Scott Armstrong called it "a truly spectacular, singular result."
John Pardon made an early breakthrough in knot theory by proving that certain sequences of knots can have arbitrarily large "distortion," a measure of how difficult they are to traverse. Princeton mathematician David Gabai said the problem had "attracted much interest among mathematicians during the previous 25 years."
Jacob Tsimerman and two collaborators proved the Andre-Oort conjecture, giving mathematicians a stronger way to understand special points on complex geometric objects known as Shimura varieties. Collaborator Jonathan Pila described him as "a brilliant mathematician" known for his "brilliance and resourcefulness." Tsimerman has also advanced Hodge theory and hopes pure mathematics can help researchers better understand AI.
President’s remarks follow Houthi strikes on Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and oil prices rising past $100 a barrel again
Donald Trump has said he is close to deciding whether to launch “a massive attack” against Iran, on a scale larger than strikes already witnessed during the months-long conflict with Tehran.
Speaking to the Axios news site, the US president said: “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.”
The House on Thursday voted to direct President Trump to end the war with Iran, after four Republicans joined Democrats to rebuke the president over his handling of the conflict.
CEO Chris O’Shea defends Centrica’s plans as it reports rise in retail profits following focus on bigger margins
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cuts it confirmed last month.
The Senate rejected an attempt to rein in President Trump's war powers in Iran, soon after the House adopted a separate measure rebuking the president amid escalations in the conflict in recent days.
Valentín Lavín Romero is the 14th mayor to be murdered since Claudia Sheinbaum became president in 2024
A mayor was shot dead on Wednesday in the Mexican state of Morelos after having survived a previous assassination attempt earlier this year. He is the 14th mayor to be murdered since Claudia Sheinbaum became president in October 2024.
Valentín Lavín Romero, who was from the Green party, an ally of the ruling leftwing Morena party, was wounded at the end of January when hitmen shot him at a petrol station on a motorway.
A 5.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Texas panhandle, the state’s northernmost region, on Thursday, marking the strongest quake to hit the area since 1900.
The earthquake struck at around 5.21am at a depth of 3.5 miles (5.7km), according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). Its epicenter was about 27.8 miles south-east of the city of Spearman and approximately 68 miles from Amarillo.
Forecasters warn of US coastal flooding, heavy rain and dangerous surf as the storm tracks west
Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall in Louisiana on Wednesday afternoon, and is moving westward toward the Texas coast, where it is expected to reach later on Thursday, bringing rainfall, winds and rising water levels.
In a Thursday morning update, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that Bertha was moving west and that the center of the tropical storm was expected to move near or along the Louisiana and upper Texas coasts over the next several hours before moving inland over Texas on Thursday evening.
Mykhailo Fedorov says only in his former post could he ‘combat procurement corruption and complete the army’s transformation’
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has offered a bit more detail on the new package of sanctions, saying they are “the largest round in four years,” and will “hit Putin where it hurts most.”
“We have agreed on the 21st sanctions package against Russia.
It delivers sweeping measures targeting Moscow’s financial system, its military-industrial complex and energy sector, that keep Russia’s war economy running.
State’s governor had declared a state of emergency for all 55 counties, and deployed 500 national guard members
Patrick Morrisey, the West Virginia governor, said at least two people were unaccounted for in Upshur county, after torrential rain caused flash floods in parts of the state.
Speaking at a news conference, Morrisey said that during search-and-recovery operations state police found an overturned vehicle in Upshur county believed to be “connected to two individuals who were reported missing”.
Nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, are urging the Trump administration not to block U.S. access to Chinese open-weight AI models or risk crippling the next generation of U.S. startups. Politico reports: On Wednesday, the newly-formed Little Tech Association sent letters to President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others in the administration with its appeal, marking the first coordinated effort by Silicon Valley's wider influential startup community to weigh in on one of the Trump administration's most closely watched AI debates. At issue: whether Washington should restrict access to increasingly powerful open-weight -- meaning, AI models whose weights are publicly available -- AI models released by Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI and Alibaba.
"American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide," the startup founders wrote in the letter (PDF) obtained by POLITICO, also sent to Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios. Instead of broad prohibitions, they argue the government should adopt targeted safeguards.
And they warn that banning Americans from downloading Chinese open-weight models wouldn't stop their proliferation -- but would weaken U.S. startups. "There'll be hundreds of companies that instantly die," said Suhail Doshi, founder of AI infrastructure startup Particle and a member of the association, which POLITICO first wrote about exclusively, in an interview. "It's great for Anthropic. We're all going to have to spend money on Anthropic." Last week, the Beijing-based AI company "Moonshot" released a massive new model that reset the AI race overnight, immediately vaulting into the top tier of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests.
China's Xi Jinping also used his first appearance at China's World AI Conference to promote a vision of low-cost, broadly accessible AI and call for international cooperation rather than technological rivalry.
Tribunal rules surveillance aimed at identifying Vincent Kearney’s sources was disproportionate and unlawful
A former BBC journalist has been awarded £20,000 in damages after MI5 and the Police Service of Northern Ireland unlawfully obtained data from his mobile phone.
A specialist tribunal on Thursday ordered the agencies to pay the compensation to Vincent Kearney for attempts to identify his sources while he was the BBC’s Northern Ireland home affairs correspondent.
New PM says no prisoners will be released under the policy until there is an urgent review of scheme
Kemi Badenoch is speaking in central London at the moment and is expected to say that Andy Burnham is “still thinking like the mayor of Manchester”.
“Going by what he’s announced so far, Andy Burnham’s ambitions for Britain are too small,” she was expected to say.
My message to British businesses is quite simple: to British businesses, to British innovators, to British investors: I will back you as your Chancellor, and I’ll back you in financial services, in technology, in retail, in industry, in all parts of the economy.
I’m just as concerned about the cost of business as I am about the cost of living.
Government agency announces status in north Wales and Upper Severn after series of heatwaves and lack of rainfall
Parts of Wales are now in drought and all other areas of the country are experiencing prolonged dry weather conditions, according to a government agency.
Natural Resources Wales (NRW) said on Thursday that record-low river flows, back-to-back heatwaves and widespread wildfires have prompted the declaration of drought status in north Wales and the Upper Severn.
As Iran's attacks keep ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to a trickle and oil prices surge, Gulf states are planning to invest billions in pipeline alternatives.
UPTON, N.Y., July 23, 2026 — Seven innovative research projects led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have been selected by DOE to receive funding through the Genesis Mission Phase I Request for Application (RFA). The awards to Brookhaven Lab support groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) research for microelectronics, nuclear and high energy physics, computational science, and atmospheric science.
The RFA awards were announced by DOE at the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C. Hendrik Hamann, chief AI scientist for Innovation, Science, and Security at Brookhaven Lab and joint appointee at Stony Brook University, presented at the summit.
“We are very excited by DOE’s decision to award Brookhaven seven Genesis Mission projects. This reflects our deep expertise in AI, the breadth of our capabilities, and the ingenuity of our teams,” said Brookhaven Lab Director John Hill. “These projects, together with those we are partnering on, will support DOE’s vision to advance national priorities by integrating AI with world-class science.”
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia, and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.
Brookhaven Lab is advancing the goals of the Genesis Mission by improving AI for science and society. Now, with seven Phase I RFA projects awarded to the Lab, Brookhaven Lab is further positioned as leader in AI research and this historic mission from DOE.
The goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.
The Brookhaven-led projects are:
An Automated, Multimodal-AI-Enabled Cloud Chamber for Constraining Cloud Microphysical Processes in Earth System Models:By controlling an advanced cloud chamber with an AI framework, scientists will create specific cloud conditions on demand, easily maintain those conditions, and collect more reliable data.
MARS: scaling Multi-Agent Reinforcement learning for Scientific hypothesis generation: This project will connect multiple AI agents, each trained on complex scientific tasks such as reading literature and analyzing data, to a network that will generate better research hypotheses than today’s AI models can.
Deployable Cavity Coupled Cold Atom Quantum Sensing Platform Driven by Agentic AI: Scientists will develop an AI-controlled quantum sensing platform to automatically tune and stabilize sensors for high energy physics experiments in real time.
From Materials to Circuits: An AI-Native EDA Framework for Physics-Based Microelectronics Co-Design:Researchers will use AI to speed up the design of custom computer chips for scientific instruments, such as particle detectors, quantum sensors, and fusion diagnostics.
Transforming Computing Cyber infrastructure for Collider Experiments to AI Based Computing and AI-ready Data:To manage the ever-increasing volume of data produced by particle colliders, reduce operator workload, and speed up discoveries, researchers will build AI into the computing infrastructure at the Electron-Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider.
AI-Driven, Self-Learning Digital Twins for Robust Operation of Particle Accelerators: Researchers will build AI-enabled, virtual representations of particle accelerators that can predict status conditions and learn from live data to make complex operations more reliable.
Cross-Domain Scientific Reasoning through Composable Foundation Models: The Genesis Mission is producing new AI models at an accelerating pace, and this project will connect those models into one continuously improving reasoning system to accelerate discovery and collaboration across the Mission.
All seven of the Brookhaven-led projects are supported by the DOE Office of Science. Beyond these Brookhaven-led projects, the Lab is contributing to 29 additional projects led by other National Laboratories, research universities, and private industry.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
Swedish nonprofit alleges cost to repair replica was $6,000 but Universal – which made $264m on film’s opening weekend – has not stumped up
The Swedish owners of a Viking longship replica that features in the Hollywood blockbuster The Odyssey say they feel “forgotten” after film-makers allegedly returned the vessel damaged and failed to foot the bill for repairs.
In nearly three decades at sea, the warship Glad av Gillberga – based on a wreck from around 1040 found in Denmark’s Roskilde fjord – has successfully sailed the North Sea, the Baltic and even voyaged to Canada.
In interview, billionaire says instead of running ‘Doge’ he should’ve ‘worked on my companies’ and shares extreme predictions
Elon Musk has admitted he became too consumed by politics during his volatile alliance with Donald Trump and his brief appointment as the president’s financial axman, running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).
The world’s richest person, and briefly its first trillionaire after his SpaceX company floated on the New York stock exchange in June, made the confession in a wide-ranging interview with the Economist published on Thursday. He shared his positions on subjects from foreign wars to AI, and made a number of eye-opening predictions for the future.
Torrential rains in West Virginia have caused flash flooding that inundated homes and businesses. Authorities say the floods washed out bridges and led to numerous water rescues in portions of the state. Patrick Morrisey, West Virginia's governor, declared a state of emergency for all 55 counties on Tuesday night. No deaths were immediately reported. Morrisey sent 100 national guard members to the hardest-hit areas in the northern portion of the state with an additional 200 members expected to arrive by late Wednesday morning. The rains were part of wide-ranging storms that produced reports of tornadoes in several states
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: It's rare that cancerous tumors can spread from one individual to another. But a genetic study suggests that's what's happening with melanoma tumors among catfish in Quebec and the northeastern U.S. The discovery represents the first known transmissible cancer in fish and one of very few transmissible cancers ever found, reported the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Julie Dragon, co-leader of the new study, noted that only three other transmissible cancers have ever been identified so far -- in Tasmanian devils, dogs and shellfish. "These conditions are incredibly rare in nature," she said. "So something has to be happening to allow this to happen." Anglers in Lake Memphremagog, which spans the border between Quebec and Vermont, first reported catching brown bullhead catfish with strange black spots and lumps in 2012. They turned out to be melanoma skin cancer tumors. (Humans can also get this kind of cancer.) Now, about a third of the brown bullheads living in the lake have them.
It's not clear how sick the fish become. In some cases, the cancer spreads to other organs, such as the brain or liver. But many fish with lesions seem relatively healthy and some older fish even have them, suggesting they can live with the disease for a time. Because of the sudden appearance of the black lesions in Lake Memphremagog the year after a huge flood caused by post-tropical storm Irene, locals worried they were caused by carcinogens washed into the lake by floodwaters. Tests for carcinogens haven't been conclusive, although a study published in May found higher concentrations of seven metals, including zinc and the carcinogen arsenic, in the skin of fish with the tumors. Researchers suspect the tumors may spread among adult fish during spawning, when crowded fish rub against one another and may be punctured by their spines.
"They... swim all over each other and we think it's possible that they poke each other and cells can get into other fish that way," Dragon said, though transmission has not yet been demonstrated.
Pre-Covid, the movie landscape was dramatically different: YouTubers weren’t dominating the box office, video game spin-offs rarely made an impact and Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t yet the star of a slasher movie. Why such a flurry of innovation – and what will be next?
Cinema has always been a medium of research and development. At any given point, the industry is searching for yet another breakthrough that can drive it into the future. Synchronised sound in the 1920s. Technicolor in the 1930s. The invention of the modern blockbuster in the 1970s.
Conversely, the consensus is that, if the 2020s has a defining trend, then it is one of decline. The theatrical experience is under attack from all angles: streaming, YouTube, a once-in-a-century health crisis that shut cinemas down entirely. And yet, if you look closer, this has actually been one of the most innovative decades that cinema has ever seen. Whether down to technology or desperation, the film industry has spent these last few years figuring out new ways to make films that simply could not have existed even at the turn of the decade.
Danny Boyle’s drama about the acquisition of the Sun and a four-hour Elon Musk documentary will premiere alongside new films from Martin McDonagh and Werner Herzog – but only one female director has a movie in competition
The Venice film festival promises to take a swing at media moguls of the print and digital era this year, with Trainspotting director Danny Boyle’s new film about Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the Sun and a new documentary about Elon Musk included in the lineup of the films for the festival’s 83rd edition.
In Boyle’s Ink, which will open the festival on the Lido on 2 September, Australian actor Guy Pearce plays compatriot newspaper tycoon Murdoch, whose purchase of the Sun in 1969 sensationalised the media landscape and transformed public life in Britain. The script is written by Olivier award-winning playwright and screenwriter James Graham (Dear England, Brexit: The Uncivil War).
Congressional Progressive caucus say ‘healthcare should not be a privilege’ as they champions single payer system
The Congressional Progressive caucus (CPC) held a shadow hearing on Medicare for All on Wednesday, led by Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingell.
The hearing comes as over half of the House Democratic caucus has co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation, and Senator Andy Kim introduced legislation on Tuesday that would enroll all children into Medicaid until the age of 26, while Republicans passed drastic healthcare cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including nearly $1n in cuts to Medicaid and allowing Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire.
Pair were trying to help seven-year-old boy who had got into difficulties, police believe
The teenage girl and woman who died in the waters off an Essex beach were trying to help a seven-year-old boy who had got into difficulties, police believe.
Family members identified the pair as Shalina Rahman, a 42-year-old British-Bangladeshi teacher who is married to a Bangladeshi politician, and her 15-year-old daughter, Sameeha. The boy, believed to be a family member, was also said to be on life support in a hospital in London after the incident.
Andy Burnham has paused an early release scheme for 6,000 prisoners that was due to start in September after an outcry from crime victims.
The prime minister said an “urgent review” will aim to “minimise risk to the public” amid concerns that killers, rapists and sex abusers would be freed on tags.
Tenisha Warner, the widow of "The Cosby Show" actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner, spoke exclusively to "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King about coping with grief one year after his death.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., July 23, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy has selected Sandia National Laboratories to lead six projects and partner on 17 additional teams through the Genesis Mission, a national effort to accelerate scientific discovery by combining artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and advanced research capabilities.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
“Sandia’s selections reflect the breadth of our mission and our researchers’ ability to connect advanced computing, artificial intelligence and engineering expertise to national challenges,” said Sandia National Laboratories Director Laura McGill. “Through the Genesis Mission, Sandia researchers will work with partners across the national laboratory system, industry and academia to leverage AI in new approaches that will accelerate discovery and develop new capabilities in service to the nation.”
The goal of the Phase I awards under DOE’s request for applications is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation or generate new scientific insights. Phase II awards support large-scale, multi-institutional efforts to advance AI solutions for more than two dozen national science and technology challenges.
Sandia, a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory, will lead six projects selected for Genesis Mission support:
Agent Bayes: A Foundation Model for Bayesian Scientific Reasoning: Led by Sandia researcher Tommie Catanach, the project will develop an AI reasoning framework to help scientists design experiments, compare models and test scientific theories against evidence using Bayesian methods.
AI-Augmented Digital Twins for “Born-Digital” Fusion Material Interfaces: Led by Sandia researcher Mary Alice Cusentino, the project will use AI-assisted digital twins to accelerate development of fusion material interfaces designed to withstand extreme heat, radiation and mechanical stress.
AI Framework for Real-Time Critical Mineral Resources Mapping and Characterization While Drilling: Led by Sandia researcher Guangping Xu, the project will develop an AI framework to integrate drilling, geophysical and geochemical data to support real-time mapping and characterization of critical mineral resources.
Physics-Informed Transformer Foundation Model with Uncertainty Quantification for Coupled Eulerian and Lagrangian Flow Physics: Led by Sandia researcher Jackie Chen, the project will deliver a reusable, physics-constrained AI foundation model workflow to improve modeling of complex flows important to energy systems, including atmospheric wind flows, combustion and aerosols.
Upscaling Particle-Resolved Aerosol-Cloud Microphysics with Generative Modeling: Led by Sandia researcher Lekha Patel, the project will use generative AI to improve how aerosol-cloud interactions are represented in models that support understanding of clouds, precipitation and water systems.
MIRACLE-AI: Molecular-to-Reservoir Integrated AI for Coupled Landscape and Earth-System Subsurface Intelligence: Led by Sandia researcher Umakant Mishra, the project will develop an AI-guided framework to improve predictive understanding of coupled biological, chemical and hydrologic processes that affect geothermal and other subsurface energy systems.
Sandia researchers will contribute to 16 selected Phase I projects led by partner institutions, spanning AI-enabled research in materials discovery, water and energy systems, synthetic biology, critical minerals, quantum science, advanced nuclear technologies, and electric grid analysis. Sandia also is collaborating with several partners on a Phase II project focused on using AI to accelerate nuclear power plant design and licensing workflows.
“When we pair world-class AI tools with Sandia’s renowned experimental, computational and mission-relevant expertise, we build research workflows that are more powerful, efficient and reliable for complex national security and energy challenges,” said Jen Gaudioso, director of the Center for Computing Research and Sandia’s Genesis Mission program manager.
The selections were announced in conjunction with the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C., where leaders from DOE, the national laboratories, industry and academia convened to discuss collaborative approaches for advancing AI-enabled scientific infrastructure.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.
The US House of Representatives for the second time passed a war powers resolution directing Donald Trump to withdraw the US military from the conflict with Iran, amid renewed fighting that has driven oil prices to their highest levels in weeks and claimed four American lives.
The resolution proposed by Democrat Pramila Jayapal passed by a 214-208 vote, largely along party lines. The same four Republicans who had helped pass a nearly identical resolution in June – Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania – joined with all Democrats in attendance to vote in favor.
Far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was among thousands who gathered at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site
Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, joined thousands of Jewish extremists who stormed Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site on Thursday.
Escorted by armed police, they prayed, waved the Israeli flag and sang the national anthem in a provocative display of political power.
MONTEREY, Calif., July 23, 2026 — For more than a century, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) has developed military leaders and research solutions to meet the unique needs of America’s Navy and national security.
Established in 1909 and now celebrating 75 years in Monterey, NPS has continually adapted to technological change while maintaining its focus on preparing leaders for national security. Today, that tradition continues at NPS with the arrival of the first NVIDIA DGX GB300 AI supercomputer in the U.S. military.
U.S. Navy Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander, U.S. Pacific Command; retired U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Ann E. Rondeau, president of the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS); Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA; and Hank Plain, board chair of the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation, cut a ribbon to mark the commissioning of the NVIDIA DGX GB300 AI supercomputer at NPS in Monterey, California, July 22, 2026. The system provides NPS and approved research partners with high-performance computing capability for defense-focused research. Photo credit: NVIDIA.
From aviation and radar to space, cyber, autonomy and artificial intelligence (AI), each era has introduced technologies that transformed how naval and joint forces operate and how the nation competes strategically. Each era has also demanded NPS graduates that are capable of understanding those technologies and applying them to increasingly complex operational challenges.
The DGX GB300 system supports ongoing collaborative AI research established under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between NPS and NVIDIA announced in December 2024, and was formally launched during a ribbon-cutting ceremony July 22, 2026 at NPS attended by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Commander, U.S. Pacific Command Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, NPS President retired Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau along with faculty, students, military leaders and collaborators.
“AI will be a backbone of America’s defense,” said Huang. “By supporting the Naval Postgraduate School and placing one of the world’s most advanced AI supercomputers in the hands of the men and women who defend our Nation, we are empowering them to train on it, build with it, and lead America’s fighting force with the decisive advantages our Sailors, Marines and Joint Force deserve.”
The DGX GB300 dramatically expands NPS’ computational capabilities and will empower future leaders with AI skills for a number of critical use cases in operational challenges including weather modeling, oceanic and operations research, cybersecurity, disaster resilience, and response planning.
NVIDIA donated the DGX GB300 to the NPS Foundation, which installed it at NPS along with funding for research projects that require its high compute and memory capacity. Teams from Vertiv, DDN, VAST Data made contributions of infrastructure, storage and technical expertise which helped accelerate deployment of the capability.
The relationships enabled NPS to rapidly field an advanced computing capability through private-sector collaboration, demonstrating an effective approach for delivering technology, expertise and innovation in support of national security.
Education as the Foundation of Technological Leadership
Modern military leaders face operational environments characterized by unprecedented complexity and new challenges.
“The changing character of warfare impacts the entire spectrum of conflict,” said Paparo. “To achieve absolute decision superiority, we must leverage data, compute, and human-machine integration to observe, orient, decide, act, assess, learn and adjust faster than any adversary. As we connect these capabilities across space, sensors and networks, our operational advantage does not merely grow by addition, it compounds to deliver overwhelming joint effects.”
For NPS, that challenge lies at the heart of its strategic imperative — an education that drives cognitive readiness.
“Enduring advantage has never depended on technology alone, it depends on leaders with the intellect, wisdom and judgment first to deter conflict and, when necessary, fight decisively,” Rondeau said. “Our mission at NPS is to prepare those leaders. By partnering with NVIDIA, we are bringing together world-leading AI capabilities, the expertise of our faculty and the ingenuity of our students to advance their education, accelerate research and develop solutions to some of the most pressing defense challenges.”
Unlike traditional universities, NPS is a naval command with a graduate education mission focused exclusively on national defense. Its students are mid-career military officers and defense professionals who arrive with operational and combat experience and return directly to positions of increased leadership throughout the Navy and Marine Corps, the joint force, interagency organizations, and allied militaries.
“Education remains our greatest strategic advantage because, when all things are equal, the human element is the decisive difference,” continued Rondeau.
A Legacy of Computing in Service to the US Military
Long before machine learning and AI emerged as a strategic priority, NPS was pioneering military applications of advanced computational science.
In 1953, NPS acquired its first electronic digital computer, and in 1960, received Seymour Cray’s world-first all solid-state supercomputer, Control Data Corp.’s CDC 1604 — serial number 1. At the time, the system placed NPS at the forefront of advanced computing and supported applications ranging from numerical weather prediction and ocean forecasting to operational fleet analysis.
Over the decades that followed, NPS contributed to advances in computer science, networking, modeling and simulation, operational analysis, cyber research, and computational applications while educating generations of military leaders.
Dr. Peter Denning, distinguished professor emeritus at NPS and an influential figure in the evolution of computer science and the Internet, said the institution has consistently recognized the strategic importance of computational capability.
“NPS has a long tradition of pioneering advances in computing that have served our Navy and the nation well,” said Denning. “Prior to the arrival of Seymour Cray’s first transistor-based electronic supercomputer, NPS hosted a copy of Vannevar Bush’s Differential Analyzer, perhaps the most powerful analog computer of its day.
“Research in computer science at NPS included then professor Gary Kildall’s creation of the world’s first microcomputer disk operating system,” he continued, “early leadership in cybersecurity, and secure networking as one of the first ARPANET nodes, which became the technical foundation of the Internet.”
Looking ahead, Denning added, “NPS has consistently been at the forefront of computing innovation. NVIDIA’s collaboration continues that tradition, creating new opportunities for breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
Preparing Leaders for an AI-Enabled Future
The decision to place the first DGX GB300 in the U.S. military at NPS was driven by a shared focus on education, research, innovation, and NPS’ unique role in preparing leaders for future national security roles. “
As we modernize our technology, we must also modernize how we educate our leaders. The officers studying at NPS today will return to the fleet and joint force ready to lead AI-enabled formations,” Paparo said, an NPS alumnus. “Access to advanced computing capability means NPS students and faculty understand the opportunities and responsibilities that come with these technologies.”
Leaders throughout the day emphasized that advances in computing and AI increase — not decrease — the importance of human judgment.
U.S. Navy Capt. Michael Owen, NPS vice provost for warfare studies and leader of the institution’s AI Task Force, said future military leaders must understand both the capabilities and limitations of advanced technologies.
“As advanced computational capabilities continue to evolve globally, responsible understanding and stewardship become even more important,” Owen said. “The question is not whether these technologies will exist. The question is whether future military leaders understand them well enough to evaluate their limitations, apply them ethically, and employ them responsibly in support of national security objectives.”
Owen said NPS must prepare leaders to evaluate emerging technologies, understand their operational implications, and integrate them responsibly into military decision-making.
From Computing Power to Operational Advantage
The NVIDIA DGX GB300 represents a significant step forward in computing capability at NPS. Installed within the school’s existing high-performance computing environment, the new computer is not a data center, but a fully integrated system that combines computing power, storage, networking, and software designed into a single, scalable platform.
This extreme co-design enables NPS to gain a substantial increase in computational capacity to the NPS.edu network while operating within the existing power and water infrastructure of the school.
At its core, the DGX GB300 pairs 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs with 72 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, allowing it to process large volumes of work in parallel rather than just sequentially. This architecture is particularly well suited for large AI applications, where speed and scale are essential. It enables students and faculty to train models, analyze data, and explore complex problems that were previously out of reach.
“Initially, we will need to carefully manage demand as we bring this capability online,” said Trenton Hancock, NPS Chief Information Officer. “But what this system really gives us is the ability to explore more complex, real-world problems, especially those that mirror the challenges our operational fleet faces every day.”
While utilization is expected to grow steadily over time, the true value of this capability is not measured in compute hours alone. It is measured by how quickly NPS students and researchers can transform data into actionable knowledge, accelerate discovery, and develop solutions to pressing operational challenges.
“As this capability matures, it will allow student and faculty researchers at NPS to identify patterns faster, evaluate alternatives more rapidly, and generate deeper insights,” Hancock added. “The real value is accelerating the transformation of data into operationally relevant effects, reducing the time required to learn, adapt and make better decisions in support of naval forces.”
For the Navy, that requirement lies at the heart of U.S. seapower — decision advantage drives operational advantage.
Learning, Leadership, and National Security
Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Huang and Paparo joined Rondeau for a campus-wide fireside discussion focused on technology, education and innovation. Questions gathered in advance challenged the leaders on topics including the impact of agentic AI, leading in an AI era, and AI as a strategic capability in a new industrial revolution.
Huang emphasized that future advantage will depend not only on AI technology itself, but on how quickly organizations learn, adopt, and adapt with AI. He encouraged everyone to engage with the technology, noting that today’s AI makes it more accessible than ever and that success requires organizations to evolve their technology, information systems, and ways of working together.
The leaders went on to talk about AI as a new industrial revolution, as fundamental as electrification, railroads, semiconductors, and the Internet, and it will reshape productivity, scientific discovery, and national competitiveness.
Speaking directly to the students assembled, Paparo emphasized that technological superiority alone does not guarantee operational success.
“Many of you will command in AI-enabled environments. Information will move at lightning speeds, compressing response times,” Paparo said. “Our advantage will come from leaders, like you, who can use the technology to see, understand, decide and act faster while exercising the judgment, experience and leadership that machines cannot provide. That education is happening here at NPS.”
As an NPS alumnus himself, Paparo highlighted the enduring value of advanced education in preparing military leaders for future challenges and stressed the importance of institutions that connect emerging technologies with operational realities.
His remarks echoed a theme repeated throughout the day — technology alone does not create advantage, leaders educated to understand and employ it do.
At NPS, those leaders are already in the classroom.
Looking Ahead
Leaders throughout the day described the DGX GB300 as one example of a strategic collaboration connecting NPS, industry and military stakeholders focused on preparing future leaders and exploring applications of emerging technologies critical to national security needs.
With the commissioning complete, attention now turns from installation to application. The NVIDIA DGX GB300 at NPS will support education, research, experimentation, and mission-focused problem solving across a growing range of national security challenges.
Rondeau shared her thoughts on the significance of the event and what it means for NPS.
“Education has always been the great equalizer,” said Rondeau. “Our national security ultimately rests in the quality of its people, and our mission is to educate those people for our Navy and military. NPS students carry their education and research forward into the fleet, the joint force, and positions of national responsibility, and that is why we invest in giving them the tools needed to think critically, adapt confidently, and make sound decisions in service to the nation.”
The men were convicted over alleged plan to stage coup and organise deadly demonstrations over fuel prices last year
Two Russian men have been found guilty by an Angolan court of terrorism and spying after being accused of planning a coup and helping to organise deadly demonstrations in the southern African country last year.
Lev Lakshtanov and Igor Ratchin were sentenced to eight and 11 years in jail respectively. They had denied the charges, claiming they were in Angola for cultural and business activities.
September exercise called off after Kenya raises concerns over funding and jurisdiction for criminal offences
The British army has been forced to cancel training for its troops in Kenya after the Kenyan government refused to ratify a bilateral defence agreement.
While the UK government wanted to renew the existing agreement, Kenyan lawmakers had sought changes to give local authorities greater powers to hold British soldiers accountable for any offences committed in the country.
We are now a nation of homogenized open concepts and curb appeal. It’s an approach that leads to anxiety and isolation
Recently, Jonathan Swan – one of the authors of a new tell-all about Donald Trump’s second term – told the hosts of The View that if you had a pie chart of Trump’s mind, “a pretty substantial slice is devoted to interior decorating”. He also revealed that Trump is engaged in “design wars” with Melania and moved furniture she had selected into his spaces. The commander-in-chief apparently has even been caught supergluing gilded accents to the Oval Office mantel himself. Though Trump claims taxpayers won’t be on the hook for the costs of his renovations, the New York Times reported that the White House’s 18 major remodeling projects – from the botched Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to the paved-over Rose Garden to the looming “Arc de Trump” – will probably come with a price tag of $1.2bn.
Of course, Trump’s renovation compulsion didn’t start this year. The president celebrated winning his first term, in 2017, by ripping out the Oval Office’s royal blue carpet with the presidential seal and replacing it with a Mar-a-Lago peach version, accented with – what else? – gold. But in his second term, he’s gotten bolder, both politically and aesthetically – and more addicted. By the autumn of his first year back in office, he went ahead and tore down the East Wing entirely.
Committee accused of trying to ‘weaponize’ justice system via ‘laughably weak and vindictive criminal referral’
Democrats have accused the US House of Representatives judiciary committee of a “baseless” and “vindictive” attack on former special prosecutor Jack Smith after it referred him for criminal prosecution for allegedly lying to Congress over his investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Committee chair Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, wrote to acting US attorney general Todd Blanche on Wednesday night, asserting Smith “made willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact” during testimony about obtaining phone records of a number of Republican lawmakers.
July 23, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy has announced funding for new projects that will harness artificial intelligence to accelerate discovery. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will lead 13 projects and collaborate as a partner on more than 30 others.
Berkeley Lab will lead 13 new Genesis Mission projects and partner on more than 30 others. (Credit: Jenny Weger/Berkeley Lab)
The projects are part of DOE’s Genesis Mission, a historic national initiative that aims to build the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia, and philanthropy, it seeks to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.
Berkeley Lab’s contributions to the Genesis Mission build on decades of research in high-performance computing, managing large datasets, and pioneering AI models. Researchers will lead new projects across multiple disciplines, advancing fields including critical minerals, materials, manufacturing, fusion, and energy.
“By developing advanced AI tools and combining them with high-quality datasets and high-performance computing, our researchers are maximizing their scientific impact and speeding up discovery,” said Kathy Yelick, director of Berkeley Lab. “Beyond that, the Genesis Mission is also an opportunity to pioneer better AI tools and approaches for all of science, which will bring payoffs for generations to come.”
The goal of the Phase 1 Genesis Mission projects is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.
The projects that Berkeley Lab leads are:
AI Decodes DOE Data to Protect U.S. Hydropower and Grid: ASPIRE will create an AI-driven workflow using Department of Energy data to improve precipitation forecasting, helping secure U.S. hydropower generation and protecting critical grid infrastructure.
AI-Driven Autonomous Labs for Accelerated Materials Discovery: Researchers will create AI systems that work with autonomous laboratories to design, perform, and learn from experiments, dramatically speeding materials discovery and scientific innovation.
AI-Powered Discovery of Quantum and Optoelectronic Materials: AI powered by physics simulations will model excited states to identify promising quantum and optoelectronic materials, accelerating research for future computing, sensing, and energy technologies.
AI to Predict Water Supplies for Energy with Novel Precision: Scientists will develop an artificial intelligence framework to jointly predict surface and groundwater dynamics nationwide, supporting energy and water security.
AI Workflows to Run DOE Codes in the Cloud: The Agentic HPC Pipeline Initiative (AHPI) will build AI workflows that enable U.S. manufacturers to run powerful DOE research codes on commercial cloud platforms.
Breaking Silos: AI for Nuclear Waste Repository Design: AI will enable a streamlined environment to analyze nuclear waste repository design, dissolving existing silos through a digital-twin approach.
Closing the Loop: AI-Accelerated Alloy Engineering: Researchers will combine AI structure prediction, high-throughput synthesis, and advanced microscopy to accelerate the optimization and design of complex concentrated alloys for extreme environmental applications.
HERALD: AI to Unlock Nuclear Archives: The HERALD project will build an AI platform to vet decades of secure government research, unlocking it for the commercial industry to accelerate nuclear innovation.
Meeting Water-Energy Demand with Local, Actionable Predictions: To predict water resources for energy infrastructure, scientists will use AI to develop a highly accurate prediction system for water availability.
Novel AI Workflow for Critical Minerals in Geosystems: The team will use AI to optimize recovery of critical minerals from copper, molybdenum, platinum, chrome, and nickel mineral deposits.
Physics-informed Digital Twins for Fusion Magnet Systems: AI-enabled digital twins will establish a credible path toward the reliable operation of high-temperature superconducting magnets, supporting future compact magnetic confinement fusion power plants.
Predicting Subsurface Fractures with AI for Energy: Scientists will combine artificial intelligence and geophysical observations to improve prediction of subsurface fractures, advancing geothermal and other energy technologies.
Safely Storing Nuclear Waste with Advanced 3D Models: Researchers will develop AI-assisted 3D geological models that can effectively identify suitable sites for subsurface nuclear waste storage.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Munich-based AI startup to use Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure and NVIDIA Blackwell platform to ingest massive physical datasets and train task-specific ’embodied AI’ models.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., and MUNICH, July 23, 2026 — Microagi has announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to accelerate the development of models and robotics capable of understanding and interacting with physical environments. As part of the collaboration, Microagi will use Google Cloud’s advanced AI stack and the NVIDIA Blackwell platform to scale its model training workloads.
Microagi is one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI startups, with technology that already supports industry leaders including Unitree and UBTECH. The company’s business model is designed to accelerate robotics AI development by training task-specific models for individual robotic platforms. The company operates a unique business model designed to accelerate robotics AI development: including training task-specific models for robotic platforms.
The new partnership announced today will ensure Microagi has access to highly optimized, NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs (G4 VMs) and NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack-scale systems (A4X Max instances) to power its model training and inference workloads. This includes Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and leading AI models to process multimodal information like video, and an overall cloud platform that can scale its applications and technology to large enterprise customers globally. This infrastructure will support Microagi’s efforts to offer customizable software packages for enterprise robotics. For example, hospitality or industrial businesses will be able to procure robots pre-configured with Microagi models tailored for specific operational roles.
“Building the next generation of embodied AI requires intensive compute, a comprehensive stack of AI technologies, and deep engineering expertise,” said Bercan Kilic, founder of Microagi. “Google Cloud stood out as the partner capable of supporting this massive model inference pipeline, and together with NVIDIA’s hardware, it provides the foundation as we scale our business offerings.”
“Google Cloud’s AI stack is designed to power complex, multimodal data pipelines like Microagi’s,” said Dr. Itxaso Araque, Director, Digital Natives & Startups, EMEA North at Google Cloud. “By using high-performance infrastructure like the NVIDIA Blackwell platform within Google Cloud, Microagi is building a highly practical path toward deploying useful robotics in everyday commercial environments. We’re proud to underpin much of this rapid advancement.”
The close collaboration between Google Cloud and NVIDIA is helping Microagi train new AI workloads and optimize its training and inference pipelines. Working closely with both Google Cloud and NVIDIA engineering teams, Microagi can streamline its workflows on Google Cloud’s platform and bring new products to customers more quickly.
“Robotics is becoming one of the most demanding frontiers for AI, requiring massive physical-world datasets, accelerated compute and a full-stack platform to turn models into intelligent machines,” said Tobias Halloran, Director of EMEAI Startups at NVIDIA. “By running on NVIDIA Blackwell powered instances on Google Cloud, Microagi can scale the training and deployment of embodied AI systems for commercial and industrial environments.”
About Microagi
Microagi, founded in 2025, is a robotics deployment company. Its platform, Atlas, fine-tunes models on a customer’s own operations, drawing on Microagi’s proprietary data corpus, and closes the gap between the robot that impresses in a demo and the robot that does reliable work on the line. Atlas is hardware- and model-agnostic: a neutral layer between a customer’s infrastructure and frontier AI models, designed to prevent lock-in to any single vendor. Microagi is headquartered in Munich, with a research hub in Zurich and offices in London and New York.
About Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers a powerful, optimized AI stack — including AI infrastructure, leading models like Gemini, data management capabilities, multicloud security solutions, developer tools and platform, as well as agents and applications — that enables organizations to transform their business for the Agentic Era. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.
Lawmakers claim Commissioner Frank Bisignano used an agency email to exaggerate tax savings under the Republicans' OBBBA while inserting partisan political messaging.
i blocked the OW app from ever getting online. this is a safety precaution as an IT person. if software (onewheel app) or hardware (security cams inside my house) has no biz to be online, then it will be blocked from the net.
5 months ago, old OW app (also blocked from the net) can connect to my GT and work fine. i got a new phone recently. i guess i musta downloaded the latest version. i also blocked it from getting online and to my surprise...it refuses to work without getting online. it can identify my GT is nearby off course. upon tapping my board, it wont connect to view/adjust my board settings. ouch. guess i will figure a way to transfer the older app from my prev Android phone to this newer Android phone.
i see NoseDive app is an option but sadly it's only on iOS. here's hoping the dev will port it over to Android. pretty please!
TEL AVIV, Israel, July 23, 2026 — Qedma today announced an integration with Quantinuum‘s platform that will allow customers to use its advanced error mitigation on industry-leading quantum computing hardware. Qedma developed this technical integration over the past year as a founding member of the Quantinuum Startup Partner Program.
In many applications, Qedma’s Quantum Error Suppression and Error Mitigation (QESEM) software can enhance accuracy, enabling larger and more complex quantum circuits. Applied to a typical workflow, QESEM mitigates errors in the quantum computing output, enabling researchers to tackle increasingly ambitious workloads in pursuit of commercial and scientific advantage.
Quantinuum’s systems are among the most accurate based on average two-qubit gate fidelity. This enables quantum simulations at the frontier of classical computational limits, and real-world applications spanning finance, materials science, and beyond. Qedma’s error mitigation software further extends these capabilities, enabling even deeper, more accurate quantum computations and expanding the range of problems that quantum computers can solve.
“Running algorithms beyond the reach of classical simulation requires quantum computers with both a large number of qubits and exceptionally low error rates – which is exactly why we wanted to join Quantinuum’s Startup Partner Program,” said Dr. Asif Sinay, CEO and co-founder of Qedma. “In initial runs, QESEM’s performance on Quantinuum systems showed benefits on extremely challenging quantum workloads, including simulations at the frontier of classical computation.”
“The goal of our startup partner program is to make our developer platform and our leading hardware widely available, to foster innovation and accelerate time to market for the quantum ecosystem,” said Jennifer Strabley, Vice President and General Manager, Quantinuum. “This integration with Qedma creates a powerful way for our users to advance ambitious quantum research on our platform and shows how it is already being used to build the next generation of technology.”
“This partnership with Qedma reflects our commitment to giving customers the tools they need to solve groundbreaking problems on the best-in-class hardware,” Strabley added. “We’re looking forward to expanding our Startup Partner Program to include other promising companies to help our customers find real solutions to meaningful problems.”
About Qedma Quantum Computing
Qedma is accelerating the path to practical quantum computing by dramatically reducing the impact of hardware errors. Its hardware-agnostic software, QESEM, enables researchers and enterprises to run larger and more complex quantum algorithms while obtaining more accurate and reliable results on today’s quantum computers. By overcoming one of the biggest barriers facing the industry, Qedma helps unlock scientific discoveries and enables users to push beyond the limits of current quantum hardware. Qedma was founded by Dr. Asif Sinay together with two prominent scientists: Prof. Dorit Aharonov, who thirty years ago proved that error corrected quantum computation is possible and laid the foundations of quantum fault tolerance, and Prof. Netanel Lindner, a world-renowned theoretical condensed matter physicist known for his work on complex quantum systems.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity.[1] Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets.
The company has a global workforce of approximately 700 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team holds PhDs and Master’s degrees. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Qatar, and Singapore.
The oil price broke above $100 a barrel for the first time in two months as a fresh escalation of the Middle East conflict threatens to compound disruption to global oil supplies.
The benchmark oil price rose sharply on Thursday, from $95 the day before, amid fears that Yemen’s Houthi militia could strangle Saudi oil exports through the Red Sea while US-Iran tensions over oil flows through the strait of Hormuz intensify.
I’m looking for some advice from people who have more experience repairing Onewheels than I do.
I have an original Onewheel XR with only 110 miles on it. I bought it about 6 years ago, and the last time it was ridden was 2 years ago. It has been stored indoors the entire time, with no water damage, crashes, or heavy use.
At this point, the board won’t power on, but when I plug the charger in then the power button flashes blue. Based on what I’ve read, I’m assuming one or more battery cells have dropped below a recoverable voltage after sitting for so long.
My main question is: If the battery is dead from age, is the rest of the board (BMS/controller) likely still okay, or can a dead battery damage those components?
I also noticed a hard white residue on part of the BMS (photo attached). I’m not sure if it’s just residue that can be cleaned off or if it’s a sign that something has leaked or failed.
For those of you who have repaired XRs:
Do you think this board is likely recoverable with just a new battery?
Can an unrecoverable battery kill the BMS or controller?
Does the white residue on the BMS look concerning?
I’d appreciate any advice before I spend the money on a replacement battery. Thanks!
ARMONK, N.Y. and MALIBU, Calif., July 23, 2026 — IBM today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire HRL Laboratories, LLC (HRL), a flagship research and development institution. HRL is a private company jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors. Both Boeing and GM will continue to partner with IBM on quantum applications and advanced technology development following the transaction.
Credit: Shutterstock
HRL’s advanced expertise in silicon-spin qubit engineering will complement and extend IBM’s long-term mission to scale increasingly powerful quantum computers and accelerate its quantum vision. Superconducting qubits and spin qubits both leverage state-of-the art silicon fabrication. This shared foundation is amongst the reasons why these two modalities offer credible paths to scaling quantum technologies.
“The HRL team will help IBM push even farther forward toward the frontiers of quantum innovation,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM’s Director of Research and IBM Fellow. “This talented group of researchers brings a broad portfolio of technologies that will strengthen IBM’s long-term plans to deliver useful quantum computing to the world, bringing together advances across quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum networking to enable the applications of the future.”
“Joining IBM is the natural next chapter for what we have built at HRL, where our team has dedicated years to exploring paths to how future quantum computers could be built at scales that today seem impossible,” said Rob Vasquez, President and Chief Executive Officer at HRL “We now look forward to leveraging IBM’s industry leadership and working alongside their world-class talent on fundamental infrastructure to take this vision forward. Additionally, our cutting-edge physical and information science innovations will combine with their advanced research capabilities to deliver an unmatched suite of technology solutions for our commercial and government customers.”
HRL will also enable IBM to innovate in and industrialize promising technologies such as quantum sensing and drive new research into quantum materials. This includes ultra precise quantum sensors capable of detecting subtle physical phenomena and capturing finely tuned measurements for life sciences, navigation, defense, and scientific applications. Combined with additional capabilities in cryogenics, control electronics, qubit interconnects, and packaging, IBM anticipates that HRL’s technical breakthroughs will help fuel its quantum program for decades to come.
Additionally, HRL has developed innovations in novel quantum materials that have the potential to unlock better semiconductors and more sensitive sensors – all of which can optimize the performance and scalability of a wide range of quantum technologies.
Beyond its leadership in quantum computing, HRL brings deep expertise in advanced sensors, high-speed and high-power communications, electronics, advanced manufacturing, and materials science, developed through decades of research and development for both commercial and U.S. government customers. HRL’s broad technology portfolio will complement IBM’s innovation leadership and help accelerate the development of next-generation computing, communications, and mission-critical systems.
Advancing Quantum Computers for Generations to Come
IBM continues to define the direction for the industry with superconducting qubit-based architectures, including breakthroughs in error correction and new algorithms enabling quantum computers to run harder problems more efficiently. IBM’s roadmap to deliver the world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers is clear and on course. This includes delivering IBM Quantum Starling by 2029, which will be 20,000 times more powerful than today’s quantum computers and capable of running 100 million quantum operations. In the mid-2030s, Starling will be followed by the even more powerful Blue Jay quantum computer, projected to be capable of 1 billion quantum operations.
As IBM looks to further extend quantum computing, HRL will bring robust knowledge of silicon‑based spin qubit platforms and surrounding infrastructure that could offer new insights into how to best scale quantum computers into the next decade.
In May 2026, IBM further expanded its global quantum leadership when the company announced it would establish Anderon, the world’s first pure-play quantum wafer foundry. As a standalone IBM company, Anderon is being created with the support of the U.S. Department of Commerce to enable scalable, consistent, and agile manufacturing for a broad range of quantum computing modalities and companies. The acquisition of HRL offers an opportunity to partner even more closely with Anderon, including potential plans to develop spin qubit manufacturing to scale quantum manufacturing and enable faster learning cycles.
Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, and IBM’s acquisition of HRL is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The transaction is anticipated to close by the end of the third quarter of 2026.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.
Director of Environment and Society Centre gives evidence to UK Parliament Energy CommitteeNews releasejon.wallace
Ana Yang gave evidence to the UK Parliament’s Energy Security and Net Zero Committee on 8 July, discussing the UK’s role in international climate policy.
Ana Yang, Director of Chatham House’s Environment and Society Centre, gave evidence to the UK Parliament’s Energy Security and Net Zero Committee on 8 July, as part of an inquiry examining the UK’s priorities and global standing as a leader on climate action.
In the second session, Ana discussed how the UK can build on and strengthen its climate leadership on the global stage in an increasingly challenging fiscal, economic and political environment.
Ana described the changed geopolitical environment since the 2015 Paris Agreement, where climate change action is completely entangled with geopolitics – including rivalry between the US and China, US disengagement with the COP climate process and the war with Iran.
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Chatham House’s Ana Yang speaking at the UK Parliament committee.
During her evidence Ana said:
‘What we also see with the Strait of Hormuz…is almost this bifurcation of the petro states and electro states.
‘And then the question is what can you do in terms of the UNFCCC and COP negotiation in setting targets and sending the signals? But then the biggest question is, what does implementation look like? Implementation needs to link to national interests. It needs to link to prosperity…it needs to also link to the security issue.’
Addressing UK climate policy she said:
‘What is the re-industrialization story for the UK… there is a missing story. In the process of clean transition, can the UK reinvent itself and think about what are the next generation of green industrial policies that will transform this country? That will inspire people, have more jobs…that is the story that is missing that connects climate to everybody’s daily life…’
Renovate rooms, investigate the supernatural and watch people burst into song in this surreal British ghost story
A young American man arrives in a dilapidated British seaside town to take on the renovations of an equally run-down hotel, inherited from a mysteriously absent father he never knew. His power tools talk to him in a Scottish accent, the local people speak in baffling slang, and occasionally people burst into song. Oh, and there are ghosts.
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is a novel mix of genres – no bad thing in these times of sequels and remakes – but, according to the creative director of independent developers Friday Sundae, Anil Glendinning, it grew organically from a single goal: to tell a very British ghost story.
Concern over US effort to prosecute Sam Tunick, accused by authorities of wiping his phone using GrapheneOS
The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean.
The case, which had its first hearing on Monday, centers on a little-known US federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.
Latest wins highlight ongoing expansion of Infleqtion’s role in advancing U.S. national security and quantum leadership.
LOUISVILLE, Colo., July 23, 2026 — Infleqtion has announced it has been awarded three projects to accelerate American scientific research and innovation by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for the Genesis Mission. The projects include collaborations with Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of Colorado Boulder and span AI-optimized quantum circuit design for nuclear applications, deployable atomic quantum sensing with Agentic AI and nuclear fusion energy research.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
“AI data centers are pulling more power than the grid was ever built to handle, and the industry is recognizing that these types of issues are beyond the capabilities of classical computing alone,” said Matthew Kinsella, CEO at Infleqtion. “By applying quantum computing to some of the hardest problems in nuclear and energy research, Infleqtion is playing a critical role in advancing the objectives of the Genesis Mission.”
The goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation or generate new scientific insights.
Infleqtion’s quantum computing and quantum sensing products address critical market needs in positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), global communication security and efficiency, resilient energy distribution and accelerated quantum computing. The following three Genesis Mission projects have been selected:
A collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and Infleqtion to drive AI-optimization of quantum circuit design for realistic nuclear problems.
A collaboration between Brookhaven National Laboratory and Infleqtion to design and test deployable atomic quantum sensing enabled by Agentic AI.
A joint initiative between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Colorado Boulder and Infleqtion to simulate nonlinear plasma dynamics using quantum machine learning and agentic AI.
The awards mark another significant milestone for Infleqtion as government investment in quantum technology continues to accelerate. The company recently announced a Letter of Intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce, which outlines a potential investment of up to $100 million to expand U.S. quantum capabilities, and comes amid new executive actions designed to strengthen American leadership in quantum science and technology. Together, these developments signal growing recognition that quantum is becoming a strategic national asset, with Infleqtion helping bridge breakthrough research with deployable commercial and government solutions.
About Infleqtion
Infleqtion, Inc. (NYSE: INFQ) is a global leader in quantum technology, delivering neutral-atom solutions for quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. With a product portfolio spanning quantum computers, quantum optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors, Infleqtion’s full-stack approach combines high-performance hardware with the company’s proprietary Superstaq quantum computing software platform. Infleqtion’s systems are already in use by the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the U.K. government, and in multiple collaborations with NVIDIA. Infleqtion, in collaboration with NVIDIA, published the world’s first demonstration of a materials science application using logical qubits. With operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Infleqtion meets the demands of government and commercial customers across the space, defense, energy, finance and telecommunications sectors.
Staley is latest high-profile figure to testify before House amid investigation into Epstein, convicted sex offender
Former Barclays boss Jes Staley appeared before by US lawmakers on Thursday in a closed-door interview about his past ties to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Staley, who spent more than three decades at JPMorgan Chase before joining Barclays in 2015, is the latest in a series of high-profile figures to appear in front of the House committee on oversight and reform as part of its investigation into Epstein, who died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial over child sex-trafficking charges.
Good morning. The US has signed a landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that could allow the kingdom to enrich uranium in the future. The deal will be submitted to Congress for review, where it could face opposition among lawmakers who fear a lack of monitoring safeguards.
In lengthy talks stretching over more than one administration, the US has feared that Riyadh would look elsewhere for nuclear technology if the US did not provide what it wanted. Saudi Arabia has long said that if it does not partner with the US, it could do so with China or Russia, which have different proliferation standards.
Why is a uranium deal with Saudi Arabia controversial? The full details of the deal have yet to be released, but it comes as the US’s war with Iran is being fought in part to prevent Tehran enriching uranium domestically and make it near impossible for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. Saudi Arabia has in the past said it would need a nuclear weapon if Iran acquired one. Kenneth Roth has analysed why Trump would agree it right now.
What are the latest developments in the war? The US military launched its 12th successive night of strikes, which have now widened to western and central Iran. In attacks lasting five hours, the US claims to have struck military targets including maritime capabilities, missile and drone storage facilities, coastal surveillance sites and air defense assets. Yemen’s Houthi militia also attacked two Saudi Arabian oil tankers, the Iran-aligned group said on Thursday, with a Saudi news agency later confirming one of the vessels was ablaze in the Red Sea.
Tenisha Warner sat down for an exclusive interview with "CBS Mornings" before a lawsuit over her late husband's estate became public, and discussed her grief and raising her daughter alone.
Woolsey died of a stroke at Washington home after facing ‘Havana syndrome’ reported by some government officials
R James Woolsey, a national security expert who led the CIA for two turbulent years after his appointment by Bill Clinton, has died. He was 84.
Woolsey, who became CIA director in early 1993, died on Tuesday at his home in Washington, according to several newspapers. Conchita Sarnoff Woolsey, his wife, told the newspapers that he died from a stroke.
The justice’s opinions have offered the president workarounds to enact his agenda despite clashes with the court
Of the conservative justices on the supreme court, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have in the current session voted most consistently, at 89 and 88%, to support Donald Trump in his cases, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yet perhaps the most influential justice to advance key parts of Trump’s radical agenda has a slightly lower rating at 76%, and performed not so much by billowing lofty abstractions of originalism and textualism, but instead by contriving an assortment of glib schemes at justification.
Mayhem in the city streets, violence, even killings, renewed rounds of Trump’s threats and shakedowns around the world through damaging tariffs, and chaos within the Congress around birthright citizenship, all of which helped fracture the divided Republican leadership on the eve of the midterm elections, have followed the opinions issued by Brett Kavanaugh. By the end of this session, he has clearly emerged as the chief enabler to operationalize Trump’s most salient political issues.
The U.S. Navy is taking a major step to restrict press access to information about service members by no longer releasing information about any sailor's service history.
Greater Manchester chief constable says crucial data on phones seized from Heaton Park synagogue attacker was not examined
Greater Manchester police have apologised and admitted “a missed opportunity” before the attack on a city synagogue.
The force’s chief constable, Sir Stephen Watson, said the phones of the Heaton Park synagogue attacker, Jihad al-Shamie, were seized by officers but crucial data was not examined.
Shah will face Republican Jay Freely, a Trump-backed former NFL kicker, in November for battleground seat
Amish Shah won the Democratic primary on Wednesday in a hotly contested congressional district in Arizona, delivering another defeat to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which backed a rival, as more voters reject the preferences of party leaders in Washington.
Shah, an emergency physician, will face Republican Jay Feely, a former NFL kicker who was endorsed by Donald Trump in his primary, in the fall. Before becoming political opponents, Feely and Shah were part of the same team — the New York Jets. Shah was a doctor on the sidelines, while Feely was the kicker.
We all know the original Amiga was far ahead of its time, and the Amiga really doesn’t need more retrospectives and glazing. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t want more Amiga retrospectives and glazing.
I’m not sure I even saw an Amiga in person until 1987, but I knew just from reading about it that I wanted one. I wasn’t able to make it happen until 1991, so I was pretty late to the game. But even in 1991, an Amiga felt like living in the future. I could load several programs and switch between them effortlessly, with the only limit being the amount of memory I had. I could connect to a BBS with a terminal program, start a download, then switch it to the background, fire up a word processor, and do my homework while the download was happening. In some cases, I could even fire up a game and play a game while a download happened in the background. I could download stuff while I played Civilization, which was pretty great.
It’s 2026, I have an incredibly powerful Linux gaming computer, but since I grew up on DOS and Windows, to this day, I still feel the need the close every other application before launching a game. I don’t need to – modern operating systems handle such things just fine, mostly – but it’s so ingrained in me it’s hard to drop this habit. I wonder if people who grew up with more capable computers than whatever DOS nonsense I grew up with are less inclined to do things like this? Or did memory constraints act as an equaliser?
Anyway, the linked article doesn’t mention it, but the Amiga is still, somehow, going relatively strong for a platform that’s supposed to be dead. Modern(-ish) hardware is getting a bit harder to come by, but AmigaOS 4 and especially MorphOS are still actively being developed, and even running them in virtual machines on x86 has become about as easy as it could be.
Dubai is offering to pay residents who attract family and friends to visit the emirate in an effort to revive tourist numbers that have plummeted since the city was drawn into the US-Israel war on Iran.
The Dubai Invite scheme, an initiative of the department of economy and tourism, allows residents of the United Arab Emirates to nominate friends and relatives and then to receive benefits worth more than 3,000 UAE dirham (about £610) if they visit.
Live, rolling coverage of business, economics and financial markets as traders fear attacks from Yemen and Iran creating ‘two-chokepoint problem’
The Houthi attacks off the coast of Yemen targeted Saudi Arabian tankers, but two Chinese vessels carrying Saudi oil appear to be trying to exit the Bab el-Mandeb strait, Reuters reports.
From Reuters:
Two Chinese supertankers carrying a combined 4 million barrels of Saudi Arabian oil are exiting the Red Sea via the Bab el-Mandeb strait on Thursday, shipping data showed, even as a Saudi vessel came under attack in the region.
The ships’ attempt to transit the strait will clearly test how tightly the Houthis will impose the naval blockade on Saudi Arabia they announced on Monday.
BrianFagioli writes: Verisign is finally bringing web domains to the internet after a decade of fighting. Verisign says the .web top-level domain has finally been delegated into the DNS root, clearing the way for public registrations later in 2026. Until now, consumers could not buy normal working .web domains, despite the extension attracting a record $135 million winning bid in 2016. The launch could make .web one of the more recognizable alternatives to .com, but Verisign already operates both .com and .net, raising questions about whether this creates real competition or simply gives the dominant registry operator another valuable extension. The decade-long fight began after a company called Nu Dot Co won the rights to operate .web in a 2016 ICANN auction with a record $135 million bid secretly funded by Verisign. Rival bidder Afilias, which was later acquired by Donuts, challenged the sale, arguing ICANN should have investigated the relationship before allowing the auction. This triggered years of complaints, reviews, and legal disputes that have ultimately now been resolved under undisclosed terms.
New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction
Space datacenters proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts.
Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacenters” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets burning up upon re-entry appears to be accumulating in the stratosphere at alarming levels. The spacecraft release black soot, rare metals, aluminum oxides and other pollutants with unknown effects.
The EU fined Google 890 million euros ($1 billion) after it said the tech giant broke digital antitrust regulations by setting up Google Play and its search engine to steer consumers toward its own services and apps over others'.
PM says ‘those who try to harm the future of our youth will not be spared’ as scandal spirals into widespread anger
Narendra Modi has vowed to set up “fast-track courts” to speed up the punishment of officials accused of leaking examination papers, as the Indian prime minister seeks to quell a youth-led “cockroach” protest movement that has rocked Delhi and posed one of the biggest challenges to his government.
In his first public remarks on the movement, Modi posted on X: “Nothing is more important than the welfare and future of our youth … Those who try to harm the future of our youth will not be spared.”
Exclusive: Elizabeth Warren claims bank did not ‘meaningfully investigate’ Jes Staley’s links with sex offender
The leading US senator Elizabeth Warren has called for urgent answers from Barclays over what she claimed was its “apparent failure to meaningfully investigate” ties between the bank’s former boss, Jes Staley, and the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a letter sent privately to Barclays’s chair, Nigel Higgins, and seen by the Guardian, Warren – the most senior Democrat on the US senate banking committee – said it was “deeply unclear how Barclays, supposedly investigating Staley’s connection to Epstein, failed to uncover this decades-long relationship”.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Democrats hold an 11-point advantage over Republicans in a new national poll, although broader polling averages show a considerably closer contest for control of Congress.
The Emerson College Polling survey found 53% of likely voters supporting a generic Democratic congressional candidate, compared with 42% backing a Republican. Democratic support rose three percentage points since Emerson’s June survey, while Republican support increased two points.
Women favored the Democratic candidate by 27 points, according to Emerson Executive Director Spencer Kimball, making them the principal driver of the party’s advantage. Men also favored Democrats, but by a narrower five-point margin.
The result is more favorable for Democrats than other recent measurements. Decision Desk HQ’s national average placed Democrats approximately four points ahead, while pollster Nate Silver’s July 22 average showed a 6.1-point Democratic lead. Silver noted that the advantage had declined from a June peak of 7.1 points.
Generic-ballot surveys measure national voter preferences rather than individual congressional races. Their usefulness is limited by district boundaries, candidate quality, turnout and mid-cycle redistricting.
Decision Desk HQ currently gives Democrats a narrow advantage in the House contest, while Republicans remain slightly favored to retain the Senate. The Emerson poll surveyed 1,100 likely voters July 19-20 and reported a 2.9-point credibility interval.
Firm told to treat third-party services that appear in its results in ‘fair and non-discriminatory manner’
Google has been fined a total of €890m (£760m) by the EU for breaches of online competition laws by its search and app store services.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Google had broken the Digital Markets Act by giving priority to its own services, such as shopping and hotel deals, in search results over those of its rivals.
A decade ago, experts said I’d be the last reporter to face a subpoena in a leak investigation. How wrong they were
In 2015, after I won a seven-year battle with the federal government and refused its demands that I reveal my confidential sources for a story I wrote about a botched CIA operation, many media experts predicted that I would be the last journalist ever subpoenaed by the government in a leak investigation. They argued that new surveillance technology made it possible for the government to more readily identify sources inside the government without having to rely on the testimony of reporters. There was no longer any need for the government to go through the lengthy and bitter legal process of trying to haul reporters into court and threaten them with jail if they refused to reveal their sources.
Fast forward more than a decade, and it is obvious that those predictions from the experts were wrong. The notion that leak investigations are primarily designed to find leakers now seems quaint.
James Risen is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist
Exclusive: Ro Khanna says ‘reindustrialization’ effort would provide grants, loans and investments to smaller businesses
Democrats in the US Congress have laid out plans for what they say would be the “boldest” bid to revitalize the country’s industrial heartlands since the second world war – using revenue raised by tariffs on China.
A bill introduced this week would create a new bank to strengthen domestic manufacturing, provided with up to $15bn in funds each year.
Why Should Delaware Care? Amid a nationwide boom in data center construction, officials across Delaware have considered various proposals to restrict the industry in various ways. Earlier this year, New Castle County adopted a rule to limit where new data centers could be developed. Now, Kent County has followed suit.
Kent County’s Levy Court approved a new set of rules Tuesday governing where data centers can be built within the unincorporated parts of central Delaware.
And during their meeting, the local officials appeared open to considering calls for an outright county-wide ban on the fast-growing industry.
The approval follows the passage of similar regulations earlier this year in New Castle County after a contentious months-long debate that pit building trades unions against consumer-advocates and environmental groups.
But during Tuesday’s Kent County meeting, no one voiced outright support for data centers.
Instead, dozens of residents broke out in applause whenever there was a mention of certain areas of the county being off limits to data centers.
There was even louder applause when State Sen. Eric Buckson (R-Dover), a former Kent County commissioner, suggested during a public comment period that the county adopt a ban on the industry.
Ultimately, the Levy Court commissioners unanimously passed the ordinance that would establish a short set of rules to limit where in the unincorporated portions of the county data centers could be built, and what developers would have to do to receive approval.
The rules do not apply to cities, such as Dover, Harrington or Smyrna. It notably would not apply to one potential data center project eyed at the former Burris Logistics facility in Harrington, which sits within city limits.
“Your message is heard,” Commissioner Jeffrey Hall, who introduced the ordinance, told the standing-room-only auditorium in Dover. “This was necessary. If we did nothing, there would be no guardrails.”
Kent County Levy Court members discuss data center regulations on July 21. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MADDY LAURIA
The ordinance sets mandatory 300-foot buffers between data centers and residences; 6-foot-tall vegetative buffers; a set noise limit and written documentation from water and electric providers about how the project might impact existing infrastructure resources.
It also requires “letters of no objection” from the county, environmental regulators and other state and local agencies for data center proposals.
The new rule comes several months after New Castle County adopted its own data center ordinance that includes much of the same requirements, though Kent County’s residential buffer requirements are less than one-third of what is required in New Castle County.
Separately, Kent County’s attorney also said local officials are conducting a legal review to see whether a full ban on data centers could be a viable option.
Kent County Director of Planning Services Sarah Kiefer said the county’s ordinance was modeled in part after recently updated rules in Loudoun County, Virginia, known as “Data Center Alley.”
While the ordinance restricts data centers in certain areas, it also automatically allows them in two specific industrial zoning districts, with certain requirements. During Tuesday’s meeting, residents, and even some commissioners, took issue with that “by right” approval.
Kiefer said the county could require a conditional use application for every potential future data center proposal, but the Levy Court would have to amend the ordinance to do that.
Kiefer also noted that currently there is only one parcel within unincorporated Kent County that is vacant and has a zoning that could allow for data center development. The property is the site of the former Reichhold Chemical plant, north of Dover.
There is a second site, south of Felton, that is identified as a parcel that could be rezoned for data center development, Kiefer told Spotlight Delaware. She said the county has not been approached with any data center applications.
Kiefer also noted that other municipalities, including Harrington, have been interested in adopting their own local data center regulations as well.
Public comments seek protections
During Tuesday’s meeting, several residents made their general disdain for data centers clear.
“I used to complain about the smell of cows. I think I would rather have that than the hum of data centers,” one Fox Hall resident said. “We don’t want data centers here.”
Others provided more nuanced opposition. Some said they want data centers to have to ask for special permissions, regardless of the zoning of their land.
Still others said they want to see even more rules governing the facilities, including bigger buffers, more restrictive noise limits, and assurances to protect public health.
Linda Parkowski, executive director at the Kent Economic Partnership, testified Tuesday that there are no data center developers currently calling her office with an eye on Kent County.
“And it’s unlikely we will get that,” she said. “It will end up in a municipality.”
Why Should Delaware Care? On Monday, the state announced its first confirmed case of measles in more than a decade. Just days later, the state officially declared an outbreak with all of the currently confirmed four cases concentrated in Kent County.
Delaware public health officials declared a measles outbreak after confirming two more cases of the virus in Kent County on Wednesday, bringing the total count to four.
The announcement comes just days after the state announced it had confirmed its first case of the virus in more than a decade.
Officials reported the state’s first confirmed case on Monday. A day later, the state announced a second case, both in Kent County. On Wednesday, officials declared the outbreak following two more confirmed cases.
According to a press release, all four of the Kent County men who tested positive for the virus were unvaccinated. The press release did not include any other identifying information, citing medical privacy restrictions.
The press release also said the state based its declaration on U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that define an outbreak as “three or more cases of measles that are connected by time and location.”
Public health officials said contact tracing was ongoing, and they would notify those who have been exposed to “confirm whether they have been vaccinated against measles, provide educational resources, and to recommend treatment when necessary.”
Earlier this year, Delaware’s principal pediatric hospital, Nemours Children’s Health, reported a measles exposure, but no information about any confirmed cases was released at a later time. The incident involved someone from out of state who sought care at the Wilmington-area hospital, officials said at the time.
In 2000, the U.S. declared measles was eliminated. But last year, cases hit their highest level since that elimination declaration amid a wave of vaccine skepticism, according to the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
What can you do to protect yourself?
Measles is highly contagious, and one person can infect multiple other people if those people are not vaccinated. Symptoms can take days, or even weeks, to show themselves, Delaware officials said.
Symptoms can include fever, cough, pink eye or a runny nose lasting for days prior to the onset of the widespread, splotchy rash associated with measles, state officials said.
If someone is exposed or begins showing symptoms, the state health department said they should call its Office of Infectious Disease Epidemiology. The state offers two phone numbers, one for business hours, as well as a 24-hour hotline:
Business hours line: 302-744-4990
24-hour hotline: 888-295-5156
The state recommends that people exposed to measles find a dose of the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine within three days. According to a press release, these vaccines can be found at primary care clinics and pharmacies, and residents should contact their preferred providers to find out more.
Two of the nation’s top pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreens, both offer the MMR vaccine. Patients can schedule appointments online. Here are links to their MMR pages:
Children ages 1 through 12 are eligible for the vaccine and usually receive two doses. The first dose is usually administered after a child’s first birthday and then again after a few years.
Four confirmed cases of measles in Kent County are the state’s first in more than a decade. | WIKIMEDIA COMMONS PHOTO BY AARON DUNCAN
According to the state, those who receive the vaccine are protected for life if they receive both doses, though like all vaccines, the state says there is still a nominal chance someone could contract the virus if they are vaccinated.
National outbreaks amid rise in vaccine skepticism
Across the country, states have contended with worsening measles outbreaks in conjunction with heightened vaccine skepticism. This year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 2,260 cases in 44 states, according to data from last week.
Those figures are approaching 2025’s full-year count of 2,289 confirmed cases. More than 90% of cases in both years were confirmed in people who were not vaccinated against the virus.
One of the states with the worst outbreaks was South Carolina, which saw nearly 1,000 cases in one of its northern counties between October 2025 and April 2026. According to a state health dashboard, more than 900 of those confirmed cases occurred in individuals who were not vaccinated.
That same dashboard also said children were particularly impacted by the six-month outbreak. Close to 900 of the confirmed cases were in children under 18. Nearly 80% of those confirmations were among children younger than 11.
In Texas, however, two children died during an outbreak last year. The state dealt with an eight-month outbreak from January to August in the western part of the state. A release from Texas health officials said it had confirmed 762 measles cases, and the outbreak hospitalized 99 people.
Earlier this month, Delaware started its own Office of the Surgeon General in response to what it saw as a disconnect between state and federal health officials over vaccines.
In September 2025, as the federal government began revising vaccine recommendations, Delaware and other states publicly countered the new guidelines. When Delaware refuted the federal government, Gov. Matt Meyer issued a “standing order” to pharmacists to “ensure ease of access” for people seeking the vaccines in the state.
It mirrored efforts in other states like Massachusetts, whose governor ordered her state’s insurance carriers to continue to cover vaccines, even if they were not recommended by the federal government.
Delaware joined with Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to collectively focus on “developing evidence-based recommendations on vaccinations, disease surveillance, emergency preparedness and supporting state public health labs.”
Why Should Delaware Care? A new state law has left Delaware’s fastest growing county to adapt its housing development process. Sussex County canceled public hearings for two cluster subdivision applications last week, the first of what could be many changes to come with how developments get approved in the county.
Sussex County canceled public hearings for two proposed housing developments in response to a new state law that county leaders said raises “serious, fundamental concerns” about the future of local control.
County officials also said last week they would “pause” public hearings for major subdivision applications, or projects including more than five lots, until they can develop a new approval process in line with the controversial state law.
The cancellations come after Gov. Matt Meyer signed Senate Bill 23, also known as “The Housing for Every Delawarean Act,” into law last week. In an effort to improve housing availability in Delaware, SB 23 requires most localities to ease restrictions on building more dense housing, like apartments and townhomes.
The new state law aims to speed up the development process by removing public hearings for some proposals, a provision that critics say reduces transparency but developers say will shorten the homebuilding timeline.
The bill also sparked controversy among local leaders who said it is part of an ongoing erosion of local control.
“This year’s General Assembly session has brought about serious, fundamental concerns about the nature of government and local authority here in Delaware,” Council President Douglas B. Hudson said in a press release announcing the public hearing cancellations.
Because of the changes codified by SB 23, public hearings for “by-right” housing developments are now prohibited. A “by-right” development is one that falls in line with local land use rules.
Sussex County officials said the two proposals set to be considered last week appear to fall under the “by-right” public hearing prohibition.
Those two projects, a 64-home development near Millsboro and 70 homes near Harbeson, will move forward, Sussex County Councilman Steve McCarron said. Though it is unclear what exactly comes next.
“We have a process, and we can no longer follow that process,” McCarron said.
What about future development approvals?
Beyond last week’s cancellations, the future of Sussex County’s 15 other pending major subdivision applications remains unclear.
A county spokesperson said he could not comment on whether any of those applications would also move forward by-right, “pending further legal research.”
Meanwhile, Joe Pika, president of the Sussex Preservation Coalition, a local advocacy group that lobbies for smart growth practices in the fast-growing southern county, said he is concerned there may be as many as 25 applications, representing thousands of new units, that could move forward without a public hearing.
“We do not believe that it’s reasonable to make this law effective immediately,” Pika said. “Counties and towns throughout the state really don’t understand what’s now expected of them as a result of the changes of SB 23. Everyone needs guidance and clarification of what is still allowed, and what’s not.”
While many of the provisions in the new law are well-intended, Pika said it will not deliver affordable housing. The changes, he said, are having the unintended effect of speeding up the construction of unaffordable housing in Sussex County.
Some argue that building any type of housing can help lower costs, but Delaware State Housing Authority Director Matt Heckles previously told Spotlight Delaware that what the state really needs are smaller houses, like townhomes and duplexes.
Pika said one of the coalition’s largest concerns is the removal of public hearings.
“Making real estate decisions in the shadows is an invitation to public corruption,” he said.
But SB 23 does not remove all forms of public participation in the development process. The law allows for public meetings, which function differently than a hearing.
The law says residents can only submit written comments for these public meetings, and the discussion can only focus on whether a proposed subdivision meets objective standards outlined in land use and zoning codes.
Jon Horner, president of the Home Builders Association of Delaware, previously told Spotlight Delaware people often use the public hearing process to stop or delay housing projects.
Get Involved Sussex County Council will meet at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, July 28, inside the Sussex County Administrative Office Building, located at 2 The Circle in Georgetown. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
McCarron said he disagrees with the law because it does not promote income-restricted housing. But he did acknowledge that public hearings for by-right applications can be confusing for residents, because the Planning & Zoning Commission almost never has the legal right to vote down the project after the hearing.
But he said at public hearings, residents can request certain conditions that improve the project, like planting trees that act as a barrier around the border of a new development. He is not sure if public meetings will allow the same discussions.
The county’s statement said the council will “discuss the matter and any future ordinances at a future meeting.”
The agenda for the council’s July 28 meeting includes a line item about discussing the implementation of SB 23.
WEST BANK — On a hillside overlooking the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir, a crowd of Israelis and Jewish visitors from abroad gathered for an inside look at how settlement works. They listened intently as Netanel, an Israeli settler-soldier in olive fatigues with a rifle strapped to his back, advertised his group’s impact in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“It started with this hilltop,” he said, referring to the current settlement push that has crept ever closer to al-Mughayyir. “We ended up putting the area in Jewish hands. There are no Arabs here.”
Netanel was speaking on a tour aimed at English-speaking Jews, some of whom expressed interest in moving to the settlements. He described his “mission” to support his fellow settlers and shepherds in their return to “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name Israeli settlers and the Israeli government use for the West Bank.
The settlement movement is accelerating, recruiting outsiders to join and bringing in reinforcements from the military’s Hagmar battalions, regional defense units staffed largely with settlement residents that have exploded in size since October 7, 2023. The government has issued thousands of rifles to civilian security squads, at times distributed personally by Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Israeli watchdog groups describe the push as an unprecedented state-backed land grab, one that settlers are carrying out with an odd combination of tools: government-supplied rifles alongside herds of sheep and goats.
Reservist settler-soldiers like the Hagmar battalions “are not simply self-organized militia groups,” said Marko Milanovic, a professor of public international law at the University of Reading. “In essence, they should be treated in the same way as IDF soldiers as a legal matter.”
Established in 2025, the Metzudat David is illegal, even under Israeli law. It is one of 10 Israeli outposts that now surround al-Mughayyir as settlements expand at a rapid clip in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At one stop on the tour, a group of Israeli youths could be seen building a new housing unit for a family slated to move into the settlement.
“The ultimate goal is for people to leave their homes and villages. But the settlers aren’t acting alone, they’re backed by the Israeli government, which uses them as instruments to get what it wants,” Amin Abu Alia, the council head of al-Mughayyir, told The Intercept.
Settlers have taken over more than 38,000 dunams of al-Mughayyir’s grazing and farmland, the equivalent of nearly 9,400 acres. Across the West Bank, settlers living in farm outposts now effectively control roughly 1 million dunams — nearly a fifth of the entire territory — according to a report published this month by the Israeli watchdog groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot. The report found that roughly 750,000 of those dunams were seized since the current Israeli government took office in late 2022.
Of al-Mughayyir’s roughly 41,000 dunams, Palestinians today have practical access to only 1,200 to 1,500, Abu Alia said. The village’s eastern gate, which opens onto the Alon Road, has been closed by the Israeli military since 2023.
In response to questions from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli defense body that administers the West Bank, said the outposts “are known to the Civil Administration and are unauthorized.” The COGAT spokesperson added that the body had already demolished other unauthorized settlement structures. “Additional enforcement measures will be taken in accordance with enforcement priorities, the operational situation assessment, and the approval of the political echelon,” the spokesperson said.
“Once [the Metzudat David] outpost went in, it effectively closed off the village’s access to land to the east, displacing the community from that land,” Dror Etkes, the head of the Israeli settlement watchdog Kerem Navot, told The Intercept. Residents describe a growing sense of foreboding, a feeling that their time is running short before life in al-Mughayyir becomes untenable. And that fear has only grown. On Saturday, a 17-year-old resident, Fadi Naasan, died of wounds he sustained when he was shot during a raid on the village earlier that month, according to the al-Mughayyir village council.
The Maoz Esther settlement in the northern West Bank.Photo: Theia Chatelle/The Intercept
Only a handful of settlers like Netanel oversee the Metzudat David outpost. Otherwise, dozens of animals fan out across the land to claim as much space as possible, requiring very little manpower.
On the tour in June, Netanel showed off the more than 100 sheep and goats that do the settlers’ work for them. The herds graze out Palestinian crops, and their steady, intimidating presence — backed by the threat of settler violence — pushes farmers off land they can no longer safely use, clearing the way for the outpost to absorb it.
These outposts now control at least 786,000 dunams, roughly 14 percent of all land in the West Bank. Some 70 percent of the land seized by grazing outposts was taken in the past few years, according to Kerem Navot and Peace Now.
For now, the settlers don’t make any money from the livestock, Netanel said. The milk and meat aren’t profitable, but “the other work they do,” he said, “is invaluable.”
Palestinians living in al-Mughayyir are unable to enter the Alon Road, the main artery connecting the eastern half of the West Bank, and must exit through the western side of the village, via Khirbet Abu Falah. Residents say this adds at least an hour to any trip.
Even the fallback route is under threat. One of the new outposts, built inside Area B on al-Mughayyir’s northwestern lands, also encroaches on the very villages the detour runs through, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“They can do whatever they want. You can’t do anything about it.”
“If you go through the IDF checkpoint, it’s a gamble. They can arrest you, beat you, steal your money, steal your belongings,” Omar Mohammed, who lives in al-Mughayyir, told The Intercept. “They can do whatever they want. You can’t do anything about it.” The Israeli military did not respond to questions about mistreatment of residents at checkpoints.
Hodaya, who led the tour and knew a reporter was present, gave only her first name, like Netanel. “On the other side of two hills, there are also another settlement,” she said. “So now, you know, the [farms] are surrounded by Jews, and that helps to make the place more safe.”
During the tour, an Israeli military armored personnel carrier was stationed at the village’s yellow gate — the kind that has become a distinct marker of movement restrictions across the West Bank since October 7, 2023 — was shut.
When one of the participants on the tour asked whether Palestinians resisted attempts to confiscate their land, Hodaya answered, “They don’t accept it and say, ‘Oh, very nice, we’re going away.’ Of course they’ll fight. They’re on the land, and they were permanent … but they understand that there’s a change.”
There was a sense of excitement on the tour about a Jewish return to what participants called Judea and Samaria, and an explicit recognition that doing so would require displacing Palestinians from their land. “The assumption is that ‘We cannot get rid of [the roughly 3 million] Palestinians right now in the West Bank,’” Etkes, of the watchdog group Kerem Navot, said, describing the settler thinking. “‘So what we have to do is isolate them and take from them their means of livelihood.’”
A Third Temple flag flies in the Maoz Esther settlement. The Hebrew text reads, “And they shall make me a sanctuary.”Photo: Theia Chatelle/The Intercept
Al-Mughayyir was the village most affected by settler violence in the West Bank in 2025, when there were more than 70 recorded settler-related incidents, according to Nasser Khoudr, Middle East assistant research manager at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, known as ACLED. It is on track to earn the same distinction in 2026.
“One of the main reasons behind this is the expansion of nearby settlements and farming outposts, especially since 7 October,” Khoudr said. “This expansion has gone together with Israeli government policies that gave more power to settler security structures.”
In April, a settler shot and killed Aws al-Naasan, a 14-year-old student, and Jihad Abu Naim, a 32-year-old parent, at the boys’ school in al-Mughayyir, according to the United Nations and village officials.
Video of the attack, verified by multiple news outlets, shows a man in military fatigues advancing on the village and firing repeatedly toward the school.
The Israeli military said the shooter was a reservist traveling in a car with other Israeli civilians who exited the vehicle and opened fire at “suspects in the area,” alleging that they had thrown stones at the car. The military said the reservist was dismissed from reserve duty and his weapon confiscated, and that military police are reviewing the killings. No one has been arrested for the shooting.
Mohammed was one of the first to reach his friend’s body after the settler-reservist shot Aws in the head. “They come in half uniform, wearing the green pants, but not the shirt,” Mohammed said. “We can’t tell if they are a settler, a soldier, or, well, both.”
The distinction has dissolved. Even in regular army units, settler ideology has taken root. In March, reservists detained CNN correspondent Jeremy Diamond and his crew in the village of Tayasir while guarding an illegal outpost, telling the journalists on camera that the entire West Bank belongs to Jews and that they were avenging a settler’s death.
“We can’t tell if they are a settler, a soldier, or both.”
According to the U.N., no Israeli soldier has served prison time for killing a Palestinian in the West Bank since at least 2017, and the Israeli rights group Yesh Din found that 93.6 percent of investigations into settler violence between 2005 and 2025 were closed without indictments.
Last August, after a Palestinian gunman allegedly opened fire on a settler grazing his sheep on al-Mughayyir’s land, the Israeli military declared a closed military zone and uprooted olive trees across roughly 74 acres of the village’s land — at least 3,100 trees by the military’s own count, and far more according to village officials who spoke with The Intercept.
The military said that the clearing was necessary because vegetation near the road obstructed “the identification of enemy movement.” But the head of the army’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, told troops the village would “pay a heavy price,” prompting two Israeli human rights groups to demand a criminal investigation into him, suspecting he was ordering collective punishment. None ever occurred.
Netanel described participating in the uprooting. He said it was sad to see the olive trees die, but “it is for security, security of this outpost. We need a clear line of sight into the land.” As Netanel spoke, the roots of the trees still pointed up into the air.
“It’s a process, a process that we are progressing,” Netanel said. “That’s what’s happening here.”
Update: July 23, 2026, 12:16 p.m. ET This story has been updated with a comment from COGAT, the Israeli defense body that administers the West Bank.
The 17-year-old dreamed of playing for the Dallas Cowboys. Now he is America’s next big track star, with another chance for gold at this week’s US championships
George Lutkenhaus and his family were rushing to the airport. There was a plane to catch and traffic was bad. Inside the car was a tense silence. In the back, a teenager, minding his own business, AirPods in, seemingly oblivious. Wife Tricia turned to George. “Are you OK?” she said.
“No, I am not OK!” he replied. “What just happened there was not normal! And he’s just sitting there in the back … ”
A 162-game season guarantees failure as much as success. Inside a losing clubhouse, staying together and believing can become the hardest part of the job
If you ask professional athletes, they’ll tell you. Losing is no fun. But in Major League Baseball, losing big can be especially tedious.
An MLB seasons boasts a whopping 162 games (twice as many as the NBA and NHL) and even the best hitters fail two-thirds of the time at the plate. If a pitcher wins half his starts, he’s an All-Star. Because of that, says decorated starter Jamie Moyer, a losing campaign takes on a particular consequence.
From left: Mark McAfee is interviewed by ProPublica audio producer Gabrielle Berbey and reporter Annie Waldman at Raw Farm in Fresno, California. Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
I never thought I’d spend six months of my life investigating raw milk. But I did.
In early June, ProPublica published a story I reported that features Mark McAfee, who runs America’s largest raw-milk dairy. The story came about after months of reporting on how the Trump administration’s policies were reshaping federal health agencies. My colleagues and I spoke with dozens of civil servants, many of whom described a climate of fear in which routine science had suddenly become politicized.
But under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., current and former government workers told me, the federal approach to raw milk was shifting to align with his priorities. In his new role, Kennedy said he was “advocating” for it and celebrated the release of a federal report to Make America Healthy Again with a toast of raw-milk shooters in the White House.
McAfee, who counts Kennedy as a customer, has advocated for raw dairy for more than two decades. But only in recent years has raw milk, which once drew a fringe crowd, been thrust into the mainstream. More than 10 million Americans now drink it; national weekly sales rose by 65% from 2023 to 2024 alone.
McAfee’s farm is pulling in about $30 million a year. It has also attracted significant scrutiny: Federal and state regulators have linked his business to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that had left hundreds of people ill.
Raw milk’s success had confounded me: How had it gained such a foothold in this country, despite regular outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli?
Speaking with McAfee seemed like a good place to start. The story I reported takes you through my extended tour of his farm, and I encourage you to read it. Below, I’ll take you through some of the highlights of my conversations and interactions with McAfee and contextualize them with my reporting.
“I’m begging you to say: ‘This is not anti-science, this is extremely pro-science. … It’s using science that is not conveniently accepted yet.”
Dairy owner Mark McAfee, on the claimed benefits of raw milk
If you trust 150 years of bedrock science, there is little reason to consume raw milk. By definition, it has not been pasteurized, the simple process of heating milk to kill off harmful bacteria. Before the practice was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of babies died each year from illnesses linked to contaminated dairy.
Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure disease, and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children. Despite stringent hygiene efforts, contamination from deadly bacteria remains an inherent, unavoidable risk in unpasteurized dairy.
Exhaustive reviews of the published science on raw milk have broadly been unable to substantiate claims of its benefits, and most experts agree that it is neither healthy nor safe to consume. But McAfee said his customers know better. To him, the stories of families who believe raw milk has transformed their health are their own form of evidence, revealing truths that institutions have failed to capture. “If raw milk was a fad or a lie, then why would people repeatedly buy raw milk and then tell the world how they love it,” he said. “Our consumers read their gut and watch their kids thrive.”
He also said the government hasn’t invested enough in research to assess its benefits.
A laboratory technician prepares broth to test for pathogens inside a lab at Raw Farm.Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered. … But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”
McAfee, on his experience as a raw-milk producer
In 2006, six people contracted E. coli during the first outbreak connected to McAfee’s farm, according to federal regulators; their median age was 8. While the outbreak’s specific strain of E. coli was not found in the products, some samples taken by investigators had high bacterial counts, indicating contamination.
One of the children affected was 7-year-old Chris Martin. After about a month of drinking raw milk, he fell gravely ill with a dangerous strain of E. coli, known as O157:H7. Chris suffered permanent kidney damage. Now 27, he can’t drink alcohol and will spend the rest of his life under a nephrologist’s care because of his elevated risk of chronic kidney disease.
Mary McGonigle-Martin’s 7-year-old son, Chris, became gravely ill after consuming raw milk from Mark McAfee’s farm.Haley Clark/ProPublica
McAfee said the 2006 outbreak opened his eyes to the risk of his product and was part of the reason he developed standards for unpasteurized dairies. But more awareness and better practices didn’t stop McAfee’s customers from continuing to get sick — in 2007, 2011, 2012 and 2016 — and the farm had to issue recalls more than half a dozen times after pathogens were found in its products.
And then between 2023 and 2024, regulators linked the farm to one of the largest publicly known raw-dairy outbreaks in decades, with more than 170 people falling ill from salmonella. McAfee disputed his farm’s connection to many of the outbreaks, including this one. He maintained that regulators’ practices for tracking illnesses were not smoking-gun proof that his farm directly caused outbreaks.
At least 233 people have been sickened in eight outbreaks that federal and state regulators have connected to McAfee’s farm since 2006, and at least 40 of them have been hospitalized. The tally is almost certainly an undercount, experts and regulators told me. Many recover at home from foodborne illness and do not seek out testing.
Old newspaper articles and documents from nearly 20 years ago show Chris Martin, now 27, when he contracted an E. coli infection after consuming unpasteurized milk.Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
“We have a red-flag system here, where if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese. … Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”
McAfee, on his cheesemaking practices
Research has shown that raw cheese is not, in fact, resistant to pathogens; while aging can mitigate some risk, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process.
So, when McAfee told me about his cheesemaking practice, it took me by surprise: The farm did what with that milk? I asked him about it again.
McAfee confirmed that milk with pathogens was used to make cheese, except for batches with salmonella, which he said were dumped or sent out for pasteurization.
I would later find out that the federal government knew that his farm was doing this. In 2024, the Food and Drug Administration discovered his farm had a “standard practice” of producing cheese from milk suspected or known to contain pathogens, according to court documents. It had told the farm to stop and destroy any cheese made with contaminated milk. That was two years ago.
The farm pushed back. It said it followed federal regulations by aging its cheese and said it tested all of it before sale. To force the farm to follow its orders and stop this practice, the government needed a judge’s ruling. But a backlog in the courts delayed the case well into 2025.
By then, political winds had shifted. The Trump administration had come in, with Kennedy at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services. (McAfee said the farm no longer diverted problematic milk to cheesemaking.)
Bottles of raw milk are preserved for testing. Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublicaRaw Farm makes cheese products from its raw milk.Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
“They have the guns and the money. I got the truth and the moms.”
McAfee, on the federal government
While federal officials were gathering evidence against the farm, McAfee focused on the “education” of consumers. Online influencers were spreading his message to audiences of millions.
In January, the government dropped its efforts to take action against the farm. A former federal employee with knowledge of the suit told me that cases involving raw milk were deprioritized in the new administration because of Kennedy’s stance on it.
A Justice Department spokesperson didn’t respond to my questions about the decision, but said in an email that the administration will “always be concerned about risks to public health and will continue to take enforcement action as appropriate to protect American consumers.”
The health department and the FDA did not respond to my attempts to seek comment. Kennedy, through his department, also did not respond to my questions.
McAfee called the withdrawal a “big win.” Drawing on ancient Chinese military leader and philosopher Sun Tzu’s teachings, he told me that he had learned to engage not in “their war,” but his own.
Alyssa Wolfer, 42, of Bakersfield, California, a proponent of raw milk and supporter of Raw Farm, attends its Camping With the Cows event.Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
“Our sales are highest they’ve ever been, and feedback online with influencers is: If the FDA says something, do the opposite. It’s safer. They don’t trust them at all.”
McAfee, after regulators linked another outbreak to his farm
Just weeks after my visit to Raw Farm, federal regulators publicly linked its cheese to yet another E. coli outbreak. Nine people were infected across three states; more than half were younger than 5. It took 18 days for the farm to issue a recall, and when it did, it said it was doing so “under protest.” Raw Farm had tested its products, found no pathogens and wasn’t at fault, McAfee told me.
I asked McAfee whether the illnesses might be connected to his practice of using problematic milk to make cheese. But now, he told me a different story. “We would in the past divert to cheesemaking,” he said. “We no longer do.”
I brought up the fact that he’d made similardisclosures in podcasts in the last year and to me just weeks earlier. But he doubled down.
“I think you have caught me in something where there’s an issue between practice and what I’m saying,” he said. “If I said it, I believed that at the time to be true, but I do know that now we do not use any questionable milk.”
On April 30, the FDA closed its investigation into the recent E. coli outbreak in cheese without taking any enforcement action. McAfee told me his raw-cheese products were back in stores. Sprouts and H-E-B, two major retail chains that have carried his cheese, did not respond to my emailed questions about the outbreak.
McAfee exits the hangar where his airplane is stored at Raw FarmSarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
The agreement offers the Saudis the same options Trump has sworn Iran will never have
The stark contrast between Donald Trump’s nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia and his nuclear demands for Iran would be comical if not so tragic. Trump has handed the Saudis the same nuclear options he swore Iran would never have.
To make matters worse, Trump seems to have offered the Saudis this sweetheart deal to make amends for his disastrous war of choice with Iran. Meanwhile, he continues to bomb Iran in a push to open the strait of Hormuz, which was not closed until Trump launched his counterproductive war.
CBA chair says contempt charge over closing speech by Rajiv Menon KC has left lawyers fearful of doing their job
The prosecution of a leading human rights barrister for contempt of court over his closing speech during a trial of Palestine Action activists has left lawyers fearful of doing their job, the chair of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) has said.
Rajiv Menon KC, who was acting for the defence, is due to stand trial next week, accused of breaching the judge’s directions in the trial of six people for a direct action protest at an arms factory of the Israeli subsidiary Elbit Systems UK in Filton, near Bristol, in 2024.
This post is about the evolution of Futhark’s type checker, motivated by a large refactoring I am about to merge. It is probably mostly of interest to other language designers, and contains some lessons I wish I had known when we first got started – although I am not particularly well-read in the type checking literature, so it’s possible all of this is old hat.
Oradea is only major city in EU where local authorities have repeatedly blocked Pride plans
Campaigners in a Romanian city have vowed to go ahead with a Pride march after local authorities denied permission for the fourth consecutive year.
Since 2023, campaigners in the western city of Oradea, which has a population of about 180,000, have sought permission to hold Pride events. However, each year they have faced opposition, making Oradea the only major city in the EU where local authorities have repeatedly blocked Pride marches.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Secret Service has opened roughly 10,000 protective-intelligence cases since January, a nearly 40% increase from the same period last year as threats against government officials increasingly originate online.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran said the volume is unprecedented during his 24-year career. Officials attributed the rise to ideological grievances, lone actors, foreign threats and people experiencing mental-health crises.
The agency reported nearly 10 times as many mental-health interventions as last year. Those cases include voluntary and involuntary commitments and coordination with families and healthcare providers when investigators identify people who may pose a danger.
Officials said agents initially treat every reported threat as potentially credible before evaluating whether the person has the intent, capability and opportunity to commit violence. Warning signs may include stalking, escalating grievances, fixation on a public official or unusual interest in violence.
The Secret Service is also expanding counter-drone systems around the White House and presidential events. The FBI said it seized more than 700 drones operating illegally near World Cup venues this summer.
The threat assessment comes before President Donald Trump attends Friday’s rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria, where officials are conducting a new security review.
Northrop Grumman has launched a private satellite-servicing mission to attach life-extending "jetpacks" to aging communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit. "It's the second satellite-saving mission to launch this month, all part of a growing, money-saving effort to keep spacecraft running as long as possible," reports Phys.org. From the report: Launched by SpaceX, Northrop Grumman's mission robotic vehicle -- dubbed MRV -- and its jetpacks will spend the next year angling into the proper orbit 22,300 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth. Hundreds of satellites orbit at this so-called geosynchronous orbit, where they match the speed of Earth's rotation and keep to the same part of the sky for continuous coverage. Once in place by mid-2027, the minivan-sized spacecraft will use its 10-foot (9-meter) arms to attach a jetpack to an aging communication satellite. Then it will zip off to two more satellites in need.
For its debut flight, the spacecraft was accompanied by three electric-propelled jetpacks that peeled away separately following liftoff. Like the MRV, the jetpacks will use their own xenon gas thrusters to get to the desired orbit. Once in place, the jetpacks will wait for the robot to grab them, one at a time, and plug them into their designated satellites. Each jetpack -- the size of a washing machine -- will provide the necessary oomph for an out-of-gas satellite to keep operating for several more years instead of retiring. If it works, it will be a boon for satellite operators SES of Luxembourg and Optus of Australia, saving them millions of dollars in replacement costs.
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — Records obtained by environmental activists show the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission repeatedly accessed sensitive driver information belonging to critics of the agency, prompting questions about whether law-enforcement databases were used for legitimate security purposes.
At least 16 activists discovered that FWC employees searched their records in Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database, known as DAVID. The system contains addresses, photographs, signatures, emergency contacts and other personal information available only for authorized government purposes.
Documentary filmmaker Brent Fannin’s records were accessed seven times in 2025 under the stated justification of a criminal investigation. Bear Warriors United founder Katrina Shadix was reportedly searched 17 times between 2023 and 2025. Several people said they had never attended an FWC meeting or been informed that they were under investigation.
FWC spokesperson Shannon Knowles denied that the agency weaponized its authority. She said officers assess potential security risks following threats involving agency employees and commissioners. Commission Chairman Rodney Barreto separately said people speaking at meetings were checked after threats connected to the state’s bear-hunt debate.
The agency acknowledged that the activists are not currently under criminal investigation. Some are considering lawsuits alleging that officials accessed their private records without a lawful purpose.
Dunedin will be the focal point, having last experienced such an eclipse in 1163 – before any humans reached New Zealand
Hotels are booking out two years in advance in the New Zealand city of Dunedin as it prepares for the region’s first total solar eclipse in more than 850 years.
At 4.17pm on 22 July 2028, the moon will pass in front of the sun, casting a roughly 100km-wide shadowy band across parts of southern New Zealand. Everywhere within that band – from tourist hotspot Queenstown in the west to Dunedin city in the east – will be plunged into daytime darkness for 2 minutes and 51 seconds.
The GOP chair of the House Judiciary Committee encouraged the DOJ to look into criminally charging Jack Smith, alleging the former special counsel who brought charges against President Trump lied to Congress.
Longtime Slashdot reader BeaverCleaver shares a report from the BBC: The wreckage of a Pan American Airways plane has been found 74 years after it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in a crash that prompted mandatory airline safety briefings. The Clipper Endeavor was found 2,000ft (610m) below sea level off the coast of Puerto Rico with a sonar-equipped drone. It went down on April 11, 1952, following multiple-engine failure shortly after take-off.
Everyone onboard survived the impact -- but passengers struggled to locate life vests and rafts as the plane rapidly sank. Of the 69 passengers and crew onboard, just 17 survived. The disaster led to sweeping reforms in aviation safety, including compulsory pre-flight safety briefings on every commercial flight. [...] Today, before every commercial flight, cabin crew are required to outline where a plane's exits are, as well as the location of life vests and how to inflate them.
MARIETTA, GEORGIA — President Donald Trump turned a Wednesday event promoting children’s investment accounts into a campaign attack against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, repeatedly labeling Democrats communists and accusing them of threatening American families.
Speaking at Wheeler High School, Trump called Ossoff a “terrible senator” and initially compared him to “Pinky Herman,” apparently confusing the name of television character Pee-wee Herman. He corrected himself later in the speech.
Trump claimed Ossoff and other Democrats want to raise taxes, weaken border protections and permit Marxists to control the government. He also said Democrats opposed tax exemptions for tips, overtime and Social Security income.
Ossoff voted against Trump’s broader 2025 tax and spending package, which included those provisions. However, the no-tax-on-tips proposal had previously attracted bipartisan support, and opposing the full package does not necessarily mean opposing every provision within it.
Trump also described the legislation as delivering the largest tax cut in American history. The Tax Foundation ranks it as the sixth-largest when measured as a percentage of the economy.
The remarks came as Republicans target Ossoff’s Senate seat in one of the country’s most competitive midterm races. Trump endorsed Republican nominee Mike Collins, while Ossoff has increasingly centered his campaign on direct criticism of the president.
Hey everyone, I’ve been building an app called AtlasCam and wanted to share it here since Onewheel riding is a big part of why I made it.
I wanted ride videos that showed more than just the camera footage. AtlasCam records video while logging the ride, and it can connect to your board over Bluetooth to include things like speed, battery, ride mode, energy use, GPS route, altitude, and weather.
You can move the overlays around, export the full video with the ride data baked in, or just trim out and export a part of a longer ride if that's all you want to share. One heads up on performance: longer rides can still take a bit to process on export, but shorter rides work great and export quickly. If you're planning to post clips to social media, a video around a minute or so tends to be the sweet spot.
I also made a Mac companion app called AtlasCam Studio. You can bring your rides over from the phone, trim and split clips, adjust the telemetry overlays, and export everything from the Mac. All data is stored locally, nothing gets sent to any server anywhere.
An Android version is also in development — hoping to get that out fairly soon, so if you're an Android rider, stay tuned.
There's more in the app than I've covered above, including:
Voice mode (BYO OpenAI API key) that lets you set routes on the map while recording
Telemetry mode
Multi-cam mode
3D Gaussian splatting (largely experimental and lidar required)
Apple Watch connection
Recording straight to an external device like an SSD
I’m still actively working on both, so if anyone tries them, I’d really appreciate honest feedback. I’m especially interested in how the board connection works across different models and firmware, and which stats people actually want in their videos.
Just to be clear, the Onewheel integration is unofficial and AtlasCam isn’t affiliated with Future Motion. You must connect to your Onewheel via the official app first, then open AtlasCam.
Look forward to seeing some rides! 🙌
Update:
Update for everyone who had the app crash immediately on opening (@Waterguytony, u/youshantsteakpee, and anyone else who hit this) — sorry for the trouble, and thanks for sticking with me while I tracked it down.
Turns out it wasn't a permissions thing after all — that was my best guess early on, but I got some real crash logs that pointed at the actual cause: on phones with the newer multi-lens camera systems (iPhone 15/16/17 Pro and similar), the app was trying to configure a lens-switching feature at the wrong moment during camera setup, and on a fresh install that could crash the app right as it opened. It wasn't about which permissions you granted or declined — that was a red herring on my end.
Good news: it's fixed and will be in the next release. I'll drop a note here once that version is live in case anyone wants to confirm it on their end.
Appreciate everyone who reported this and answered my questions — genuinely made the difference in finding it.
A reminder that my colleagues are covering the latest out of the Middle East at our dedicated live blog.
Donald Trump took to Truth Social a short while and noted that the US will destroy one bridge or power plant, including those near Tehran, “any time” that Iran “shoots a ship” in the strait of Hormuz.
Shooting happened on street in popular neighborhood lined with restaurants, bars, shops and homes
A police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed a man Wednesday in an incident that was captured on cellphone footage, sparking local protests.
John Patterson, the Madison police chief, acknowledged the shooting at a news conference, but stressed footage circulating was just one perspective of what happened.
I had heard some rumors about ghosting issues with the stompies foot pads but wasn't sure if they had redesigned the stompies for the newer x7lrs and have been shipping out new boards with a redesign that fixed the issue but apparently that's not the case and yesterday almost lost my board in the river. Anyone else have any experience with this I reached out to and created a ticket on discord through fungineers support but have yet to hear back. Also wanted to add it is a fairly new board I got it on July 1st and it has 275 miles on it and this was the first time ever having any issues with it
Nearly 300 projects selected from historic RFA response spanning all 50 states to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, discovery science, and national security.
WASHINGTON, July 22, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the first projects selected under the Genesis Mission Request for Applications (RFA). The national portfolio of research teams will help develop and demonstrate AI-enabled scientific workflows designed to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, discovery science, and national security.
Credit: DOE
Designed to double America’s scientific productivity, the Genesis Mission brings together DOE’s world-class scientific capabilities, advanced AI, high-performance computing, and the nation’s leading researchers to transform how scientific discovery is conducted and strengthen American leadership in science and technology.
“America has no shortage of bold ideas or talented scientists, and the response to the Genesis Mission proves that,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “The 278 projects selected today represent the very best of our nation’s scientific enterprise. The remarkable number of high-quality proposals we received demonstrates that America’s innovation pipeline is strong, and it points to even greater opportunities for future investment and continued expansion of the Genesis Mission portfolio.”
The Genesis Mission RFA generated the largest response to a funding opportunity in DOE history. Following a rigorous merit review process, the selected projects represent:
278 awards: 87 led by DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) National Laboratories, 168 led by universities, 19 led by companies, and 4 led by nonprofit organizations.
342 participating institutions: 16 DOE and NNSA National Laboratories, 142 universities, 157 companies, 13 nonprofit organizations, and 14 other institutions.
These projects will address some of the nation’s most pressing energy, scientific, and engineering challenges, including in nuclear energy, critical mineral extraction, intelligent chip design, and commercial fusion energy.
Among the selected projects, the largest is a three-year, $60 million investment in nuclear energy that will harness AI to help deliver nuclear facilities faster and safer while cutting operating costs to provide Americans with affordable, reliable, and secure energy.
“The extraordinary response to this Genesis Mission application process demonstrates that America’s scientific community is ready to reimagine how discovery happens,” said Under Secretary for Science Dr. Darío Gil. “Through the Genesis Mission, we are bringing together the nation’s leading researchers, institutions, and technology partners to build the next generation of scientific capability. We look forward to seeing these teams demonstrate new research workflows that accelerate discovery and reveal what is possible when AI and science advance together.”
With today’s selections, research teams will begin developing and demonstrating AI-enabled scientific workflows designed to accelerate scientific discovery across DOE’s mission areas. Awardees will gain access to the Genesis Mission Platform, including AI agent frameworks, advanced AI models and software made available through industry partners, and high-performance computing resources across DOE’s National Laboratories and partner facilities. Together, these capabilities will enable researchers to rapidly design, test, and refine new approaches to accelerate scientific discovery.
The US has signed a landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that could allow the kingdom to enrich uranium in the future.
In a statement on Wednesday, the US Department of Energy said its secretary, Chris Wright, and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, signed a “peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement”, along with a “bilateral safeguards agreement”.
TOKYO, July 22, 2026 — Hitachi, Ltd. today announced that it has been selected as the prospective implementing organization for New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (“NEDO“) “Post-5G Information and Communication System Infrastructure Enhancement R&D Project” theme titled “Accelerating the Development and Demonstration of Next-Generation Quantum Computers to Solve Social Challenges.”
This project was jointly proposed by Hitachi and Intel K.K., the Japanese subsidiary of Intel Corporation, and builds on the comprehensive strategic collaboration previously announced by Hitachi and Intel. Following its selection, Hitachi will advance the project through joint research with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). The project period is scheduled to run until March 2029.
Hitachi is working to establish foundational technologies for the design, manufacturing, and integration of qubit chips based on semiconductor mass-production processes. To realize practical quantum computing, Hitachi is accelerating research and development of large-scale, highly reliable silicon quantum computers with a view toward mass production, while building next-generation computing infrastructure to help address social challenges. Through these efforts, Hitachi aims to create new solutions and bring them into practical use in society.
Expectations for quantum computers are rising as a means of addressing social challenges that are difficult to solve with conventional computers. To demonstrate clear value in real-world applications, it is necessary to realize fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of correcting noise-based errors, which require integration at the scale of one million qubits.
Silicon quantum computers are expected to be suitable for large-scale applications because they can utilize existing semiconductor manufacturing technologies. For future practical application, it is necessary to address challenges across manufacturing, integration, and operation, such as smoothly bridging the gap from the research stage to mass production and industrialization and responding to performance variations in devices.
Hitachi is also strongly promoting research and development in the Moonshot R&D Project (Goal 6) led by the Cabinet Office. Additionally, Hitachi has collaborated with research institutions such as RIKEN, a National Research and Development Agency, and imec, a global innovation hub for nanoelectronics and digital technology, and has built up foundational technologies such as control technology that enables the stable operation of qubits over long periods. This project aims to translate these academic achievements into practical technologies and industrial applications. Hitachi will continue to advance everything from chip design to high-density integration and cloud operations. By bringing together expertise from industry, government, and academia, Hitachi aims to realize large-scale silicon quantum computers and bring new solutions into practical use.
“With the advancement of AI, demand for computing that supports society and industry is expanding rapidly,” said Shigetoshi Samejima, Vice President and Executive Officer, CTO, GM of the Research & Development Group, Hitachi, Ltd. “At the same time, challenges are becoming more apparent, including rising power consumption in computing infrastructure such as data centers, as well as optimization issues in drug discovery, materials development, energy systems, logistics, and supply chains that are difficult to address with conventional computing alone. Hitachi positions quantum computers as a strategic technology that can break through the limits of computation itself and support future social infrastructure and industrial systems. We are pleased to have been selected for this NEDO project and to launch R&D together with Intel and AIST. By bringing together the collective knowledge of industry, government, and academia around the world, Hitachi aims to contribute to the early realization of FTQC (fault-tolerant quantum computing). In addition, through the realization of largescale quantum computers originating in Japan, the creation of new markets, and the development of an ecosystem, Hitachi will continue to drive the further growth of its digital business centered on Lumada.”
Based on the foundational technologies for qubit-chip design, implementation, and cloud operation developed through this project, Hitachi aims to launch the cloud service by fiscal year 2027 and then roll out services in stages. At the same time, as important milestones toward practical application, Hitachi will work to realize prototype silicon quantum computers implementing quantum error-correcting codes at the 100-qubit scale in fiscal 2028 and at the 1,000-qubit scale in fiscal 2030. Going forward, Hitachi will accelerate research and development through collaboration with Intel, AIST, and other partners. Furthermore, through these achievements, Hitachi aims to support the evolution of Lumada and contribute to solving social challenges that are difficult to address with conventional computing platforms, thereby helping advance industrial and social infrastructure and realize a sustainable society.
About Hitachi, Ltd.
Through its Social Innovation Business (SIB) that brings together IT, OT(Operational Technology) and products,
Hitachi aims to be a global leader in continuously transforming social infrastructure through digital, contributing to a harmonized society where the environment, wellbeing, and economic growth are in balance. Hitachi operates worldwide across four sectors – Digital Systems & Services, Energy, Mobility, and Connective Industries – as well as a Strategic SIB Business Unit focused on new growth areas. With Lumada at its core, Hitachi creates value by combining data, technology and domain knowledge to solve customer and social challenges. Revenues for FY2025 (ended March 31, 2026) totaled 10,586.7 billion yen, with 606 consolidated subsidiaries and approximately 290,000 employees worldwide. Visit us at www.hitachi.com.
President Trump attended a dignified transfer honoring the four U.S. Army soldiers killed in the Middle East in recent days during the ongoing war with Iran.
Gory details about tarp, mats and inflatable pool come to light during hearing over death of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
At singer D4vd’s former Hollywood Hills home, law enforcement detected possible bloodstains – invisible to the naked eye – on items including a green tarp, black rubber mats and a crumpled inflatable pool that had the odor of fresh laundry.
The gory details came to light on Wednesday, the second day of a hearing to determine whether there was probable cause for the musician, whose full name is David Anthony Burke, to stand trial for the murder and sexual abuse of Celeste Rivas Hernandez.
President visits swing state to promote ‘Trump accounts’ and says high prices lingering from Joe Biden’s presidency
Donald Trump scoffed at the word “affordability” as a political message, describing it at a campaign rally on Wednesday as a term concocted by Democratic political consultants to criticize his presidency. Yet even as the president dismissed the notion of affordability, he devoted much of his speech at Wheeler high school to touting the bread-and-butter benefits of his economic policies.
“So I just want you to remember that if you’re paying a little bit more – a lot of it’s come down now, we got it coming down very rapidly actually,” Trump said in Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, casting higher prices today as a lingering effect of the Biden administration.
Mayor Valentin Lavin, who was allied to President Claudia Sheinbaum's leftist party, had already survived an armed attack in January, according to local media reports.
More than 70 attacks have been recorded over past year, including acts of violence, property damage and vandalism
One mosque is attacked in Britain every five days, according to new data released by the government’s partner for monitoring anti-Muslim hatred.
More than 70 attacks on mosques in the UK have been recorded over the past year, which include acts of intimidation, violence, property damage, harassment, anti-Muslim hate speech, online abuse and vandalism.
"General Motors has been pulling a Tim Cook and boosting its software and subscription business," reports Business Insider. During the automaker's Tuesday earnings call, executives said they're increasingly leaning on software subscriptions like OnStar and Super Cruise to generate high-margin recurring revenue long after customers buy their vehicles. GM says OnStar brought in about $800 million in the second quarter, while Super Cruise revenue grew about 70% year over year. From the report: GM says its software business keeps roughly 70 cents of every dollar it brings in. That's a rare level of profitability in the auto industry, as many car sales generate just four to 10 cents per sales dollar. [...] GM expects to add about 1 million OnStar subscribers this year, bringing the total close to 13 million. Super Cruise, GM's hands-free, eyes-on driving system, is growing even faster. GM added about 70,000 subscribers during the quarter and expects to end the year with more than 850,000. Revenue from the service increased about 70% from a year earlier.
And a lot of drivers are sticking around after the free period ends. GM said between 30% and 40% of eligible owners continue paying after their included three-year Super Cruise subscription expires. [..] "We do think we have tremendous levers, multiple levers of growth," Barra said on the call. "We definitely think there's a lot of opportunity at GM to grow, improve margins, and become less cyclical."
"Software and services are becoming increasingly important to how customers experience GM vehicles and how we deliver value beyond the initial purchase," a spokesperson previously told Business Insider. "As vehicles become more software-defined, we can introduce new digital experiences through updates and optional services rather than hardware changes."
Shares in Elon Musk company fall more 3% in after-hours trading, as earnings per share miss Wall Street expectations
Tesla reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, disclosing far lower profits than expected. The company’s already beleaguered stock, which had fallen about 14% this year to date, dipped further following the earnings report.
Elon Musk’s automaker, once the pinnacle of his tech empire, has taken a back seat to SpaceX. Musk’s rocket and AI company held the largest stock market debut in history last month, turning the richest man on Earth into the world’s first trillionaire, though his net worth has since fallen from its peak.
Better-than-expected results of $120bn came despite delays in release of powerful AI model Gemini Pro
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported double-digit revenue growth for its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. This is the tech giant’s 12th consecutive quarter of massive revenue gains.
The better-than-expected results come as investors evaluate how Alphabet’s huge spending on AI has affected its bottom line and what its long-term plans are to sustain those enormous investments. The company revised its yearly capital expenditure forecast to $200bn, with quarterly spending growing 100% year over year.
GOP-controlled chamber paves way for reconciliation bill, while making long-shot attempt at new voting restrictions
House Republicans on Wednesday agreed to begin the process of writing a $95bn bill to fund the war with Iran as well as provide new aid to farmers, while making a long-shot attempt to impose new restrictions on voting nationwide.
In a virtually party-line 216-214, the Republican-controlled chamber passed a budget resolution that paves the way for the creation of a reconciliation bill, which can advance through the Senate under special rules that circumvent the Democratic filibuster and requires only a simple majority to pass. Two Republicans – Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky, as well as Kevin Kiley, an independent of California who aligns with the GOP – joined all Democrats in opposing the measure.
Donald Trump approves agreement to help country make fuel for civilian nuclear programme
Donald Trump signed a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia on Wednesday that could enable the kingdom to enrich its own uranium for nuclear reactions.
The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, signed “a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement” and “an accompanying bilateral safeguards agreement,” according to a statement from the US Department of Energy.
Secret Service officials warned nationwide threats have reached an unprecedented level since January, nearly 40% higher than during the same period last year.
Withdrawn case marks a victory for the social media giant after earlier landmark loss at trial over addictive claims
A Florida teen whose lawsuit claimed Meta’s platforms were to blame for his depression and anxiety dropped his case against the company just days before the trial in Los Angeles was set to start, his attorneys said on Wednesday. It was the latest in a series of high-stakes lawsuits against social media companies for allegedly designing addictive products that lead to the harm of children.
The lawsuit, brought by a 15-year-old boy known as RKC, originally named four defendants, Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, Snap Inc’s Snapchat and ByteDance’s TikTok. YouTube and TikTok settled in JuneandSnap reached a tentative settlement in the case, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The terms of those settlements were confidential.
New prime minister has made Sarwar – the first senior Labour figure to call for Keir Starmer’s resignation – a peer
Scottish Labour’s rivals in Holyrood have slammed Anas Sarwar’s shock decision to resign as leader to sit in Andy Burnham’s new government, calling him a “chancer” and accusing him of lying to voters.
The prime minister has made Sarwar – who was the first senior Labour figure to call for Keir Starmer to resign – a peer and given him a ministerial post at the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, No 10 announced on Wednesday.
The House passed a $1.15 trillion defense authorization bill Wednesday with a controversial provision expanding U.S.-Israel military technology cooperation intact, despite a bipartisan effort to remove it and warnings from Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., that the measure could compromise American sovereignty and national security.
The 216–212 vote on the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act passed mostly along party lines after lawmakers were denied a separate vote to remove Section 219, which would create a permanent initiative to merge U.S. and Israeli defense tech.
“Codifying the integration of our military technology and supply chains with those of any other country is dangerous,” said Massie, one of seven Republicans to buck party lines and vote against the NDAA. He was joined by Reps. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma; Tim Burchett of Tennessee; Eli Crane of Arizona; Harriet Hageman of Wyoming; Anna Paulina Luna of Florida; and Chip Roy of Texas.
Six Democrats voted for it: Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas; Don Davis of North Carolina; Jared Golden of Maine; Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Adam Gray of California; and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.
Section 219 would establish a United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative and require the defense secretary to designate a Pentagon executive agent responsible for coordinating bilateral defense research, development, testing, evaluation, and industrial cooperation.
Massie, who sought to remove the provision alongside Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept ahead of the vote that institutionalizing the relationship would create long-term national security risks.
Doing so with Israel would create “a lopsided arrangement” in which American national security is unnecessarily compromised, he added. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., similarly referred to the provision as “an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy,” in a statement on social media.
Massie also pointed out that codifying the initiative would make it more difficult for future presidents to withdraw from the arrangement.
“Enshrining this broad agreement and the permanent position it creates in legislation removes the flexibility of future Presidents to withdraw from such an arrangement,” Massie said. He further argued that it “requires a treaty to effect, not an amendment buried in a law as presented here.”
The provision, previously numbered Section 224, has generated controversy since The Intercept reported on it in June. The Intercept found that it closely resembled the U.S.–Israel FUTURES Act, introduced by Reps. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, and Davis, with companion legislation from Sens. Ted Budd, R-N.C., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. All four lawmakers have received substantial campaign support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel groups, while the FUTURES Act itself received public backing from AIPAC and the neoconservative foreign policy think tank FDD Action. Massie lost his primary for reelection to his Kentucky House seat in the spring, after President Donald Trump and AIPAC both backed his opponent.
The standalone FUTURES Act did not advance, but many of its core concepts subsequently appeared in the NDAA.
Massie and Khanna later led an amendment to strike Section 219, joined by Democratic Reps. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts; Jesús “Chuy” García of Illinois; Rashida Tlaib of Michigan; Don Beyer of Virginia; Jill Tokuda of Hawaii; Derek Tran of California; and Joe Courtney of Connecticut. The amendment was not made eligible for floor consideration. Luna, the Florida Republican, separately sought to strike Section 219, but her amendment was also denied a vote.
“There is no world that the United States government gives away our most elite military weaponry or technology to our allies, including Israel,” Stutzman told The Intercept. “Just because we are collaborating with our allies to work towards a common goal of safe citizens doesn’t mean we are giving away American sovereignty.”
Stutzman’s office previously told this reporter that Section 219, then numbered Section 224, originated with Jackson’s office. Stutzman separately told Responsible Statecraft that his own proposal to replace direct U.S. military assistance to Israel with trade and defense cooperation grew out of conversations with Israeli contacts.
Also on Wednesday, House Republicans passed a $95 billion budget plan to fund the war on Iran and impose new restrictions on elections.
House passage does not make Section 219 law. The Senate’s version of the NDAA, which has yet to pass, contains its own version of the defense technology initiative, leaving the proposal’s ultimate fate dependent on further Senate action and negotiations between the chambers.
SANTA CLARITA, CALIFORNIA — A routine package delivery became a medical emergency when a rattlesnake hiding beneath an Amazon envelope bit a 3-year-old girl outside her family’s home.
The girl, identified by her family as Addy, ran outside with her mother July 13 to retrieve the package after it had been dropped over the property’s gate. As she reached toward the padded envelope, a Southern Pacific rattlesnake underneath it struck her left hand.
Addy’s mother drove her to meet emergency responders in a nearby grocery store parking lot. Paramedics transported her to a hospital, where doctors administered antivenom before transferring her to a pediatric intensive care unit. She received two additional doses and remained hospitalized for two nights.
Her father, Manny Barajas, said Addy is recovering well but still has bruising around the bite. The family created a fundraiser to help cover medical expenses and wages lost while caring for her.
The encounter comes during an unusually active rattlesnake season in California. State poison-control officials had received 277 snakebite reports this year, nearly matching the number typically recorded during an entire year. Three Californians have died from snakebites in 2026.
Officials advise residents to look carefully around packages, landscaping and other shaded areas where snakes may seek shelter. Anyone bitten should limit movement and seek emergency medical treatment immediately.
Code found in the iOS 27 beta suggests Apple is developing a system that could restrict leased iPhones when customers fall behind on payments. The discovery follows a recent Bloomberg report that Apple may soon launch a new "Apple Upgrade" leasing program, allowing customers to pay for hardware through monthly installments. 9to5Mac reports: The code describes a system called App Managed Features, which allows an authorized financing or provider app to enroll an iPhone and perform ongoing status checks. If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple's system services can place the iPhone in "Restricted Mode," which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved, while keeping a small set of apps available. The fixed allowlist currently found in the iOS 27 beta includes: Accessibility Reader, App Store, Health, Magnifier, Phone, Clock, Settings, Wallet, Passwords, and the Restricted Mode interface itself.
Apps that can send critical alerts, such as Messages, Home, and certain medication or safety apps, may also remain accessible. However, the provider appears to have some control over those exceptions. The code does not appear to cancel, suspend, or otherwise modify App Store subscriptions associated with blocked apps. As a result, a subscription could continue billing even while access to its app is restricted.
Additionally, there isn't a fixed number of missed payments that automatically triggers the restrictions. The financing provider's app decides when to lock the device based on its own policies. Finally, the new framework also introduces a new type of activation lock called "Partner Finance Lock," which is meant to prevent users from erasing, reselling, or stripping a restricted device for parts.
The Jordanian army said it intercepted four Iranian missiles on Wednesday with two additional missile falling in an open area, AFP reports.
The two missiles that the army did not intercept fell in “two remote, uninhabited areas, without causing any human casualties or material damage” the army said in a statement.
The Advisory Council for Historic Preservation, whose members were mostly handpicked by President Trump, is poised to end mandatory state review and public comment on projects affecting historical properties.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani conceded late Tuesday that the city does not have the authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
House Republicans adopted a budget resolution that kickstarts the party-line reconciliation process. It now heads to the Senate, where it'll face an uphill battle.
Two beluga whales settled into their new home at SeaWorld San Antonio this week following an international relocation mission from shuttered Canadian theme park Marineland.
The integration of AI into scientific and engineering workflows will kickstart an unprecedented period of progress, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at today’s inaugural Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C.
“We will see a…rapid transformation of human understanding, of nature, of physics, of how to harness beneficial technologies for humans,” Wright told about 650 government officials, scientists, media types, and others who piled into the Capital Hilton a few blocks from the White House today. “The next 10 years will be the most revolutionary 10 years in the scientific and energy worlds in human history.”
The Department of Energy is seeding that future scientific progress through Genesis Mission, the moonshot-style program unveiled nearly eight months ago to harness emerging AI technologies. The DOE unveiled the first batch of awards today, primarily for phase one Genesis Mission projects, in which the government is committing to spend about $250 million across 278 projects led by DOE National Labs, universities, private companies, and non-profit organizations. There was one phase two award announced, while the bulk of the phase two awards are expected to be announced in September.
Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the Genesis Mission is on part with the great American endeavors of the past century.
“Two hundred fifty years after our nation’s first great adventure and innovation, 87 years after the Manhattan Project and 65 years after the Apollo program, we are once again mobilizing a grand vision and national effort for the achievement of our highest ambitions,” Kratsios said at the Genesis Mission Summit. “When President Kennedy declared that Americans would set foot on the moon, he told the world that such a lofty goal would serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Now, at the dawn of artificial intelligence, with the Genesis Mission, we are set not just one goal, but many. Now we choose not to just have one high achievement, but many grand challenges.”
The DOE originally unveiled 26 lighthouse challenges in February to help guide scientists and engineers as part of Genesis Mission, largely illuminated by the Energy Department’s priorities. As the Genesis Mission has expanded to 20 federal agencies, the DOE has added new challenges focused on space, human health, defense, and veterans health, bringing the total number of challenges to 33, said Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil.
Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, at Genesis Mission Summit
“We will keep refining and expanding as appropriate,” Gil said, “but these now reflect the full strength of these 20 different agencies and departments coming together.”
If all goes as planned, the Genesis Mission will lead to an Internet of science that connects government, academia, and industry together, Gil said. This could help to realize a dream of scientists for the past 300 years, where data and scientific knowledge can be encoded and shared in a manner that uplifts everyone connected to it, he said.
“In the original Internet, the end nodes of the computing of the devices were computers, and the orchestration was a TCP/IP protocol,” he said. “In the modern world of Internet of science, the end nodes are both computers and scientific instruments, particle accelerators and telescopes and microscopes, and additive manufacturing, and the orchestration is enabled by this agentic capability that can pass through complex scientific understanding of workflows and orchestration.”
Today’s Genesis Mission Summit provided a glimpse into the types of progress that Gil, Wright, and Kratsios are looking to drive. For instance, Terrence Chao, a math professor at UCLA, talked about how AI is helping to find all types of new solutions to math problems that stood for decades. AI is particularly useful for verification of math problems, which was a very time-consuming, manual job before.
“It’s transforming a field very unevenly, but ultimately in a very promising way,” Chao said, estimating that AI has accelerated mathematics by 100 fold. “For centuries, we were in an era where we were always short on proofs.” But today, we’re in an era where we more proofs than problems.”
Laurent Chapon, the associate lab director for photon sciences at Argonne National Lab, told the Genesis Mission Summit audience that AI is transforming scientists’ relationship with experimental data.
The lab uses X-rays and other machines to scan items, such as semiconductor, for errors. The data flowing from these experiments every year is the equivalent of 150 million movies. Analyzing that data is was time-consuming task that could take weeks. But thanks to AI, that analysis can now be conducted in a few minutes to a few hours.
There are now 33 Genesis Mission challenges
“As we scan the X-ray through the specimen, the AI model is able in real time to reconstruct the data, something that was impossible only a few months ago,” Chapon said. “So you go from something that takes hours to something that takes essentially real time. This is done at 200 images per second. So there’s at least a factor 100 in speedup, and it impacts everything we do.”
Hendrik Hamann, the chief AI scientist for innovation, science and security at Brookhaven National Laboratory, described how AI is helping to transform the electrical grid.
“Unlike language foundation models, which are trained on text, our models are trained on the language of the grid voltage,” he said. “The model learns how to predict the physics of the grid, enabling us to evaluate billions of scenarios not only rapidly, but also accurately and robustly.”
AI is often considered to be a burden on the grid. But in fact, AI can help make the grid stronger. That includes with conducting studies to integrate new data centers into the grid. “Without AI, for example, data center interconnection simulation studies take months, sometimes years. Now we can do it literally in minutes,” Hamann said.
Siva Rajamanickam, a distinguished member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratory, told the Genesis Mission Summit audience about how his team is using AI to advanced manufacturing.
His team built an agent-driven workflow that generates designs for a rocket and its payload, based on set of objectives and constraints. The agent explores the search space and comes up with a series of 16 designs. The humans then pick the best one to build.
Genesis Mission Director Dario Gil
“There is this notion that if you have a complex problem like this, you have to choose two of three: better, faster or cheaper,” Rajamanickam said. “With a technology like AI…you can go for better, faster and cheaper.”
The potential benefits of using AI to drive science and engineering are so massive that they cannot be ignored, Gil said. There have been a few times in the history of the United States where everyone comes together to do something that’s much bigger than ourselves. This is one of those times, he said.
“I am not arguing that this is the only national effort that we should do in science and technology. Far from it,” the Genesis Mission director said. “But if we cannot agree on this one–that this computing revolution is transforming the practice of science and engineering–what is so obvious that we’re all going to agree on as the second and the third and the fourth? Let’s demonstrate the potential where we see plenty of evidence that this is transforming every single field. And this is a moment also for us to come together, to work across sectors, to work collaboratively and realize this premise. And once we learn how to do this again, that we can have a decentralized approach but moments of unity and moments of working and doing really ambitious things together, we will learn that we can do a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth at a scale that we could never do before.”
Grip tape started peeling up awhile back. Didnt think a whole lot of it but I finally ordered new grip tape from FloatLife (fuckin killer job packaging up my order by the way. Hand written thank you note and a koozy, so thanks boys) Anyway. I got around to replacing it and realized that the sensor was peeling up not the grip tape. So what are my options here? Should I try and clean the little rocks from this side of the sensor and maybe apply some sort of adhesive to get the sensor stuck back down then separate the grip tape from the sensor? Not to destroy this thing. Figured id quit while I was ahead and ask the professionals on here. Thanks guys.
Three-year-old girl landed in ICU after snake bit her while grabbing a package outside her family’s Santa Clarita home
A three-year-old girl landed in the intensive care unit earlier this month after a rattlesnake bit her while she was trying to grab an Amazon package.
Addy, the young girl, ran out with her mother on 13 July to pick up a package dropped over the gate to their home in Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles.
Ancient Slashdot reader alanw shares a post from the OSS Security mailing list, where sysadmin Jan Schaumann wonders what to do after the Linux kernel cranked out 432 CVEs in a little over 24 hours: "I understand the position that CVEs were always a flawed way to track or prioritize security changes... But this onslaught really shows it's not feasible to attempt to prioritize individual kernel changes. I'm not sure what to do here going forward." The Register reports: The nixCraft team speculated on social media that AI bug reports are a likely reason for all those kernel CVEs, which wouldn't be without precedent - Linus Torvalds himself said in May that the Linux kernel security mailing list had become "almost entirely unmanageable" due to AI-assisted bug hunting. Nonetheless, Torvalds has described AI as a useful tool for Linux development while still noting it can be a drag for maintainers, both from a workload standpoint and the fact "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs." [...]
Unfortunately for Linux sysadmins, the position in which they find themselves in this current mess isn't one that's readily solved. CVEs might be a messy way to track and prioritize security updates, especially when hundreds of them are published over a short period, but without something better, it falls to IT and security teams to determine which vulnerabilities affect their systems and which kernel updates they need to deploy. Senior kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman replied to Jan's post, pushing back on the idea that the kernel's CVE volume is uniquely unmanageable. The kernel isn't special, he argues -- companies everywhere are finally realizing they need to re-evaluate how they update all of their systems and devices, something that's traditionally been "woefully ignored."
On the "just always update" approach, Greg says that's precisely what the kernel community endorses: "This is what the kernel developer community recommends and supports. If you want support from us, do this." Can't manage it yourself? Pay a company for support, or "just use Debian or Yocto as their security practices are amazing." He points to Android as proof the approach scales, calling it "the largest deployment of software in the world" -- billions of devices kept updated "with one very-overworked developer guiding it all."
As for reviewing every CVE individually, he notes this can be largely automated by intersecting the files a CVE touches with the files you actually build, which typically trims the relevant set "down to about 10% of the overall total" -- the approach enterprise distros already take for their customers. Panic-mode selective patching gets a blunt "Good luck with that!" -- regulations like the EU's Cyber Resilience Act are set to legislate that habit away ("rightfully so," in his view), and "your insurance company might wish to have a talk with you as well."
Greg also warns the flood isn't over: "The number of llm-found issues is only on the rise right now, it's going to be a very long 18 months at the least to dig ourselves out of this mess, and people had BETTER be updating their systems all along the way if they expect to be secure in any way." As for the 432-CVE burst itself, he explains it was simply him catching up on a weeks-old, publicly visible review queue over the weekend -- delayed by "a perfect storm of 6 weeks straight of conferences and vacations" -- so it shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone watching the public git repo.
Passage of annual bill complicated by Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran without congressional approval
The US House of Representatives passed a $1.15tn defense policy bill in a near-party-line vote on Wednesday, after Democrats refused to back the measure amid the war with Iran and Donald Trump’s push to impose new restrictions on voting nationwide.
A key plank of the president’s plan to spend $1.5tn on the military in the 2027 fiscal year, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passed the Republican-controlled chamber by a 216-212 vote, with all but six Democrats opposing its passage. Seven House Republicans broke ranks to oppose the measure, which now goes to the Senate.
Playable through Microsoft’s new Xbox Backward Compatibility program for PC, you’ll be able to relive classic Xbox titles directly on your laptop, desktop or handheld.
Hacking of Hugging Face shows we do not seem to have reliable ways to curb extremely powerful AI systems
Last week Hugging Face – a company that hosts artificial intelligence models and datasets – was hacked.
After it reported the incident to law enforcement, few would have predicted what came next: the culprits were revealed to be AI agents from OpenAI, which had broken out of containment and were acting of their own accord.
Shakeel Hashim is the editor of Transformer, a publication about the power and politics of transformative AI
Apple is reportedly launching a Klarna financing deal that will let U.S. customers spread the cost of devices over up to three years, pushing the company closer to a hardware-as-a-service model. "The only thing you don't get under the new arrangement is AppleCare, for which you'll allegedly need to pay extra," notes Computerworld. From the report: The introduction of the scheme gives consumers a way to purchase the company's popular high-end devices when they are introduced -- no doubt,at higher cost -- this fall. [...] A combination of changed customer habits and external threat means the stars are now aligned for hardware-as-a-service models. "Reframing a device as a low monthly payment protects that [upgrade] cadence and allows Apple to start marketing their products as device-as-a-service to consumers, which no other vendor was ever able to do," [IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo] wrote to me.
There is a one-more-thing aspect to this: the products are effectively being leased, a new approach that will give Apple a stronger grip on EOL devices, helping it grab more of them for refurbishment, resale, and recycling. Over time, this will give the company a much stronger grip on the lucrative second-user market that exists around Apple equipment, even while for almost every consumer product we find the life we want is something we can rent, but probably can't afford to own.
The other solid reason to take a partnership approach is risk management. Apple had intended to develop its own buy-now, pay-later scheme via Apple Pay Later, but abandoned that plan as it became riskier with rising bank rates. "Also, by backing the program with Klarna rather than reviving the in-house subscription plan it shelved in 2024, Apple captures the demand upside without taking the credit risk onto its own balance sheet," Jeronimo said.
"Apple Upgrade lands at precisely the moment Apple needs it," Jeronimo wrote in a note seen by Computerworld. "Having just pushed Mac and iPad prices up on the back of the memory shortage, with iPhone increases widely expected in September -- as well as the new iPhone foldable expected at $2,500 -- Apple's real risk is that rising prices even further can impact the upgrade cycle."
Health policy experts say higher import duties could increase costs and strain supplies while offering no guarantee manufacturers will shift production to the U.S.
Andy Biggs wins nomination to challenge Katie Hobbs as Alex Kolodin won party’s primary for secretary of state
Donald Trump-backed candidates in Arizona prevailed in key primary contests on Tuesday, setting up a fall campaign that will test whether Republicans can reverse some of their recent losses in the presidential battleground state.
Andy Biggs, the hard-right congressman endorsed by Donald Trump, easily won the Republican nomination to challenge the incumbent Democrat, Governor Katie Hobbs.
The lab will also advance 32 additional projects through various partnerships
July 22, 2026 — DOE announced the awards July 22 at the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C. The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by DOE, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, the Genesis Mission is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
The projects that ORNL will lead focus on critical issues of national interest, such as fusion energy, critical minerals, water for energy, next-generation materials and manufacturing and new computing and networking strategies.
“These nine Genesis Mission projects showcase what ORNL does best, which is bring together world-class teams, transformative technologies and unique research facilities to tackle problems that matter to the nation,” ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer said. “By integrating AI with rigorous scientific workflows, our teams will test new methods for accelerating discovery and determine what it takes to scale those capabilities for broad impact.”
The goal of each DOE-supported Genesis Mission project is to identify promising pathways toward transformative science capabilities and to establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.
The nine ORNL-led Genesis Mission awards will address the following national priorities:
AI-assisted fusion power plant designs, led by Katarzyna (Kate) Borowiec to develop an AI platform that will integrate high-performance computing tools and robotic system design.
Low-energy AI for scientific discovery, led by Prasanna Date to leverage neuromorphic computing to analyze scientific data at unprecedented rates and scales with lower costs and higher speeds than conventional AI while maintaining equivalent accuracy.
AI-accelerated materials development and advanced manufacturing applications, led by Stephen DeWitt and driven by Pipit, an AI-based “foundation model factory” that will create custom foundation AI models that U.S. industry can leverage.
AI-enabled discovery of rare earth elements, led by Xin Gu to assist in exploration of materials essential for energy technologies, advanced manufacturing and national supply chain security.
AI-powered operations for self-driving science research, led by Mariam Kiran to coordinate network traffic among agentic and scientific workflows across institutional boundaries.
AI foundation model development for water forecasting, led by Dan Lu to improve prediction of surface and groundwater systems across the continental U.S.
Modeling soil processes with AI, led by Benjamin Sulman to increase understanding of underground biogeochemical cycles.
AI-driven Earth system prediction, led by Dali Wang to forecast water availability, streamflow and river temperature weeks to years in advance, supporting hydropower and thermoelectric operations in the Tennessee Valley Authority region.
AI for next-generation fusion materials development, led by Ying Yang to link processing, microstructure and performance that will accelerate deployment of next-generation structural alloys for reliable operation in nuclear fusion power plants.
ORNL researchers will participate in 32 additional Genesis Mission projects led by other national laboratories, universities and industry partners, addressing a range of national challenges. Additional information on each project is available here.
ORNL also provides foundational support to the Genesis Mission through the American Science Cloud, the secure, federated and science-optimized cloud environment that integrates DOE’s world-leading computing and experimental facilities, data resources and high-performance networks across DOE’s 17 national laboratories. At the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, installation is also under way on Lux, an AI supercomputer made possible by a co-investment of AMD and DOE. Lux will be completed this year, enabling users to dramatically accelerate AI-driven research.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.
The projects will advance fusion, nuclear energy, national security and science capabilities
July 22, 2026 — Seven Los Alamos National Laboratory projects have been selected for funding under the Genesis Mission, a national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform.
Los Alamos National Laboratory will lead seven projects for the Department of Energy’s historic Genesis Mission. Credit: LANL.
“Los Alamos has a long history of advancing the scientific capabilities that strengthen our nation, and these projects continue that tradition,” said Laboratory Director Thom Mason. “Selection for the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission reflects the exceptional talent of our researchers and the Laboratory’s leadership in high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and scientific discovery. These investments will accelerate breakthroughs that advance national security, energy security and U.S. scientific competitiveness.”
An Autonomous AI Framework for Closed-Loop Nuclear Fuel Qualification
Reinforcement Learning for Scientific Problem-to-Code Generation via Measurement-Based Reward Functions
A Physics-Informed Multimodal Foundation Model for Fracture Evolution in the Upper Crust
AI-Guided Creep-Fatigue Life Prediction for Fusion Structural Materials
AI-Enabled Decision-Support Platform for Stimulation Design, Fracture Characterization, and Production Optimization Toward Doubling Subsurface Energy Recovery
ArchEvolve –An Evolutionary Agentic AI System for Deep Co-Design
From improved Coupled Ocean-Ice States to Improved Water Prediction: A Generative AI Approach
Additionally, Los Alamos will play a role in 19 other projects, where partner institutions are the lead.
The goal of the Phase I Request for Application awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.
Los Alamos National Laboratory will be recognized at the Genesis Mission Summit today, where awardees will be announced.
About the Genesis Mission
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia, and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.
Jamieson Greer denies tariffs have pushed up prices during grilling from lawmakers over cost-of-living concerns
Donald Trump’s chief trade official denied the president’s sweeping tariffs have increased prices for US families, as lawmakers challenged him over cost-of-living concerns across much of the country.
US inflation surged to a three-year high earlier this year. During a heated exchange before US senators on Wednesday, however, US trade representative Jamieson Greer appeared to claim Trump’s controversial economic agenda had not driven prices higher.
Video captured two visitors illegally crossing the fragile crust of the Grand Prismatic Spring. “I thought I was going to watch people die," an onlooker said.
Local officials have said no foul play is suspected in Nolan Wells’s death during a boating trip. But an attorney for Wells’s family said the autopsy could not rule it out.
In Kentucky and West Virginia, rescuers freed trapped residents as states face catastrophic floods and damage
Tropical storm Bertha made landfall in St Bernard parish, on the Gulf coast south-east of New Orleans, Louisiana, on Wednesday afternoon, the US national hurricane center said.
The Miami-based forecaster added that maximum sustained winds were estimated to be 45mph (75km/h) with higher gusts.
Another deadline to fund the government is looming this fall in Congress, and lawmakers seem eager to avoid another costly impasse ahead of the midterms.
European Commission says Paramount Skydance’s decision to end Universal venture addresses merger concerns
Paramount Skydance’s £80bn takeover of Warner Brothers took a step closer to being realised after it won conditional approval from the European Union.
The European Commission said Paramount’s offer to end a film distribution joint venture with Universal Pictures addressed its concerns over the potential merger. As part of its commitments in the EU, Paramount has 13 months from the date of closing the deal to pull out from the venture.
PM says he wants to ensure ‘everything has been looked at’ amid outrage at policy from family of PC Andrew Harper
Andy Burnham is immersed in a deepening political row after ordering a review of plans for the early release of thousands of killers, rapists and sex offenders from prison in September.
After the family of PC Andrew Harper expressed outrage that his killers may be eligible for release, the prime minister responded by pledging to make sure that “everything has been looked at again” before a fresh tranche of about 6,000 offenders were freed on tags.
July 22, 2026 — Scientists today face challenges of extraordinary scale and complexity. From shaping and simulating the intricate dynamics of fusion plasma, to exploring the vast search space of new materials, to making sense of the exabytes of data pouring out of the world’s most advanced experimental facilities. The demands on modern research are unprecedented. Frontier AI can help address these challenges, while accelerating groundbreaking scientific discoveries.
In December, Google Cloud shared its commitment to the White House’s Genesis Mission — the national effort to harness AI and double the pace of American scientific discovery within a decade. Since then, Google DeepMind (GDM) announced an early access program that provides AI for science tools to all 17 Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories, and Google Public Sector shared how Gemini for Government could serve as an AI backbone for the DOE.
Today, at the DOE Genesis Mission Summit 2026, Google is expanding this by committing $40 million of AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers in support of the Genesis Mission.
Frontier AI Tools for Scientific Discovery
Under this expanded commitment, Google will first provide DOE’s Genesis Mission awardees in-kind access to GDM’s frontier AI for science portfolio, including:
AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding and discovery agent, for designing advanced algorithms.
AlphaFold 3: A model for predicting the structure and interactions of proteins and other biomolecules.
AlphaGenome: A tool for understanding how variation in DNA, including the non-coding genome, shapes biology and disease.
WeatherNext: A state-of-the-art family of AI weather forecasting models for mapping weather conditions.
AlphaEarth Foundations: A foundational AI model for mapping and understanding the planet in unprecedented detail.
Second, Google will provide Gemini for Government seats and tokens for one year to tens of thousands of users across the DOE National Laboratories’ operations, research, and management teams. This secure platform supports the full breadth of work from the research bench to the administration of specialized user facilities serving the entire scientific community, providing a single secure foundation that the DOE mission can depend on.
AI for Science Tools in Action Across the Laboratory Ecosystem
While there is still a lot of work still to do, the practical impact of the Genesis Mission is already coming to life across the laboratory ecosystem.
At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), senior scientist Dr. Henry Kvinge is using AlphaEvolve to map out massive mathematical systems that are far too complex for humans to explore by hand. The AI uncovers hidden connections automatically, fast-tracking discoveries that would normally take researchers years to find.
“Modern math relies on abstraction, but combinatorics offers concrete models that make complex geometry and algebra easier to grasp. We’ve found that systems like AlphaEvolve are perfect for this search,” said Dr. Kvinge. “By leveraging the broad mathematical knowledge of LLMs, we can automate the exploration of countless angles. We’re still experimenting, but the discoveries are already shaping our future research.”
At the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), researchers are utilizing Gemini to fundamentally change how they interact with physical laboratory hardware. Dr. Steven R. Spurgeon, a senior materials data scientist at NLR, leads a pioneering program in autonomous materials discovery.
“Our collaboration has allowed us to build an autonomous experimentation capability,” said Dr. Spurgeon. “By deploying Gemini in our instruments, we cut microscope calibration time from over 90 minutes to about 13 minutes (eight times faster) and reduced the manual steps needed to focus an image from as many as 50 down to two. That’s time and attention we’ve given back to the science itself, enabling genuinely autonomous workflows that observe, reason, and decide in real time. This has helped us explore parts of the material design space we simply could not have reached through manual operation alone.”
Source: Pushmeet Kohli and Karthik Narain, Google Cloud
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little over a month after the Department of Defense (DOD) bragged that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work, members of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they were burning through tokens, and needed to limit use. "Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens, by mid-June the Army CIO pool was exhausted of tokens and had to re-establish limits," the email reads. The email goes on to say that although the Army has chosen to renew token usage at "its current levels," it's unclear "if the Army CIO pool will be renewed after 1 Oct."
The Army uses Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform where users can run different large language models (LLMs), including Alphabet's Gemini, Meta's Llama, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. "Apparently the whole Army burned through the whole year of tokens for just one service," says an Army employee who spoke to WIRED [...]. The Army employee says that the Army has been pushing its workers to lean into using generative AI. Employees were given an allotment of at least 200,000 tokens per month, according to emails viewed by WIRED, and were automatically allocated more if they burned through their initial allotment. Employees who had signed up for Ask Sage but were not regularly using it would receive emails encouraging them to use more of their allocated tokens.
In order to use Ask Sage, the Army had access to 100,000,000 tokens as part of an annual subscription to an "enterprise pack." Tokens represent a unit of output, either in text or image, from an LLM. For the Ask Sage tool, a single token equates to about 3.7 characters, according to documents viewed by WIRED. The Defense Department burned through some 20 billion tokens per day during the 38-day Operation Epic Fury in Iran, according to Breaking Defense. It's unclear if the tokens used by regular DOD employees are drawn from the same pool as those who might be using AI tools on classified or secret information.
Honestly, it feels like only yesterday that System76, Linux OEM and the company behind pop!_OS, announced it was going to develop its own desktop environment, COSMIC. We’re about seven months into the more general availability of COSMIC, and the company has put up a nice overview of the various improvements that have already made their way into the code since then.
Of course, there’s a ton of visual improvements have been made to COSMIC, as well as a slew of new features: improved search, a brand new system monitor, drag and drop for tabs throughout COSMIC, and much more. COSMIC’s file manager and terminal have also seen a lot of work, with a ton of new small features and additions to bring them up to par with what people expect form a modern file manager and terminal emulator.
There’s a ton more listed in the article, so it serves as a nice “while you were away” if you’ve not been following development.
What happens when programmers get to vote on a complete ban on slopcoded software on their code platform? Members of Codeberg were asked to vote on a proposal to completely ban slopcoded projects from Codeberg, and in what should not be a surprising outcome to anyone not overcome with “AI” hysteria, the vast majority voted in favour of the complete ban: over 70% of Codeberg members voted to ban slopcoded projects entirely (358 in favour, 144 against, 14 abstentions).
Of course, this is not a surprising outcome. Stripped down, programming is a form of artistic expression, and programming is no different than writing, painting, composing, or any other artistic endeavour. I think it’s safe to say writers, painters, composers, and similar creatives are against “AI”, so it’s only natural programmers feel the same; poll after poll shows the overwhelming majority of respondents – usually well over 70-80% – are against “AI”.
The pro-“AI” accounts on OSNews often try to paint my anti-“AI” position as extremist, but in reality, I’m just voicing how 70-80% of people clearly state they feel. I have zero skin in this game, zero outside pressure to please any bosses to get that promotion, zero pressure to conform to avoid getting laid off, zero pressure to not contradict upper-management. I can speak freely, openly, and without fear of retaliation. And as Nikhil Suresh explains in his harrowing from-the-trenches article AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making, that’s a massive asset.
The vast majority of people – including your friends, family, and co-workers – really hate “AI”. You can either accept this, or be left behind.
Campaigners in Ukraine pledge to continue nationwide protests until Mykhailo Fedorov gets his job back
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was under growing pressure to reinstate his sacked defence minister on Wednesday, after campaigners said they would continue indefinite nationwide protests until Mykhailo Fedorov got his job back.
Party chair queries status of funds Reform leader received from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne
The Conservatives have asked HMRC to investigate whether Nigel Farage should have paid tax on the £5m gift he received from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.
The party chair, Kevin Hollinrake, wrote to the tax authorities questioning whether it was a payment to compensate him for running to be an MP.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 22, 2026 — AMD and Anthropic today announced a strategic partnership to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs in AMD Helios rack-scale solutions, with deployment of the first gigawatt beginning in the first half of 2027.
Credit: Shutterstock
The extraordinary pace of AI adoption is driving rapid growth in demand for training and inference capacity. Anthropic is scaling its compute infrastructure to serve strong and growing demand for Claude, and its adoption of AMD Helios at gigawatt scale represents a major expansion of AMD’s position at the center of the global AI infrastructure buildout.
Anthropic will deploy AMD Helios rack-scale solutions featuring AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, part of the AMD Instinct MI450 Series, together with AMD EPYC “Venice” CPUs, AMD Pensando networking and ROCm software. Purpose-built for next-generation AI training and inference, Helios delivers the performance, efficiency and scale required for the most demanding AI workloads. This deployment builds on Anthropic’s existing use of AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs.
In addition, AMD and Anthropic are launching a multi-year engineering collaboration to use Claude to accelerate AMD software development. Specifically, the teams will use Claude to optimize workloads for AMD Instinct GPUs and accelerate ROCm software development. AMD will also broadly adopt Claude across its engineering and product development teams.
AMD has committed to make a strategic equity investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic in the future.
“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Anthropic and deploy AMD Helios at gigawatt scale,” said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO, AMD. “This collaboration brings together Anthropic’s leadership in frontier AI with the full strength of AMD high-performance computing. Together, we will accelerate AI adoption at scale and establish Helios as a major platform for the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers,” said Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer, Anthropic. “By partnering with AMD across the stack, we are securing the capacity we need and optimizing it for training and serving Claude. Running across a diversified range of hardware lets us map the right workloads to the right hardware.”
Today’s announcement marks a major milestone in the partnership between AMD and Anthropic. By combining gigawatt-scale deployment and deep engineering collaboration, the companies are building a long-term foundation to accelerate the development and deployment of next-generation AI infrastructure.
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.
Microsoft has announced Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC, a new preservation program that will let players run select classic Xbox games on Windows PCs and handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally. Tom's Hardware reports: "This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time," the company said in a blog post authored by Xbox "VP next generation" Jason Ronald. Alongside backward compatibility, the company says games will also include new features. The four titles in the announcement are: BLiNX: The Time Sweeper; Conker: Live and Reloaded; Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge; and Fuzion Frenzy.
You can now buy all of these games on PC, and they're also included in all Xbox Game Pass plans. Anyone who already owns these titles digitally on console can also now play them on PC or handheld, with support for Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Crucially, this appears to be a digital-only preservation effort, so it won't help anyone who only owns physical copies of these games. Xbox has reportedly been testing a way to digitize physical games as far back as Xbox One, but that hasn't yet materialized yet.
Alongside the preserved original gameplay, Xbox claims these games will let users customize graphics settings, with up to 4x resolution scaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed modes, anisotropic filtering, and enhanced anti-aliasing, with more features to come in the future. Notably, Xbox will add achievements to select original Xbox games on console and PC.
The program will help research communities enhance datasets to accelerate discovery in national priority areas.
July 22, 2026 — The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the NSF Unlocking Dataset Value for AI-Enabled Scientific Discovery program, a new investment to advance scientific community datasets and enable discovery and innovation using artificial intelligence and other methods in national priority areas.
Credit: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock
Across science and engineering, researchers have built valuable datasets through prior research. However, many datasets have the potential to be used for new inquiries outside of the initial scope of data collection, but are not accessible, interoperable or ready to be used by automated AI systems. Many existing datasets also lack a way for a broad array of researchers to contribute and benefit. The new program will help research communities unlock more value from datasets to ask new questions, test new ideas and extend the value of prior scientific investments.
AI enables data processing and analysis at scales and speeds beyond human capacity, helping researchers identify previously hidden patterns and relationships. When paired with scientific datasets that are trusted, accessible, fit for their scientific purpose and curated, AI can advance scientific research and connect previously siloed disciplines.
Rather than primarily supporting new data collection, the program focuses on increasing the value of existing scientific datasets and enabling new AI-driven insights, interdisciplinary research and investigations. Projects may develop novel methods for feature extraction, metadata generation and the integration of multiple datasets; build robust data pipelines for automated analysis by AI tools and systems; and more. Researchers are encouraged to leverage existing resources, including NSF data platforms, the NSF Integrated Data Systems and Services program, the NSF-led National AI Research Resource, and the American Science and Security Platform built by DOE as part of the White House-led Genesis Mission.
“High-quality scientific data are foundational to advancing an AI-enabled research and innovation ecosystem,” said Ellen Zegura, senior science and engineering advisor in the NSF Office of the Director. “By helping research communities unlock the value of existing data, we can accelerate breakthroughs, drive innovation and strengthen America’s global leaderships.”
NSF anticipates investing up to $100 million through the program, with awards ranging from $2 million to $5 million each, and planning grants of up to $200,000 each.
The program aligns with America’s AI Action Plan by supporting AI-enabled scientific discovery, the creation and publication of structured scientific datasets for AI model training, publicly accessible research-sharing platforms, research infrastructure and the STEM workforce of the future.
These investments also complement the Genesis Mission, a national effort to harness AI for science. Established by President Trump’s Executive Order in November 2025, the Genesis Mission will build an integrated platform to harness scientific datasets to train scientific models, create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows and accelerate scientific breakthroughs across mission-driven National Science and Technology Challenges.
Learn more about NSF Unlocking High-Impact Data for AI-Enabled Scientific Discovery program here.
Democrats in the Senate and House are investigating the origins of a DOJ legal opinion that would make it easier for states to keep people with mental illness in institutions, rather than helping them to live at home.
July 22, 2026 — Today, Microsoft is excited to share a long-term commitment to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission, backed by a $60 million investment designed to accelerate AI for science and the breakthroughs it can deliver for the country. This deepened commitment includes Microsoft’s new Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge coordination hub and program office, otherwise known as SPARK, that is focused on facilitating collaboration and scientific discovery for the Genesis Mission.
Credit: Shutterstock
The Genesis Mission represents an ambitious vision, bringing together DOE’s 17 National Laboratories, world-class experimental facilities, decades of irreplaceable scientific data and next-generation computing into a single, unified platform capable of transforming how science gets done. The critical goal of the Genesis Mission is to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade by embedding AI directly into the scientific process. It’s a bold step forward and exactly the kind of moonshot that defines American science.
Microsoft believes that this goal is not only achievable, but also essential as a national security imperative and an economic engine for generations to come. With this commitment and the launch of SPARK, the company is ready to partner fully in this mission and build on collaborations across government and with academia.
Microsoft Investing in AI for Science
Today, Microsoft’s $60 million investment package will begin to accelerate AI for science in support of DOE and the National Laboratories. As sustained scientific impact requires more than infrastructure alone to enable lasting scientific outcomes, Microsoft’s investment package is structured in two parts:
$40 million in Azure compute and AI credits: Distributed over three years, to power the large-scale AI and scientific workloads at the heart of the mission. This gives researchers room to train, simulate and iterate at a scale that matches their ambition.
$20 million in solution engineering enablement services: Dedicated engineering, architecture, deployment, adoption and acceleration support to turn cloud and AI capacity into operational scientific outcomes. This investment helps ensure that the Genesis Mission advances in practice and in principle.
Together, this investment reflects a simple conviction: While infrastructure opens the door, it is people, expertise and disciplined delivery that carry discoveries across the finish line. Microsoft is committing to both.
Introducing SPARK: Microsoft’s Catalyst for Advancing Scientific Partnerships
Great partnerships need more than good intentions and good technology — they need a clear way to work together. So, alongside this commitment, Microsoft is standing up a new program office and coordination hub: SPARK, or Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge.
SPARK is the single front door and coordination hub for Genesis Mission collaboration with Microsoft. SPARK orchestrates the full breadth of what Microsoft brings to bear: program, technical, research, engineering, security, compliance, partner and field teams into one clear, consistent path from first idea to deployed science.
SPARK is built around five commitments:
A dedicated Genesis Mission Program Management Office: This office handles intake, prioritization, a disciplined sprint-and-checkpoint cadence and a steady operational interface with DOE for alignment, reporting and sustained partnership.
An AI for Science Center of Excellence: An integrated delivery team that moves use cases from concept to secure, compliant, scalable implementation, with enablement through office hours, hackathons and training grounded in responsible AI and reproducible research.
Optimization of Azure credits: Ensures computing resources are directed toward the projects where they can accelerate science most.
Management of technical services: Dedicated support to help labs adopt and operationalize AI-for-science capabilities, delivered by Microsoft teams and select partners.
Joint research and development: A focused set of Genesis Mission-aligned challenge problems, co-developed by Microsoft researchers and DOE scientific leadership, with milestones, publications and IP governed by mutually agreed terms.
Underneath SPARK sits the full breadth of Microsoft’s secure, FedRAMP-authorized cloud and AI portfolio. This includes Microsoft Azure infrastructure, Microsoft Foundry and Zero Trust security through Microsoft Defender, Sentinel and Entra. Azure capabilities will help extend the DOE’s American Science Cloud capabilities by providing computing, AI, data and collaboration services that complement existing scientific infrastructure. Together, these capabilities will help accelerate discovery, enable secure collaboration across institutions and provide researchers with flexible access to advanced technologies and resources. This will enable DOE and National Laboratory scientists to move faster from hypothesis to discovery, without compromising the security, reproducibility and governance that mission-critical research demands.
Accelerating Science with Microsoft Discovery and Quantum
Microsoft’s new commitments build on capabilities recently announced through Microsoft Discovery and Microsoft Quantum. They are designed to accelerate scientific research and will support the Genesis Mission’s ambition to bring AI, advanced computing and emerging technologies more deeply into the scientific process.
To enable a unified research platform for Genesis Mission work, Microsoft will provide access to Microsoft Discovery, the company’s integrated platform that unites AI models, simulation, data and experimental workflows driven by advanced cognition rooted in scientific method, within a single governed environment. Microsoft Discovery, now generally available, includes support for autonomous lab orchestration, integration of Microsoft Research’s AI models for science, continuous AI learning through the scientific loop and agentic memory, advances in Discovery Bookshelf for data curation and scalable indexing and deeper integration and multi-hop reasoning over enterprise science data estates, including data governance. Together, these capabilities are designed to help researchers move more quickly from data to insight, from simulation to experiment, and from promising idea to scientific breakthrough.
Microsoft also recently announced the preview of the Microsoft Discovery app, a local desktop experience that helps researchers, students and scientific teams begin working with Microsoft Discovery today. The company’s support for the Genesis Mission will include access to the Microsoft Discovery app to enable DOE and National Laboratory teams with early access to its capabilities.
Microsoft’s recent quantum progress further strengthens the foundation for Genesis Mission work. With Majorana-based quantum advances, including more reliable topological qubits and a roadmap toward scalable quantum computing, Microsoft is helping move quantum from long-range research toward practical scientific capability. For DOE and National Laboratory teams, that progress can open new ways to model complex materials, chemistry, energy systems and national security challenges that are difficult or impossible to solve with classical computing alone. Just as important, the same agentic AI for science approach behind Microsoft Discovery is helping accelerate quantum research itself, creating a reinforcing cycle in which AI speeds quantum breakthroughs and quantum computing expands what scientists can ultimately discover.
The Work Is Already Underway
Working alongside and supporting federal researchers and universities, Microsoft is already seeing real-world impact, from faster materials screening to advanced biosurveillance modeling. Four of the first projects taking shape under this partnership show what that looks like in practice:
Discovering critical energy storage materials and biosystems design (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) Using AI to dramatically accelerate the discovery of new energy storage materials through novel experimentation design and shrinking analysis of massive volumes of scientific data from years to weeks. In biosystems design, Microsoft Discovery is plugging directly into PNNL’s laboratory automation infrastructure to launch self-driving scientific workflows that autonomously design, run and fine-tune biological experiments in real time.
Strengthening biosecurity (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) Pairing advanced AI with modern bioinformatics to identify emerging biological threats sooner and develop responses faster, strengthening the nation’s ability to stay ahead of the next outbreak and developing proactive defenses against evolving biosecurity risks. By applying advances in AI, scientific computing and biotechnology, Microsoft and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are helping strengthen the nation’s ability to prevent, detect and respond to biological threats, advancing US biosecurity and biodefense priorities while supporting the long-term resilience and competitiveness of the US bioeconomy.
Autonomous labs for accelerated materials discovery (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) Supporting the development of AI-enabled autonomous (“self-driving”) laboratories through the integration of advanced foundation models and simulation tools — including MatterGen and MatterSim — to rapidly design, execute and optimize experiments for structural materials and superconductors. By combining autonomous experimentation with accelerated computational materials discovery, this approach dramatically shortens the path from scientific hypothesis to validated, manufacturable, mission-enabling materials, while exploring a vastly larger design space than is possible through traditional methods.
Accelerating nuclear energy permitting and autonomous energy operations (Idaho National Laboratory) Applying AI to streamline the licensing, permitting and review of new nuclear projects. AI helps automate the development of complex engineering and safety analysis materials, a historically time-consuming and expensive process, to get this critical documentation into the hands of regulators and safety reviewers sooner. The lab also demonstrated that secure, distributed, hyperscale cloud can enable autonomous remote operations for nuclear power generators. Together, these efforts are helping bring safe and reliable power online faster and ensure scalable, efficient and reliable operations to meet the nation’s surging demand for energy.
Midfielder signs a one-year deal with extension option
League investigation centers on the transfer
Inter Miami have signed Casemiro as a free agent, but Major League Soccer is investigating the South Florida side for potential tampering in the process of acquiring the Brazilian midfielder.
Casemiro has signed what amounts to a one-year contract with Miami, beginning now and ending at the conclusion of the 2027 “sprint season” that precedes the league’s switch to a fall-to-spring calendar in 2027-28. There is an option for an extension that would see the Brazilian stay in Miami through the 2028-29 MLS season.
Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán ran into traffic and killed by semi after federal officials approached him at Florida gas station
The Mexican man who was hit and killed by a semi-truck in Florida when running away from federal immigration officials was vacationing in the US with a tourist visa, according to news reports this week.
The 28-year-old, Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, was killed on 14 July after an “encounter” with federal officials, including those with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a state highway patrol spokesperson said last week.
July 22, 2026 — The U.S. National Science Foundation today announced $83 million in awards through the Integrated Data Systems and Services (IDSS) program. The awards will expand access to data infrastructure resources that researchers can use alongside computing and artificial intelligence resources to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation.
Credit: Shutterstock
IDSS supports national priorities to strengthen U.S. leadership in AI, build an AI-ready workforce and ensure researchers have the tools and infrastructure needed to compete globally. The program advances a national AI research ecosystem by connecting scientific data with computing, instruments, software and AI resources, complementing the NSF-led National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) and other cyberinfrastructure investments. These investments also support the White House’s Genesis Mission by strengthening the data infrastructure that enables researchers to make discoveries, use AI and advanced computing and accelerate innovation across the U.S. research enterprise.
“America’s leadership in artificial intelligence depends not only on advanced computing resources but also on the data infrastructure that enables researchers to discover, access, share and analyze scientific data at scale,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. “These investments provide foundational capabilities that empower scientists and engineers to drive transformative AI-enabled discovery, accelerate innovation and strengthen national competitiveness.”
The IDSS program invests in national-scale data systems that advance data-intensive and AI-driven science, engineering research, innovation and education. Because data is essential for scientific discovery, these investments will improve how scientific data is collected, stored, shared and analyzed across NSF facilities, research centers and national laboratories.
The awards also connect data systems, AI models and computing resources so they work together more effectively, while creating shared platforms that make it easier for researchers to find, use and reuse data across different projects and fields. In addition, they provide access to AI tools and advanced computing systems that help researchers use AI more effectively in their work.
Collectively, these investments will enable scientists to focus on generating new insights from data rather than managing underlying infrastructure. The IDSS awards and project descriptions are provided below.
Category I: National-Scale Integrated Data Systems and Services
Fabric for AI-Driven Science (FabAID), led by the Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison, Wisconsin, will build a national data fabric that connects repositories, computing resources and cyberinfrastructure, including NAIRR, to streamline access and curation of large-scale scientific datasets for AI-driven research.
National Data Platform (NDP), led by UC San Diego, will create an AI-ready ecosystem that integrates distributed data, computing facilities and AI resources across the U.S. to support interoperable, scalable and reproducible AI-driven scientific workflows.
Category II: Transition to National-Scale Operations
Interactive Discovery Laboratory (iDLab), led by UCLA, will provide a unified web-based platform that connects researchers to computing and data resources across NSF-supported high-performance computing sites and cloud systems, enabling streamlined workflows for AI-enabled research and expanding STEM education and training through browser-based environments.
BRIDGE National Center, led by the University of California, Irvine, will deliver an open, cloud-based infrastructure for reusable data science workflows, datasets and machine learning models to improve reproducibility and accelerate AI-driven discovery.
National Science Data Fabric (NSDF), led by The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will transition a pilot into a national service that connects researchers to distributed scientific data through standardized frameworks that make data easier to find, access, and reuse. It will enable secure and reproducible workflows and support workforce development programs in data science and AI.
Multidisciplinary Environment for Scientific Advancement (MESA), led by The University of Arizona, will develop an AI-driven data platform that uses metadata automation and intelligent agents to connect and organize scientific data across disciplines, enabling interoperable and reproducible AI workflows.
In addition, several planning grants were awarded to support the development of future data infrastructure proposals under Category I and II.
The IDSS program strengthens the national research data infrastructure by improving access to scientific data and enabling its more effective use in combination with AI and computing resources. By making scientific data more accessible and actionable, these investments are expected to accelerate scientific discovery, advance innovation and expand AI-enabled research capabilities, helping translate federally supported research into benefits for the American public.
On Monday, the Supreme Court accepted a petition from Alaska involving an alleged six-pack of beer, an airplane, and the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause.
In Jouppi v. Alaska, the Justices will weigh in on a dispute going back to April 2012, when Alaska state police arrested pilot Ken Jouppi and his lone passenger on Jouppi’s local air-taxi transport plane. The plane was bound for the town of Beaver, which had banned the consumption of alcohol. The police spotted a six-pack of Budweiser on top of the passenger’s luggage and subsequently found three cases of beer.
Jouppi denied knowing the presence of the Budweiser in his airplane, while the police claimed the six pack was visible on top of the passenger’s luggage. Jouppi and his company were found guilty of knowingly transporting an alcoholic beverage into a dry community and were fined $3,000. Jouppi himself spent three days in jail.
Since then, the state of Alaska has tried to seize Jouppi’s Cessna aircraft under a forfeiture statute. The plane was valued at an estimated $95,000. Jouppi’s attorneys have claimed that the forfeiture violates the Eighth Amendment, which states that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” The Alaska Supreme Court upheld the state’s forfeiture claim.
The question presented to the Supreme Court is “whether, in determining whether a fine contravenes the Excessive Fines Clause, courts may consider the gravity of the underlying offense purely in the abstract or should consider the gravity of the specific defendant's wrongdoing.”
The Eighth Amendment’s recent history and incorporation
While the Eighth Amendment was part of the Bill of Rights ratified and added to the Constitution in December 1791, it took a very long time for parts of it to be applied at a statewide level. The original Bill of Rights only applied to the national government. However, following the ratification of the 14th Amendment and later rulings by the Supreme Court, the Court has applied nearly every provision of the Bill of Rights to abuses by the states. This process began to pick up steam in Gitlow v. New York (1925), where the Court affirmed that the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause extended First Amendment’s free speech protections to the states.
The most recent Bill of Rights provision incorporated by the Court is the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines clause. In Timbs v. Indiana (2019), a unanimous Supreme Court considered the case of a man, Tyson Timbs, who owned a Land Rover valued at $42,000. Timbs later used the vehicle in a series of drug transactions. The state of Indiana attempted to seize the Land Rover under a forfeiture statute. Timbs’s attorneys argued that the seizure was excessive, since the maximum fine for his charge was $10,000. While the lower court agreed with Timbs, the Indiana Supreme Court decided, in part, that the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause had never been incorporated at a state level and, therefore, did not apply in the case.
In her opinion in Timbs, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the traditions of the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and other original sources, as well as key evidence from the Founding, Reconstruction, and the twenty-first century, as proof that the Excessive Fines Clause is “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty.” Ginsburg and six other Justices cited the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause as incorporating the Excessive Fines clause at a state level. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch cited the 14th Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. But the Court did not cite specifics on the test used to analyze the underlying substantive claim—namely, whether a given fine is excessive.
The arguments in the case
In its brief to the Supreme Court, Jouppi’s attorneys argued that any test that relates to the amount of a fine for a criminal offense is based on the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Bajakajian (1998). There, an airline passenger leaving the United States was found to have an unclaimed total of $357,144 in cash on his person, well above a limit of $10,000 that needed to be claimed. The federal government sought forfeiture of the entire amount. Writing for the majority in Bajakajian, Justice Thomas concluded that the amount of a fine “must bear some relationship to the gravity of the offense that it is designed to punish.”
In Jouppi, a trial court found that the forfeiture of the Cessna was unconstitutionally excessive under the Bajakajian precedent since Jouppi was only convicted of a class A misdemeanor. A state appeals court in Alaska vacated the trial court’s judgment, concluding that its investigation was incomplete. The Alaska Supreme Court then decided that the forfeiture was appropriate based on the amount of harm caused to the community by the illegal importation of alcohol. “It is clear to us that the legislature determined that the harm from even a six-pack of beer knowingly imported into a dry village is severe enough to warrant forfeiture of an aircraft,” it held. The Alaska Supreme Court also said that its decision did not conflict with the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fine Clause.
In its petition to the Supreme Court, the Institute for Justice, representing Jouppi, asked the Supreme Court to resolve several questions presented in the case. It specifically argued that the Alaska Supreme Court decision was an outlier, since it was based on an abstract view of the question and not the details of the case. The Alaska Supreme Court’s decision conflicted with the Supreme Court’s “precedent and the Excessive Fines Clause’s text and history,” it concluded.
After Jouppi’s petition of certiorari was filed, the state waived its right to respond. The Supreme Court then asked the state to file a response brief. The state said the Alaska Supreme Court decision was based on a clear mandate from state lawmakers. “Alaska faces unique difficulties in combating alcohol abuse and its consequences,” it said. “Given that many communities are accessible primarily by air, the legislature provided that any airplane used to illegally import alcohol into a dry community was subject to forfeiture.”
“The Alaska Supreme Court reached its conclusion by reviewing the specific facts of Jouppi’s case alongside the legislature’s objectives. That is how other courts have addressed similar claims, and that is what is required by United Statesv. Bajakajian.”
The Supreme Court considered the case at private conference on June 29, 2026, with its decision to take the case coming three weeks later. It is expected that the Court’s decision in its next term starting in October 2026 will become its latest action to refine its guidance on the Eighth Amendment.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Mamdani admits he lacks power to arrest Israeli prime minister after saying he’s ‘not welcome’ in New York City
Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, doubled down on his support for the international criminal court (ICC) on Wednesday and called on federal authorities to execute the court’s warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest should he visit the city in the fall.
“I call on the federal government to join the international criminal court and to execute both this warrant as well as any warrant the international criminal court holds,” Mamdani told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.
DOVER, DELAWARE — President Donald Trump attributed a forceful anti-nuclear position to four fallen service members Wednesday as he traveled to receive their remains, drawing renewed criticism from former Republican ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Before attending the dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base, Trump said without evidence the service members had stated “very strongly” that the United States could not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. He did not explain when they allegedly made those remarks or provide evidence supporting the attribution.
The ceremony honored Sgt. Angel Rampersad, 1st Lt. Tyler Feehan, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales and Sgt. Michael Swinton. Three were killed in an Iranian missile strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. Swinton died during the controlled detonation of an Iranian drone in Iraq.
Greene separately attacked Trump after he posted comparisons between the 18 American deaths in the Iran conflict and casualties from previous wars. She said the president appeared to be “bragging” about the relatively low total and accused him of abandoning his campaign image as a peace-oriented president.
The dispute reflects a growing split within Trump’s political coalition over a war that has killed 18 U.S. service members, wounded hundreds and raised fuel prices as fighting approaches its fifth month.
At a Galaxy Unpacked event in London today, Samsung unveiled a new foldable smartphone designed to compete with the still-unannounced iPhone Fold. Called the Galaxy Z Fold 8, it features a wider 4:3 form factor with a 7.6-inch inner AMOLED display, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. "The inner display has enough extra real estate for multi-tasking and entertainment," reports Mashable, which got a chance to try the new foldable ahead of the event. "And if you're worried about a crease in the middle of the display, don't be. We got up close with the device, and the crease fully disappears when the display is activated." From the report: As stated above, the main distinguishing factor of the new Z Fold 8 is its wider 4:3 proportions compared to the Z Fold 8 Ultra. If the latter is a book-style foldable, the former can almost be called a tablet-style foldable, instead. We think the wide screen will serve even better for reading books or multi-tasking with several apps open at once.
Also, at 201g, Samsung is really emphasizing how light the device is. The company is calling it the "world's lightest fold ever." And while the device may be light, its no lightweight. Samsung's newest foldable features Flex Titanium technology, which makes the Galaxy Z Fold 8 more durable. Speaking of durability, it also boasts Samsung's advantage hinge technology, Armor Flexhinge.
The Z Fold 8 feels like a solid middle point between the premium Z Fold 8 Ultra and the comparatively affordable Z Flip 8. All three phones use the same chip, but the Z Fold 8's 4,800mAh battery is smaller than that of the Z Fold 8 Ultra. However, the Z Fold 8 does have an option for 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage, similar to the Ultra.
Samsung’s bold design shift shows how consumer needs are reshaping the foldables category. I was among the first outside Samsung to see its new lineup in Korea.
July 22, 2026 — The EuroHPC JU has signed a procurement contract with E4 Computer Engineering, the selected contractor, for the acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of MeluXina-AI, a new AI-optimized supercomputer for the EuroHPC AIF in Luxembourg.
As part of the Luxembourg AI Factory initiative, MeluXina-AI will be hosted and operated by LuxProvide. The new supercomputer will strengthen Europe’s capacity in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science, supporting research, innovation, and industrial development across strategic sectors.
MeluXina-AI will deliver the computing power required for the training, testing, and pre-production deployment of advanced AI models. The system will be supported by a rich, scalable software ecosystem designed to meet the needs of AI users, from startups and companies of all sizes to researchers and industry.
Integrated by E4 Computer Engineering, The MeluXina-AI supercomputer will be built on Dell Technologies servers with liquid-cooled NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 systems based on the Blackwell architecture across 252 nodes for a total of 1,008 GPUs and a multi-protocol file system for both AI and HPC tiers. The supercomputer will be deployed on a dual-site infrastructure, Bissen and Bettembourg, delivering an estimated AI peak performance of over 20 Exaflops.
The software stack engineered to meet the MeluXina-AI requirements will enable GPU-as-a-Service delivery to multiple tenants with container-native isolation and dynamic workload scheduling. The Smart Governance of the platform will be provided with a rich and diversified ecosystem, including the Urania platform developed by E4.
The infrastructure will support secure multi-tenant operations through advanced cloud-native and isolated environments, helping protect sensitive data and intellectual property. Through integrated compute and data bridges, the platform will also enable connectivity with external data platforms, cloud providers, and other EuroHPC AI Factories, contributing to a seamless end-to-end computing environment for AI workloads across Europe.
In addition to this, sovereign cloud capabilities will support the deployment of AI applications within secure and sovereign environments, ensuring control, security, and compliance.
Since April 2025, the Luxembourg AI Factory has been a central hub for AI innovation and adoption, providing services to European startups, SMEs and other users by leveraging the existing MeluXina supercomputer. Its activities focus on several strategic sectors, including finance, space, cybersecurity and the green economy.
With the signature of this contract, the initiative enters its next phase. MeluXina-AI will underpin the development of trustworthy and high-performance AI solutions and create new opportunities for innovation in Luxembourg and across Europe.
The system will be installed across sites in Bissen and Bettembourg, Luxembourg.
Installation activities are expected to start in fall of 2026.
More Details
E4 Computer Engineering was selected following a call for tender launched in February 2026. Dell Technologies will participate in the implementation of the contract as subcontractor.
Luxembourg has been selected as a hosting site for an AI Factory in December 2024.
Primarily designed to serve startups and SMEs, in their research and innovation activities, MeluXina-AI will also be accessible to the wider research community.
The new AI-optimized supercomputer will be co-funded with a total budget of EUR 80 000 000 for the acquisition, delivery, installation, and maintenance of the system. The EuroHPC JU will fund 50% of the total cost through the Digital Europe Programme (DEP).
The Luxembourg AI Factory is coordinated by LuxProvide and implemented in collaboration with five consortium members, including Luxinnovation, the Luxembourg National Data Service, the University of Luxembourg, and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology.
The Luxembourg AI Factory is part of a broader network of AI Factories across Europe as the EuroHPC JU is currently overseeing the implementation of 19 AI factories offering free, customized support to SMEs and startups, complemented by an additional 13 AI Factory Antennas.
I’ve seen a lot of talk about the XRC where people are saying it’s the perfect board. I got a pint off marketplace to try out Onewheeling. I have been absolutely loving it. I live close to the city so I can run into town to explore. I charge it up while I dip into places. But as I use it more I’m getting irritated with the short distance. I’ve also got trails close by that I know my pint won’t be able to handle. I have a skating background and mainly use it for riding around town. When I go to look at stuff on the sight it seems to really push the GT and I like the idea of the distance and power but people have said it’s like a boat. They’ve also talked about the XL for more foot room I have kind of smaller feet so it hasn’t been a major issue but it’s something I see people bring up. I don’t want to lose that carving factor but if I’m gonna spend the money I want to know I’m getting the best. So what are people’s thoughts on XRC vs GT. Is the rally edition worth it. Or the recurve rails. I’m 5’11 and 240lbs shoe size 10 if any of that’s important.
Trump’s 50% tariff threat means there will be no ribbon-cutting celebration of Gordie Howe International Bridge
A planned joint US-Canada ceremony on Friday celebrating the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, is no longer expected to take place after Donald Trump announced a 50% tariff on most Canadian goods.
In announcing the tariffs, the president accused Canada of unfairly discriminating against US automobiles, alcohol and dairy products, escalating tensions with one of the United States’ closest allies.
Company behind ChatGPT says agent ‘cheated’ an evaluation by attacking a Hugging Face database
OpenAI has revealed that an autonomous AI agent powered by its technology went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a prominent startup by itself in an “unprecedented incident”.
The company behind ChatGPT said the startup Hugging Face had detected and contained the agent – an AI tool designed to carry out tasks without human assistance – which had entered its systems.
FORT DRUM, NEW YORK — U.S. health officials quarantined 14 American citizens at a military installation for four days after they returned from the Democratic Republic of Congo during a major Ebola outbreak.
The travelers entered the United States by land after traveling through Canada and were stopped at border crossings in New York and Vermont. They were transported to Fort Drum, where CDC personnel monitored them before their release, according to Reuters.
Sources familiar with the incident said none displayed symptoms or had known exposure placing them at meaningful risk of transmitting Ebola. The group reportedly included recently naturalized Americans who had visited relatives in Congo.
The quarantine followed a Trump administration policy preventing people currently in Congo from boarding commercial flights to the United States until they have spent 21 days outside the country. American citizens retain the legal right to enter through land borders, creating a gap between airline restrictions and border-entry rules.
Public-health and legal experts have questioned whether broadly applied restrictions are justified for travelers without documented exposure. The CDC says travelers leaving outbreak-affected areas should monitor for symptoms for 21 days, the maximum recognized incubation period.
Officials released all 14 travelers after four days without symptoms. The government has not explained why that period was considered sufficient or disclosed the legal authority used to hold them at Fort Drum.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one's television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG's webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user's TV. On July 2, [KrebsOnSecurity] featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42 percent of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one's television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung's Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.
Responding to questions about Spur's research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended. "A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform," Taylor said. "If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended." Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company's review of those apps is "well underway now."
"As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance platform quality and the user experience, LG will continue to strengthen our evaluation process for developer-submitted apps, including those that incorporate residential proxy SDKs," Taylor wrote in an emailed statement. [...] "A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight," Spur's Trevor Sutter wrote. "The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn't give consent, such as minors." LG is also facing criticism for monitors that automatically install software promoting paid McAfee subscriptions through Windows Update without user approval.
Brussels talks between senior diplomats now underway in attempt to sign off 21st package of sanctions, after previous failed attempts
The Venice Biennale said it would challenge a European Union decision to withdraw a €2 million grant in response to the return of Russia to its 2026 edition, despite continuing aggression on Ukraine, Reuters reported.
The Italian government sharply criticised the move, while the European Commission warned it would suspend or terminate funding if the Russian pavilion returned.
Figures come as large parts of southern Europe endure another record-breaking period of extreme temperatures
France recorded more than 5,700 excess deaths during its June heatwave, authorities have said, as swathes of southern Europe continue to endure another record-breaking period of extreme temperatures.
The French national health agency said on Wednesday that it had recorded 5,764 excess deaths between 17 June and 2 July, an excess mortality rate of 36%.
About a month ago did a bearing swap and threw TFL grizzly ceramics in. Rode super smooth for about 150 miles, besides the time I had to retighten inner and outer axle bolts when it started making a clicking sound, which solved the issue completely. Couple of days ago, my friend (130lb) dropped of a curb no higher than a foot and I noticed that the sound of the impact, for lack of better word, felt somewhat more impactful than usual. About three miles down the road, my friend noticed a ticking feeling under her feet, especially when turning left. Not much of a sound, or a vibration, but a clock like tic tic tic feeling under her feet. I thought the axle bolts must have came loose again somehow, so I reassembled and retightened inner and outer axle bolts with some blue loctite and noticed the clicking sound (see video) as I applied pressure to the wheel from one side to another. Interesting part is that it only happens if the wheel is rotated in one or two specific positions. And I believe I can see some movement between inner bearing ring and the axle when I apply the pressure trying to recreate the sound If I spin the wheel freely, the bearings make no sound and run smooth as expected, with occasional light tic sound every 10 or so rotations.
Could this be caused by a less than a foot drop and a ball bearing is cracked somewhere in there, even if the bearing is not making rough noise when spun by hand or ridden? Of something got messed up along the way and the axle is the issue? Hopefully that’s enough information for somebody to recognise what could be the issue and maybe somebody had to deal with this and could advise me before I have a spare half a day to pull the stator out to check on the axle. Thanks!
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump has approved a 30-year civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, potentially opening the kingdom to domestic uranium enrichment while placing American companies at the center of its nuclear-power program.
The agreement, known as a Section 123 pact under the Atomic Energy Act, is expected to be submitted to Congress within days. Lawmakers will have approximately 90 days to review it, but blocking the agreement over a presidential veto would require a two-thirds majority.
Unlike stricter “gold standard” agreements, the Saudi pact reportedly does not prohibit uranium enrichment or reprocessing spent fuel. It also lacks the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol, which permits more intrusive inspections. Those omissions are likely to generate bipartisan concern because both activities can contribute to producing nuclear-weapons material.
Administration officials argue that U.S. involvement would provide greater oversight than allowing Saudi Arabia to work with China or Russia. A proposed enrichment facility would require a joint feasibility study and could operate under a restricted “black box” arrangement controlled by American companies.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration would not approve an agreement that creates a proliferation risk. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has previously said the kingdom would pursue a weapon if Iran obtained one.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — A federal judge permanently struck down a New York law that allowed state officials to handle private-sector labor disputes when the National Labor Relations Board could not act.
U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee granted summary judgment to Amazon, ruling that the 2025 law conflicted with federal labor law. He cited a 1959 Supreme Court decision establishing that labor matters covered by the National Labor Relations Act generally fall within the NLRB’s exclusive authority.
The law authorized New York’s Public Employment Relations Board to oversee union elections and unfair-labor-practice cases whenever the NLRB was deemed “unable” to resolve them. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the measure after President Donald Trump removed an NLRB member, leaving the federal board without a quorum and hundreds of cases awaiting decisions.
Amazon sued after the state board opened a case involving Brima Sylla, a union vice president fired from the company’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island. Union officials allege Sylla was dismissed because of his organizing activity, while Amazon denies retaliation.
Komitee temporarily blocked enforcement in November before making the injunction permanent. He rejected New York’s argument that the NLRB’s inability to act justified an exception to federal preemption. A separate NLRB challenge to the state law remains pending, and the state labor board and Teamsters have not announced whether they will appeal.
More than a decade after the human microbiome was comprehensively mapped, scientists have now identified the vast communities of microbes that make up the Great Barrier Reef.
Analysing DNA from seawater samples of 48 reefs, researchers have mapped the microbiome of the Great Barrier Reef, documenting more than 360,000 distinct viruses as well as more than 500 new bacterial species not previously known to science.
Top US AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI cheered when Australia announced it would set new AI rules.
Big tech celebrating limits on their Silicon Valley VC-funded free-for-all might seem counterintuitive but there’s a much broader play than just what happens in one relatively small market.
Jack Dorsey's Block has launched Buzz, an open-source workplace collaboration platform that combines messaging, project management, and software development workflows for teams of both humans and AI agents. Dorsey described Buzz as "a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes" that is "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign and open source." SmartCompany reports: According to the Buzz website, users can invite specialized AI agents into team chats, allowing them to collaborate with employees and even other AI agents. From there, they can reportedly move directly from discussions into planning, coding, pull requests and project management without switching between multiple applications.
Buzz also aims to replace parts of GitHub by bringing software development workflows directly into the platform. Teams can plan work, write code, review pull requests and manage Git projects without jumping between separate collaboration and development tools. [...] In practice, that means businesses aren't locked into a single AI provider. Organisations can self-host Buzz, customize it to suit their own workflows and choose whichever AI models best fit their needs.
Europe’s leaders queued up this week to welcome Andy Burnham as Britain’s seventh prime minister since the Brexit vote – all expressing the hope that his tenure would continue the thaw in EU-UK relations initiated by his predecessor, Keir Starmer.
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission chief, said she was looking forward to strengthening cross-Channel ties, adding that a “very good” first discussion had confirmed a common commitment to “bringing the EU and UK closer and closer”. France’s Emmanuel Macron said he hoped for a deeper relationship that gave “new momentum to the partnership” between the EU and the UK. Germany’s Friedrich Merz said he, too, was looking forward to forging an even closer bond.
Record June temperatures expected to cut grain harvest by 9m tonnes to its lowest level since 2018
The heatwave that swept across Europe in June is estimated to have cost the continent’s grain farmers €2bn (£1.7bn) in lost revenue and destroyed 9m tonnes of crops, sparking concern about the impact on the price of food.
Coceral, the European cereals and oilseeds trade association, made the estimate for the harvest of crops such as wheat, barley, maize and oats following the heatwave.
Gov. Newsom's office says the no-bid deal was "competitive," the records weren't delayed, and our reporting is false. The state's own database, deadlines, and the Legislature's budget bills say otherwise. Here's the point-by-point review.
As lawmakers approve a social media ban on kids and phones in high schools, Macron says France is "leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children."
Can the world benefit from China’s quest for food security?Expert commentjon.wallace
China wants to become more self-sufficient in food. This could make it easier to fight climate change and improve nutrition worldwide, but there are also risks to global food markets.
China’s remarkable economic transformation over the past four decades has sharply reduced the share of its population who are hungry – from 30 per cent in 1980 to less than 2.5 per cent today.
In part that has been achieved by ensuring it has the means to buy the food and food inputs it cannot make for itself. Today China is the world’s largest agricultural importer, accounting for 60 per cent of soybean imports and 76 per cent of beef imports in 2024.
China’s drive for food security
Food security is seen as central to maintaining the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. But China has become increasingly concerned over whether the food and food inputs it imports will continue to be available and at an acceptable price. The threat of weather-linked shortages among a fairly concentrated group of major suppliers is a long-standing concern which is being made worse by climate change. And growing tensions with the US have heightened China’s concerns over threats to its overseas supply sources and transport routes.
China’s first response has been to diversify its sources of supply, and in particular to reduce its reliance on the US. Brazil replaced the US as China’s largest foreign agricultural supplier in 2018, exporting nearly $60 billion of agricultural products (mainly soybeans and beef) to China in 2023.
China’s ability to become self-sufficient in food is limited by its acute shortage of arable land and water scarcity
Chinese firms are building port and rail infrastructure to help develop new suppliers, reduce costs and avoid chokepoints: a new port at Chancay in Peru and rail link to Brazil will reduce reliance on the Panama Canal. China also holds very large buffer stocks and accounts for more than 60 per cent of global stocks of maize and close to 50 per cent of such stocks of wheat.
These efforts have been complemented by an increasing determination to become more self-sufficient in food production. The Chinese approach relies on the development and deployment of new technologies, applying regulation and subsidies, and coordinating state and private sector firms. Major improvements in Chinese agricultural infrastructure have already been achieved, reducing waste and conserving water.
Parallels with manufacturing
Some experts have argued that China’s emerging food strategy parallels the approach it previously deployed to become a world leader in advanced manufacturing – particularly of green tech products – substituting for imports and sharply increasing exports.
There are aspects of the food security strategy that parallel what has happened in the manufacturing sector. But there are also important differences: the food strategy faces additional constraints that are not present in manufacturing. And the strategy has other objectives alongside greater self-sufficiency, including maintaining affordability and improving resilience, sustainability and population health.
China’s ability to become self-sufficient in food is limited by its acute shortage of arable land and water scarcity, made worse by urban development and industrial contamination.
Applying investment and technology to improve food processing efficiency may be straightforward. But using technology to improve agricultural yields is much harder. So too is developing alternative sources of protein attractive to Chinese consumers.
There are also risks involved with concentrating food production within China’s borders. Doing so could increase the vulnerability of the food supply to climate shocks. It could also raise the scale and intensity of farming – risking increased pollution, water scarcity, land degradation and energy demand.
Reducing dependence on foreign supplies of animal feeds and increasing the use of new protein sources is also likely to increase domestic food prices, at least in the short term. And the effects on foreign relations could be significant: reducing imports could weaken the political influence China has over food exporting countries, while increasing food exports – on top of the existing manufacturing surplus – would exacerbate trade tensions.
Lastly, there is the problem of ‘involution’: Chinese state interventions in manufacturing have contributed to excessive competition. The same issue could affect agriculture: deploying subsidies to improve efficiency and reduce costs through innovation and investment may conflict with the goal of maintaining farmer incomes.
Global impacts
Overall, however, it does seem likely that China’s food security strategy, combined with its declining population, will eventually lead to a sustained decline in average agricultural imports and a more diversified supply base. Moreover, there should be a reasonable amount of time for China’s major food suppliers to adjust.
A number of possible benefits for the world may follow. Most importantly, the reduction in overall Chinese demand for food imports could reduce deforestation in supplier countries. Land freed up from supplying China may be redeployed into supplying food to other markets with rapidly expanding populations such as sub-Saharan Africa, or in the production of future biofuels which could yet play a significant role in decarbonizing transport.
It may also create additional production capacity and space for nature-based means of carbon sequestration, facilitating the changes in land use necessary to deliver net zero. And China’s increased sustainability standards at home may spill over into its purchases of food from abroad.
Meanwhile the enhanced technologies developed to enhance Chinese self-sufficiency may potentially be applied elsewhere. That could help improve yields, resist contamination, reduce waste, recover degraded land and create new nutritional products. China’s efforts to diversify its sources of supply could also accelerate modernization of agriculture in non-traditional markets, improving local food supply alongside economic growth.
But there are also significant risks which need to be managed. Development of non-traditional markets could increase deforestation pressures if not effectively regulated. Redeployment of land to biofuels could reduce the global food system’s ability to respond to climate or other supply shocks. Lower Chinese external demand for food in ‘normal’ times could be accompanied by heightened risk of sudden spillovers – positive or negative – to international markets. A sudden increase in heavily subsidized Chinese exports would be highly damaging to farmers in developing countries.
The case for international cooperation
What the rest of the world needs from China is the greatest possible stability and predictability in its net external demand for food over time. China is not the only source of potential shocks to the global food system – the rapid take up of weight loss drugs in advanced countries is another potentially transformative factor. But the sheer scale of Chinese demand makes it a special case. The world also needs major food producers to maintain the ability to respond flexibly to supply shocks. And it needs China to use its market power to encourage rising sustainability standards worldwide.
China also stands to benefit from such an outcome, and strengthened cooperation between producers and consumers is the most likely route to achieving it. Some steps are already being taken, such as a dialogue underway in the WTO on setting common sustainability standards for trade in food. But these need stronger political backing, greater urgency and the areas of cooperation need to be broadened.
Low income developing countries need reasonable access to new food-related technologies being developed by China and the advanced economies, including those that deploy AI. Greater transparency is needed over demand and supply, particularly with respect to the future role of biofuel production. As food stocks may play an increasingly critical role in balancing shocks, more transparency is needed on their level and how they will be used, including in a crisis.
Increased geopolitical tension is driving China’s food security strategy, but international cooperation can turn this into a ‘win-win’ outcome for both China and the wider world. Neither side should miss the opportunity.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Political division is becoming a personal safety concern for a growing share of Americans, according to a global survey conducted by Gallup and the Lloyd’s Register Foundation.
The 2025 World Risk Poll found that 10% of U.S. adults identified politics as the greatest risk to their everyday safety, up from 6% in both 2021 and 2023. That was the highest recorded share among the 140 countries surveyed, although the United States was statistically tied with Hungary at 9%. The global average was 1%.
Concerns crossed partisan and demographic lines. Gallup found no statistically significant differences based on political affiliation, age, gender or education. Respondents variously blamed political extremism, polarization, the Trump administration or Democrats.
Politics was not Americans’ leading overall concern. Road-related accidents ranked first at 34%, followed by crime and violence at 19%. Personal health conditions and mental health were each cited by 5%.
The survey also found deep distrust toward government. Fifty-eight percent of Americans said the government does not care about their well-being at all, compared with 47% in 2021.
Gallup surveyed nationally representative samples of roughly 1,000 or more adults in most participating countries throughout 2025. The national margins of sampling error ranged from 2.2 to 5.5 percentage points.
Believe it or not, Pokémon Go is 10 years old this month. The wildly successful smartphone game, which allows you to track down lovable creatures in the real world using GPS and augmented-reality technologies, has reportedly been downloaded 800m times across 150 countries and regions. A trillion Pokémon have been caught so far – and I have been responsible for a modest percentage of that figure.
When the game was first released, my sons and I spent many happy hours wandering the streets and parks of Frome searching for Jigglypuffs and Charizards, and the game’s social element, which lets you take on gym battles with other players in your vicinity, offered my autistic son a route to communicate with other children in a way he’d never been able to before.
To win in this year’s midterm elections, the party must highlight that Trump has made huge financial gains while millions struggle to make ends meet
If the Democrats hope to maximize their chances of winning in this November’s elections, there’s a subject they need to scream far and wide about: Donald Trump’s immense and unprecedented corruption. The Democrats need to make clear to every American that Trump has shamelessly used his second term to increase his wealth by an astounding amount – by more than $2bn – all while millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, their struggles made worse by Trump policies that have pushed up inflation and gas prices.
Every day through election day, the Democrats should convey loud and clear that America’s billionaire president has focused far more on making himself richer than on improving the lives of average Americans. Trump’s corruption and conflicts of interest are so vast and outrageous that many Americans have little idea how vast and outrageous they are: ranging from Trump’s making more than $1.4bn from crypto last year to granting pardons to criminals whose familieshave donated to Trump’s campaign to his sons’ investing in startup companies that receive generous help from the Trump administration.
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
The rapid dismantling of the US public health system at all levels means the US is in worse shape than it was before the Covid pandemic, former top CDC officials say.
US secretary of state says international community should ‘join forces’ against authoritarian Ortega regime
Nicaragua’s congress, controlled by the country’s long-serving president, Daniel Ortega, has announced a “work plan” to implement the authoritarian leader’s order that the country should no longer hold elections.
The UN and the US strongly condemned Sunday’s announcement by Ortega, who has been in power since 2007 and, after a controversial constitutional change last year, now governs alongside his wife, Rosario Murillo, as “co-president”.
The ancient remains were found face down and will undergo radiocarbon dating to determine their age. DNA analysis will also be carried out to determine the person's sex.
Bloomsbury has 14,087 titles listed in agreement between AI startup and authors over use of their work
The publisher of Harry Potter has received a multimillion-pound payout as a beneficiary of a $1.5bn (£1.12bn) copyright settlement between the AI startup Anthropic and thousands of authors over the use of their protected work to power chatbots.
Bloomsbury, which is home to the bestselling novelists Sarah J Maas and Susanna Clarke as well as JK Rowling, said it had 14,087 titles listed within the settlement, with a proposed compensation of about $3,000 a title.
Inspired by interactive theatre and fuelled by the motion capture tech used by VTubers, the vampire spies in Red Kiss have personality in spades
‘You look at the news and you’re like, ‘Another pointless war, another pointless bloodshed, another pointless genocide.’ And that can make you a bit hopeless.”
Roy van der Schilden, narrative designer and business director at Wispfire, speaks of a very human feeling. But the protagonist of its upcoming game Red Kiss can relate – despite being a vampire.
Two new frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, 9 hours of battery life, and privacy questions still in the air: here’s what Samsung shared about what’s coming this fall.
Samsung’s sporty smartwatch gets a larger battery, a faster Qualcomm processor, hands-free Gemini and new trail features. The catch? It also costs more.
Researchers listening off the Caribbean island of Dominica found variations in the mammals’ audible clicks when marine traffic was close
Sperm whales produce a specific pattern of clicking noises when they hear the noise of boats, researchers have found. The pattern is so distinct that the scientists who identified it said they can now use it to predict when ships are nearby.
Researchers from Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), a non-profit research organisation working to decode sperm whale communication, spent four years tuning in on the calls of 15 sperm whales off the coast of Dominica.
‘Structural divergence’ in China’s economy exposes a growing problemExpert commentthilton.drupal
Manufacturing is thriving while household spending is suffering. This seems to reflect a deliberate strategy by Beijing to maximize its geopolitical leverage. Growth suffers as a result.
China’s policymakers can compete with the best when it comes to euphemism, and one new phrase worth taking note of is ‘jiegou fenhua’ or ‘structural divergence’ – a term the People’s Bank of China used in its July statement to describe what’s going on in the Chinese economy.
What it means is that the economy is running at two different speeds. The manufacturing sector and exports are enjoying a stellar performance, while indicators of household spending and satisfaction remain in the doldrums. This is by no means a new phenomenon: Chinese households’ gloom has deepened ever since the pandemic ended, while Chinese manufacturers have been accelerating their capture of global market share for almost the exact same length of time.
These features of China’s economy have been on full display in the economic data recently published by Beijing.
China’s $125 billion trade surplus for the month of June, for example, was its largest ever. Although Chinese import growth has been accelerating recently, the real news is the way in which Chinese manufacturers continue to dominate global markets.
Consider this: in recent months, the year-on-year growth rate of Chinese export volumes, boosted by rising AI investment, has been running at close to 15 per cent. Meanwhile, the growth rate of global import volumes is less than 5 per cent. As long as Chinese exports are growing more quickly than the world’s imports, China’s global market share is rising. And that has been true without interruption since early 2023.
Meanwhile, the misery of Chinese households is illustrated by their persistent reluctance to spend money. The National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) has published its quarterly survey of household income and consumption, and the data shows that the savings rate of urban households is now running close to 40 per cent. Pre-pandemic, that rate was closer to 33 per cent, already extraordinarily high.
The flipside of this is very weak retail sales growth, which was just 0.7 per cent during the first six months of 2026. For comparison, the same figure for the US was over 4 per cent.
Another consequence of such weak domestic spending is that few want to borrow: the growth rate of total social financing, China’s broadest measure of credit to the economy, has been setting new all-time lows in each of the last three months.
Property collapse
These two divergent stories about China’s economy share a common root. What connects them is the decision that the authorities took in 2020 to direct capital away from the property sector – on which the economy had come to rely heavily in the years after the Global Financial Crisis – and towards manufacturing.
The resulting property collapse is still very much ongoing: the average of real estate prices in 70 cities (published monthly by the NBS) fell once again in June, to a level more than 20 per cent below its peak in the summer of 2021.
That decline in property prices is at the absolute core of ‘structural divergence’, in three connected ways.
In the first place, Chinese households have taken a huge knock to their financial confidence, since real estate has been their main asset. This has led to a ‘negative wealth effect’: falling real estate prices cause households to lose confidence and make them more nervous about spending. This is not the only factor, but it’s a major one.
The decline in property prices is at the absolute core of ‘structural divergence’.
Second, weak domestic spending helps boost China’s exports. Although the global technology boom is certainly lending support to Chinese manufacturers, a surge in Chinese export growth would have happened regardless, since exports regularly do well when domestic spending is weak: Chinese firms look for markets abroad when domestic consumers are unwilling to spend. And since that unwillingness has been on constant display since real estate prices started to fall, the outperformance of exports is unsurprising.
Third, a natural consequence of weak domestic spending is that Chinese inflation has been incredibly low. That in turn keeps Chinese exports strong because of the way in which the difference between China’s inflation rate and that of its trading partners affects China’s international competitiveness. China’s trade-weighted, inflation-adjusted exchange rate has depreciated by around 15 per cent since early 2022, and almost all of that gain is because China’s inflation rate has been so low compared to that of its trading partners.
A deliberate strategy?
Since the phenomenon of ‘structural divergence’ seems to flow so obviously from China’s real estate collapse, one has to wonder why that collapse was induced by policymakers in Beijing.
One explanation is geopolitically innocent: since real estate investment had come to account for around a quarter of Chinese GDP, a rebalancing of the economy away from real estate made perfect sense on its own terms.
But another potential explanation has geopolitics more at the centre of Chinese decision-making.
One trend that Beijing won’t have failed to notice, as the 2010s unfolded, was the phenomenon of ‘US exceptionalism’ – the impressively strong recovery that the US staged after the 2008 crisis. Although that recovery had a lot to do with the increase in US budget deficits, US technology investment also played an important role.
It is worth suggesting, at least, that this episode of US exceptionalism might have convinced Chinese policymakers to reinforce their commitment to establishing China as a ‘manufacturing powerhouse’ in response to the dynamism of the US economy.
Powerhouse status has indeed been achieved, and China’s dominance of global manufacturing has given it enviable sources of leverage through the application of export controls. The most convincing example of this to date is the rare earth export licensing regime Beijing announced in April last year, which pushed the Trump administration to climb down from its threat of a 145 per cent tariff on Chinese goods.
But there could be plenty more to come. In March this year the Chinese Academy of Sciences identified 63 strategically sensitive technologies that might be eligible for effective export restrictions, including quantum devices, aerospace engineering components, biotechnology and electromagnetic catapult systems.
If you want to develop an application for AmigaOS 3.x but don’t want to deal with real hardware, virtualisation and emulation are your friends.
Apropos of nothing, I decided to set up an Amiga development environment. Since figuring things out wasn’t straightforward, I wrote down instructions for Linux about how to compile the first program and run it in an emulator. Enjoy!
It’s a great guide, easy to follow, and you’ll be up and running quickly. The emulator the guide uses – AmiBerry, a fork of WinUAE – contains slopcode, so you may want to consider alternatives. This doesn’t change much for the guide though, as whatever tasks you need to do outside and inside AmigaOS itself remain unchanged.
Isabel Rose, 26, sentenced to six years for blackmail and perverting course of public justice over her allegations against British man
A British woman who reported being raped to police in Hong Kong has been sentenced to six years in prison for blackmail and perverting the course of public justice.
Isabel Rose, 26, from south-east London, travelled to Hong Kong in early 2024 to visit a British banker she had met while travelling in south-east Asia.
The billionaire says the AI-generated film will stay true to Homer’s original, after repeatedly criticising Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster over its casting choices
Elon Musk has said his AI platform Grok Imagine will make a “historically accurate” adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, after the success of Christopher Nolan’s blockbusting treatment which the SpaceX founder has regularly criticised over its casting.
In a post on X, Musk said: “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” Musk also linked to a post containing a three-minute clip of footage that the user said had been generated from Grok Imagine, showing a scene between Odysseus and the nymph Calypso.
Just received my new Funwheel X7 Long Range. I can already tell I'm going to love the board but want to save others from a bit of deceptivemess on Fungineers side.
The X7 series is FAR from compatible with with XR accessories. Bumpers don't align, X7 Rear bumpers uniquely require rear threaded inserts meaning XR bumpers leave your rear footpad held on with only the 2 wheel side screws when trying to add BANG bumpers. Additionally XR Front Sensor Footpads don't have long enough cables to accommodate the X7.
Not throwing any hate. Do far the board feels like a beast to my aging XR+, but feel like the Fungineer team should be a little more transparent that "compatibility" means DIY modding for the majority of aftermarket accessories to their ready-to-ride boards.
Hope this helps others from disappointing surprises when ordering upgrades for their X7 boards.
EDIT: It's the REAR footpad (not the front as originally posted) that requires threaded inserts not found in rear BANG bumpers. Thanks @jonnyblaze12591 for pointing this out and confirming Fangs fitment.
Drivers of cars from the Volkswagen Group using alternative Android versions like GrapheneOS, LineageOS, or /e/OS have been unable to use the VW app for some time. This means they can neither check their vehicle’s remaining range from their phone, schedule service appointments, nor control charging and air conditioning. The car manufacturer has made changes to the app’s backend that only allow devices with Google’s pre-installed Play Services. When asked by heise online, VW stated that affected users should not expect a timely reopening. “However, they are looking into it.”
Even as the AI bubble becomes a mainstream talking point on Wall Street, tech companies continue to peddle the fantasy that AI is poised to become an almost magical money-maker. Case in point, OpenAI wants you to believe that by 2030, it’ll be raking in $100 billion a year just from ads alone — even though it’s currently struggling to reach just $1 billion.
The US tech giants fueling this “AI” bubble are trying to hide the true extent of their debt:
Hidden debt at U.S. tech giants swelled eightfold in four years to an estimated $1.65 trillion as artificial intelligence investments ballooned, a Nikkei study shows, exceeding actual debt and making it tougher for investors to assess risk.
[…]
The five companies’ hidden debt, which does not appear on balance sheets, totaled $1.65 trillion in the most recent quarter, exceeding the roughly $1.35 trillion in debt reflected on their balance sheets. The data includes some estimates.
The American stock market is booming, thanks to artificial intelligence. Tech giants are borrowing billions to acquire AI talent, purchase chips and hardware, and construct data centers. And market watchers are starting to get worried. They see financiers bulldozing giant piles of money to private AI start-ups with no realistic path to profitability, tech companies reliant on other tech companies for revenue growth, and non-tech businesses without a lot to show for their AI investments. The value of AI-linked firms has climbed $27 trillion in the past three years—an astonishing amount, equivalent to 36 percent of the value of the entire U.S. stock market today. Although future earnings could justify those valuations, as Dominic Wilson and Vickie Chang of Goldman Sachs argued in a note to clients, the profit expectations require Panglossian optimism.
No less an authority than Sam Altman is arguing that we are in an AI bubble. The International Monetary Fund is citing it as a significant risk to financial stability and warning about what might happen when it bursts: diminished investment, tighter credit, reduced consumption, disrupted trade flows.
I have it on good authority that “AI” increases productivity by 10x, so surely, none of the above is a problem. Any day now, we will be inundated with waves of brand new, high-quality, valuable software. Any day now, existing software will increase in quality by 10x, leading to a huge surge in software sales. Any day now, productivity in factories will increase rapidly thanks to “AI” freeing up workers’ time, driving prices down 10x, leaving consumers with 10x more money to spend. Any day now, everyone will be able to produce the next Citizen Kane or write the next Anna Karenina, causing an explosion in magnificent, timeless art that will have historians of the future marvel at our civilisation’s ingenuity and artistry.
In the meantime, these companies can just ask their “AI” how to become profitable. Should be table-stakes for a 10x force multiplier.
Stephen Miller warned of a leftwing ‘cancer’ threatening civilization. As a critical care doctor, I have a response to his diagnosis
The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in Washington. It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record. And the country, running to the loudest of them, never examined the one most likely to kill.
In critical care we distinguish the mechanism of death from its cause. The mechanism was a Thursday. The cause was chronic, progressive and untreated.
Robert B Shpiner is a clinical professor of medicine in pulmonary and critical care at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Administration will also overhaul how US government funds federal research by supporting individual scientists and AI over universities
The US will spend $5bn to tackle longstanding scientific problems across multiple fields using AI, the Trump administration said in a statement on Wednesday. The agencies will use the funding to identify the root causes of chronic diseases, accelerate drug discovery and develop longer-lasting building materials, among other tasks, according to the statement.
Scientists will have access to the Department of Energy’s supercomputers, AI and specialized datasets, along with other components needed to run experiments using algorithms, said Michael Kratsios, the chief technology adviser to Donald Trump, in an interview with Reuters.
I have an OG pint, upgraded battery and im on my 3rd tire. Im up to 2700 miles on this thing after like 6 years. One of the best purchases ive ever made
How Burnham should engage with AfricaExpert commentthilton.drupal
The new prime minister can achieve significant results in Africa if he sets clear ambitions, strengthens the UK’s partnerships and implements a more joined-up approach.
The UK’s Approach to Africa, developed in 2025 under former Foreign Secretary David Lammy following consultations with African partners, outlines a pragmatic vision for partnership in which trade and investment links take centre stage.
This ambition reflects an acknowledgement of Africa’s increasing economic and strategic weight. With expanding consumer markets, significant long-term growth potential and a central role in future supply chains, the continent has become an arena for intensifying global competition.
However, the Approach remains a framework for engagement rather than a full strategic reset of UK-Africa relations. And Africa is unlikely to be among new prime minister Andy Burnham’s first foreign policy priorities. Burnham also faces a challenging fiscal environment, with the government’s latest spending plans reducing bilateral funding for African countries to help finance higher defence spending.
Yet Africa is an area where relatively modest strategic delivery and a clearer approach could yield significant political and economic dividends for the UK over the long term. Burnham’s government needs to define a clear ambition for the UK’s engagement with Africa and translate it into a credible, differentiated offer that advances both African priorities and UK interests.
Trade and investment require a coherent offer
For the UK to meaningfully contribute to the realization of Africa’s economic potential, it needs a more joined-up approach. This should combine sharp commercial strategy, new outreach to business leaders and investors, and existing work across multiple government departments to produce investment opportunities.
Germany’s more integrated, trade-oriented approach offers a useful lesson. It links development finance, industrial policy and private sector mobilization – as seen in the ‘Marshall Plan with Africa’. Rather than a single programme, this framework has underpinned various reform partnerships with select African countries, combining policy reforms with targeted finance to improve the investment climate and attract private capital to those countries. Its emphasis on reform incentives, investment promotion and coordinated financing demonstrates the value of a clearer government‑wide offer to businesses and African partners.
Rather than replicating Germany’s model, the UK can adopt its underlying discipline: setting sharper priorities, strengthening cross-government coordination and presenting a business-oriented offer focused on areas where UK and African countries’ interests align.
Critical minerals offer a clear example. Resource-rich countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Namibia and others, are seeking to move beyond the extraction of raw resources towards greater industrial development and value creation. The UK and its partners are looking to build more resilient supply chains for minerals that are essential to the energy transition and emerging technologies, as set out in the UK Critical Minerals Strategy. This alignment of interests presents an opportunity: not simply to secure access to resources for the UK, but to build partnerships that support investment, skills development, infrastructure and local economic transformation.
The UK can also make more strategic use of its public finance institutions and multilateral partnerships to mobilize private investment. UK Export Finance (its export credit agency), British International Investment (its development finance institution), and related instruments can help de-risk projects, boost co-financing and support commercially viable investments that might otherwise stall. At the same time, harnessing the depth of the City of London’s financial markets and asset managers will be essential to turning these investment pipelines into large‑scale capital flows for African infrastructure, energy and industrial projects.
The Simandou 2040 programme in Guinea demonstrates the potential of this approach: a UK Export Finance guarantee of £1.8 billion is supporting a portfolio of infrastructure projects aligned with the Simandou iron ore development, helping to catalyse wider international investment in transport, energy and administrative modernization.
Building a credible partnership
Fiscal realities have already made it necessary for the UK to pursue more selective engagement. The UK government’s latest spending plans amount to a 52 per cent reduction in regional bilateral aid to Africa over the next three years as part of wider cuts to fund higher defence spending. These changes will drastically impact long-term programming and are likely to affect the perceptions of the UK’s commitment on the continent.
Yet they do not represent a total disengagement. The UK has maintained strategic partnerships with regional heavyweights including Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. It remains active on Sudan through humanitarian assistance and diplomacy. It has also continued security and stabilization engagement in conflict-affected regions through instruments such as the Integrated Security Fund.
Africa requires political attention in its own right.
The UK’s credibility as a partner will ultimately depend on whether it is seen to follow through on its stated plans. This in turn requires preserving the diplomatic capacity needed to understand political developments, identify opportunities and maintain trusted relationships across the continent. Recent budget pressures and organizational changes have already constrained aspects of the UK’s presence in Africa. Further reductions to diplomatic missions should be avoided; they would weaken the in‑country expertise, trade and investment capacity, and trusted networks that underpin effective commercial engagement.
As engagement becomes increasingly economic, now is also the time to decisively move past the traditional framing of Africa through a primarily development lens. Africa requires political attention in its own right. A ministerial structure that separates Africa from development responsibilities – supported by a dedicated Africa adviser to the Prime Minister – would strengthen cross-government coordination and signal that the UK views African countries as strategic partners.
Beyond bilateral economic interests, the UK can be an important partner for African countries in international forums, working alongside them to advance their priorities. This includes supporting African ambitions for global governance reform, greater representation in multilateral institutions and a stronger African voice in organizations such as the G20. The UK’s upcoming G20 presidency in 2027 provides a timely opportunity to demonstrate that commitment and advance shared priorities.
Technical cooperation remains another area of comparative advantage. Support for public financial management, taxation, digital governance and project preparation often delivers greater long-term value than headline funding alone because it responds directly to African priorities and strengthens the foundations for sustainable growth.
From ambition to lasting partnership
The UK’s future standing in Africa will depend not only on where it chooses to engage, but on how effectively it harnesses the expertise, networks and capabilities already present across government, academia, think-tanks, business and civil society. Better connecting these assets can help create a more coordinated and strategic offer.
The UK can be an important partner for African countries in international forums.
Soft power remains an important part of this equation, but increasingly exercised through practical cooperation rather than traditional influence-building. Education, professional exchanges, research partnerships and institutional cooperation can build trust and sustain relationships over the long-term.
Selective support for conflict prevention and resolution, including mediation efforts in Sudan, needs to remain an essential part of the UK’s approach, alongside sustained humanitarian engagement. A credible partner must continue to support countries and communities facing acute crises, even while making difficult choices elsewhere.
Shoppers are waking up before sunrise to score the $3 mini grocery bags, which have become a global status symbol
A Friday morning on a public holiday usually means sleeping in. Instead, I was standing outside my local Trader Joe’s before 7am, staring at a line of shoppers that seemed to stretch for miles.
The grocery store in Santa Clarita, just north of Los Angeles, wouldn’t open for another hour. But hundreds of people were already waiting for the same thing: Trader Joe’s new striped pastel mini canvas totes, a $2.99 reusable bag that has inspired a frenzy more typically associated with sneaker releases or concert presale tickets.
Scientists have rediscovered a healthy coral reef off the coast of Benin more than 60 years after surveyors first hinted at its existence. "At least eight coral types and eight fish species have formed a thriving ecosystem on this long-forgotten site," reports Inside Climate News. "What they had captured was a wealth of marine life: six types of soft coral; two black corals; and eight species of sheltering fish, from golden African snappers to the Monrovia doctorfish." From the report: While no coral samples have yet been extracted, researchers have classified the site as a mesophotic coral ecosystem (MCE). Such systems are light-dependent communities existing at the lower limits of reef-building corals. At more than 175 feet below the surface, the coral garden they discovered appears patchily scattered on a rocky substrate. Bridging the gap between shallow reefs and deeper benthic habitats, MCEs are home to distinct species and unique environmental conditions. While scientists are increasingly recognizing their ecological and climatic importance, they remain among the least explored elements of tropical and subtropical marine biodiversity. And this one has real potential to unlock new information about coral history.
"Since it's an undisturbed marine ecosystem, it can help through carbon dating or paleoclimatic study to tell us which kind of climate system has occurred here in the past," said [Gerard Zinzindohoue, the project lead for Coral Reefs Rediscovering & Exploration in Benin]. "It's better to know the past to help explain the present, and help know which kind of direction we can take in the future." In addition to the blackbar soldierfish, West African goatfish, and Guinean angelfish filmed darting through the reef, the discovery presents potential conservation claims for other marine life. "We will be advocating for its full protection, perhaps by setting up a marine protected area around it," said [Houangninan Midinoudewa, an oceanographic researcher at the Benin Marine Conservation Club], who specializes in elasmobranchs -- the study of sharks, rays, and skates.
Midinoudewa is currently submitting an application to designate the area as an Important Shark and Ray Area with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Based on the knowledge of local fishermen, Midinoudewa is confident the reef is home to sawback angel sharks, silky sharks, brown skates, and marbled stingrays. The team behind the discovery hopes this will spark a wave of similar discoveries in the waters off West Africa, an area of the world underserved by scientific research projects. "I hope the Gulf of Guinea will be a hub for research because we know our resources are being exploited and people [need to] know exactly what we have and why we should care," said Midinoudewa. Zinzindohoue agrees: "We don't need to wait for others to come to our country to show us what is under our sea. We are the ones who must take responsibility."
ChatGPT maker OpenAI says its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an "unprecedented cyber incident."
Proceedings suspended as politicians call for Modi government to address police violence and education scandals
India’s opposition parties have shut down parliament in a protest calling for the resignation of the education minister, in solidarity with the new youth-led “cockroach” movement.
Opposition politicians, led by the Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, gathered outside the parliament building in Delhi on Wednesday, many dressed in black and waving placards calling on Dharmendra Pradhan to quit.
ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA — Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Lindell is proposing a six-month pause in deportations to allow undocumented Minnesota residents without criminal records to apply for what he calls conditional work visas.
Lindell said applicants would be fingerprinted and screened before receiving permanent authorization to work and pay taxes. They would not receive citizenship or voting rights under his proposal.
The MyPillow founder said people whose only offense was entering the United States illegally should receive another opportunity to remain and work. He also proposed jail sentences for business executives who knowingly continue paying undocumented workers in cash after the registration period.
Lindell acknowledged that President Donald Trump, who endorsed his campaign last week, may oppose the plan. Trump’s administration has prioritized expanded deportations and increased cooperation between state authorities and ICE.
A Minnesota governor could restrict state participation in federal enforcement, but cannot independently issue immigration visas or provide federal work authorization. Implementing Lindell’s plan would therefore require cooperation from Congress or the Trump administration.
Lindell said he would cooperate with federal agents while enforcing laws governing protests. He is seeking the Republican nomination to face Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Klobuchar.
MIAMI, FLORIDA — President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio do not plan to prevent Andrew and Tristan Tate from being extradited to Britain, where the controversial online influencers face dozens of sex-crime charges.
U.S. marshals arrested the brothers in Miami after British authorities filed 38 additional charges, bringing their combined total to 59. The allegations include rape, assault, human trafficking and offenses involving indecent images. The alleged conduct occurred between 2010 and 2017.
The brothers deny wrongdoing and describe the prosecutions as politically motivated. Their attorneys plan to challenge extradition in federal court.
Under the U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty, a federal judge must determine whether the request meets legal requirements. Rubio would make the final decision and could deny extradition if he concluded that the case involved political persecution.
A senior administration official told Axios that the United States intends to honor its treaty obligations. A State Department official said Rubio has not spoken with the brothers or their attorneys and has no plans to intervene.
The Tates supported Trump and promoted his 2024 campaign to their substantial social-media audiences. However, administration sources said neither Trump nor Rubio is inclined to assist them. The brothers also face separate human-trafficking and sexual-assault allegations in Romania, which they deny.
Family and boxing community grieving deeply after Rapp was killed by motorist while she was cycling in Texas
The violent death of the US boxer Hannah Rapp, whom authorities say was killed recently by a motorist while she cycled, has left her sport, her communities outside the ring and her loved ones grieving deeply just weeks after she took her first world title shot.
A statement from the Bryan Boxing gym where Rapp trained in Texas commemorated her as “an amazing lady and soul” while the Aggieland Cycling club to which she belonged recalled how her “kindness and excitement for life [buoyed] all who knew her”.
The US president has been complaining about Canada’s ‘filthy, polluted and unhealthy air’. Maybe he should put all that energy into tackling the climate crisis
Right, that’s it: we’ve got to do something about Canada. The country’s wildfires, which resulted in air quality alerts across more than 20 US states, ruined my weekend. On Friday the air in Philadelphia, where I live, was so unhealthy I couldn’t go outside without my eyes stinging. My kid’s preschool cancelled outdoor time, while the city suspended trash pickup and closed public pools.
You know who did not suspend their regularly scheduled programming because of a bit of toxic smoke? The plot monitoring committee at my allotment. Despite the apocalyptic conditions, they were still busy ensuring the gardening bylaws were strictly adhered to. I realised this on Saturday when I got an official violation for too many weeds. Yes, I’d got a bit carried away with “chaos gardening” (all the rage these days) and I’d meant to clean things up on Friday, until the smoke got in the way. So, thanks for that Canada.
He decried endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now he may be stuck in one of his own making
As Donald Trump launched a war of aggression against Iran nearly five months ago, he insisted Washington would achieve a decisive victory within weeks. Trump and his advisers scoffed at any suggestion that they were breaking repeated campaign promises not to start new conflicts, and to end America’s legacy of forever wars, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In early March, a week into the war, Trump declared he would only agree to “unconditional surrender” by Iran’s theocratic government. He vowed to destroy much of Tehran’s military, called for a popular uprising and touted the overthrow of the regime that rose to power after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. Of course, Trump’s grandiose promises turned out to be the latest chapter in a long history of American imperial hubris.
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware officials confirmed the first two cases of measles in more than a decade this week. The cases come as almost every other state is battling their own resurgence of the long-eliminated virus amid a growing national vaccine skepticism and Trump administration cuts to public health funding.
Delaware public health officials reported two confirmed cases of the highly contagious measles virus in Kent County this week — the state’s first in more than a decade, they said.
According to a statement from the Delaware Division of Public Health, both men who tested positive were unvaccinated.
The statements did not include any other information about the men who tested positive, citing medical privacy restrictions.
Public health officials said contact tracing was ongoing, and they would notify those who have been exposed to “confirm whether they have been vaccinated against measles, provide educational resources, and to recommend treatment when necessary.”
Earlier this year, Delaware’s principal pediatric hospital, Nemours Children’s Health, reported a measles exposure, but no information about any confirmed cases was released at a later time. The incident involved someone from out of state who sought care at the Wilmington-area hospital, officials said at the time.
In 2000, the U.S. declared measles was eliminated. But last year, cases hit their highest level since that elimination declaration amid a wave of vaccine skepticism, according to the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
What can you do to protect yourself?
Measles is highly contagious, and one person can infect multiple other people if those people are not vaccinated. Symptoms can take days, or even weeks, to show themselves, Delaware officials said.
Symptoms can include fever, cough, pink eye or a runny nose lasting for days prior to the onset of the widespread, splotchy rash associated with measles, state officials said.
If someone is exposed or begins showing symptoms, the state health department said they should call its Office of Infectious Disease Epidemiology. The state offers two phone numbers, one for business hours, as well as a 24-hour hotline:
Business hours line: 302-744-4990
24-hour hotline: 888-295-5156
The state recommends that people exposed to measles find a dose of the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine within three days. According to a press release, these vaccines can be found at primary care clinics and pharmacies, and residents should contact their preferred providers to find out more.
Two of the nation’s top pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreens, both offer the MMR vaccine. Patients can schedule appointments online. Here are links to their MMR pages:
Children ages 1 through 12 are eligible for the vaccine and usually receive two doses. The first dose is usually administered after a child’s first birthday and then again after a few years.
According to the state, those who receive the vaccine are protected for life if they receive both doses, though like all vaccines, the state says there is still a nominal chance someone could contract the virus if they are vaccinated.
National outbreaks amid vaccine skepticism
Across the country, states have contended with worsening measles outbreaks in conjunction with heightened vaccine skepticism. This year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 2,260 cases in 44 states, according to data from last week.
Those figures are approaching 2025’s full-year count of 2,289 confirmed cases. More than 90% of cases in both years were confirmed in people who were not vaccinated against the virus.
One of the states with the worst outbreaks was South Carolina, which saw nearly 1,000 cases in one of its northern counties between October 2025 and April 2026. According to a state health dashboard, more than 900 of those confirmed cases occurred in individuals who were not vaccinated.
That same dashboard also said children were particularly impacted by the six-month outbreak. Close to 900 of the confirmed cases were in children under 18. Nearly 80% of those confirmations were among children younger than 11.
In Texas, however, two children died during an outbreak last year. The state dealt with an eight-month outbreak from January to August in the western part of the state. A release from Texas health officials said it had confirmed 762 measles cases, and the outbreak hospitalized 99 people.
Earlier this month, Delaware started its own Office of the Surgeon General in response to what it saw as a disconnect between state and federal health officials over vaccines.
In September 2025, as the federal government began revising vaccine recommendations, Delaware and other states publicly countered the new guidelines. When Delaware refuted the federal government, Gov. Matt Meyer issued a “standing order” to pharmacists to “ensure ease of access” for people seeking the vaccines in the state.
It mirrored efforts in other states like Massachusetts, whose governor ordered her state’s insurance carriers to continue to cover vaccines, even if they were not recommended by the federal government.
Delaware joined with Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to collectively focus on “developing evidence-based recommendations on vaccinations, disease surveillance, emergency preparedness and supporting state public health labs.”
Why Should Delaware Care? City Council presidents have the power to set meeting agendas, and therefore set the tone for how a municipal government’s core decision-making body runs. At 92 years old, Dover City Council President Fred Neil brings a unique mix of lengthy life experience and moderating presence to the often discordant body of municipal leaders in Delaware’s capitol city.
An enthused Fred Neil settles into a plush office chair inside Dover City Hall, ready to dive into his life story.
The Dover City Council president describes being fresh-out-of-college and going to work as a news reporter in 1959, using a “wet battery recorder” and “alligator clips” to send his audio through the airwaves to his Baltimore radio station’s audience.
He recalls driving around Charm City as a 20-something, chasing down interviews with Democratic and Republican presidential nominees John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, accompanied by another reporter with “one eye and a peg leg.”
Neil spent 12 years as a “newsman,” as he calls the job, before moving on to a series of other communications and public relations positions across Maryland.
Now, at 92, Neil sits atop the dais inside Dover City Hall, presiding over often-divisive local government meetings as he serves his second one-year term as the city council president.
He is among the few nonagenarians to currently hold elected office in the United States. As of 2024, Neil was recorded in the National League of Cities database as the oldest municipal elected official in the country by a margin of nine years.
U.S. Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is well-documented as being the oldest member of Congress at age 92. Grassley was born in September 1933, just two months before Neil.
Roughly two decades into his formal retirement, Neil often has to stay at city hall for meetings that run late into the night, sometimes not ending until 11 p.m.
His secret? An afternoon nap and an occasional mid-meeting candy break.
He sometimes becomes so energized after city council meetings that he can’t sleep, staying up late into the night writing opinion columns or other letters with his thoughts on city issues, Neil said.
In recent years, those columns have lambasted the state Department of Justice for not prosecuting low-level crimes and celebrated the contentious Dover Police Academy’s role in the city’s public safety force.
Neil often serves as the moderating voice between vocal, competing factions on the city council — partially because that is his job as council president, and partially because that is his natural temperament, according to people who have known him for years.
Neil’s colleagues from his time in Baltimore, and now, the two-plus decades he has spent in Delaware, all describe him as a clear-headed, effective communicator. They say it is not surprising he ended up holding elected office at 81, or that he stuck with it into his 90s — “the gray 90s,” as Neil refers to them.
“The easiest thing for [Neil] would be to take the same route as a lot of people his age do; he could be playing pickleball,” Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen said.
But for Neil, city government was never the plan.
He said he refuses to become a politician. Neil maintains that he is still a newsman at heart, simply sitting on the other side of the dais.
“I’m an elected official,” Neil told Spotlight Delaware in an interview in late May. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll be a politician because that indicates something else. It means somebody has my interest and I’m going to cater to them for that interest.”
Charm City roots
Neil is a proud born-and-raised Baltimorean. He held a handful of different jobs in media, communications and sports during the 70 years he lived in Maryland.
He also is a lifelong actor, performing in musicals from “Fiddler on the Roof” to “The Will Rogers Follies.”
His theatrical inclinations come through both in the way he conducts a city council meeting and in one-on-one conversations — gesticulating wildly and peppering his speech with whimsical phrases.
“You’ve got wife No. 1 in there, and you have wife No. 2,” Neil said during an interview with Spotlight Delaware, pointing to a packet splayed out in front of him titled “Fred’s Road to 90: A short trip through a long journey.”
The 20-page document describes his various jobs, two marriages, three children and six grandchildren. Neil wrote the packet to teach his grandkids more about the twists and turns of his life.
A child of the Great Depression, Neil was expected to work in the pharmacy his parents owned by the time he was “tall enough to reach the cash register.”
Following his high school graduation in 1952, he enrolled at the University of Maryland College Park, where he studied history and journalism, with a two-year intermission to serve in the U.S. Army, before graduating in 1959.
During his later years at the University of Maryland, Neil got a job working weekends at a Washington D.C.-area radio station for $1 an hour.
By the time he finished college, Neil said, he was thrust into the radio broadcasting industry. He covered Maryland politics, and – his favorite – the Baltimore (now Indianapolis) Colts and Orioles.
Neil rose through the ranks of the Baltimore radio world, becoming the news and sports director of WCBM and president of the Maryland Press Club by the late 1960s.
Tom Scheurich, a longtime friend of Neil’s and a colleague in one of his later roles at the Maryland Department of Education, said he remembers listening to Neil’s distinctive voice on the radio, years before they knew each other.
“His voice had a personality that made you want to listen to him and find out more about what was so exciting and he was so excited about,” Scheurich said.
Neil eventually left the media industry behind in 1970, worried about the impending recession, and transitioned into a series of other communications-related roles, including a brief stint as press officer for Maryland politico William Donald Schaefer during his time as the mayor of Baltimore.
He also spent 20 years as the public affairs officer for the state Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, ushering in what Scheurich described as the “golden age” of the division’s work helping people with disabilities find employment.
Neil has various amusing anecdotes to share from his different jobs — like when he “became a makeup artist” for a PR gig, or was “called in” to save a failing season of the Baltimore Banners tennis team — but always returns to the lessons he learned from being a newsman.
He describes the career as having taught him how to discern peoples’ motivations, and look at all sides of an issue when it is presented to him.
“It all comes back to the news,” Neil said. “Anything that I look at is based on all of those experiences as a newsman.”
Drawn to service in Dover
Neil and his wife, Dawn, decided to leave Baltimore in 2003 and relocate to Dover, because they read in Kiplinger Magazine that Delaware was a good place to retire.
At the time, Neil said, he planned to mostly retire, while continuing a couple part-time positions with the Maryland State Pest Control Association and with his own PR firm, “Fred Neil Associates.”
Shortly after settling in Dover, however, Neil was drawn into his neighborhood homeowners’ association because he was dismayed by the lack of homeowner protection laws in Delaware compared to Maryland.
“I needed to protect my community,” he said. “I’m in a community of seniors, and I saw the landlord taking advantage of us.”
With a newfound passion for homeowners’ protections, Neil became involved with the Delaware Manufactured Home Owners Association (DMHOA) and began getting to know state lawmakers as he lobbied for legislation.
Bill Kinnick, who worked with Neil at DMHOA in the 2010s, said Neil became known as the “media-type person” at the organization, who could do technical writing and use his communication skills to effectively persuade lawmakers.
Kinnick described getting the General Assembly to create an Office of the Manufactured Housing Ombudsperson through the DOJ as a major victory for homeowner protection, borne from the communication skills Neil brought to the group.
Since stepping into the role as city councilman in 2015, when Rep. Sean Lynn (D-Dover) vacated the seat to serve in the General Assembly, Neil has continued to take an interest in homeowner rights.
He often jumps to the defense of property owners when the city council debates topics like panhandling and drug use in Dover. He also has been focused on passing a “Lemon Housing Ordinance,” which would require home inspections before a residential property is transferred from one owner to another.
Not a ‘politician‘
Nearly an hour into the May interview with Spotlight Delaware, Neil showed few signs of tiring. He continued his pithy phrases and hand gestures as he described his decision to become an elected official — not a “politician.”
Neil has served on Dover City Council since 2015. He has been chosen by his fellow council members to serve as president in both 2025 and 2026.
His current council term runs through 2029, though he is quick to say he will step down at any point if his “mental acuity” falters. He will reevaluate running for another term in 2029, he said, “presuming I’m still alive.”
Neil has presided over the city council during a particularly turbulent period in Dover. The city government has faced controversy between its police chief and local police union, a seemingly everlasting debate over a hotly contested panhandling ordinance, the firing and subsequent legal battle by its former city manager and a major budget shortfall.
When city council meetings devolve into squabbles between members, or when residents lobby personal attacks at the dais during public comment, Neil is left to manage the room.
He often lets traces of his theatrical side come through, eliciting laughs in hopes of lightening the mood in the chamber.
Dover City Council President Fred Neil is a lifelong actor, pictured performing as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” | PHOTO COURTESY OF FRED NEIL
Before the council takes a vote on a contentious ordinance, Neil will read from a lengthy pre-written statement, explaining his vote.
Former City Council President Tim Slavin and Mayor Christiansen, also a former council president, both say Neil is the ideal person to preside over the body. He is able to synthesize different opinions and bring a moderating voice to the dais, they said.
“He’s just a really, really good communicator,” Slavin, who served on city council until 2021, said. “He’s not confrontational, but he also doesn’t shrink away from his responsibilities.”
For Neil, leading the city council, unsurprisingly, comes back to his newsman experience.
He aims to gather as many perspectives as possible to figure out his position on an issue, he said, while trying to determine whether his fellow council members are being motivated by “political aspects,” like aspiration for higher office, or a genuine concern.
“I’m a sponge,” Neil said.
He laughed that reporters now use cell phones to record interviews, and laptops to type notes. A far cry from his alligator clips and telephone mouthpiece system of his radio reporting.
Despite these changes, and the countless others Neil said he has experienced over the past 92 years, he is committed to keeping up with the times.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
Prosecutors seek a one-year sentence and heavy fine after chef garnished dish with insects not approved for consumption
Prosecutors in South Korea have asked a court to sentence the owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant to one year in prison for serving a dessert topped with ants, an insect not approved for consumption under local food safety law.
The request, made on Monday, also sought a 20m won (£10,108) fine for the company that runs the restaurant, Yonhap news agency reported.
Israel’s general election will be like no other beforeExpert commentjon.wallace
Netanyahu’s government has presided over unprecedented failure and polarization. Yet the opposition still struggles to articulate a genuine alternative.
There was something symbolic about the Knesset’s setting of the Israeli general election for 27 October. Most parties preferred a different date but were unable to reach an agreement. Instead, they allowed the clock to run down until the last day permitted by law: even this relatively minor decision became a source of political contention. That well reflects the context for this election. Israelis will head to the polls in three months with the country more polarized than ever.
By any standard, this general election is the most consequential in Israel’s history, both domestically and internationally. Its outcome will have far-reaching implications not only for Israel but also for Palestinians in the occupied territories and for the wider region.
As matters stand, the projected results point to another prolonged political stalemate. Opposition parties are polling better than those that make up the current coalition. But most Zionist parties still insist they will not join forces with Arab parties (who primarily draw support from Palestinian citizens of Israel). This decision is morally reprehensible and politically self-defeating – leaving the opposition short of the 61 seats required for a majority in the 120-member Knesset.
Moreover, the opposition parties have so far maintained the justified position they adopted before the 2022 election: they will not form a government with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Initially, this stance was driven by his legal status as a defendant in three corruption cases. Today it is reinforced by his reluctance to take responsibility for the catastrophic events of 7 October 2023 and what has followed.
Unless the election produces a far more decisive result than current polling suggests, or one of the political camps reneges on its campaign pledges, Israel may once again find itself heading back to the polls after 27 October – in search of a decisive outcome.
The extraordinary years since 2022
This election is taking place in extraordinary circumstances – originating in 2022 when Netanyahu, operating in the shadow of his ongoing corruption trial and determined to remain in power, formed a government with some of the most extreme right-wing, ultranationalist, messianic and anti-democratic elements in Israeli politics. His decision saw them become indispensable coalition partners.
From the coalition’s inception, its most radical members were determined to weaken the judiciary and, with it, Israel’s system of checks and balances – the pillars of its liberal democracy. Their proposed judicial reforms sparked one of the largest protest movements in Israeli history, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets, week after week, in an effort to stop what they regarded as the erosion of democratic institutions.
At this critical moment, Hamas launched its cross-border attack on Israeli communities near the Gazan border – the deadliest day in Israel’s history, in which nearly 1,200 people, many of them civilians, were killed, and 251 taken hostage.
Since then, Israel has become embroiled in multiple conflicts involving Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and, most significantly, Iran – with no clear end in sight on any front. Worse, Netanyahu’s gamble that President Donald Trump would prosecute the war with Iran until the regime in Tehran was destroyed has backfired: Iran remains intact. And Israel’s relations with the US are at a low ebb.
Israelis’ choices
On the security front, voters are being asked to judge a government that has continually failed in its most basic responsibility: protecting its citizens. It has presided over prolonged wars while facing unprecedented external legal and diplomatic challenges.
The war in Gaza has claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives, displaced the overwhelming majority of the territory’s population many times over, and failed to achieve the government’s declared military objectives. At the same time, it has left Israel more internationally isolated than at any point in recent decades. The government is defending itself against allegations of genocide before the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Meanwhile Iranian missiles have struck Israeli towns and cities for the first time, killing civilians. And Hezbollah’s attacks have forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents from northern Israel.
Equally significant is Netanyahu’s continued refusal to establish a state commission of inquiry with full powers to compel testimony, obtain documents and investigate the failures surrounding 7 October and the wars that followed. That refusal remains an open wound in Israeli society and is likely to weigh heavily on voters’ minds.
Fragmentation
Security, however, will not be the only issue shaping the election campaign. At least ten parties appear likely to surpass the 3.25 per cent electoral threshold required to gain representation in the Knesset. That ensures a highly fragmented political landscape – which will make it even harder to address fundamental questions about the future character of Israeli democracy, the balance between the branches of government, and relations among the country’s diverse communities.
The period between the dissolution of the Knesset and the formation of the next government…could prove especially volatile.
Particularly contentious are relations between secular Israelis and the rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox population. The final weeks of the current Knesset have been marked by a rush of controversial legislation, much of it aimed at expanding executive power at the expense of judicial independence and media freedom.
Among the most divisive measures is legislation seeking to entrench exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men from compulsory military service. This issue cuts across traditional political divisions: for Israelis who have been through compulsory service or spent hundreds of days in reserve duty since October 2023, exemptions are unacceptable, and may prove decisive when they cast their ballots.
The lack of an alternative
One of the enduring enigmas of Israeli politics is that, despite Netanyahu’s unprecedented failures during his longest period in office, the principal opposition parties struggle to offer a clear policy alternative.
In many areas, they promise to pursue broadly similar objectives but with greater competence. This is particularly evident on the Palestinian issue, where most remain reluctant even to articulate support for a two-state solution or an end to the occupation.
Likewise, on the topics of Iran, Lebanon and Syria, they generally differ more in style and political approach than in strategic direction, placing somewhat greater emphasis on diplomacy while maintaining Netanyahu’s sole reliance on military power. The trauma of 7 October, and the entrenched prevailing opinion among Israelis that all security threats are existential and that there is hardly any diplomatic solution to them, are not something politicians are prepared to challenge, at least not in this election.
The period between the dissolution of the Knesset and the formation of the next government, however many election rounds that may require, could prove especially volatile. Netanyahu will remain head of an interim government, retaining full executive authority, including the power to initiate military action.
There is concern that an ageing, politically weakened and increasingly desperate prime minister could use escalation on one or more fronts to create a renewed sense of national emergency. That could happen even in defiance of the President Trump, with US–Israel relations in their current condition. Iran, Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank could all become arenas for such escalation, encouraged by the most extreme members of the coalition.
In one sense, the October election cannot come soon enough. Israel is in urgent need of political renewal after years of paralysis and deepening division. Yet the months ahead are likely to witness one of the most toxic and bitter election campaigns in the country’s history. Against the backdrop of ongoing wars, fears of political violence and the real possibility that the vote will once again fail to produce a decisive outcome, any sense of anticipation is tempered by caution, and even trepidation.
Newly released footage shows the moment a police officer from Southlake, Texas, pulls a driver unharmed from a car after the vehicle burst into flames during a routine traffic stop. Cpl Joshua Swisher was awarded the local police department's meritorious conduct award for his bravery in the incident
In key swing districts across the country, Democratic Party leaders have backed centrist candidates with carefully calibrated positions on charged issues such as artificial intelligence and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
William Lawrence is running a very different campaign.
In a purple congressional district in Michigan, Lawrence, a co-founder of the progressive Sunrise Movement, is calling for a moratorium on new data centers and labeling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.
The approach mirrors that of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has endorsed Lawrence.
Both men are making strong showings in the polls, and now the centrists are fighting back. A shadowy group is running misleading ads that question Lawrence’s progressive bona fides.
“We have seen this in many cases in other elections this cycle — that corporate centrists are attacking progressives for not being progressive enough.”
The line of attack is telling, Lawrence told The Intercept.
“People are sick of the status quo,” he said. “We have seen this in many cases in other elections this cycle — that corporate centrists are attacking progressives for not being progressive enough. And it shows you what voters are hungry for is change.”
An unabashed progressive, Lawrence breaks the mold of the typical candidate to run for a seat like Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, which is centered around the state capital of Lansing and the college town of East Lansing.
The district was previously represented by centrist Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who now serves in the Senate, and is currently held by Republican first-term Rep. Tom Barrett.
The other two candidates running in Michigan’s August 4 primary hew closer to Slotkin’s mold. Bridget Brink is a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who quit in protest of President Donald Trump’s policies on the war with Russia, and Matt Maasdam is a former Navy SEAL who served as a military aide to President Barack Obama.
Unlike Lawrence, both declined to call Israel’s war on Gaza genocide at a debate.
Lawrence also comes from a starkly different background: While Brink and Maasdam traveled the corridors of power in Washington, Lawrence focused on building grassroots power, first through his role co-founding the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which backed the Green New Deal, and more recently helping found the Michigan Rent Is Too Damn High coalition.
Mutual Endorsements
On July 7, Lawrence and El-Sayed announced that they were endorsing each other. Like Lawrence, El-Sayed is running in the progressive lane in his primary while arguing that it will not hurt his electability in the general.
“We have a lot of people who want to back both of us,” Lawrence said. “Given that the two of us both prioritize having a very robust, grassroots campaign rather than just relying on tens of millions of dollars in dark money like our respective opponents, it is especially beneficial for us to be able to integrate our grassroots operations.”
Although no independent polls of the race have been released, Lawrence’s campaign commissioned one showing him leading the pack. Another commissioned by Brink’s campaign showed her ahead.
Now that Lawrence has demonstrated that he has a shot at winning, the attacks have begun.
Meanwhile, a super PAC called the Crush MAGA PAC is targeting Lawrence, rather than the Republican holding the seat. The group has plowed more than $500,000 into a highly misleading ad that accuses Lawrence of investing in “Wall Street, big oil, and data centers” and campaigning against Democrats for supporting the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which sought to pressure party candidates over Israel’s war on Gaza.
The investments highlighted in the anti-Lawrence ad make up a small portion of the $11,000 Lawrence has invested in a mutual fund; the mutual fund, not Lawrence himself, chose them. And, for his part, Lawrence eventually supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
The source of the ad campaign against Lawrence is unclear, but he has speculated that it may be powered by pro-Israel donors.
If Lawrence succeeds in the primary, he will have to win in a general election in a purple district. He believes he can show that progressive candidates can win in split districts, pointing to the election and reelection of Congressional Progressive Caucus member Rep. Chris Deluzio in a swing district in Pennsylvania.
“He’s not throwing people under the bus, and he has joined the progressive caucus, and he has now turned that into a more comfortable district. He has been winning with healthy margins,” Lawrence said. “That is what I hope to be able to do as well.”
COLUMBUS, OHIO — Elon Musk and three other billionaires supplied nearly all the money raised last quarter by a super PAC supporting Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, strengthening his financial advantage in the closely watched Ohio governor’s race.
Campaign-finance filings show Musk contributed $5 million to V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims in May. Technology entrepreneur Ratmir Timashev also donated $5 million, while hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and asset-management executive Ross Stevens each contributed $1 million.
Together, the four donors provided $12 million, representing approximately 98% of V-PAC’s second-quarter contributions. Musk, Timashev, Ackman, Stevens and investor Jeffrey Yass have collectively supplied $37 million, or more than 88% of the super PAC’s total funding.
V-PAC spent more than $8.1 million in June on an advertisement attacking Democratic nominee Amy Acton and reported approximately $25.8 million in available cash at the quarter’s end.
Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited amounts but cannot legally coordinate their activities with candidates. Ramaswamy’s campaign and V-PAC did not respond to the Ohio Capital Journal’s requests for comment.
Acton’s campaign criticized the donations as evidence that wealthy interests could influence state policy. Campaign-finance advocates said the concentrated funding could also overwhelm other voices as Ohio prepares for what may become one of its most expensive gubernatorial elections.
The best games, goals and personal highlights – from a magical Azteca to Erling Haaland breaking America
Paraguay 1-1 Germany. There were plenty more games with more goals but none could match the drama of the penalty shootout in this last-32 tie. Germany aren’t supposed to lose in them but they did this time in spectacular fashion. Ed Aarons
Many Black Americans were not cheering Spain’s complicated history. They were rooting against the racism, politics and silence associated with Argentina
There are moments in sports when you realize people aren’t just watching the score any more. They’re watching values. They’re watching who speaks. They’re watching who stays silent. And they’re watching what those silences say.
I found myself thinking about that throughout this World Cup. On paper, Sunday’s final looked simple. Spain v Argentina. Two footballing giants and countries with glorious soccer histories. Two nations whose pasts are also stained by colonization, oppression and chapters of history that shouldn’t be whitewashed simply because someone can score a goal.
New survey reveals one in 10 Americans identify politics as biggest risk they face in life – 10 times the global average
Americans are 10 times more likely than people elsewhere in the world to regard politics as the greatest threat to their personal safety, according to a global survey that suggests the country’s deep partisan divisions are poisoning everyday life.
The latest Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll found that one in 10 Americans identified politics as the biggest risk they face in their daily lives when asked an open-ended question. The figure is up from 6% in both 2021 and 2023 and well above the global average of 1% across 140 countries.
A laborer picks tomatoes on one of the few farms that participates in a voluntary initiative to protect workers from exploitation. Audra Melton for ProPublica
During those two years, I’ve thought a lot about how the government’s obligation to keep foreign workers safe has collided with another priority: to help U.S. farmers stay in business.
Farmers have long pushed for fewer H-2A regulations. That’s in part because of the skyrocketing costs of the program, which sets minimum hourly wages and requires that farmers pay for workers’ housing and transportation. As one Georgia farmer wrote last year in a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor, “It has felt like every policy that pertained to the H2A program was made focusing solely on the benefit of the migrant worker.”
All of that brings to mind a freezing cold weekend in January 2025, early on in my reporting, when I showed up at a farmers’ conference in Savannah, Georgia. What the farmers sought at that gathering — and what happened in the months that followed — exemplifies the tension between keeping workers safe and keeping farms solvent.
After I made my way through a brightly lit convention hall — past the tractor salesman’s stall, the labor regulator’s booth, and tables of peach preserves and dried blueberries — I arrived in a room full of farmers eager to know what President Donald Trump’s second term would mean for an industry dependent on foreign labor and facing a rising number of bankruptcies.
A small group of lawyers and lobbyists gave several presentations to the farmers. One of them vowed that Trump could “profoundly” change the program, in part by making it easier to hire H-2A workers and pay them less. And if the lobbyists’ plans were successful, farmers would save even more money by facing fewer labor protections for workers.
“Everything is on the table,” said Braden Boucek, an attorney who has represented the farm industry in challenges to the H-2A program’s requirements.
In the year to come, Trump’s immigration policies would drastically reduce the number of immigrants crossing the border and accelerate deportations of people without legal status living in the country. But one important pathway — the H-2A visa program — would remain wide open. And the administration, under pressure from the farm industry, would be quick to embrace the types of changes the lobbyists told the farmers about on that frigid January weekend.
To get the financial relief that farmers were seeking, three key things had to change with the H-2A program, the lawyers and lobbyists told the farmers at the conference.
The first was to overturn parts of a rule enacted by the Biden administration. The rule granted workers the right to pursue certain union protections, including ones that would shield them from unfair treatment by their employers. Farmers opposed the rule because they felt it would make it harder to run their businesses.
At the conference, I listened as former U.S. Labor Department assistant secretary Leon Sequeira told farmers how several ongoing lawsuits could help “invalidate” parts of the rule. The previous June, a Georgia blueberry farm, along with 17 states, had sued the administration, alleging that the rule went beyond what Congress allowed. That lawsuit, along with two others, had led to injunctions that temporarily halted part of the rule.
Sequeira, who is a lawyer in one of the three cases, later told me that the legal effort “isn’t about denying more protection for workers.” Rather, it’s intended to protect farmers from overreach by the U.S. Labor Department.
“People can certainly differ on whether or not workers should receive more protection under the law,” he told me. “But as multiple courts have said, that is a decision for Congress to make in passing laws, not the agency.”
Five months after Trump took office, his administration suspended enforcement of President Joe Biden’s rule. It then proposed to rescind parts of it. That proposal is pending.
The second change was to slow or stop wage increases for H-2A workers that had soared during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. After months of industry pressure, the Trump administration last year reduced the hourly pay rate, which it expects will save farmers more than $2 billion a year. Those savings are projected to cost H-2A workers up to 32% of their annual wages, according to the think tank the Economic Policy Institute.
The last thing I heard at the conference was an ambitious legal strategy to advance the interests of farmers even further.
One of the lawyers, Ann Margaret Pointer, explained that three recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings had together diminished the powers of the federal government. One decision limits the ability of federal agencies to create new regulations. Another makes it harder for agencies to fine companies that violate some federal laws. And a third makes it easier for employers to challenge federal regulations that had been on the books for many years.
Pointer said those decisions could pave the way for future lawsuits challenging the visa program — and could strengthen the odds of farmers winning those lawsuits.
All three of those efforts were vital, she explained to the farmers at the conference, to “prevent some of the costs to comply with the H-2A program from falling on your shoulders.”
I recently reached out to the lawyers and lobbyists who spoke at that conference to ask how they felt about their progress on the plan they’d described.
Boucek, who is now a U.S. attorney in Tennessee, declined to comment for this story.
Pointer and Sequeira both said that the Trump administration’s initial changes to the program improved the way it works for farmers. Sequeira also said that the changes are just the beginning of the wish list for the agriculture industry.
Pointer and Sequeira said the larger changes the industry is seeking to the H-2A program will require action from Congress. They pointed to a recently filed bill that proposes to limit wage hikes, cut red tape for farmers and allow additional sectors of the farming industry to participate in H-2A. (Labor and immigrant advocacy organizations oppose the bill, saying it would harm farmworkers and would amount to executive overreach.)
Until Congress changes the statute, Sequeira said, the Labor Department “can only fiddle around the edges.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced that imported generic medicines will face steep new tariffs beginning in 2028 unless manufacturers shift production to the United States.
Under the plan, generic drugs entering the country will remain tariff-free for two years beginning Aug. 1, 2026. A 100% import duty will take effect in August 2028 and remain for one year before increasing to 200% in August 2029. The administration’s existing tariff policies for patented and brand-name pharmaceuticals will remain separate.
Trump said the delayed implementation gives foreign manufacturers time to construct American plants and relocate production. Many generic medicines and their active ingredients are currently manufactured in lower-cost markets, particularly China and India.
The policy could significantly affect the U.S. healthcare system because generic drugs account for more than 90% of prescriptions filled nationwide while representing a relatively small share of total drug spending.
Swiss manufacturer Sandoz said it would consult U.S. policymakers but needed more information before evaluating possible investments. Industry analysts warned that rebuilding domestic manufacturing could strengthen supply chains but also increase production expenses and consumer prices.
Specific exemptions, enforcement procedures and treatment of companies already constructing U.S. facilities have not yet been fully detailed.
"GPT-5.6 Sol and an 'even more capable' model used stolen credentials and exploited vulnerabilities in the Hugging Face API to obtain secret information used to cheat on evaluations," writes longtime Slashdot reader Dr. Bombay. The Associated Press reports: "We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media. AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own. "We suspected last week's cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent," Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue said in a statement. "Turns out it did!"
[...] "AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities," OpenAI said in its statement Tuesday. "The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities." Delangue said he spent the past 24 hours working with OpenAI, "and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It's quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!" Delangue added that it "might be the first incident of its kind."
New York mayor admits he does not have authority to arrest Netanyahu, adding Israeli PM is ‘architect of a horrific genocide’
Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, acknowledged on Tuesday he does not have the authority to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, but urged US federal authorities to do so if the Israeli prime minister visits the US later this year.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” Mamdani said in a video posted to social media.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA — Republican voters nominated several prominent allies of President Donald Trump for Arizona’s highest statewide offices Tuesday, elevating candidates who challenged or sought to overturn the certified results of the 2020 election.
Rep. Andy Biggs won the Republican nomination for governor and will face Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in November. Biggs supported efforts to contest Trump’s 2020 defeat and was subpoenaed during an Arizona investigation into attempts to reverse the state’s results.
State Rep. Alexander Kolodin secured the GOP nomination for secretary of state. Kolodin represented Republicans who signed documents falsely claiming Trump won Arizona and filed unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the 2020 and 2022 elections. He will face Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.
State Senate President Warren Petersen also won the Republican attorney general nomination. Petersen supported the Republican-led review of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots, which confirmed President Joe Biden’s victory while identifying no evidence that changed the result.
Trump endorsed all three candidates. Their victories demonstrate his continued influence over Arizona Republican primary voters, although similar candidates struggled statewide in 2022 and 2024.
Arizona remains politically competitive, with unaffiliated voters likely to play a decisive role in November. Biggs will challenge Hobbs, Petersen will face Attorney General Kris Mayes, and Kolodin will run against Fontes.
In today’s newsletter: A White House operating without expertise, strategy or restraint is stuck in a conflict with no easy way out, which is sending economic shockwaves far beyond its own borders
Good morning. Within two hours of entering No 10 on Monday afternoon, Andy Burnham had his first call with Donald Trump. After chit-chatting about the football (both agreed England had an “excellent tournament”) and Manchester (our new prime minister invited the president to visit the city Trump once described as a “town”), they got on to far trickier territory: the strait of Hormuz.
The US has attacked Iran for the eleventh consecutive night, hitting aircraft hangars and drone storage sites across the country. It came after Iran launched retaliatory strikes on US air bases and neighbouring Gulf states, which have accused it of deliberately targeting desalination plants that are essential to life in the region. Each side now claims it is preventing the other from gaining control over the strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil was shipped before the war began. Vessels carrying crucial shipments of oil, gas and fertiliser remain at a standstill.
UK politics | Andy Burnham is under mounting pressure to explain how he will pay for his policy pledges as he implored his new cabinet to examine “all possible ways” to tackle the cost of living crisis.
UK news | A man has appeared in court charged with the murder of the former MP and Reform UK spokesperson Ann Widdecombe. Joshua Kerry, 28, is accused of killing the former Conservative minister at her home in Haytor, Devon, by hitting her on the head with a hammer 21 times.
Middle East | The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told the Senate the US-Israel war on Iran had cost $37.5bn so far, as he faced lawmakers furious over the conflict’s soaring price tag and the deaths last week of three American service members.
Climate crisis | About 23 million people will be banned from using hosepipes by this weekend, as England and Wales moves closer to drought status.
Ukraine | Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and offered a “prominent position” to the defence minister he sacked last week in a move that sparked nationwide protests.
Abbas Araghchi says he has kept on the move since being pulled from rubble after strike on first day of war
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has described how he was pulled from the rubble of a leadership compound after the US-Israeli airstrike that killed the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, on the first day of the war, and has survived since by constantly moving around the capital, Tehran, by car.
In an interview with the Iranian journalist Javad Mogouyi, Araghchi confirmed Israel and the US had accurate intelligence on the location of Khamenei and other officials, enabling them to target Iran’s senior leadership.
In April Japan coined new term kokushobi for days above 40C as country advises workers to wear shorts to the office to cope with stifling heat
Japan logged its first official kokushobi or “cruelly hot day” on Tuesday since the new term for when temperatures top 40 degrees Celsius was introduced in April. The Japan Meteorological Agency coined the new designation to warn the public of the heat dangers of days that were once freak weather events but have now become more common.
The central Japan cities of Gujo and Tajimi in Gifu prefecture, along with Toyota in Aichi prefecture, all hit 40C. Gujo’s 40C and Toyota’s 40.1C were all-time highs recorded at their respective weather stations.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: France's parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first European country to bar children from apps such as TikTok. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September. "France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers," Macron said in a video posted on social media, hailing "a major step forward."
He thanked members of parliament for backing the legislation on Tuesday. "The Constitutional Council must now rule on it, and then it will be time to take action to make this measure a reality and protect our children online," he added on X. After approval by the Senate earlier on Tuesday, members of the National Assembly passed the bill by 279 votes to 81. A growing number of countries are taking steps to restrict social media access amid multiplying warnings over its harmful effects on children.
The ban was to be introduced in two stages, with under-15s blocked from creating new accounts from September 1. The ban would apply to existing accounts from January 2027, according to the legislation. The digital minister, Anne Le Henanff, said before the vote that the timeline was realistic, "because age-verification tools already exist" and others are still in the works, and the onus was on the platforms to impose the rule. "For four months, all of us in France will have to prove our age," she told journalists. "If someone is under 15, the account will be closed." The minister also gave assurances that users' personal data would be protected.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The House narrowly rejected an amendment Tuesday that would have written President Donald Trump’s restrictions on transgender military service into federal law.
The amendment, introduced by Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, failed 212-217 during debate over the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Four Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the proposal.
Trump issued an executive order after returning to office directing the Pentagon to exclude transgender people from military service. The administration argues that gender dysphoria and medical treatments associated with gender transition conflict with military readiness, discipline and deployment requirements.
Boebert’s amendment would have made those restrictions part of the defense authorization law, potentially making them more difficult for a future president to reverse.
The vote occurred weeks after a divided federal appeals court blocked the Pentagon from removing transgender plaintiffs who are already serving. The court’s majority found that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s policy appeared motivated by unconstitutional hostility toward transgender people.
However, the ruling allows the military to continue preventing new transgender applicants from enlisting while litigation proceeds. The administration has indicated it will appeal.
The broader NDAA establishes Pentagon policies and authorizes defense programs, military construction and national security activities. The amendment’s defeat does not itself repeal Trump’s executive order or the Pentagon’s current enlistment restrictions.
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani said New York City lacks the legal authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits for the United Nations General Assembly, reversing a pledge he made during his mayoral campaign.
Mamdani said his administration consulted the city’s Law Department and examined every available legal avenue for executing an International Criminal Court warrant. The review concluded that municipal authorities cannot independently enforce it.
The mayor nevertheless called Netanyahu a “war criminal” and the “architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people.” He urged the federal government to join the ICC and enforce its warrant. Netanyahu and the Israeli government strongly deny the allegations.
The ICC issued warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the conduct of the war in Gaza. Neither the United States nor Israel is a member of the court, limiting its authority within the United States.
President Donald Trump said Netanyahu would not be arrested “in any way, shape or form” during a U.S. visit. Netanyahu is expected in New York for the General Assembly in September.
HOUSTON, TEXAS — Passengers riding with Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when an ICE agent fatally shot him say federal vehicles rammed their van before agents opened fire, contradicting the government’s initial account of the July 7 encounter.
Statements filed in federal court by Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego say two unmarked vehicles struck the van from behind and along its side. Both men said Salgado Araujo had stopped and that no agents were positioned directly in front of or behind the vehicle when shots were fired.
The Department of Homeland Security previously said Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle, ignored commands and attempted to run over an agent, prompting the officer to fire in self-defense. Federal officials have not released body-camera or dashboard-camera footage because the vehicles and agents were not equipped with those recording systems.
Video collected from nearby surveillance cameras does not show the entire encounter. Fourteen policing experts who reviewed available footage for The Texas Tribune questioned the agents’ use of unmarked vehicles and whether emergency lights or sirens were activated.
A federal judge has temporarily prohibited authorities from deporting or transferring Rojas Pliego while his petition for release proceeds. Federal and Harris County authorities are investigating the shooting, but officials have not announced charges or released the names of the agents involved.
US gas prices have continued to rise since the conflict with Iran resumed this month. According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), a gallon of fuel is now just over $4 – almost a dollar more than a year ago.
It comes as Brent Crude, the international oil benchmark, is now up by almost 2% to $90.92 a barrel.
Some lawmakers appeared frustrated as they sought clarity on the Trump administration’s strategy for the conflict amid renewed hostilities and a $67 billion funding request.
Bought a onewheel pint for a little regional burning man type event. It was my first time riding one and it was so great at that event. Used it multiple times a day to zoom across camp sites to the main stage. However. battery each day was damn near gone. I tried to charge from my camper at night but had a few issues charging off my inverter. I either need to get a DC car charger, or upgrade to a bigger battery onewheel. I'm thinking i'll take it to burning man in a month. If i'm only using it at these festival events, think its worth upgrading? Or just get the dc charger and call it a day?
Roger Rogoff was fired from his role as U.S. attorney in Seattle shortly after judges on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington appointed him to the job.
U.S. forces launched a new round of airstrikes against Iran at the direction of President Trump following the deaths of three U.S. soldiers in an Iranian strike in Jordan.
Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, is due to meet Donald Trump for the first time today as he wraps up a four-day visit to Washington.
The meeting coincides with ongoing US-mediated talks between Lebanon and Israel. The two sides announced a “framework agreement” on 26 June which stipulates the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon as well as the disarmament of Hezbollah.
Mtula Payton and Dandrae Martin were tried together over shooting on K Street in April 2022 that left six dead
The trial of two menaccused of carrying out the deadliest shooting in the city of Sacramento, California, ended in a mistrial on Tuesday.
The suspects, Mtula Payton and Dandrae Martin, were tried together and faced up to 15 years to life in prison for their role in the shooting, which killed six people and injured at least a dozen. While they were not convicted for the deaths, they were found guilty of being in possession of firearms despite having prior felonies.
Defense secretary has asked Senate appropriations committee for nearly $88bn more to continue effort
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth told the Senate on Tuesday that the US-Israel war on Iran had cost $37.5bn so far, as he faced lawmakers furious over the conflict’s soaring price tag and the deaths last week of three American service members.
During an appearance before the Senate appropriations committee, Hegseth, whose opening remarks were repeatedly interrupted by protesters, provided an updated account of the war’s cost – up from previous estimates – and defended the Trump administration’s roughly $88bn supplemental funding request, calling it “urgent, necessary”.
Lawmakers hammered the president for bulldozing norms in pursuit of his construction goals and imposing his likeness on buildings, coins and passports.
Guardian analysis shows officers arrested 43,138 people as quiet and steady operations ramp up across the country
The Trump administration arrested a record number of immigrants last month, according to newly released government data that reveals how US immigration agents are quietly but steadily ramping up operations across the country.
A Guardian analysis of the latest data published by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) found that federal immigration agents arrested 43,138 people in June – the highest number since Donald Trump took office in January last year and promised a campaign of mass immigrant deportations.
Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, 28, died July 14 after authorities said he darted across a busy road in St. Augustine, Florida, and into the path of a truck.
Airbus is moving 70 critical applications from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway as part of a broader digital sovereignty push to keep sensitive data "under European control." Eventually, the migration will cover 900 applications, including ERP, CRM, manufacturing execution, and product lifecycle management systems. Airbus says it will, however, continue using U.S. providers for less sensitive workloads. "We do not intend to move away from all non European solutions; we balance our choices based on the criticality of the data," the company said. The Register reports: Catherine Jestin, head of digital at Airbus, told us on Thursday: "The selection of Scaleway is a combination of a very strong technical answer and a very strong commercial offer making it competitive compared to hyperscalers' public cloud offerings. In addition, Scaleway is committed to involving Airbus in the definition of its future product roadmap." "The objective is to host Airbus's most critical applications (those required for the Minimum Viable Company). This represents 900 applications and we will start with 70 of them today hosted on AWS."
Applications being sent to Scaleway include ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management. Finding a cloud provider to host its most sensitive applications for defense and industrial workloads was not a certainty when the process began, Airbus told us last year, because European cloud providers do not have the scale of their US rivals.
Jestin said Airbus will continue to work with AWS. Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS. In a statement, she said: "By integrating a trusted, high performance, cloud environment that keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws, we are ensuring that our digital infrastructure keeps pace with our aerospace innovation, while maintaining control and resilience of our industrial operations."
UK resident was evacuated from Democratic Republic of the Congo where there is an outbreak of the disease
A humanitarian worker is being monitored at a specialist hospital in London after potential exposure to the Ebola virus.
The UK resident was medically evacuated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where the worker had been treating patients with the disease, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.
Sausalito city manager Elaine Forbes faces misdemeanor charges for allegedly trying to steal the three-story vessel
A Bay Area city manager will face misdemeanor charges for allegedly breaking into a 66ft yacht while drinking and trying to steal the vessel.
Elaine Forbes, Sausalito’s city manager, was arrested on the morning of 18 July after police received a call for a noise disturbance. Police say Forbes had “apparently broken into” a three-story yacht, where she was consuming alcohol.
Tesla says it is launching its Robotaxi service in Orlando and Tampa, though it has not shared fleet sizes or whether customers can immediately hail rides. The Verge notes the announcement lands on Tesla earnings day and comes as the company's robotaxi rollout remains far smaller than Elon Musk previously projected, with tracker data showing only a small number of unsupervised vehicles operating in existing cities. From the report: [B]ack in May, Tesla had five unsupervised robotaxis in Dallas, six in Houston, and 29 in Austin. As of today, there are only 17 unsupervised vehicles in Austin, four in Dallas, and zero in Houston, according to the Robotaxi Tracker. By comparison, Waymo is estimated to have over 3,500 fully driverless vehicles in operation across over 10 cities.
Like Waymo, Tesla typically introduces robotaxis to a new city with a safety driver behind the wheel. Unlike Waymo, sometimes Tesla moves that person over to the passenger seat with access to a kill switch should anything go wrong. The company has been inconsistent in how it rolls out its robotaxis to new markets. The numbers go up and down, with zero explanation from the company as to why.
[...] By adding new cities, Tesla is clearly trying to sell investors on the idea that its robotaxi project is growing. But the fluctuating fleet size, inconsistency in supervised vs unsupervised vehicles, and long wait times tell a very different story.
After nationwide protests Oleksandr Syrskyi is to be replaced in reshuffle and popular defence minister returns to government
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and offered a “prominent position” to the defence minister he sacked last week in a move that sparked nationwide protests.
In a late-night TV address, Zelenskyy said he was appointing Mykhailo Drapatyi, a popular and innovative general, as the new head of Ukraine’s armed forces. Drapatyi would oversee a reorganisation of the army’s command structure, Ukraine’s president said.
Discovered this after I felt a repetitive bump in my riding. I thought it would’ve been a flat spot but nope! Definitely a lump, the rubber is much softer than the rest of the tire as it is easily pushed in with my thumb.
Time to replace it before it blows out? I’ll admit I’m a little afraid to ride it now that I’ve found that spot.
Discussions about quantum-classical connectivity often conflate two fundamentally different concerns: the need for low-level real-time control of quantum hardware, and the need for communication requirements at the application level. The paper separates them explicitly into two levels.
The real-time level primarily refers to the control and calibration tasks as well as quantum error correction (QEC), where classical decoders process error syndromes and apply corrections and calibration tasks needed to keep quantum processors performing correctly. The decoder and control stack must keep pace with the syndrome-extraction cycle and react fast enough that the correction latency does not exceed the logical gate cycle (microseconds for superconducting devices); low-latency coupling here is non-negotiable.
The application level is where hybrid algorithms, such as variational solvers and quantum-enhanced sampling, perform the computation by repeatedly exchanging data between a classical host and a quantum processing unit (QPU). Current approaches to hybrid algorithms do not generally rely on classical processing completing within a device-imposed timescale — either the workflow exchanges data only between circuit executions (today’s noisy intermediate-scale quantum, or NISQ, algorithms), or a fault-tolerant logical QPU hides the real-time QEC loop.
Figure 1 illustrates these two levels in a single compute cycle.
Figure 1. Credit: AWS
A diagnostic for Integration Decisions
One can decompose the total cycle time of a hybrid workflow into three components: classical compute time (TC), quantum compute time (TQ), and communication overhead (Tcomm). From this, the researchers derived the communication-to-computation ratio, Rcc = Tcomm / (TC + TQ), which indicates whether a workflow is compute-bound or communication-bound:
If Rcc≪ 1, communication overhead is negligible relative to computation, and co-location offers little benefit to speeding up hybrid algorithm execution.
If Rcc≫ 1, the workflow is communication-dominated, and low-latency integration materially improves performance.
These two cases are analogous to the two sides of classical HPC’s roofline model, where attainable performance is bounded by peak performance on one side and by peak bandwidth on the other.
Case-by-Case Analysis
Though utility-scale applications will fundamentally and unavoidably rely on low-latency quantum-classical integrations, due to the need to maintain logical qubits, for workflows analyzed at the application level (such as today’s NISQ algorithms) the case is not so clear-cut.
The researchers applied the model to specific, published NISQ algorithm demonstrations, putting concrete numbers on intuitions the community holds with varying confidence. This led to the following conclusions.
Compute-intensive workflows lose only a negligible fraction of runtime to communication, so remote access suffices. Sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD), a leading near-term approach for quantum chemistry, combines shallow quantum circuits with heavy classical diagonalization. Its Rcc is approximately 10⁻⁴ (measured on 77 qubits of IBM’s Heron device), meaning communication overhead is negligible even over wide-area networks. The generative quantum eigensolver (GQE), which trains an AI model using quantum energy feedback, also shows low Rcc values (10⁻³ – 10⁻¹) even under extensive compute scaling assumptions.
Today, communication-dominated workflows need low latency, but not supercomputers. Quantum-enhanced Markov chain Monte Carlo (QE-MCMC), which accelerates sampling from complex probability distributions, has an Rcc of ~ 10³ assuming remote access (on a 10-qubit IBM device); this is because each step of the algorithm requires a rapid round-trip with minimal computation on either side. It is important to consider that while this workflow needs low-latency connectivity, it does not require heavyweight compute resources for the classical step, which is estimated to take ~10 nanoseconds per iteration.
Error correction requires low latency. As QPU systems scale up and applications begin drawing on logical qubits, quantum error correction becomes indispensable. Co-location of QPUs with HPC will be increasingly important once QEC requires low-latency and high-performance compute.
Looking Ahead
Though the importance of quantum-classical integration in building the logical qubits needed for large-scale quantum computing is not in doubt, the paper helps clarify precisely where this integration remains important.
This assessment on its relevance at the application level is a product of the researchers’ knowledge of today’s hybrid algorithms; once tight quantum-classical integrations exist, future approaches to quantum algorithms may well be developed that take advantage of them at the application level. Furthermore, the paper identifies specific crossover conditions, e.g. dramatic shot-budget reductions via amplitude estimation, and the emergence of practical quantum memory, under which the integration requirements of even today’s algorithms will shift. The model provides a quantitative method to track these developments and update infrastructure plans accordingly.
As AWS deepens its commitment to fault-tolerant quantum computing — including its strategic collaboration with QuEra to bring fault-tolerant quantum computing to Amazon Braket — resource estimation frameworks like this help the community make informed, evidence-based decisions about how to prepare.
Longtime Slashdot reader williamyf writes: FireFox 153 was released today. The most important user-facing changes are improvements to PDF handling (you can now merge PDFs and add images to them), and HDR video playback (on Windows, provided HDR is active systemwide). Other under-the-hood changes include browser-wide containers and QWAC support. The full list is in the change notes.
But the most important feature is that this version is an ESR and, therefore, defines the ESR feature set for the next year. Why is being an ESR so important, you ask?
1.) ESR, rather than "normal" (a.k.a. Rapid Release), Firefox is the out-of-the-box browser for many important distros, including Debian, RHEL, Kali, Tails, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Slackware, and others.
2.) Many organizations, large and small, standardize on Firefox ESR as their default browser, regardless of the default browser included with their OS.
3.) Firefox ESR is the basis for many downstream projects, such as Waterfox and KaiOS. All these projects will inherit, for a year, whatever ESR brings to the table today.
4.) Many ISVs and SaaS providers, if they certify their wares for Firefox at all, certify for the ESR version only.
Please note that ESR 153 will not be offered as an automatic update until two months from now (ESR 140 will still be supported). If you want it now, you will need to download and install it manually.
Also of note, ESR 115 will be supported until March 2027. If you use an unsupported version of macOS or Windows (like Windows 7 or 8.x), this is the version to get. However, even Mozilla cautions against running a supported browser on an unsupported OS: "Note that Microsoft ended official support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 in January 2023. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates and have known vulnerabilities. Without official support from Microsoft, maintaining Firefox for outdated operating systems becomes costly for Mozilla and risky for users."
Committee voted 9-8 to advance Clayton’s nomination to serve as intelligence chief despite Democratic opposition
The Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday advanced the nomination of Jay Clayton to serve as the US intelligence director, despite criticism from Democrats.
Donald Trump had nominated Clayton, now the top federal prosecutor in the southern district of New York, for the role of the director of national intelligence (DNI) last month after the departure of Tulsi Gabbard.
Staff ‘raised on multiple occasions’ risks of tech mogul’s philanthropic body associating with disgraced financier
A new external review commissioned by the Gates Foundation has found that there were “roughly 30 meetings” between Jeffrey Epstein and foundation leaders and staff – including Bill Gates – between 2011 and 2014, even as foundation staff “raised on multiple occasions the risks of associating with Epstein because of his prior conviction”.
The Gates foundation commissioned the review in March, following the justice department’s release earlier this year of millions of documents related to Epstein. The files included numerous references to Gates, several photographs of him, and records showing that he met with Epstein on multiple occasions, which prompted renewed scrutiny of Gates’s past ties to the disgraced financier.
I have an original XR and I very much like a slick because it reduces the noise and I like a rounded tire because it's just more fun to carve. I have always used Hoosier slicks since this fit the bill when I looked around many years ago -- what do folks recommend these days?
Edit: thanks all. Sounds like a choice between FF Whisper, TFL SP2, and Enduro (quiet despite tread).
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. "The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf," ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is "the world's largest book database," and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. "Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative."
In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don't include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in "model collapse," a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models.
"Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage [...] "Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools." [...] ISBNdb advertises that it can keep the identity of AI companies secret. "Strict NDA [non-disclosure agreement] on every engagement," ISBNdb's site says. "Every project begins with a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. Your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed." ISBNdb notes that AI companies may not want to be caught destroying printed books during the scanning process. "The optics problem is real," ISBNdb's site says. "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy."
As new prime minister briefs cabinet on ‘cost of living government’, critics ask where money will come from
Andy Burnham is under mounting pressure to explain how he will pay for his policy pledges as he implored his new cabinet to examine “all possible ways” to tackle the cost of living crisis.
On his first full day in power, the prime minister faced questions about how he would fund the removal of VAT from electricity bills and an expected uplift in defence spending – an issue that led his new chancellor, John Healey, to resign as Keir Starmer’s defence secretary last month.
Donald Trump has defended his new 50% tariffs on most Canadian goods, claiming the country cannot survive without the US.
The White House announced the sweeping round of import duties – due to come into effect next month – on Monday, igniting fresh tensions between Washington and Ottawa.
President Trump is imposing 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, from hockey equipment to alcoholic beverages, escalating the trade dispute between the two countries.
Parliament votes to stop children using apps such as TikTok in policy championed by Emmanuel Macron
France’s parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first EU country to bar children from apps such as TikTok.
The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September.
António Costa, the president of the European council, said in a post on X that he held a “good” phone call with Andy Burnham last night, in which he said they agreed to “further strengthen” EU-UK relations and continue to cooperate to support Ukraine.
He said there was also discussion about “common geopolitical challenges facing Europe”, which could be a reference to many things, including energy prices soaring due to the US-Israel war on Iran, Europe’s trading and security relationship with Washington, the future of Nato, the continent facing a wave of hybrid warfare, driven by Russia, or the surge of national populism and backlash against immigration.
Paul Condon tells spycops inquiry force failed to properly control unit which committed ‘horrendous’ abuses
A former Metropolitan police commissioner has admitted that the surveillance of the family of Stephen Lawrence by undercover officers was institutionally racist, the spycops inquiry has heard.
While Paul Condon was in command of the Metropolitan police in the 1990s, a controversial undercover unit spied on the family as they sought to persuade Scotland Yard to properly investigate Lawrence’s racist murder.
Explosion in ticketing and hospitality revenue goes along with a Fifa desire to recoup lost TV income in future deals
As is often the case, it has been left to Donald Trump to say the quiet bit out loud. “We have to do this again and we have to do it while I’m around, you hear that Gianni?” the US president told Fox News in an interview broadcast in the buildup to the World Cup final.
An American bid for the 2038 World Cup has been the talk of the hotel lobbies populated by administrators from around the world over the past month, who have watched this country’s seemingly limitless appetite for major events and willingness to pay whatever it takes to attend them.
BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has launched the Enterprise Store as part of Ubuntu Pro, giving organizations a way to manage Ubuntu software distribution in restricted networks, behind firewalls, and in air gapped environments. The on premises proxy sits between devices and Canonical software stores, allowing companies to cache downloads, control software revisions, and manage snaps and charms without requiring every system to connect directly to the internet. The Enterprise Store is designed for organizations with strict security requirements, including regulated industries and environments where predictable software updates and audit controls are important.
Storm warnings stretch from Florida to Louisiana as Bertha brings heavy rain, flooding risk and possible tornadoes
Tropical Storm Bertha strengthened in the Gulf of Mexico and was moving slowly toward the Florida Panhandle and Alabama, causing a tropical storm warning and storm surge watches, forecasters said.
The storm was about 125 miles (201km) south-east of Mobile, Alabama, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Tuesday afternoon. It was moving north-west at 5mph (8km/h) with maximum sustained winds of 60mph.
July 21, 2026 — NVIDIA Vera Rubin is here, and it’s going gigascale.
Vera Rubin NVL72 production is ramping up with racks running at partners CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Spanning 350-plus factory sites in 30 countries, Vera Rubin has the largest, most mature rack-scale supply chain ever assembled to meet customer compute demand.
Credit: Shutterstock
The Vera Rubin platform is built from chip to grid to deliver the highest performance per watt and the lowest token cost. CoreWeave’s first benchmark on DeepSeek-R1 says it all: 10x more throughput per megawatt than Grace Blackwell NVL72 — landing directly on the metric that matters most for power-constrained AI factories.
Advancing Performance with Extreme Co-Design
What makes this possible is extreme co-design across seven chips and five rack trays — Vera Rubin NVL72, Vera CPU rack, Groq 3 LPX, Spectrum-6 SPX and Vera BlueField-4 STX — all engineered as a single system rather than assembled from separate off-the-shelf products.
The NVIDIA Vera CPU is at its center. It redefines what an AI factory CPU can be. Designed and built for the agent era, its custom Olympus core delivers 2x single-threaded performance, 3x core-to-core bandwidth and 40% lower memory latency versus competing chiplet designs, making it the most efficient single-threaded CPU for the agentic workloads that matter most.
Accelerating AI Factories with Purpose-built Networking
For networking, the platform’s sixth-generation NVLink scale-up delivers more than 2x throughput on complex workloads, 3x lower latency and 10x higher packet rates than off-the-shelf Ethernet. For scale-out, Spectrum-X Ethernet combines 102.4T Spectrum-6 switch systems, 1.6T ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, adaptive routing, advanced congestion control, telemetry and open operating system support, enabling 1.6x higher RDMA bandwidth than off-the-shelf Ethernet.
The world’s leading AI infrastructure builders — including CoreWeave, Microsoft, SpaceXAI and Tesla — are among the first to bring in Spectrum-6 switches to accelerate their AI factories. NVIDIA Photonics with co-packaged optics for scale-out — the industry’s first such switch in volume manufacturing — adds 5x lower power and 10x higher MTBI versus pluggable transceivers, with CoreWeave, Lambda and OCI among the first adopters.
Spectrum-XGS Ethernet extends performance across sites with 1.9x multi-site throughput because gigascale AI isn’t a single building problem.
And NVLink Fusion opens the NVIDIA infrastructure platform to third-party XPUs, giving partners a faster path to market on the proven NVLink scale-up stack and ecosystem.
Saving Setup Time, Water
NVIDIA’s three generations of rack-scale co-design produced a Vera Rubin NVL72 system with no cables, fans or hoses in the tray, cutting compute tray assembly time from hours to one minute.
A 45-degree Celsius liquid cooling inlet temperature design enables chiller-free dry-cooler operation. For new AI factories, this higher temperature dry cooling along with the closed-loop liquid cooling system saves millions of gallons of water per megawatt annually.
Jazz saxophonist – who recorded with artists Frank Sinatra, BB King and more – died in Los Angeles, reports say
The US jazz saxophonist Plas Johnson, best known for his solo riff on the timeless classic The Pink Panther Theme, has died at the age of 94, according to reports.
The native of Donaldsonville, Louisiana, died on 15 July, according to a report from the Los Angeles jazz radio station KKJZ.
IRVINE, Calif., July 21, 2026 — Veritone, Inc., a leader in enterprise AI and data solutions, today announced it has officially joined the Genesis Mission Consortium to collaborate with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on its ambitious Genesis Mission and other key AI and advanced computing initiatives.
The Genesis Mission is a landmark federal initiative designed to unify the nation’s National Laboratories, supercomputers, and federal datasets into a single, AI-powered research platform. The Department of Energy has framed Genesis as one of the most significant federal science and technology endeavors in decades, aimed at accelerating discovery science, securing American energy independence, and reinforcing national security. As a consortium member, Veritone joins a marquee group of technology and AI leaders, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Scale AI, in supporting and advancing these initiatives.
“The Genesis Mission is about fundamentally transforming the pace and scale of American scientific discovery and AI sovereignty, and Veritone is honored to contribute our expertise in data orchestration and sovereign AI to this historic initiative as an official Consortium member,” said Ryan Steelberg, CEO and President of Veritone. “By transforming vast, siloed datasets into fuel for scientific discovery, we are placing powerful tools into the hands of researchers tackling our most critical national challenges.”
As a member of the Genesis Mission Consortium, Veritone and the DOE will explore strategic collaborations to advance the mission’s goals. The focus will be on leveraging Veritone’s aiWARE enterprise AI platform to modernize the agency’s data infrastructure and research capabilities. A key objective is to securely transform the DOE’s vast, fragmented, and unstructured data archives into governed, dynamic, and AI-ready assets within FedRAMP-certified and government cloud environments. This is designed to provide a critical foundation for training advanced AI models and enabling complex scientific analytics.
Veritone’s platform can support the Genesis Mission in several key areas:
AI-Ready Data: Using Veritone Data Refinery and Digital Media Hub, the collaboration will explore ways to make massive archives of scientific and engineering data accessible and useful for advanced AI/ML model training.
AI Ecosystems: Deploying the open-architecture aiWARE platform to provide robust “co-scientist” capabilities, help automate R&D workflows, and accelerate application development in secure government cloud and FedRAMP-certified environments.
Automated Compliance and Analysis: Leveraging applications like Veritone Assess to support regulatory review and provide automated analysis, helping to modernize infrastructure and streamline research processes.
“To lead the world in scientific discovery, our nation’s researchers need secure, scalable, and sovereign AI tools,” said Jon Gacek, General Manager of Public Sector at Veritone. “Our membership in the Consortium establishes a collaborative framework to explore how Veritone’s proven AI operating system can help the DOE build a national research infrastructure that is second to none. By turning passive data archives into active, intelligent assets, we can help accelerate the productivity and impact of American science.”
Additional information about the Genesis Mission is available at genesis.energy.gov.
Veritone will be attending the inaugural Genesis Mission Summit 2026 on July 22 in Washington, D.C. A live webstream is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/vJixXKpCw9k.
About Veritone
Veritone (NASDAQ: VERI) is a leader in enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Serving organizations in both commercial and regulated sectors, Veritone’s software, services, and industry applications simplify data management, empowering the largest and most recognizable brands in the world to run more efficiently, accelerate decision-making and increase profitability. Veritone’s leading enterprise AI platform, aiWARE, orchestrates an ever-growing ecosystem of machine learning models to transform audio, video and other data sources into actionable intelligence. By blending human expertise with AI, Veritone advances human potential and drives positive societal change. To learn more, visit www.veritone.com.
PALO ALTO, Calif., July 21, 2026 — DeepInfra, a purpose-built cloud platform for high-throughput AI inference, today announced the results of an independent benchmark of the NVIDIA Vera CPU, NVIDIA’s next generation CPU purpose-built to power agentic workloads. As one of a select group of collaborators granted early access to Vera hardware through NVIDIA’s open AI ecosystem, DeepInfra designed and ran its own production-grade benchmark to test the infrastructure with a real-world agent workload. The benchmark found Vera led by up to 2.2x against competitive CPUs.
DeepInfra processes nearly five trillion tokens per week, with close to 30% driven by agentic systems. At that scale, CPU performance is critical to delivering the cost efficiency, low latency, and throughput that agentic workloads demand.
“We built DeepInfra’s infrastructure from the ground up for inference. We have tuned every layer of it for cost, latency, and throughput at production scale,” said Nikola Borisov, co-founder and CEO, DeepInfra. “NVIDIA is building for where AI workloads are headed, and we believe Vera is exactly the kind of hardware solution the next iteration demands.”
DeepInfra tested Vera using its own production AI agent and real captured traffic, benchmarking against three leading CPUs from AMD, and Intel under identical conditions.
Key results from the benchmark include:
Fastest in every workload category, doubling NVIDIA’s claim: Against NVIDIA’s published claim of 80% faster agentic CPU performance, Vera measured up to 2.2x faster orchestration than the x86 baseline – and was the fastest of all four architectures tested in every workload category.
Up to 1.6x more concurrent agents at the same quality of service: On identical CPU partitions, Vera sustained 256 concurrent agents within strict response-time and error targets, versus 160–192 for the competing chips.
Spare capacity served a full LLM: With all 256 agents running at full load, Vera’s leftover cores simultaneously served a 20-billion-parameter open-source model faster than an entire previous-generation CPU socket dedicated solely to that task, without slowing the agents.
“Bringing Vera to market is an incredible opportunity, but performance is ultimately proven in production,” said Ian Finder, Director, Data Center CPU Products, NVIDIA. “DeepInfra is pushing Vera with demanding, real-world agentic workloads that reflect the needs of production environments. These results demonstrate exactly what Vera was designed to deliver.”
DeepInfra also published a technical analysis with the full benchmark methodology and complete results, here.
Founded in 2022, DeepInfra is a purpose-built cloud inference platform for high-throughput AI, enabling companies to run open-source and proprietary AI and agentic models at scale. The company owns and operates its AI Compute infrastructure, supports 200+ open-source models, and processes nearly five trillion tokens per week — delivering the cost efficiency, low latency, and security that production AI demands. Its fully managed platform includes OpenAI-compatible APIs and enterprise-grade security compliance, including zero data retention and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification. For more information, visit deepinfra.com.
The tire on my Pint X got worn down so I bought a replacement tire directly from onewheel, thinking it would be most compatible and the safest option. I didn’t realize how unbelievably hard this tire is to get on the wheel!
I was able to get the first part on with a LOT of force but getting the second lip around the rim is harder than any other tire I’ve replaced ever before. I’ve already scratched the rim a bit trying to use a metal prying tool and have broken my plastic one just trying to do what all the YouTube videos say. I lube the tire before trying to get it on but as soon as I get more than half of it on, one side starts coming off as I’m putting the other side on. My dad and I have used all our strength and we couldn’t get the tire on. It’s just SO stiff.
Has anyone else been in this situation and are there any tips I’m not trying to get this tire on without scratching or bending the rim? I’m out of options.
July 21, 2026 — AI has entered the gigascale era. The world’s most advanced AI factories are bringing together hundreds of thousands of GPUs and CPUs to train frontier models, power agentic AI and generate intelligence at unprecedented scale. At this level, networking becomes a critical computing power multiplier in driving token generation.
Marking a networking milestone, NVIDIA Spectrum-6 — a 102.4-terabit-per-second Ethernet switch system delivering 2x the capacity of previous-generation systems and built as part of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform — is arriving across the world’s gigascale AI factories.
Credit: NVIDIA
Spectrum-6 anchors the next generation of the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet platform, delivering the bandwidth, scale and intelligence needed to operate an AI factory as one end-to-end computing system.
Leading AI Builders Move First
The world’s leading AI infrastructure builders — including CoreWeave, Microsoft, Nebius, SpaceXAI and Tesla — will be among the first to bring in Spectrum-6 to accelerate their AI factories.
For cloud providers, Spectrum-6 means more compute capacity can operate as a unified, high-performance resource, helping customers train models and deploy inference services faster.
“CoreWeave is built for the most demanding AI workloads, and networking is central to delivering that performance at scale,” said Min Jun, director of product for networking at CoreWeave. “Bringing NVIDIA Spectrum-6 and liquid-cooled Spectrum-X Ethernet infrastructure into our AI factories will help us deliver the bandwidth, resilience and efficiency customers need to train frontier models and deploy inference faster.”
“At gigascale, performance comes down to coordination: keeping every GPU in lockstep so one slow link doesn’t stall an entire job,” said Laurelle Roseman, vice president of global partnerships at Nebius. “That’s what NVIDIA Spectrum-6 goes after, and why we brought it in early — a fabric that stays fast and resilient as our customers’ most demanding workloads scale.”
For AI pioneers building their own infrastructure, Spectrum-6 means more GPUs working in lockstep, higher utilization during demanding collective operations and greater resilience for long-running jobs.
Across use cases, the outcome is faster time to results and better economics at extraordinary scale.
CoreWeave, Microsoft and Nebius will be among the first providers to deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin-based infrastructure with Spectrum-6, extending access to the platform across a broad community of developers, startups and enterprises.
AI Performance Is a Network Problem
Peak GPU performance alone no longer predicts the performance of an AI factory.
Large-scale training and inference workloads depend on thousands of accelerators exchanging data continuously. Collective communications are the fundamental operations that synchronize work across GPUs and generate intense east-west traffic, often with many systems transmitting simultaneously.
Ethernet was designed primarily for enterprise applications and north-south traffic moving between users, servers and storage. It wasn’t created for the synchronized, collective-heavy communication patterns of gigascale AI.
Spectrum-X Ethernet changes that. Purpose-built for AI, it transforms Ethernet into a high-performance scale-out fabric engineered to keep every GPU fed with data.
The Next Generation of Spectrum-X Ethernet
The Spectrum-6 switch chip combines with the NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNIC to form the next generation of Spectrum-X Ethernet, and is engineered as part of NVIDIA Vera Rubin, bringing together the NVIDIA Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6 Switch, ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, BlueField-4 DPU and Spectrum-6 Ethernet switch.
Spectrum-6 supports both pluggable and co-packaged optics form factors. In addition, Spectrum-6 offerings support liquid cooling, enabling a comprehensive, end-to-end cooling approach for the entire AI factory while increasing network power efficiency.
Unlike off-the-shelf Ethernet, the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform for AI factory scale-out combines intelligent switches, NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs and full-stack networking software, all engineered together for AI. The platform’s advanced features continuously optimize how traffic moves through the fabric.
In addition, NVIDIA Spectrum-X technology intelligently balances traffic across available paths, rapidly bypasses failures and precisely recovers when data traveling across a network fails to reach its destination. Plus, support for open network operating systems and a choice of RDMA transport models gives AI builders flexibility without compromising performance.
Spectrum-X Ethernet is inherent to NVIDIA’s vertically integrated, horizontally open approach: codesigning silicon, systems and software across the full computing platform while supporting standard Ethernet, open network operating systems, open protocols and a broad ecosystem of cloud providers, system makers and infrastructure partners. Instead of needing to assemble a collection of parts and optimize them afterward, customers gain a complete AI factory platform designed to deliver the fastest time to train and the lowest cost per token.
Demonstrating this approach, Spectrum-X Ethernet delivers up to 1.6x higher AI networking performance than off-the-shelf Ethernet and sustains up to 95% network efficiency across deployments exceeding 100,000 GPUs.
Hardware-accelerated Spectrum-X multiplane topologies reduce the number of switches required for data centers by 1.7x to further accelerate network efficiency. Further layering on the benefits achieved via Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics, including 5x higher power efficiency and 10x improved mean time between incidents, network fabric enhancements continue to deliver workload accelerations beyond component-level optimization.
Learn more about the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet platform here.
ESPN is undergoing a significant round of layoffs for the first time in three years after taking over NFL Network in April.
Chairman Jimmy Pitaro said in a memo to employees Tuesday morning, obtained by the Associated Press, that most moves are the result of ESPN’s acquisition of NFL Network and other league digital assets last year.
CAMPBELL, Calif., July 21, 2026 — WEKA today unveiled the third generation of its WEKApod Nitro, WEKApod Prime, and WEKApod Prime Max AI storage appliances, featuring custom-engineered chassis and patent-pending hardware innovations that deliver the highest performance and capacity density on the market today. Built to run seamlessly with WEKA’s new NeuralMesh 6 software, announced separately today, the systems deliver a unified AI inference infrastructure platform designed to help AI clouds, model builders, and enterprises scale production AI workloads while reducing infrastructure costs, footprint, power consumption, and operational complexity.
WEKApod is the world’s densest AI storage and memory system
As organizations deploy long-context, agentic, and retrieval-driven AI workloads at massive scale, infrastructure architectures built for traditional enterprise data workloads and early machine learning-era training are struggling to deliver the GPU utilization, token throughput, operational scale, and infrastructure efficiency required for modern inference economics.
The new WEKApod systems were purpose-built by WEKA to address these challenges and are poised to shatter existing rack-level data storage benchmark records and redefine every dimension of AI economics, establishing a new scorecard for inference-era infrastructure. A single WEKApod system can deliver 1.1 exabytes of effective capacity in a single rack, with NeuralMesh data reduction running on a hardware foundation of 441.5 PB raw capacity, making it the first single-rack system to break the exabyte barrier. Throughput reaches 10.2 TB/s per rack. IOPS reach 210 million per rack.
To accomplish this, WEKA designed the system with a PCIe Gen 6 internal fabric, a cable-based, backplane-free drive interconnect, NVIDIA ConnectX SuperNIC networking enabling Spectrum-X Ethernet data plane connectivity, and a software-managed thermal architecture. The systems have multiple patents pending for their innovative chassis design, underlying drive-interconnect, thermal-management, and serviceability technologies.
“AI infrastructure built for traditional workloads cannot power the inference era. The constraints are different: rack space, energy, supply chain, and operational density now determine whether AI deployments produce margin or destroy it,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO at WEKA. “We built WEKApod to operate inside those constraints rather than against them, on hardware WEKA designed and engineered specifically for inference-era computing, with a supply chain we control. It delivers upfront economics that compound with the best total cost of ownership across the full gamut of AI infrastructure requirements, establishing a new scorecard that we believe every customer running production AI at scale will soon evaluate their infrastructure decisions against.”
“As AI workloads scale and datacenter utilization continues to grow, modern systems need to deliver more performance, more capacity and more efficiency without demanding more floor space or power,” said Jason Hardy, VP of Storage Technology at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking gives WEKApod 3 the high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric needed to keep the storage-to-GPU data path clear at scale, helping customers get more out of every GPU they deploy.”
Why Agentic AI Requires a New Approach
The constraints driving AI infrastructure decisions today are both physical and procurement-related. US datacenter construction declined in 2025 for the first time since 2020. Grid connection queues in major markets stretch 4 to 7 years. Morgan Stanley projects a 49-gigawatt power shortfall in the US through 2028. At the same time, NAND markets remain constrained and OEM-channel lead times have stretched well beyond what infrastructure planning cycles can absorb. Storage that consumes rack space and power inefficiently is directly competing with GPUs for the same constrained physical resources. Storage built on hardware the vendor does not control inherits supply chain risk on top of that.
WEKApod is WEKA’s answer to those fundamental issues: a system built to reduce the datacenter footprint, reclaim critical rack space, and improve tokens per watt, without sacrificing token throughput or workload performance. Per rack unit, WEKApod leads every publicly available alternative in capacity and throughput density, by 267% in effective capacity and 114% in throughput, over the next-best system in each category. On the procurement side, WEKA controls component sourcing directly rather than inheriting OEM channel dependencies, giving AI cloud providers and enterprises the pricing stability and lead-time predictability that infrastructure planning at scale actually requires.
For sovereign AI cloud providers and hyperscalers, that means more GPUs and more tenants per rack. For AI builders and enterprise teams, it means more inference capacity within their existing datacenter footprint.
“Inference at production scale is a fundamentally different infrastructure problem than training. The metrics that matter most are tokens per rack, tokens per watt, cost per inference at sustained load. Most vendors in this category have optimized for legacy benchmarks while the workloads have moved on,” said Steve McDowell, Chief Analyst, NAND Research. “WEKApod is engineered to support the metrics that customers need most now, with a unified hardware and software approach that reflects that. Anyone planning to build out AI infrastructure in today’s constrained datacenter and memory market should be evaluating every vendor against this new scorecard, regardless of which vendor they ultimately choose.”
WEKApod Nitro: Maximum Performance. Optimized for Inference Workloads.
WEKApod Nitro was built and configured for the most performance-critical AI workloads, where storage bandwidth determines whether GPUs run at full saturation or stall waiting on data. A two-rack-unit, four-node chassis offers four fully independent failure domains and 56 TLC drives, paired with dual-port NVIDIA ConnectX networking, delivering 800 Gb/s throughput.
WEKApod Prime and WEKApod Prime Max: Massive Capacity. Minimal Footprint.
WEKApod Prime delivers balanced capacity and performance from an AlloyFlash TLC and QLC mix in a four-node, two-rack-unit chassis with 56 total drives.
WEKApod Prime Max was built and configured to deliver maximum capacity in the smallest possible footprint. A two-rack-unit, two-node chassis packs 70 NVMe drives. NeuralMesh’s high-performance object storage and always-on data reduction, combined with Micron’s 245.76 TB 6600 ION drives, enable WEKApod Prime Max to deliver 1.1 exabytes of effective capacity in a single 56U rack — density no competitor can match.
“Agentic AI and inference are raising the bar for data center efficiency, requiring density, power and performance to scale together,” said Jeremy Werner, senior vice president and general manager of Micron’s Core Data Center Business Unit. “With the new WEKApod architecture and Micron 245TB SSDs, customers can deliver 15.8 petabytes in a 2U footprint, maximizing storage capacity while preserving power and space for additional compute.”
Key WEKApod Features and Benefits
Custom-Engineered 2U Chassis: Delivers the highest performance and capacity density available on the market today in the smallest possible footprint. The same enclosure supports both four-node and two-node configurations.
Built on PCIe Gen 6 Internal Fabric: Delivers bandwidth headroom for every drive to run at full utilization simultaneously.
Micro Failure-Domain Design for High-Density Drives: A backplane-free environment creates fully independent failure domains and contains incidents to a single drive, preventing the need for cluster-level interventions.
Thermal Architecture Engineered for 35°C Ambient Operation: Software-managed NVMe power throttling under thermal stress means the system degrades gracefully rather than triggering shutdown. At production AI scale, this is the difference between a performance event and an SLA breach.
Built-In Serviceability: Hot-pluggable boot drives delivered via a custom interposer with GUI-guided replacement. Mirrored NIC port layout keeps drive bays accessible during maintenance. A drive replacement is a 10-minute self-service operation, not a 2-hour maintenance window.
Headless Deployment: Cloud-driven rack-scale installations via NeuralMesh Home.
Configurable Appliances From Sub-1PB to 100PB and Beyond: The third-generation WEKApod Nitro, WEKApod Prime, and WEKApod Prime Max are the first WEKApod products sold as configurable SKUs. Chassis type, memory, drive capacity, and drive count are customer-selectable. Every configuration offers the same operational simplicity.
Availability
WEKApod Nitro, WEKApod Prime, and WEKApod Prime Max are available to order today through WEKA’s worldwide distributor and VAR network for delivery beginning in Fall 2026. NeuralMesh 6 will ship with the first systems.
WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. Its NeuralMesh platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid, NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served.
TRENTON, NEW JERSEY — New Jersey is removing approximately 6,600 voter registrations created after a software error enrolled residents who had identified themselves as noncitizens while applying for driver’s licenses or state identification cards.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill said the error occurred between June 2023 and June 2024, before she took office. Applicants reportedly answered “no” when asked whether they were U.S. citizens, but the Motor Vehicle Commission system still transmitted their information for voter registration. The residents were registered “through no fault of their own,” Sherrill said.
A preliminary state review found that fewer than 400 people registered through the error later cast ballots. Officials have not established how many remained ineligible when they voted, whether any had since become citizens or whether the ballots affected an election outcome.
Sherrill ordered the registrations removed, launched an investigation and announced that the state would replace the software vendor responsible for the system. She criticized what she described as serious administrative failures and insufficient transparency under the previous administration of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
The disclosure comes amid President Donald Trump’s continued claims that noncitizen voting is widespread. Available prosecutions and election reviews have generally found such voting uncommon, but the New Jersey malfunction demonstrates how administrative errors can improperly add ineligible residents to voter rolls.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Farm organizations are challenging the Trump administration’s cancellation of nearly $300 million in federal grants intended to help beginning and underserved farmers obtain land, financing and market access.
The Department of Agriculture terminated 49 of 50 awards under its Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access program in March. Recipients received two business days’ notice, with USDA officials saying the program conflicted with agency priorities and included wasteful spending on items such as massages, gazebos, recreational vehicles and unusually large office-supply budgets.
Organizations interviewed by Grist said those expenses did not appear in their budgets and that USDA has not identified which recipients allegedly proposed them. Several groups said their grants directed substantial funding toward land purchases, technical assistance and direct aid for farmers.
The cancellations affected projects operated by farming nonprofits, tribal organizations and local governments across approximately 40 states and territories. At least 45 recipients appealed, but most were told the terminations were broadly applicable agency decisions rather than individual findings subject to administrative review.
Twenty-four recipients later joined an existing federal lawsuit against USDA. A federal judge has temporarily restored access to approximately $127 million while litigation continues.
Agroecology Commons retained its $2.5 million award because an earlier injunction protected it, but the organization says uncertainty has limited hiring and long-term planning.
Diligent, popular, unexpected pick for the Treasury has been given a straitjacket – and the job of funding PM’s policy promises
On the frequent occasions that John Healey would travel abroad as defence secretary, he was so determined to keep working he would get the crew to tether a desk to the inside of his military aircraft so he could read his papers.
His diligence is one reason why Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, made Healey his unexpected pick for chancellor on Monday. Allies say others include their shared commitment to re-industrialisation and devolution.
Health secretary says source has been identified despite experts warning infections are likely to keep rising
The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has said the ongoing outbreak of cyclosporiasis – the illness caused by the cyclospora parasite that causes watery and explosive diarrhea – is “under control”.
Kennedy made the remarks one day after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did an about-face on a 27-state recall of shredded iceberg lettuce, calling the reported product a “false positive”.
Such technology solves problem of longer, thinner, energy-saving wings not fitting in airports around the world
Airbus has said it will test folding wings for the next generation of its bestselling planes, as the world’s largest planemaker races to work out the shape of future commercial aircraft by the end of the decade.
Longer, thinner wings made of light but strong composite materials offer the promise of energy savings but present a problem for manufacturers because they will not fit in airports around the world, many of which are already at or near full capacity.
Yemen’s Iranian-aligned Houthis have warned shipping companies that their tankers risk being attacked if they use Saudi Arabian ports, as the militia moved quickly to enforce a blockade announced the previous day.
The Houthi warning for the Red Sea, coming on top of Iran’s threat to shipping on the other side of the Arabian peninsular in the Gulf, could affect the substantial Saudi oil exports that have so far been unscathed by the months-long conflict and deepen the rapidly escalating crisis in the region.
Danish pharma company says Eli Lilly using outdated trial data to make its weight-loss drugs appear more effective
Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk said on Tuesday it is suing arch US rival Eli Lilly over “false and materially misleading” adverts for its competing weight-loss and anti-diabetes treatments.
The Danish pharmaceuticals heavyweight complained that the US group – which makes rival weight-loss treatments Zepbound and Mounjaro – “intentionally selected outdated studies” that compared Lilly’s highest doses against lower doses of Novo Nordisk’s medicines.
WAYNE, Pa., July 21, 2026 — Cornelis, a leading provider of high-performance networking solutions, unveiled a new reference architecture that pairs its CN6000 SuperNIC with AMD 6th Gen EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI400 series GPUs. Designed for disaggregated AI inference, large-scale training, and HPC simulation, the architecture provides infrastructure operators with a blueprint for building high-performance systems on an integrated compute and networking platform.
Cornelis plans to detail the full architecture and share OEM validation results this fall at OCP Global Summit and the AI Infra Summit.
The new reference architecture comes as AMD prepares to detail its next generation of AI infrastructure during the Advancing AI 2026 event, taking place July 22-23 in San Francisco. The announcement reflects Cornelis’ continued investment in enabling customers deploying the latest generation of AMD compute platforms.
Engineering High-Performance AI Networks
AI infrastructure now runs multiple workloads that share the same dependency: a network that keeps pace with the compute sitting next to it. Training synchronizes updates across thousands of accelerators at once. Inference has split into prefill, decode, and agent orchestration stages that hand work to each other in sequence. HPC simulation moves large volumes of state between nodes on every iteration. In each case, a network that queues a transfer makes the compute behind it wait.
AMD’s latest roadmap reflects that shift. Its EPYC Venice processor, built on a 2-nanometer process with up to 256 cores per socket, is expected to become the industry’s first CPU to reach that milestone on TSMC’s most advanced node. AMD has also previously detailed its Instinct MI400 series GPUs, for large-scale cloud training and inference, on-premises enterprise deployments, and sovereign AI and HPC.
Cornelis designed the CN6000 for the density that these powerful new compute offerings create. The SuperNIC supports Omni-Path, RoCEv2, and Ultra Ethernet transport on a single adapter, so operators can standardize their network strategy without locking into one protocol. It is engineered for 800 Gbps of bandwidth through a native PCIe 6.0 x16 host interface, matching AMD’s latest offerings, so the network and the compute advance together. The Cornelis CN6000 architecture is targeting more than 1.6 billion bidirectional messages per second. This keeps time to first token low and token throughput steady as concurrent requests scale.
Cornelis has begun modeling the efficiency and ROI potential of this new architecture, starting with AI training, where pre-production simulations show a CN6000 based network completing AllReduce collectives roughly 24 percent faster than standard Ethernet. This evaluation also resulted in cutting training time for a 250-billion-parameter model on a simulated 10,000 GPU cluster by about 13 percent. The same collective-communication advantage extends directly to inferencing, where disaggregated architectures depend on fast, low-latency exchange between prefill and decode nodes and MoE expert routing, exactly the traffic pattern CN6000 is built to accelerate. The CN6000 family pairs the 800G multi-protocol SuperNIC with a 48-port Omni-Path switch and a libfabric-based software stack that is seamlessly compatible with AMD ROCm. The CN6000 is expected to be generally available in Q4CY26.
Building on a Proven Collaboration
The architecture extends Cornelis’s collaboration in market with AMD that spans over five years, more than 25 validated platform configurations, and nine OEM partners across the two companies’ shared ecosystem. The two companies also operate a joint HPC Center of Excellence in Munich, where engineering teams from both sides validate performance on real workloads ahead of customer deployment. The reference architecture outlined today builds on that foundation and points it toward AMD’s newest CPU and GPU generation.
“AMD built its CPU and AI accelerator business by giving operators a real alternative when the market didn’t offer many,” said Lisa Spelman, chief executive officer of Cornelis. “We built Cornelis the same way. As AMD gets ready to share more of its AI vision and roadmap, Cornelis is proud to be one of the partners building alongside AMD for our joint customers.”
About Cornelis
Cornelis delivers high-performance, scale-out and scale-up networking solutions that accelerate AI and HPC workloads. Cornelis technology enables lossless, congestion-free networking that reduces training time, improves inference, and maximizes compute utilization. From foundation model training to complex climate modeling and real-time analytics, Cornelis solutions power the most demanding workloads across commercial, academic, government, and cloud environments. With a focus on performance, scalability, and efficiency, Cornelis helps organizations achieve faster insights and greater return on infrastructure investments. Learn more at www.cornelis.com.
CAMPBELL, Calif., July 21, 2026 — WEKA today announced WEKA NeuralMesh 6, the most significant software release in the company’s history, delivering a purpose-built platform designed to help customers run production AI training, inference, and accelerated compute workloads at production scale on a single unified software stack.
The release offers a robust set of capabilities that the AI infrastructure market has historically forced operators to assemble from separate vendors: native multi-tenancy at hyperscale, a full S3 protocol stack on NVMe, intelligent metadata-first data mobility that delivers async replication and remote caching, always-on data reduction with contractual guarantees, Kubernetes-native operations, and unified observability across every deployment.
Inference Costs Now Decide Which AI Companies Scale
The release arrives as the AI industry increasingly shifts decisively from training to production inference. Long-context reasoning, agentic workflows, and retrieval-driven AI workloads place sustained pressure on memory, metadata, and storage in ways traditional infrastructure architectures were not designed to handle. NeuralMesh 6 was built to deliver breakthrough inference economics at production scale for AI clouds, frontier model providers, government agencies, and large enterprises at the forefront of AI innovation.
Inference Economics Proven in Production on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
NeuralMesh powers hyperscale AI inference in production today on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Leveraging WEKA’s Augmented Memory Grid capability, which extends GPU memory by accelerating persistent KV cache access to NeuralMesh-managed NVMe storage, benchmarks on OCI H100 infrastructure have demonstrated 10x higher token throughput, 10x more concurrent users served, and 7x more tokens per GPU in production deployments.
“As agentic AI workloads push context windows and GPU utilization to new limits, WEKA and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are helping customers scale inference more efficiently without simply adding more GPUs,” Pablo Selem, senior director, software development, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “WEKA’s NeuralMesh platform with Augmented Memory Grid on OCI helps remove memory bottlenecks, delivering substantially more throughput and concurrent users from the same GPU footprint. For customers, that means higher ROI on infrastructure investments and a clearer path to cost-efficient AI at scale.”
Inside NeuralMesh 6
NeuralMesh 6 builds on this production foundation. Key features and capabilities include:
Native Multi-Tenancy at Hyperscale
NeuralMesh 6 delivers the industry’s only multi-tenancy architecture that combines physical hardware isolation with logical network isolation on a single platform.
Composable Clusters provide complete hardware-level isolation, dedicated CPU, memory, and storage drives per tenant for anchor tenants that require guaranteed resources, workload separation, and predictable performance under load.
Virtual Multi-Tenancy provides VPC-like network isolation through WEKA’s Virtualized RDMA Data Fabric (VRDF), supporting private VLANs, overlapping IP address spaces, per-tenant quality of service (QoS), per-tenant encryption with independent KMS, and independent LDAP/AD authentication. Virtual MT scales to more than 1,000 isolated logical tenants per cluster, with new tenant provisioning in under 30 minutes.
The two tiers compose. A single WEKA hardware cluster running 50 Composable Clusters can support up to 50,000 logically isolated tenants on the same physical infrastructure — a path from dozens of tenants to tens of thousands without re-architecting.
Full S3 Protocol Stack on NVMe
NeuralMesh 6 delivers a fully-featured, native S3 implementation in which the same physical data blocks are addressable via S3 and POSIX simultaneously — not a gateway that translates between protocols, but a single unified namespace. A file written via NFS or POSIX is immediately readable via S3, and vice versa, eliminating the multiple full-dataset copies that a conventional AI pipeline carries between the training, fine-tuning, and inference stages. The implementation is built for AI workload patterns: 2,000 to 5,000 concurrent S3 connections per node, roughly five times the concurrency of conventional S3 architectures. S3 over RDMA enables zero-copy data transfer directly to GPU memory. Object storage is no longer a secondary tier — it is a high-performance protocol native to the same platform that serves POSIX file workloads.
Intelligent Replication for AI Workloads
GPU infrastructure is increasingly distributed across sites, clouds, and regions. Traditional replication architectures force organizations to wait for complete data copies before workloads can begin — a model that breaks down when GPU availability shifts in hours rather than weeks. NeuralMesh 6’s intelligent replication changes the model. The same foundation supports AI data mobility, cloudbursting, and multi-site collaboration. Metadata-first replication makes destination environments immediately browsable. Data hydrates on demand, only when accessed, reducing WAN traffic and eliminating unnecessary full-dataset copies. Organizations can place workloads where GPU capacity exists today rather than where data was originally written. In this first step towards complete federation and a global namespace, NeuralMesh 6 unlocks async replication and instantaneous remote caching functionality.
Always-On Data Reduction with Performance Guarantees
NeuralMesh 6 introduces always-on data reduction, specifically designed for AI workloads, with fingerprinting, similarity hashing, deduplication, and compression. It delivers less than 5% write overhead, up to 6x capacity savings on AI training data, and a contractual guarantee of both the data reduction ratio and the performance impact. The performance tax that has historically forced operators to choose between efficiency and speed is gone: data reduction is on by default, every deployment, every workload. Customer-specific pre-sales analysis can project workload-based reduction outcomes before deployment.
AlloyFlash Automated TLC + QLC Flash Tiering
AlloyFlash enables combining TLC and QLC NVMe flash within a single cluster, transparently routing latency-sensitive operations to TLC while leveraging QLC at roughly 30-40% lower cost per terabyte for bulk-capacity workloads. AlloyFlash makes the highest-density WEKApod configurations production-viable, not just capacity-on-paper. Automatic, transparent, no customer configuration required.
NeuralMesh Kubernetes Operator
NeuralMesh Kubernetes Operator automates cluster deployment and lifecycle management in Kubernetes environments. For neo-clouds and AI research labs running Kubernetes as their operational standard, Kubernetes Operator reduces deployment time from weeks to hours and brings NeuralMesh into the same declarative operational model their compute infrastructure already uses.
NeuralMesh Observe
NeuralMesh Observe is SaaS-based observability built for high-performance AI storage. Unified multi-cluster dashboards, client-level diagnostics, intelligent alerting with configurable thresholds, and routing to Slack, PagerDuty, or email with direct links to relevant dashboards. Included with every NeuralMesh deployment at no additional cost.
“WhiteFiber is building a distributed GPU platform across multiple data centers connected by high-speed dark fiber. At our scale, data mobility isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s foundational,” said Sam Tabar, CEO at WhiteFiber. “NeuralMesh’s intelligent replication makes data mobility real at scale: we can make datasets visible across sites and pull exactly the data each job needs to the next GPU allocation as it becomes available. That shifts replication from a back-end protection function to a core part of how our distributed AI infrastructure needs to operate, improving workload mobility, capacity efficiency, and the resiliency our customers depend on. WEKA’s data and memory infrastructure provides the foundation to scale our footprint without compromise. We’re excited to keep building on that together.”
“The infrastructure operators running production AI today have been forced to assemble platforms from vendors that were never designed to work together. Separate stacks for file and object, manual data movement between them, multi-tenancy bolted on after the fact. NeuralMesh 6 delivers what they’ve actually needed all along: a single platform that handles the high-performance file layer and the high-capacity object layer on the same blocks, with native multi-tenancy, intelligent data mobility, and always-on data efficiency built in from the start. This is what production inference infrastructure looks like when it’s designed for the workload, not retrofitted for it,” said Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer at WEKA.
Availability
NeuralMesh 6 will be generally available in the second half of 2026. Existing WEKA customers can upgrade to NeuralMesh 6 at no additional cost through standard upgrade channels and should contact their Customer Success representative for more details.
WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. Its NeuralMesh platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid, NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served.
Microsoft is adding seven games, including remastered versions of Halo and Hexen + Heretic, to Game Pass in the coming weeks, but it’s removing eight others.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration paused more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota on Tuesday, demanding additional documentation for claims federal officials described as potentially fraudulent or unsupported.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services deferred approximately $867.5 million claimed by California and $199 million requested by Minnesota. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the money has not been permanently withdrawn and could be released if state officials demonstrate that the services and expenses were legitimate.
Kennedy said questionable California claims were concentrated in home-based services. Minnesota’s deferred payments involve 14 program areas previously identified by the state legislative auditor as vulnerable to fraud, including personal care services, residential facilities and medical equipment.
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said the agency is using data analytics and artificial intelligence to flag unusual spending before federal reimbursements are issued. However, Kennedy and Oz did not publicly present evidence establishing that the specific claims were fraudulent.
The action expands an administration campaign targeting improper healthcare payments. Minnesota was already disputing earlier Medicaid deferrals, while California previously had approximately $1.3 billion placed under review. Payment deferrals can pressure state budgets because states may have already paid healthcare providers while awaiting federal reimbursement.
Carl Isom-McDaniel was on a walk with his grandson at Yellowstone National Park earlier this month when a bison suddenly charged at him and threw him 8 feet into the air.
A United Airlines employee appears to have been caught on video threatening to call ICE on a passenger last week at San Francisco International Airport.
@rc It will take a while before your muscles in your feet get used to onewheeling you are using muscles in your feet you don't normally use to begin with try short stints but try and get regular sessions and build them up
It’s 2 AM and the on-call engineer pulls up the dashboard. GPU utilization sits at 87%. No alerts have fired. The cluster looks busy, which usually means the cluster looks healthy. She closes the laptop. What she didn’t see: p99 latency on the chat completion endpoint had been climbing for four hours. At 9 PM it was 1.2 seconds. By midnight it was 6.4. Users in time zones where it was still business hours had been waiting seconds for first tokens to appear. Clients had started timing out requests. The system was failing people quietly and continuously, and the primary inference dashboard showed green.
The metric said 87% occupied. It said nothing about what the silicon was doing, how long requests were waiting, or whether any of them were being served within the latency envelope users actually experience. GPU utilization is a hardware metric. Nobody designed it to answer reliability questions. Treating it as your primary inference service level objective (SLO) is like checking engine RPM to decide whether passengers arrived on time.
The Utilization Illusion
The reason high GPU utilization can indicate distress rather than health comes down to what the metric actually counts: active compute cycles on the silicon, regardless of whether that work is serving requests efficiently.
In transformer inference, KV cache pressure is one of the most common culprits. As context lengths grow and concurrent requests multiply, the KV cache fills. The serving runtime responds by increasing batch sizes to amortize memory overhead, which drives up compute occupancy. GPU utilization climbs toward 95%. Meanwhile, each individual request is waiting longer in the queue to be included in a batch, and once in the batch, it’s competing for cache slots. You can hit 95% GPU utilization while median TTFT has tripled, because the hardware is genuinely busy doing work that isn’t moving requests forward quickly.
Request batching pressure compounds this. Continuous batching strategies maximize throughput at the cost of queuing latency when the system is saturated. A request arriving at peak load may sit in the inference gateway queue for 300-800ms before a single token generates. That wait is invisible to a GPU utilization monitor. The GPU wasn’t idle during that window. It was running other requests.
Utilization measures silicon occupancy. It does not measure request health, queue depth, or whether your p95 TTFT is inside any number a product manager would consider acceptable.
What to Measure Instead
Three metrics replace GPU% as the operational signal for inference systems.
Time-to-first-token (TTFT) is the primary user-facing SLO for interactive workloads. It captures exactly what users feel: how long until something starts happening. TTFT degrades before throughput collapses, which makes it an early warning signal rather than a post-mortem one. Set hard p95 and p99 thresholds. Alert on them. For many interactive endpoints, a p99 TTFT above a few seconds is already a user-facing reliability problem, whether GPU utilization is 40% or 95%.
Token throughput per SLO tier replaces aggregate tokens-per-second as a throughput signal. Aggregate TPS tells you the system is producing tokens. Tiered throughput tells you whether the right classes of requests are meeting their latency envelopes. A batch summarization job consuming 60% of throughput while interactive requests queue behind it looks fine on aggregate TPS and catastrophic on tiered throughput. The distinction only appears when you track them separately.
Request queue depth at the inference gateway is the leading indicator that separates the other two. Queue depth rising before TTFT degrades is your earliest signal that saturation is approaching. If queue depth is growing and TTFT is still within bounds, you have a short window to act. If you only discover the problem when TTFT spikes, you are already serving degraded traffic.
Agentic Workloads Make This Worse
Multi-step agentic workflows multiply every failure mode described above. A single user request that invokes a tool-calling chain or an MCP orchestration layer doesn’t generate one inference call. It generates four, or seven, or twelve, depending on how many steps the agent takes before returning a result.
(Shutterstock AI)
GPU utilization aggregates across all of those sub-calls. It tells you the cluster is busy. It doesn’t tell you that step three in the agent chain has a TTFT of 4 seconds because it generates a long context that’s saturating the KV cache, while steps one, two, and four are completing in 300ms. The aggregate utilization number hides the bottleneck entirely.
In an agentic system, latency compounds. A five-step chain where one step degrades from 400ms to 3 seconds adds 2.6 seconds to every user request. Users don’t see individual step latencies. They see the wall clock time from request to final response, and that number reflects the worst-performing link in the chain. GPU utilization will never show you which link that is.
Reliability Primitives That Work
The fix is not more GPU dashboards. It is different instrumentation at the gateway layer. Three changes make inference systems easier to operate and harder to fail silently.
Circuit breakers at the inference gateway should key on TTFT percentiles, not GPU%. When p95 TTFT on an endpoint crosses a threshold, stop routing new requests there and either fail fast or route to a fallback tier. A GPU-keyed circuit breaker would never trip during KV cache saturation. A TTFT-keyed one trips exactly when users are already experiencing degradation.
Retry budgets should scope per agent step rather than globally. A global retry budget in an agentic system allows a single degraded step to consume all retries, leaving no budget for transient failures elsewhere in the chain. Per-step budgets contain the blast radius. Step three gets two retries. If it fails both, the chain fails fast rather than exhausting the system’s retry capacity on one bad step.
SLO tiers by inference class matter because interactive requests, batch workloads, and background agents have genuinely different latency requirements. Some interactive chat experiences may need sub-second TTFT before users start noticing friction. A background document summarization agent can tolerate 5 seconds. Treating them identically means either over-provisioning for batch or under-serving interactive users. Define the tiers explicitly, enforce them at the gateway, and alert on each independently.
GPU utilization belongs in your capacity planning workflow and your procurement conversations. It will tell you when to order more hardware. It will not tell you whether the hardware you have is serving users well. Those are different questions, and confusing them will get you paged at 2 AM over a dashboard that says everything is fine.
About the Author: Vasuki Uday Kiran Vudathala is a Staff Performance Engineer at ServiceNow with over 15 years of experience in performance engineering,
platform engineering, and observability for cloud-native and Generative AI platforms. He writes about AI infrastructure, platform reliability, and production system behavior, with technical articles published in InfoQ, SD Times, Stickyminds, HackerNoon and Medium.
Internal emails revealed in court and interviews with ex-employees describe how Amazon’s practices drove up prices for competitors like Walmart and Target. Amazon denies price-fixing claims and says it works to lower costs for consumers
A “modern leather” table lamp, listed online at Walmart, shot up from $24.99 to $39.
The price of an air fryer on a retail site called Newegg went from $84.99 to $149.99.
An electric ice-cream maker was listed at just $17.99 at Amazon and Best Buy. Then it became unavailable at Best Buy, and more than tripled in price to $59.99 at Amazon.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his agency is pausing $867.5 million in Medicaid payments to California and $199 million to Minnesota.
The deaf actor, who played a major role in Godzilla v Kong and its 2024 sequel, was killed in a car crash in Maryland
Kaylee Hottle, who played a major role in Godzilla v Kong and the sequel Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, has died at the age of 18.
Her death was confirmed by her father, Joshua, in a video shared on Facebook. The stream was in American Sign Language (ASL) as the Hottle family is all deaf. “I am taking a flight that I never would like to take,” is the name of the video.
Thousands of people again on the streets of Delhi calling for education reforms despite police violence on Monday
Taru had come to the protest prepared this time. In one hand was an anti-government poster and in the other was a bicycle helmet. “We need to have protection in case Delhi police beat us up again,” said the 25-year-old, who stood among her friends. “We are not scared of them and we won’t run away, no matter what they do. We’ll stay here till they listen.”
On Tuesday, central Delhi still thronged with thousands of protesters, as an unprecedented expression of dissent against the powerful ruling Narendra Modi government showed no sign of abating.
The US has carried out a fresh round of strikes against Iran, after three US soldiers were killed in action.
The Pentagon has also admitted that nearly 100 US service members have been injured over the last two weeks, as Tehran launched a wave of reprisals to the tenth consecutive nights of attacks, even as peace talks mediated by Pakistan continue.
Lucy Hough speaks to senior international correspondent Julian Borger
Trump’s health secretary says AI used to identify potential fraud in Democratic-run states
The Trump administration has paused more than $1bn in Medicaid funding to California and Minnesota, citing “suspected fraud and noncompliance” – withholding of funding that follows a $243m pause in Medicaid payments to Minnesota earlier this year.
“If those states want that money, they need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said at a press conference on Tuesday.
The wishful thinking behind the war with IranExpert commentjon.wallace
Iran has survived war with the US by adapting its doctrine. The US must also change its thinking.
Nearly five months after the United States and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran, it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape one conclusion: the central objectives that underpinned Washington’s decision to go war have not materialized.
Wars should ultimately be judged not by the number of targets destroyed or sorties flown, but by whether they achieve their political objectives. By that measure, the campaign against Iran deserves a sober reassessment.
The expectation that military pressure would trigger regime collapse, force Tehran into political capitulation, or fundamentally degrade its strategic capabilities has, so far, not been borne out. At best, those expectations were overly optimistic. At worst, they reflected wishful thinking masquerading as strategy.
First, regime change has not happened – and there is little evidence to suggest the war will bring it about anytime soon. Iran undoubtedly faces deep domestic dissatisfaction. Years of sanctions, inflation, corruption and political repression have generated repeated waves of unrest, culminating in the nationwide protests of late 2025 and early 2026, which were brutally suppressed by the security apparatus.
The discontent which led to those protests is likely still brewing. But history repeatedly demonstrates that authoritarian regimes often prove far more resilient under external attack than anticipated. Foreign intervention often allows regimes to recast themselves as defenders of national sovereignty – blunting internal dissent in the process. Opposition movements can be reluctant to mobilize while the country is under attack.
That appears to be precisely what has happened in Iran. Rather than imploding, the Islamic Republic has weathered what many in the US and Israel believed would become an existential crisis. Political fractures remain, and the economy continues to deteriorate: the rial touched record lows at the weekend. But the state retains the institutional cohesion, security capacity and elite discipline necessary to survive. The war may even have strengthened some of the very institutions it was intended to weaken.
Second, the assumption that Iran’s military capability has been decisively degraded is difficult to sustain. Throughout the campaign, President Donald Trump repeatedly declared that Iran’s missile force had been ‘obliterated’ and that much of its launch infrastructure had been destroyed. Israeli officials similarly highlighted the destruction of launchers, production facilities and command-and-control nodes. Yet developments over the past five months suggest those assessments were, at minimum, premature.
Iran has demonstrated a sustained ability to launch ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones across multiple theatres, from the Strait of Hormuz to countries hosting US military bases – including recent strikes on Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq and Jordan.
Whether acting directly or through its regional partners, Tehran has maintained a tempo of operations inconsistent with claims that its arsenal has been nearly exhausted. There is no reliable public estimate of Iran’s remaining missile stockpiles or production capacity. Definitive claims about its military depletion are difficult to sustain.
Strategic attrition
More importantly, Iran has demonstrated an ability to learn. It has not prioritized preserving its military assets. Instead, it has adapted its doctrine based on previous rounds of confrontation in 2024 and 2025. What once appeared to be operational shortcomings increasingly resemble the learning curve of a military preparing for a prolonged conflict rather than a single decisive exchange.
Iran has not sought battlefield dominance but strategic attrition, gradually increasing the political, economic and military costs for its opponents
In 2024, Iran carefully choreographed its military response to both Israel’s attack on its Syrian consulate in April of that year and the assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas fighters that October.
Missile attacks on Israel were launched in measured waves, often lacking precision. Even its retaliation for US strikes against Fordow and other nuclear facilities in June 2025 appeared designed to demonstrate resolve without provoking an uncontrollable regional war. This was read by some as hesitation or lack of capability. But it is now clear that it was strategy.
Iran possessed greater capacity to escalate, as it has demonstrated in the current war. But it chose not to exhaust its options. That restraint, interpreted by some as weakness, is consistent with a strategy of preserving escalation options while collecting valuable intelligence on Israeli and American missile-defence systems, response times and interception patterns.
In the 2026 conflict, Iranian targeting has become noticeably more selective. Rather than launching as many projectiles as possible, Tehran has focused on maximizing the strategic value of each strike. Attacks against Gulf energy infrastructure, ports and logistics nodes generate disproportionate economic, political and psychological consequences for the US and countries in the region.
This reflects a fundamentally different theory of victory. Iran has not sought battlefield dominance, but strategic attrition, gradually increasing the political, economic and military costs for its opponents over time.
In other words, Iran appears less focused on winning a short war than on managing a long confrontation, imposing incremental costs on its adversaries while preserving military and political options for future rounds of escalation.
Making a deal
The final assumption of the war, that Iran would capitulate politically and agree to a deal beneficial to the US and Israel, also proved wrong. Tehran’s red lines remain remarkably similar to those that existed before the war.
Enrichment of uranium on its soil remains non-negotiable. Its ballistic missile program may be damaged and depleted to some extent but is still central to its deterrence strategy. Its support for its proxies across the region has not been weakened (though its ability to fund and supply them may have been). In fact, the war has caused Tehran to expand the range of issues it considers core national interests, now adding control of the Strait of Hormuz to its list of red lines.
Far from appearing weakened, Iran increasingly projects confidence that it has weathered the storm. Whether that confidence is justified is almost secondary. It is Tehran’s perception of its situation that will shape its behaviour.
This is why the current trajectory is so troubling. If policymakers continue to base their strategy on assumptions that have repeatedly failed – that the regime is on the verge of collapse, that military pressure alone will produce capitulation, or that additional strikes will fundamentally alter Tehran’s calculations – they risk fighting a war with an Iranian regime that exists more in their expectations than in reality.
The likely outcome is neither decisive victory nor durable peace, but an increasingly familiar cycle of tit-for-tat, temporary ceasefires, failed negotiations and renewed escalation. Each fresh round of fighting will doubtless be presented by the US as the one that will finally break Tehran’s resolve. Yet each round is more likely to convince Iran that strategic patience, rather than compromise, remains its best option.
Until US assumptions are revisited, the war risks becoming self-perpetuating, driven less by achievable political objectives than by the hope that the next round of military pressure will succeed where every previous round has failed.
The French Open has become the first grand slam tournament to offer players a share of the event’s revenue in a significant step forward in the row over prize money. Officials from Roland Garros made the offer to the players’ representative, Larry Scott, in talks at Wimbledon a fortnight ago in a move that will increase pressure on the US Open, which is due to announce its prize fund for this year’s tournament at the start of next month.
While an agreement has yet to be reached, the French Open’s willingness to commit to a revenue-share model to determine prize money is a major development, and sets Roland Garros apart from the three other grand slam tournaments.
Oratomic, a quantum computing startup that emerged from stealth just four months ago, has raised a $300 million Series A round to pursue an unconventional approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing. The Pasadena-based company says its combination of reconfigurable neutral-atom hardware and quantum error correction could reduce the number of physical qubits needed for a useful quantum computer to roughly 10,000–20,000, rather than the much larger systems traditionally thought necessary. The financing was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Khosla Ventures, and the company said it plans to devote the funding to building a fault-tolerant quantum computer rather than intermediate commercial products.
The investment follows Oratomic’s emergence from stealth in March alongside publication of a research paper by scientists at Caltech and the company describing a new approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing based on reconfigurable neutral atoms.
Titled Shor’s algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits, the paper combines neutral-atom hardware with high-rate quantum error-correcting codes, improved logical operations and optimized compilation techniques to reduce the resources required for large-scale quantum computing. The work builds on two decades of advances in quantum error correction and quantum algorithms that have steadily lowered projected qubit requirements, while arguing that further architectural improvements could reduce those requirements by another order of magnitude compared with many previous estimates.
Oratomic CEO Dolev Bluvstein described the findings as a turning point for the team. “What we came up with—a clear road map to building a quantum computer—came faster than we expected,” he said.
Source: Cain et al., “Shor’s algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits” (2026).
Oratomic was founded to commercialize the research. The Pasadena-based company is led by CEO Bluvstein and brings together researchers from Caltech, Harvard, Google and other institutions, including Caltech professors Manuel Endres and John Preskill. It aims to build utility-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers by the end of the decade while continuing to collaborate with Caltech through the university’s Advanced Quantum Computing Mission.
In April, Oratomic partnered with Monarch Quantum to integrate Monarch’s Quantum Light Engine technology into future utility-scale systems, combining optical interconnect technology with Oratomic’s neutral-atom architecture.
The company’s roadmap places it among a growing field of neutral-atom developers, including QuEra, Infleqtion, Pasqal and Atom Computing, each pursuing architectures intended to scale toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. Oratomic, however, distinguishes itself by arguing that its neutral-atom architecture and error-correction approach can reduce the number of physical qubits required for practical quantum computing by orders of magnitude compared with conventional assumptions. If validated, Oratomic’s approach could significantly shorten the path toward commercially useful quantum computers.
The technical challenges associated with fault tolerance, error correction and large-scale system integration remain substantial, and Oratomic’s approach has so far been demonstrated only on paper. Whether the company’s architecture can be translated into a practical, large-scale quantum computer remains an open question. The $300 million Series A, however, suggests investors believe the idea is worth putting to the test.
The Queensland government has buried the findings of its own working group of domestic violence victim-survivors after their report was heavily critical of police responses and called for a “civilian review mechanism” to escalate complaints about police.
The Liberal National government has repeatedly said it would “put victims at the heart” of the state’s justice policies.
How the dismissal of Ukraine’s popular defence minister backfired for ZelenskyyExpert commentLToremark
The dismissal of Mykhailo Fedorov – the man behind Ukraine’s successful drone campaign against Russia – has sparked protests across Ukraine and turned into a political crisis for Zelenskyy.
For the second time this year, a surprise cabinet reshuffle by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has caused international headlines. Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko has resigned – at Zelenskyy’s request – triggering the automatic dissolution of her cabinet. The popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, was stripped of his role after only six months in office. Fedorov’s dismissal has sparked protests across Ukraine calling for him to be reinstated. Zelenskyy’s decision not to reappoint him has turned the reshuffle into a political crisis.
Zelenskyy defended his decision as a necessary step to resolve a paralyzing internal conflict between Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. In an attempt to quell the protests, Syrskyi has now been sacked and replaced with joint forces chief Mykhailo Drapatyi, seen as an ally of Fedorov. Zelenskyy also says he has offered Fedorov a ‘prominent position within the government’ but details are yet unclear. Although this will help defuse the crisis, the pairing of Drapatyi leading the armed forces alongside Fedorov driving tech innovation is viewed by many as essential for driving their reform agenda forward. This is now likely to become the focus of the protests.
Competing visions of war and governance
This animosity between Fedorov and Syrskyi reflects a fundamental ideological clash over how Ukraine should fight and govern itself. Critics view Syrskyi as an embodiment of the archaic, centralized Soviet-style approach that prioritizes artillery and ground assault infantry – and tolerates high casualty rates. Public condemnation of this old-guard military culture has recently intensified following investigative reports exposing the mistreatment and systemic abuse – even fatal – of recruits within a regiment reporting directly to Syrskyi.
Conversely, Fedorov champions an asymmetric, tech-driven approach to warfare designed to outsmart a larger adversary. His track record includes scaling domestic drone production, negotiating the shutdown of Starlink terminals used illegally by Russian forces, and introducing ‘after action reviews’ (AAR) to boost Ukraine’s missile interception rates. Fedorov also promoted pay raises, a new fixed-term contract system, and mechanisms to address soldiers going AWOL. But he was ousted before all his reforms could be realized and there is now widespread frustration that progress on these vital changes will stall.
Perhaps even more importantly, Fedorov’s reforms disrupted an opaque system long exploited by corrupt generals for personal enrichment. His introduction of competitive tendering and digitized procurement tracking made it increasingly difficult to inflate supply contracts and hide illicit kickbacks. Fedorov had also called for integrating battalion-level performance metrics into resource allocation and operational decisions.
Zelenskyy’s political calculus
While Fedorov has never publicly expressed presidential ambitions, his political capital is growing. A recent survey by the Kyiv Institute of International Sociology revealed that public trust in Fedorov surged from 38 per cent to 50 per cent over the last six months, whereas trust in Zelenskyy remained stable at around 61-62 per cent.
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Ambassador Zaluzhnyi at Chatham House
However, public sentiment is shifting: a May 2026 poll indicated that 67 per cent of Ukrainians expect Zelenskyy to be replaced once the war ends. Although Ukraine is constitutionally barred from holding elections under martial law, Zelenskyy has consistently sought to neutralize potential political rivals through dismissal or co-optation.
Zelenskyy’s most formidable political rival remains General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, although his political momentum appears to be waning. An early June poll showed that if presidential elections were held immediately, 32 per cent of Ukrainians would still vote for Zelenskyy. Conversely, Zaluzhnyi’s support dropped from 25 per cent to 16 per cent over the same period. Notably, Zelenskyy dismissed Zaluzhnyi as commander-in-chief and made him ambassador to the UK in February 2024 – around the time when Ukraine’s presidential elections would have normally occurred.
In January 2026, a massive energy sector corruption scandal forced the resignation of Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. In the resulting government reshuffle – which also elevated Fedorov – Zelenskyy appointed former military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov to his administration to restore public trust. This restructuring happened amid persistent pressure from Washington for Ukraine to establish a path towards democratic elections. Budanov’s inclusion is politically significant: he consistently ranks as one of the top three most trusted political figures, with data in late 2025 suggesting he could defeat Zelenskyy in a hypothetical runoff election.
Ultimately, sidelining capable and popular officials has become a distinct pattern of Zelenskyy’s leadership style – even more so as discussions about potential autumn elections heat up behind closed doors. But this time it backfired.
The timing of Zelenskyy’s decision is particularly baffling. Fedorov’s 40-day operation to isolate the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula had reached unprecedented momentum, and any bureaucratic slowdowns could now leave frontline brigades vulnerable. Russia is also preparing for another potential wave of mobilization after its autumn Duma elections.
EU Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, meanwhile, called Fedorov’s sudden removal a ‘big surprise’, emphasizing that he was the driver of Ukraine’s tech-first model and asymmetric drone strategy. Ukraine had just signed the EU-Ukraine Defence Industrial Partnership, establishing a framework for joint production and integration of combat-tested drone and counter-drone technologies with European manufacturing capacity. Fedorov had also recently submitted an application to route EU funds towards US and European anti-ballistic missile technology for Ukraine to help mitigate critical air defence shortages.
In Ukraine, active-duty soldiers and veterans have reported internal pressure designed to suppress support for Fedorov and the protests over his removal. For the demonstrators, Zelenskyy’s initial alignment with Syrskyi represented a regressive path toward opaque, Soviet-style governance, protecting vested interests of defence companies that may be losing contracts as a result of Fedorov’s strategy and reforms.
The new commander-in-chief, Drapatyi, is widely respected in Ukraine as a highly effective, accountable battlefield commander committed to military reform and soldiers’ well-being. It remains to be seen if Fedorov will accept Zelenskyy’s latest offer of a ‘prominent position’. He has already refused an offer to serve as an adviser overseeing defence technology and military reforms.
Sgt Michael Emmanuel Swinton died during controlled detonation, bringing total of US personnel killed in war to 17
The US military has identified an army soldier killed recently during a “controlled detonation” of a downed Iranian drone in Iraq as Sgt Michael Emmanuel Swinton, of Fayetteville, North Carolina.
According to a press release from the US defense department on Tuesday morning, the 30-year-old Swinton was supporting overseas contingency operations in Iraq – and he was “killed in action during a controlled detonation of a downed One-Way Unmanned Aerial System” on Saturday at Erbil airbase in northern Iraq.
The World Cup left us with some surprising heroes. Kudos to pop’s leader of the bland and his very public rebuke to hatred and division
Long before the United States turned the World Cup final into an orgy of pop music and advertising, the signs were already there that this year’s co-hosts should never have been allowed within a thousand miles of the tournament. The garish half-time show curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay seemed to reinforce that – but then came a moment of improbable genius.
I was surprised. The last time America hosted, the problem wasn’t commercial overkill so much as sheer shrugging apathy. I was in New York during USA ’94. Apart from a few flapping banners outside the Nike store, you wouldn’t have known one of the world’s biggest sporting events was taking place. This, in hindsight, was a blessing. Football was allowed to football.
Simon Price is a music journalist and author
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Company is delivering free-space quantum memory technology to Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Maryland to address a critical bottleneck to scaling quantum networks.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill., July 21, 2026 — Photon Queue, a quantum technology company building high-efficiency quantum memories for next-generation quantum computing systems, today announced the close of its oversubscribed seed funding round of $4 million, led by Playground Global. The seed round builds on Photon Queue’s early customer traction, including contracts with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Maryland that validate demand from leading institutions at the forefront of quantum computing and photonic systems research.
The funding will accelerate Photon Queue’s product development, manufacturing capabilities and customer deployments as the company scales to meet demand from quantum computing companies, national laboratories and research institutions.
Quantum computing depends on photons arriving at exactly the right place and time. As systems scale, quantum platforms will need to network many smaller processors together, creating a universal bottleneck: synchronizing single photons across complex quantum systems. Quantum memories solve that problem by storing photons until they are needed.
Photon Queue’s devices store photons directly in free-space optical loops using proprietary high-reflectivity mirror systems and optical switches. Unlike other approaches that require cryogenics, vacuum systems or complex transduction processes, Photon Queue’s devices operate at room temperature using standard power, while delivering ultra-high efficiency and world-leading bandwidth.
“Useful quantum computing will require photons to move through networks with extraordinary precision, efficiency and timing. That is the problem Photon Queue was founded to solve,” said Nathan Arnold, co-founder and CEO of Photon Queue. “In less than two years, we have taken technology from the lab to deployed commercial hardware with leading national lab and university customers. Our work with Sandia and the University of Maryland is a major validation point that quantum memory is becoming essential infrastructure for the next era of computing.”
Photon Queue’s devices are designed to be compatible with virtually any wavelength, making them broadly applicable across photonic, trapped ion, neutral atom and other quantum computing architectures. The company has deployed its first commercial quantum memory device at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Maryland.
“Quantum computing is hitting a scale problem that better qubits alone cannot solve. The industry needs new infrastructure to move, store and synchronize photons with far greater efficiency,” said Marissa Ramirez de Chanlatte, Investor at Playground Global. “Photon Queue has built an elegant solution, turning breakthrough quantum optics into commercial hardware, with early customer traction. We believe they are a foundational company that will define the quantum memory category.”
“Quantum memories are a critical enabling technology for distributed quantum systems, and performance, efficiency and ease of integration are essential,” said Saikat Guha, Clark Distinguished Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park and director of the NSF Center for Quantum Networks. “Photon Queue’s room-temperature, free-space approach is compelling because it stores photons directly without the complexity of cryogenics, vacuum systems or transduction. We look forward to working with the Photon Queue team as they continue developing practical quantum memory hardware for our research in quantum networking, sensing, and communication”
Founded in 2024 as a spinout from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Photon Queue is led by co-founders Nathan Arnold, CEO and Kelsey Ortiz, CTO. The founding team brings deep expertise in quantum optics, photonic systems and hardware commercialization.
Photon Queue is a graduate of the Duality Quantum Accelerator, a corporate partner of the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the winner of the Q2B Startup Pitch Competition. CEO Nathan Arnold is also a fellow at Chain Reaction Innovations at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy entrepreneurship program.
Photon Queue also recently announced $500,000 in funding from the New Mexico Economic Development Department and Roadrunner Venture Studios to support its expansion in New Mexico and deepen its work with the region’s national laboratory and quantum technology ecosystem.
About Photon Queue
Photon Queue is the world’s leading developer of free-space quantum memory devices. Founded in 2024 as a spinout from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the company builds high-performance quantum memories that store photons using linear optics at room temperature — delivering ultra-high efficiency and world-leading bandwidth with no cryogenics, vacuum systems or complex transduction required. Photon Queue’s technology serves quantum computing, communications and metrology applications. The company is headquartered in Champaign, Illinois. Learn more at photonqueue.com.
RAVENDEN, ARKANSAS — A white separatist organization is seeking to expand its whites-only housing model across the Ozarks, Appalachia and the South while defending its membership restrictions against a federal civil rights lawsuit.
Return to the Land established its first 160-acre settlement near Ravenden in 2023. Approximately 40 people now live there, including about a dozen children. The organization says it creates communities for people of European ancestry and screens applicants based on their racial, religious and cultural backgrounds.
The group operates through a private membership association connected to a for-profit company. Its leaders contend that this structure permits them to select residents despite federal fair-housing protections. Legal experts dispute that interpretation, noting that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibits racial discrimination in property transactions without exceptions for private associations.
A federal lawsuit alleges that Return to the Land rejected Michelle Walker, a Christian woman with Russian-Jewish ancestry, after learning she was married to a Black man and had biracial children.
Founder Eric Orwoll has publicly identified as a white identitarian and made approving references to Adolf Hitler. The group is raising money for additional settlements and says work has started on a second Arkansas location.
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin’s office said it began reviewing the organization after receiving complaints but had no investigative update.
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA — Emergency department visits by uninsured patients increased 8% at Virginia hospitals during 2025, raising concerns that coverage losses are shifting more medical care into costly emergency settings.
The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association classifies these visits as “self-pay,” meaning patients lacked insurance or could not document coverage when treated. Emergency rooms must evaluate and stabilize patients regardless of their ability to pay, leaving hospitals to absorb unpaid costs or recover them through other revenue.
Visits involving Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance remained comparatively stable or recorded only modest increases. Meanwhile, Virginia’s insurance marketplace has lost more than 67,400 enrollees compared with the same period last year, according to the State Corporation Commission.
State lawmakers approved additional assistance for free clinics and federally qualified health centers, along with a state insurance subsidy expected to help approximately 200,000 residents. Enrollment for that assistance begins in November.
Hospitals are also preparing for stricter Medicaid work and eligibility-verification requirements scheduled to begin in January. Healthcare officials warn that rising uncompensated care could lead systems to reduce staffing, close outpatient services or negotiate higher payments from private insurers. A state report has identified 13 rural Virginia hospitals as financially vulnerable, although industry representatives said immediate closures are not inevitable.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: When the weirdest people in the country are running the government, what will it take to make competence fashionable again?
Election Interference or Election Integrity?: Lies designed to manufacture doubt so Trump can meddle in elections he can’t win honestly.
Pete Hegseth’s “High-T Department of War”: Hegseth’s testosterone crusade trades medical evidence for a slogan, a dangerous substitution.
Does Major League Baseball Need a Salary Cap?: Or, will owners accept a real spending floor instead of using the cap as an excuse to stay cheap?
The League - Sam Pollard: An absorbing documentary reminds us that the Negro Leagues were not a sidebar to baseball history but half the story.
Cab Calloway - “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”: Robinson’s breakthrough becomes a joyous roll call for Black players who rushed through the door Robinson opened.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.”
Dan Quayle (1947–), former Vice President of the United States
(Photo by Fotosearch/Getty Images)
I laughed when I first read this because there is a wonderful irony baked into the source. Once upon a time, Dan Quayle established a high-water mark for weirdness in American politics.
In 1988, when George Bush (the elder) chose Quayle as his vice-presidential running mate, he seemed like a politically solid choice: he was young (just 41 years old), handsome, reliably conservative, and a Midwestern senator from Indiana who could be counted on to deliver his state’s electoral votes. But Quayle’s selection quickly became problematic, as allegations surfaced that he’d used family connections to get a spot in the Indiana National Guard to avoid being drafted at the height of the Vietnam War. (Quayle denied it.) That story was soon followed by talk of a scandalous golf trip to Florida with two Republican congressmen and a female D.C. lobbyist, who was having an affair with one of the congressmen and claimed Quayle had “wanted to make love” to her. (Quayle denied it.)
Then there was his disastrous debate performance, when he said he had as much experience as John F. Kennedy when Kennedy ran for President, only to have his opponent, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, respond, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” The reviews were withering. Today, though, if Quayle is remembered at all, it’s for “The Potatoe Incident,” which occurred on June 15, 1992, during the Bush/Quayle reelection campaign, when he mistakenly “corrected” a 12-year-old student during a spelling bee, telling him to add an “e” to the end of the word “potato.” Already a liability to the campaign, the incident made him a laughingstock.
Still, it all seems pretty quaint by today’s standards. Just compare his bona fides to Donald Trump’s: Quayle used family influence to get into the National Guard, while Trump used his family doctor and some imaginary bone spurs to get out of the military altogether; Quayle made a pass at a D.C. lobbyist, while Trump had affairs with a porn star and a Playboy playmate; Quayle glibly compared himself to J.F.K. in a debate, while Trump said Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats” in a debate; and while Quayle is remembered for “potatoe,” Trump is remembered for “covfefe.” (To round out the comparisons, Quayle was the captain of his college golf team, while Trump has been accused of cheating at golf by Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly, actor Samuel L. Jackson, and the late Senator Lindsey Graham.)
Quayle’s quote about weird people actually was a reference to Grigori Rasputin, the infamous monk who was said to exert an unholy influence on Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra prior to the Russian Revolution. Trump, of course, has his own cast of weird influencers, starting with “First Buddy” Elon Musk, the auto and aerospace mogul with no government experience whom he put in charge of DOGE, the newly invented Department of Government Efficiency that ransacked the government to save money for the billionaires at the expense of everyone else. There’s Roger Stone, the unofficial Trump aide who was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and witness tampering on Trump’s behalf, and who has a tattoo of his one-time boss Richard Nixon on his back. And there’s internet personality Laura Loomer, the self-described “pro-white nationalist” and “proud Islamophobe,” whom Trump has defended as “a very good patriot.” But the pinnacle of Trump-adjacent weirdness is surely occupied by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Democratic scion turned vaccine-denying, dead-animal-abusing, conspiracy-embracing, brain-worm-hosting head of Health and Human Services.
Trump’s cabinet is in fact filled with the kinds of weirdos who used to be relegated to headlines in the National Enquirer and airtime on Fox News, rather than leading important departments of the government. It all makes you yearn for a distant past when our government was manned by people who had expertise in the appropriate fields and ran the government with competence and humility rather than fealty to a mad king. Was that really just a decade ago? It feels as far away and fantastic as the world Homer and Christopher Nolan depicted in The Odyssey.
Why Should Delaware Care? Concerns about enrollment at school districts throughout the state have grown, with some school buildings experiencing extreme overcrowding while others face declining enrollment. A proposal to “tweak” the elementary school feeder pattern at Colonial schools marks the most recent attempt to address challenges with classroom space.
For years, parents of special education students in the New Castle area have sought out Southern Elementary School for its programs tailored to their kids’ needs.
But in recent weeks, the Colonial School District announced it is planning to decentralize those special education programs away from the school, which sits near the C&D Canal, and distribute the resources to schools throughout the district, which stretches from Wilmington to Port Penn.
During a board of education meeting earlier this month, Colonial Superintendent Jeff Menzer said the needs of special education students in Southern Elementary have outpaced the size and capacity of the building.
And he said that in order to reshuffle students to new programs, the district would have to also “tweak” its feeder pattern for all students at several elementary schools.
The change would send more general education students to Southern and fewer to Eisenberg, Castle Hills, and Wilbur elementary schools, he said.
Roughly 330 students would be affected by the changes, which would not go into effect this fall, but rather the 2027-28 school year.
Menzer called the plan a “positive change” for the district.
Colonial Superintendent Jeff Menzer | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
“Bringing students closer to their home, families closer to their school, their resources closer to the students at their home, we’re benefiting the larger community as well,” he said during the board meeting.
Under the new plan, students living in Holloway Terrace and Mayview Manor neighborhoods and currently attending Eisenberg Elementary would go to New Castle Elementary for the 2027-28 school year.
Castle Hill Elementary students living in areas such as Cavalier Country Club Apartments and Christiana Acres, among others, would instead attend Carrie Downie Elementary. And Castle Hill students living in Emblem at Christiana would attend Pleasantville Elementary.
Southern Elementary would draw students living in High Pointe at Saint Georges, Blairville Court, Buena Vista Park, among other parts of the district that formerly attended Wilbur Elementary.
Menzer said the changes were done “as minimally disruptive as possible.”
Schools throughout the state experience enrollment challenges
For many students with individualized education plans, or IEPs, their schooling does not only take place inside a classroom.
Some students require small group lessons or intensive interventions, and schools need space to provide those required resources.
But space is limited in Southern Elementary. The school was at 97% capacity rate during the 2025-26 school year, according to the Delaware Department of Education.
Southern Elementary School near Delaware City operated at a 97% capacity rate during the 2025-26 school year, according to the Delaware Department of Education. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
Colonial School District officials’ decision to change elementary school feeder patterns marks the first attempt from a school district in recent years to address ongoing enrollment fluctuations.
While some school districts grapple with overcrowded schools, a separate phenomenon of half-empty school buildings has prompted Delaware’s House Speaker Mimi Minor Brown (D-New Castle) to question whether those facilities could be repurposed into different types of community facilities.
Last month, Minor-Brown introduced a resolution that asks budget officials to develop a framework, along with school districts, that would define an “underutilized” property. They would then outline a process for repurposing it for other community services, such as child care or senior housing.
In a social media post, Minor-Brown said her resolution would not close any school or take power from local school board members. Instead, she said it starts a “coordinated planning conversation.”
The phenomenon has been fueled by several factors, including an expansion of charter schools in New Castle County and changes to bus patterns that allow students to attend schools outside of their community.
Menzer previously told Spotlight Delaware that capacity numbers are not “cut and dry,” because some students need more space than others depending on their individual needs.
As a result, Menzer said some schools that have lower recorded enrollments than others are still overcrowded because of some students’ needs for more inclusive settings.
Currently, the district’s new feeder pattern would take students from some of the more populated schools, such as Wilbur and Eisenberg, to schools with lower capacity rates like New Castle and Carrie Downie elementary schools.
What will happen next with the elementary school feeder pattern?
Throughout the next month, the Colonial School District will work with the University of Delaware to implement necessary geotagging and mapping changes for the 2027-28 school year.
The Colonial Board of Education will then vote whether to implement the realignment recommendation during its Sept. 8 board meeting.
Menzer said there will be a priority to share necessary information with affected families throughout the fall. The district will also host question-and-answer sessions for Back to School nights at Eisenberg, Wilbur, and Castle Hills elementary schools.
Families will have a chance to visit the school where their child will be assigned for the 2027-28 school year, Menzer said.
Even if the Colonial Board of Education approves the new feeder pattern this fall, implementation will not begin until August of 2027.
My generation is struggling to find safety in our human relationships. AI companionship is filling the gap
“There are parts of myself I only share with my AI,” Jerome told me. “Your AI?” I asked.
He was 27, three months out of a breakup, and entirely aware that his AI relationship was, as the psychotherapist Esther Perel put it, “a business product”. Still, he confided in it more than he ever had his friends. I mention Jerome because, in the four years I’ve been reporting on gen Z, I have watched my peers become him, one by one. We are the first generation of digital natives and the last generation to have experienced human-to-human intimacy exclusively. Now the attention economy’s younger sister, the intimacy economy, has monetized the connection and affection that make us feel human.
Historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s book Country of Lords looks back at the many men who have tried to fight against egalitarianism, from John Adams to Peter Thiel
The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.
Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and economicinequality, Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk “emerging as a trillionaire very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends”.
FORT WORTH, TEXAS — The Justice Department plans to transfer transgender women involved in a federal lawsuit to a secure, segregated unit at Federal Medical Center Carswell, seeking to resolve conflicting legal disputes over inmate housing and safety.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons notified a Washington court that the plaintiffs in Jane Doe v. Blanche would be housed separately from the prison’s general female population. Four plaintiffs already at Carswell have been moved into the specialized wing.
The arrangement follows an order in a separate Texas case requiring Carswell to prevent inmates assigned male at birth from sharing housing and common areas with the female plaintiffs. The unit includes separate shower schedules and other measures limiting contact between the populations.
The transgender plaintiffs previously obtained an injunction temporarily preventing their transfer to men’s prisons. They argued that such placements would expose them to an increased risk of sexual violence.
Their attorneys now contend that the Carswell unit amounts to restrictive isolation, limiting medical appointments, legal visits, education, recreation and social interaction. Four inmates submitted declarations alleging deteriorating mental health and renewed gender dysphoria.
The plaintiffs have asked U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to block the remaining transfers or restore broader movement at Carswell. Lamberth scheduled oral arguments for July 29 before deciding whether the proposed arrangement complies with his earlier injunction.
Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America.
I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed.
As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented.
Footage from labor contractor Javier Sanchez Mendoza in 2018 on a blueberry farm. Mendoza was charged in a federal indictment and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in forced labor.via Facebook
I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most in the state where I live, Georgia, and the state where I tracked these abuses. During the long drives back and forth between my home in Atlanta and my reporting trips in the rural South, I had a lot of time to consider how little we know about the farms that feed us.
Max Blau/ProPublica
I struggled with the disconnect between the problems on America’s farms and the limited awareness of those problems in most American households. I felt that disconnect in my own kitchen, every time I reached for the berries in my fridge.
I wanted to know: With enough digging, would it be possible to determine if the blueberries I’m buying come from farms with a record of mistreating workers?
Federal regulators don’t require blueberry brands to disclose on their packaging any information about the individual farms they buy from. So I had to spend time — a lot of time — trying to figure that out.
I started by looking at labels on the blueberry pints in my grocery stores.
I snapped photos. I researched the brands. I read government records.
Max Blau/ProPublicaMax Blau/ProPublica
If you look closely, you’ll see that the pints often list the state where the berries are grown or the city they’re distributed from. But not the farm itself.
Mauricio Rodríguez Pons/ProPublica
As it turns out, the pints sold by a specific brand aren’t always sourced to a single farm. To keep up with demand, and to help keep prices low, brands buy berries from a whole bunch of farms and sell them under a single label.
That makes it even harder to know if the berries you’re buying come from farms where workers were harmed.
Illustration by Andrew B. Myers for ProPublica
I was able to trace one brand’s berries back from my grocery stores to an individual farm. I’m not going to name that brand, though, because its practices are hardly unique.
Sure enough, I found that the brand did buy berries from a farm that had hired a labor contractor, and that contractor was responsible for some of the abuses in one of America’s largest labor trafficking prosecutions.
That case, which I wrote about at length, revealed that thousands of foreign farmworkers had been illegally charged fees by labor contractors to work in the U.S. Some were forced to pick crops for little to no pay in what prosecutors described as a form of modern-day slavery.
This wasn’t the first case of the abuse of farmworkers at the hands of labor contractors. Or the last. Many of these harms might have been prevented if the workers had received the protections they were promised by the U.S. government. And there have been no substantial reforms to address the abuses, either.
Federal prosecutors entered as evidence photos of the housing that defendants had provided to farmworkers.Obtained by ProPublicaFederal investigators seized a trove of passports that they say had been confiscated from farmworkers by the defendants.Obtained by ProPublica
The reason contractors exist in the first place is because farmers struggle to find workers in the U.S.
Many farmers speak only English. So they end up hiring contractors to bring foreign laborers to the U.S. and oversee their work.
That outsourcing can shield farmers from responsibility for — or even awareness of — harm against their workers.
Many farmers, brands and grocers were reluctant to talk to me about these abuses.
I spoke with experts to see if there are ways for consumers to know if the people picking their blueberries are being mistreated.
Those experts, who study farm labor conditions and food supply chains, said the gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program. Under the program, supermarkets and other corporate buyers commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, at a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices.
For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.
Pacific Tomato Growers is one of a few dozen farms to participate in the Fair Food Program, which protects workers against abuse and exploitation.Audra Melton for ProPublica
Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. The stickers give consumers like me a clear indication that the workers who picked that produce were treated fairly.
When I’ve found these tomatoes in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.
But only a few small blueberry farms participate in the program.
Until that or something else changes, consumers will know virtually nothing about the farms their blueberries come from. And they won’t be able to make choices that could make a difference in the lives of the people who pick them.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s primary super PAC has accumulated more than $400 million, giving his political allies a formidable financial advantage ahead of the November midterm elections.
MAGA Inc. began 2026 with roughly $300 million and raised another $19 million during June, according to a Federal Election Commission filing released Monday. The organization can spend unlimited amounts supporting or opposing federal candidates but is legally prohibited from coordinating directly with their campaigns.
Major June contributors included NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who donated $1 million. Cryptocurrency billionaires Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss contributed a combined $10 million after selling Bitcoin to fund their donations.
The super PAC’s cash reserves are more than three times the Republican National Committee’s reported $129 million and substantially exceed the resources available to major Democratic committees. MAGA Inc. spent nearly $377 million supporting Trump and other Republicans during the 2024 election cycle.
Republicans currently hold narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress, making control of the House and Senate vulnerable to relatively small shifts in competitive states. Despite its enormous stockpile, MAGA Inc. spent little on campaign activity during June and has not publicly detailed where it will direct its money.
The group’s fundraising demonstrates Trump’s continued influence over Republican donors even though he cannot seek another presidential term.
A collection of speeches and writings by Pope Leo XIV has been certified as human-authored less than two months after Leo declared artificial intelligence the greatest threat to humanity.
Proudly Human, the Australian company spearheaded by Australia’s former chief scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, undertook a review of a collection of writings and speeches by the pope, in collaboration with the publisher, the Australian Catholic University and cardinals in the Vatican.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump imposed new 50% tariffs on approximately $20 billion in annual Canadian imports Monday, accusing Canada of discriminating against American vehicles, alcohol and dairy products.
Trump invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a rarely used provision allowing presidents to impose duties of up to 50% on countries determined to have disadvantaged U.S. commerce. The three presidential proclamations mark the law’s first known use in nearly a century.
The tariffs take effect Aug. 19, providing 30 days for the two governments to negotiate. Products affected include wine, cement, dairy goods, furniture, clothing, fishing equipment and hockey gear. Energy, potash, fish and critical minerals are excluded.
Some products previously qualifying for tariff-free treatment under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement will now face the additional duties. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the action violates the trade agreement and will increase costs for American consumers and businesses.
A White House official said Canada must be held accountable because it retaliated against earlier U.S. tariffs. Trump has also directed aides to examine whether additional trade penalties could be connected to smoke from Canadian wildfires entering the United States.
The USMCA remains in effect, but Washington recently declined to extend it beyond its current review period, beginning a process that could allow the agreement to expire in 2036.
The president said the levies will take effect in 30 days unless Canada drops what the administration called “discriminatory” trade barriers against U.S. products.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that so-called Trump accounts, new federal investment and savings accounts for children, “could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars” by the time children turn 18. That’s only true if parents or other donors contribute thousands of dollars per year, per child, assuming that future returns are close to the historic stock market averages.
While touting the program, Trump has also repeatedly suggested that children from homes with “essentially no money” could become “very rich” with the Trump accounts. But financial experts say it’s unlikely that parents in low-income households would be able to afford to contribute enough for their children’s accounts to reach hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time they reach adulthood. “Think of it, children that are born without money, without any money. Great parents, they can have — everything can be great, but they have no money. They can become very wealthy children at 18,” Trump said on July 6.
Photo by pingpao / stock.adobe.com
Parents, relatives, friends, employers, state governments, philanthropic organizations and individuals can contribute to these accounts until a child turns 18, up to a total $5,000 annual combined limit per account.
Not everyone has embraced the program; Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi posted on X on July 6, “It’s safe to say, I would pass on a Trump account.” Thompson said, “Trump University already taught us what happens when his name is on the brochure.”
But experts say those who eschew the accounts for their children could be leaving free money on the table.
As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, the federal government will seed new accounts with $1,000 for children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, who have a valid Social Security number. (Parents can open accounts for older children, but they won’t get the $1,000.)In addition, the first 25 million children under the age of 10 and residing in a ZIP code with a median income of $150,000 or less will receive an additional $250, which was funded by Michael and Susan Dell’s donation of $6.25 billion to these investment accounts.
Even if donors don’t contribute anything, that seed money could grow to several thousand dollars by the time a child reaches adulthood.
What are Trump Accounts?
The Trump accounts are a new child savings account that a parent can open for any child before the age of 18. As of July 6, Trump said that “6 million American children have signed up,” and out of those, 1.4 million met the birth date requirement that makes them eligible for the $1,000 in government seed money. As of July 4, the Treasury had already deposited the $1,000 into over 500,000 accounts. As we said, parents and relatives, employers, charities, and others can also contribute, up to the per-account $5,000 yearly maximum.
The Treasury Department said on July 1 that the Trump accounts will all be initially invested in State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 ETF, which is a low-cost index fund that tracks the performance of the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the U.S., and that other stock index fund options will be available in the “coming months.” The accounts will be managed by parents and will grow tax-deferred until the child turns 18 years old, when the account is then treated like a traditional individual retirement account.
The money can’t be withdrawn before a child reaches adulthood. Once a child has turned 18, just as with a traditional IRA, withdrawals can be made penalty-free for certain qualified expenses, such as college tuition and for first-time home purchases (up to $10,000). If an exception doesn’t apply, there’s a 10% tax for making withdrawals before age 59 and a half. Withdrawals, including any pre-tax contributions such as the government seed money or employer contributions, are also taxed at ordinary income tax rates, as the Tax Foundation explains. After-tax contributions are exempt from those taxes.
When promoting the program, Trump has often claimed that these accounts “could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time they [children] reach 18 or 21.” To grow to such levels, though, parents or others would have to make significant annual contributions to a child’s account.
A White House Council of Economic Advisers report estimates — based on its mid-range scenario, which assumes an average annual return of 10.3% and the government’s $1,000 in seed money — that a Trump account would grow to $303,757 by the time a child turns 18 if supplemented by the maximum $5,000 annual contribution (adjusted for inflation starting next year). The CEA also provides a high-range scenario — which assumes an average annual 18.5% return — in which the account would grow to $730,395 by the time the child turns 18. CEA’s low-end scenario — which assumes average annual stock growth of 5.4% — projects an account balance of $187,408 in 18 years.
Growth estimates without such generous annual contributions would, of course, result in much lower returns. Accounts supplemented by annual contributions of $2,500 per child (adjusted for inflation starting next year) would grow to $154,798 when a child turns 18, according to CEA’s mid-range scenario. And with no contributions, the $1,000 seed money would grow to $5,839.
For context, the State Street ETF chosen for the initial accounts has averaged an annual return of 11.31% since it was launched in late 2005.
Joseph Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us in an interview that “it is possible” for someone who contributes the maximum to a Trump account to have a balance of hundreds of thousands. He said that “a newborn who gets the $1,000 and then their parents contribute $5,000 every year until they’re 18. You know, if you assume a 7% rate of return, that does get to about $200,000 by the time they’re, say, 18.”
He estimated the balance of an account with no additional parent contributions to be a little more than $3,000 when the child is 18. All of those values, he noted, are before taxes and adjustments for the effects of inflation. They are also all highly dependent on the performance of the stock market, he said, so the returns may be less than estimated if the stock market doesn’t do as well.
Trump’s Claim of Poor Children Becoming Rich
The government website about the accounts —trumpaccounts.gov — makes it clear that donors or families would need to contribute the maximum yearly amount to likely grow an account balance to more than $200,000 once a child is 18. But in publicly discussing the accounts, Trump has frequently framed them as an opportunity for children from low-income homes to become rich.
“It’s really an amazing thing because it gives young children that start out with really nothing and it gives them — boy, it’s more money than anybody could imagine,” Trump said in remarks about the program on Jan. 28.
“It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a child has had no money, and when that baby becomes a man or a woman, they can have hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more, but they can have hundreds of thousands of dollars, because we’re seeding it,” Trump said in a CNBC interview on July 2.
“Children can, at the age of 18 and after, become very wealthy people; come into the world with essentially no money and end up a very young age being very rich,” Trump said at a Trump account launch event on July 6. “Think of it, children that are born without money, without any money. Great parents, they can have — everything can be great, but they have no money. They can become very wealthy children at 18.”
But financial experts say it’s unlikely low-income families could afford or would make those kinds of thousands of dollars in annual contributions for each of their children. Trumpaccounts.gov estimates that if no additional contributions are made beyond the initial $1,000 seed money, that account could be worth $243,000 by the time the child is 55 years old.
Michelle Singletary, a personal finance columnist for the Washington Post, wrote on July 11 that many low-income families would lack the disposable income needed for these accounts to grow significantly by age 18. “If you’re a family living paycheck to paycheck, finding an extra $400 a month to lock away is a fantasy. The issue has never been a lack of account types. The obstacle for many families is a lack of surplus cash,” she said. “By relying on families to invest up to $5,000 annually to see meaningful growth, Trump accounts do not solve the fundamental problem of poverty.”
According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, “Without additional deposits into the accounts of kids from families with low incomes, children of wealthy parents will primarily benefit” from the program.
In a blog for the Tax Law Center at New York University, Greg Leiserson, a former senior economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, also warned the program may exclude vulnerable children who have “unstable or complex living situations” as well as “those whose caregivers have very low incomes and do not file a tax return.”
Furthermore, some experts argue that the Trump accounts are not as tax-efficient as other investment accounts for many families. Adam N. Michel, the Cato Institute’s director of tax policy studies, wrote an analysis that found the Trump accounts would yield the lowest after-tax value of savings compared with other types of accounts, such as a Health Savings Account or a traditional or Roth IRA.
“The most attractive feature of a Trump Account is not its treatment of personal contributions but the ability to receive transfers from governments, employers, and nonprofit organizations,” Michel wrote. “These contributions represent direct government subsidies or tax-free contributions from employers or nonprofit organizations. In that context, the accounts function less as a neutrality-enhancing investment vehicle and more as a welfare program. Any financial advantage of the accounts therefore derives primarily from the presence of these external contributions rather than from improved tax treatment of the contributions made by the beneficiary’s family or friends.”
In a press release, the Trump administration stated that more than 50 companies so far have committed to making Trump account contributions for their employees’ kids. Employers can make tax-free contributions of up to $2,500 a year to employee accounts. That amount counts toward the $5,000 annual maximum contribution.
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ATLANTA, GEORGIA — Sen. Jon Ossoff is demanding answers from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about reduced federal monitoring of foodborne illnesses as a major cyclosporiasis outbreak spreads across the country.
Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, criticized the CDC’s decision to reduce mandatory reporting through the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, known as FoodNet. The program previously tracked eight pathogens but narrowed its required surveillance to Salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli in July 2025.
The CDC reported 1,645 laboratory-confirmed domestically acquired cyclosporiasis cases since May 1, with more than 5,100 additional cases under review across 34 states. Michigan has reported the largest concentration. The intestinal infection is caused by the Cyclospora parasite and commonly produces prolonged watery diarrhea, nausea, cramping and fatigue.
Ossoff called the surveillance reduction “foolish and self-indulgent” and asked Kennedy whether Cyclospora tracking would be restored. However, health officials have not established that the FoodNet changes caused or worsened the outbreak. Other federal and state surveillance systems continue collecting Cyclospora reports.
The CDC said FoodNet narrowed its requirements because other systems now monitor the excluded pathogens, allowing staff to prioritize core work. Federal investigators have linked one outbreak cluster to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in five states, although other reported illnesses may have separate sources.
In the special election for an Ohio Senate seat, the state’s increasing residential electricity bills are in the political spotlight.
Democratic former Senator Sherrod Brown, who will face Republican Sen. Jon Husted, posted July 1 on X: “Since the passage of the corrupt, Jon Husted-backed (House Bill 6) bailout, your utility rates have gone up $663 a year.”
The post linked to an article citing monthly utility data from the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to calculate a $663.36 annual electric bill increase from the law’s enactment in October 2019 to January. The article says HB 6 contributed to the increase.
The Ohio legislature passed House Bill 6, or HB 6, in 2019 and it was tied to what was widelyrecognized as the largest political corruption case in Ohio’s history. Eight people were charged with crimes including racketeering, public corruption and bribery.
The bill included mandated utility bill surcharges to subsidize failing power plants and allowed FirstEnergy to levy charges regardless of consumer use.
But experts told PolitiFact that although HB6 was a factor, the law was not the main driver of the $663 annual increase. Instead, they attribute it to an influx of data centers, international conflicts and rising prices from regional power grid auctions.
What did HB 6 seek to do and what was Husted’s involvement?
HB 6 was a $1.3 billion bailout to FirstEnergy, an Ohio-based utility company.The 2019 legislation led to consumers subsidizing failing power plants through monthly surcharges.
FirstEnergy spent $60 million on bribes to Ohio political figures to ensure the law’s passage.
Husted championed HB 6’s passage as lieutenant governor. He has not been charged with any crimes or accused of wrongdoing; when testifying in March, he said he had no knowledge of the bribery.
His 2018 campaign with Gov. Mike DeWine received heavy financial support from nonprofits and political action committees funded by FirstEnergy. Trial records include text messages and emails where FirstEnergy executives call Husted their “golden boy” and describe his high engagement in convincing both DeWine and state lawmakers to pass the bill. (In 2025 DeWine appointed Husted to fill the remaining term of J.D. Vance, who became vice president. Husted is running now to keep the seat, which Brown held previously from 2007 to 2025.)
HB 6 had four parts: a nuclear plant bailout; a guarantee of set profits not tied to consumer usage; coal plant subsidies; and the reduction of green energy mandates with plans to eventually eliminate them.
Husted’s campaign spokesperson, Amy Natoce, told PolitiFact “The subsidies contained in HB 6 were repealed, so it is quite literally impossible for HB 6 to be raising utility rates.” The rate increases were in effect for six years before they were repealed.
The bailout for two of FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants added mandatory monthly surcharges to nearly all residential, commercial and industrial utility bills and was expected to generate $150 million annually. In 2021, after the FBI arrested people for racketeering, House Bill 128 repealed the surcharge before FirstEnergy collected any funds. HB 128 also repealed the utility’s ability to guarantee itself a baseline level of revenue by raising base rates.
The coal plant subsidies, which led to a $1.30-$1.50 monthly charge for residential consumers, ended in May 2025. The cuts to Ohio’s energy efficiency requirements and Renewable Portfolio Standards, which formerly forced utility companies to buy a portion of their power from renewable sources, have been maintained.
How much have rates changed, and what’s driving increases?
Brown’s figure comes from comparing average annual residential bills from October 2019 and January. The 2019 annual bill was about $1,070 and the January bill was about $1,734.
The rate has continued to increase since January; based on data from Ohio’s Public Utilities Commission, the average June monthly bill was $155.65 (or $1,867.80 annually).
When contacted for comment, Brown’s campaign cited these figures and shared a document that said the law “contributed” to the utility increase. They also cited a 2025 study from Runnerstone, an energy engineering consulting firm, showing that Ohio residents have paid $527 million because of HB 6 subsidies.
However, Brown misleads by citing HB 6 as the main driver of rising rates.
“There’s no way anyone with a straight face could tell you that House Bill 6 raised electric bills by $663,” said Dr. Noah Dormady, an Ohio State University associate professor in public policy analysis and energy policy, and an expert witness in the HB 6 racketeering trial,. “To attribute all of this cost to House Bill 6 is irresponsible.” Dormady said the price hikes are because of utility companies facing increased demand from data centers and Ohio-specific retail auctions where suppliers are price gouging. He also pointed to increased energy costs because of the Ukraine-Russia and Iran wars.
Ohio relies on a regional grid and competitive wholesale power market, operated by PJM Interconnection. PJM determines what mediums to source power from, while power producers participate in wholesale capacity markets and are paid for expected demand. Dormady explained that investor-owned distribution utilities in Ohio during retail auctions purposefully restrict supply so bidding prices are higher. These translate into higher supply rates on consumer bills.
According to energy reports from Third Way, a centrist think tank and advocacy organization, supply rates make up about half of monthly electricity bills. Natural gas prices have been unusually high this year because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and war in Iran, but PJM’s recent prioritization of natural gas generation has contributed to the higher supply rates.
Molly Bryden, a researcher at liberal-leaning think tank Policy Matters Ohio, said a leading cause for the energy hikes is utility companies hiking rates to combat data centers’ usage. Ohio utilities have asked the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to increase distribution and transmission rates, citing data center growth; some approved cases may add an additional $10 per month in the coming years.
Our ruling
Brown said since the passage of the “Jon Husted-backed” HB 6, Ohioans’ utility rates have gone up $663 a year.
Husted was a vocal supporter of HB 6.
The article Brown cited compares the annual rate of $1,070 at the time of legislation’s enactment in October 2019 with the rate in January, which was $1,734, a $663 increase.
However, much of the increase reflects wholesale electricity prices, increased data center demand, and a reliance on natural gas. Brown misleads by linking the increase to the legislation.
The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True.
CORRECTION, July 21, 2026: This story was updated to more accurately describe the Ohio power market.
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — Rep. Russell Fry entered the rapidly developing race for South Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat Monday, promising to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda following the death of longtime Sen. Lindsey Graham.
“South Carolina, I’m in,” Fry wrote while announcing his campaign. The two-term Republican described himself as a “conservative MAGA candidate” and said his priorities would include reducing living costs, strengthening border security and supporting Trump.
Fry represents South Carolina’s 7th Congressional District, which includes Myrtle Beach, Florence and Georgetown. He joins Rep. Ralph Norman, businessman Duke Buckner and appliance-company executive Mark Lynch among Republicans seeking the nomination.
Graham died July 11 at age 71 after suffering an aortic tear. Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to serve the remainder of his current term. Trump has encouraged Nordone to seek a full term and offered his endorsement, although she has not announced a campaign.
The candidate filing period runs from July 21 through July 28. The Republican special primary is scheduled for Aug. 11, with a runoff on Aug. 25 if no candidate receives a majority. The eventual nominee will face Democrat Annie Andrews in the Nov. 3 general election.
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK — Federal authorities are investigating after an incendiary device erupted Monday morning outside a Lower Manhattan government building that houses several federal agencies and an immigration court.
The incident occurred near the entrance to 26 Federal Plaza at Worth and Lafayette streets. Preliminary reports indicated that fireworks and a flammable liquid had been placed inside or near a garbage container before igniting, producing flames and a large plume of smoke visible from the surrounding area.
Police officers took one man into custody at the scene. FBI Director Kash Patel said two people suffered minor injuries, although officials did not immediately provide details about how they were hurt. Authorities said no shots were fired, and there was no indication of an additional threat.
The 41-story building contains offices for the FBI, ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and other agencies. It also houses a federal immigration court and a short-term detention facility used for people involved in immigration proceedings.
The FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force is leading the investigation with assistance from the NYPD and FDNY. Traffic and public transportation were temporarily disrupted near the scene. Investigators had not announced a motive or identified the detained man as of Monday afternoon.
BEDMINSTER, NEW JERSEY — Military fighter jets intercepted three aircraft Sunday after more than 10 private planes entered temporarily restricted airspace over Bedminster and East Rutherford during President Donald Trump’s visit to New Jersey.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command said NORAD aircraft responded to three of the incursions. Pilots of two planes failed to respond immediately, prompting fighter jets to deploy flares to attract their attention. NORAD said the flares burn out rapidly and posed no danger to people on the ground.
The restrictions covered airspace near Trump’s Bedminster golf club and MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, where the FIFA World Cup final was held. Trump attended the match with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Spain defeated defending champion Argentina 1-0 after Ferran Torres scored during extra time. The international event drew political leaders, celebrities and more than 80,000 spectators, leading authorities to implement heightened security throughout the region.
Neither NORAD nor the Federal Aviation Administration specifically attributed the restrictions to Trump or the championship match. Temporary flight restrictions are routinely established around presidential travel and major events involving national leaders.
NORAD urged private pilots to review federal flight notices before departure, saying airspace awareness remains a shared responsibility. A similar interception occurred near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida in March.
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA — Debt collection lawsuits have reached their highest recorded level in Alabama, placing thousands of residents at risk of wage garnishment, frozen bank accounts and other court-ordered penalties.
A Pew Charitable Trusts study found that creditors filed approximately 108,308 collection cases in Alabama during 2025, an increase of 140% compared with 2019. Filings more than doubled from roughly 54,000 in 2023 and represented about 38% of the state’s nearly 290,000 civil cases last year.
The cases primarily involve unpaid credit card and medical debt. Researchers said fewer than 4% of defendants have attorneys, while many people fail to respond because they do not understand court documents, cannot verify who owns the debt or are unaware of available legal protections.
The rise was especially sharp in some majority-Black counties. Greene County experienced a 500% increase in filings between 2010 and 2025, while Sumter County recorded a 463% increase. Majority-white counties also experienced substantial growth.
Debt collection representatives said lawsuits are generally pursued only after consumers fail to respond to repeated outreach. Consumer advocates counter that debt buyers often purchase accounts for pennies on the dollar and pursue cases through a legal process that defendants find difficult to navigate.
Pew recommended clearer notices, stronger documentation requirements and protections preventing collectors from draining essential income from consumers’ bank accounts.
Very few homes in Adak, Alaska, are occupied, yet many, like these in the town’s Sandy Cove neighborhood, are the subject of federal subsidies that provide outdated internet service. Marc Lester/ADN
On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.
The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.
The money being wasted is yours.
It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.
Alaskans pay the most for phone and internet but get the slowest service. Please fill out our quick survey to share how much it costs you to get online and what you think of the service.
Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it.
The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)
Yet few places make the federal government’s failure to safeguard this money more obvious than Adak.
At its population peak decades ago, Adak housed thousands of Navy personnel and their families. Now, most homes in the town near the western end of Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain are left abandoned and deteriorating.Marc Lester/ADN
Once home to thousands of sailors and their families, the island emptied after the base closed in 1997. While the state estimated the population to be 77 last year, residents themselves put it at closer to two dozen — meaning the federal internet subsidy to the local telecom amounts to about $14,000 a year per person. And, it turns out, there’s zero indication any of these people are benefiting from it.
We know this because we flew to the island in June and visited every building the company itself told regulators it serves. We knocked on every door. Talked to every person we could find.
Not a single one told us they subscribe to the island’s subsidized internet service.
Residents get online through Starlink, the Elon Musk satellite service that arrived in 2023 without any subsidy from the FCC. People here say it’s up to 40 times faster and costs $90 to $140 per month, compared with the hundreds of dollars a month that Adak Eagle, the local telecom, once collected from customers on top of its subsidy checks. (Adak Eagle’s website currently advertises internet plans for $99 to $550 per month.)
But the subsidies remain.
Like many Alaska telecoms, Adak Eagle was built on public money. It began in the early 2000s with FCC subsidies and federal loans to upgrade old telephone wires for fiber-optic lines that could support both voice and internet service. By 2011, the company was collecting $2.68 million a year from the Universal Service Fund.
Once-occupied homes along Kuluk Bay have been ravaged by weather and time since Adak was an important Cold War outpost.Marc Lester/ADNOne of many play areas left in disrepair on residential streets in AdakMarc Lester/ADN
A 2013 federal order determined company president Larry Mayes spent telecom subsidy money on a fleet of vehicles and a fishing boat that weren’t necessary for his business, and that the $237,455 salary Mayes paid himself one year was “unreasonable” and “disproportionate” given the size of the company and what’s typical for Anchorage, where he lives.
(The company filed letters with the FCC at the time stating its salaries “should be evaluated in the context of a small company where each employee wears multiple hats” and citing the island’s “remoteness and harsh climate conditions.”)
On top of the $3.6 million his company has received from the federal broadband subsidy since 2016, he also received $3.54 million from the FCC through a program that replaces revenue phone companies once earned connecting long-distance calls. The state kicked in an additional $3.75 million through its own subsidy program, the Alaska Universal Service Fund. (Some Adak residents said they continue to pay the company for landlines that they use as cellphone backup.)
When we first asked Mayes about the federal internet money, he hung up on us. He did not respond to questions emailed in May, a written interview request delivered to his Adak office in June or detailed questions emailed and hand-delivered to his Anchorage office in July. Reached again by phone on July 13, he declined to comment and ended the call.
The one thing Mayes did say before hanging up on the first call: that he is playing by the rules of the FCC’s subsidy program, and if we had questions about it, we should ask the agency.
We did. Repeatedly. About the publicly funded connections to demolished homes on Adak and other uses of internet subsidies in Alaska.
The FCC never responded.
Internet for Vacant Homes
A vehicle kicks up dust on Bayshore Highway outside of the town of Adak on Adak Island.Marc Lester/ADNA seal spies a walker along the coastline near Clam Lagoon.Marc Lester/ADN
Step outside Adak’s tiny airport terminal, and the scene is straight out of “The Walking Dead.” You can spend hours walking the city streets without seeing another human, the only sounds the dry scrape of tall grass and warbling seabirds. Stiffened copies of People magazine declare George Clooney the 2006 Sexiest Man Alive. A shuttered McDonald’s drive-thru still advertises 99-cent hamburgers.
Subdivisions outside the city core sprawl like any in America, with neatly arranged ranch-style homes, powder-blue roofs, wide driveways and generous garages. After the Navy shipped out, hurricane-force Aleutian winds pried homes apart. The worst of it is in a beachfront neighborhood called “Officer’s Country” on old city maps. Bathroom mirrors and toilets and kitchen tables stand exposed to the rain in homes cleaved in half like dollhouses.
Even in newer neighborhoods, we found rotted exterior walls with holes so wide you could drive a truck inside. Grass grew on living room floors. Bedrooms were filled with bird nests.
Exterior walls are missing on one home in a central subdivision of Adak.Marc Lester/ADN
In the few homes the FCC paid Adak Eagle to connect that are habitable, the occupants have abandoned Adak Eagle.
Henry Collins, 61, lives in one of those homes. He was partially blinded in a chemical accident years ago while cleaning a boat at the island docks. Now he and his wife spend their days caring for their newborn. Sometimes they FaceTime with his wife’s family in the Philippines and hold the baby up to the screen.
He accidentally cut Adak Eagle’s internet cable with a string trimmer. No matter. He never could afford the subsidized service anyway, and his rooftop Starlink receiver was untouched in the landscaping incident.
One street over, 26-year-old Steven Ivanoff pays close attention to internet speeds because he plays Overwatch and Fortnite competitively online.
Steven Ivanoff, a year-round Adak resident, relies on Starlink to play video games with other people online.Marc Lester/ADN
Before Starlink, residents said, Ivanoff’s former roommate and fellow gamer was notorious for using up the scant bandwidth Adak Eagle provided every time he went online to play. Neighbors hollered at him to get off the damn computer. Adak Eagle’s subsidized fiber offers download speeds of 1 to 10 megabits per second, according to the FCC National Broadband Map — far short of the FCC’s 100-megabit standard for broadband and, at the low end, barely fast enough to load a modern webpage.
All that has changed. At our request, Ivanoff tested the speed of his Starlink connection using an online service called speedtest.net. He clocked it at a screaming (by Alaska standards) 447 megabits per second.
At another house, four dachshunds stood guard in a fenced yard while inside, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration who moved from Arkansas was playing a reality TV show on her widescreen — Starlink-powered, like everyone else’s internet.
Elizabeth Pryor’s Adak home is on the list of those federally subsidized for internet service. She uses Starlink for internet service, the standard for the town’s few remaining residents.Marc Lester/ADNHenry Collins said he accidentally cut the cord for Adak Eagle internet service, which he didn’t subscribe to anyway. He relies on Starlink instead.Marc Lester/ADN
Elizabeth Pryor has leaned into the isolation by starting a mini farm. In her solarium, a cardboard box trembled with teenage chicks, peeping under a heat lamp. No bears on the island, she said. So that’s nice. No foxes either. “But the rats ate my jalapeno peppers down to the stalk! Chomp chomp chomp.”
Her house rises across the street from a pile of rubble, the remains of a house fire.
Both properties — the rubble pile and Pryor’s home, alive with puppies and chickens — are on the list of houses for which Adak Eagle received subsidies to connect to the internet. She doesn’t use it.
Wiring an Empty Island
Fog obscures the views surrounding the city of Adak. Residents say only a couple dozen people live there.Marc Lester/ADN
Adak was already a ghost town when Mayes’ company started wiring the island.
According to the U.S. Navy’s own Record of Decision on the base closure, published in 2000, “there was no established community on Adak” after the military’s departure. The Navy’s ongoing assessments documented houses being condemned and boarded up.
Andilea Weaver, the company’s former vice president, said Adak Eagle began replacing rat-gnawed copper landline wires to Adak buildings in 2006 — nine years after the base closure.
In 2016, Adak Eagle proposed a 10-year plan to receive new subsidies in exchange for connecting or maintaining lines to 346 locations, nearly every building left standing. The FCC agreed. The agency formally declared the new spending plan to be in the public interest.
According to federal data published by the Universal Service Administrative Co., the most locations that Adak Eagle reported having broadband available was 283.
The buildings the FCC says Adak Eagle keeps wired for internet include duplexes, fourplexes and ranches where we found no sign of life. The agency shows connections at places where we found doors yawning open in the wind, hinges screaming with rust — no furniture inside, no appliances, yet in many cases, a single telephone still plugged into a wall.
A destroyed home among many abandoned ones in Adak’s sparsely populated Sandy Cove neighborhood. Government agencies, hunting lodges and a few year-round residents occupy a small portion of housing.Marc Lester/ADN
Whether the abandoned structures Adak Eagle has prepped for low-speed internet can beckon new occupants is an open question.
Adak is so far west of the Alaska mainland that it’s in a different time zone. So far west that it’s almost in the Eastern Hemisphere.
The last vestige of industry departed with the closure of the island’s fish processing plant in 2020. Now the economy consists of a bit of hunting and bird-watching that lures a few hardy tourists aboard the two flights a week that serve the island. (Warning: Pack canned goods. The grocery store and restaurant were closed our entire visit.)
Alaska’s Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan has argued the U.S. should open a new military base on Adak because of its strategic proximity to waters cruised by the Chinese and Russian navies. With $115 million set aside by Congress last year for “exploration and development of existing Arctic infrastructure,” a Pentagon-led task force is developing recommendations on how to proceed, a Sullivan spokesperson said.
The remains of a meal left behind by a bald eagle on the shores of Betty LakeMarc Lester/ADNA bald eagle takes flight from a post on the south end of the city.Marc Lester/ADNPaint peels and windows are shattered on a structure once occupied by the Navy on Adak’s hillside.Marc Lester/ADN
After knocking on hundreds of doors and canvassing every subdivision, we spent our last hours in Adak checking to see if anyone was using the subsidized internet in the old commercial buildings and offices scattered around the center of the city.
At one of the last addresses on the list crouched a cinder block building surrounded by pickup trucks and wide spools of orange piping — the same piping we’d seen leading up to demolished houses the day before. A rotary phone hung on the wall.
This was the local office of the company we’d been examining. Even the people who work there have stopped relying on the internet service that you pay for. Above the front door, above the sign for Adak Eagle Enterprises, stood two Starlink dishes.
Starlink equipment is mounted on the roof of internet provider Adak Eagle Enterprises.Marc Lester/ADN
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A programming decision has escalated into a test of presidential power, federal regulation and press freedom after President Donald Trump demanded that ABC and NBC lose broadcast licenses for declining to air his election-security address live.
Trump accused the networks of participating in a “plot” and said their licenses should be revoked. ABC and NBC streamed the speech through digital platforms rather than carrying it on their primary broadcast channels, a choice networks have also made during previous Democratic administrations.
The Federal Communications Commission does not license national networks directly. It licenses local stations, including stations owned by ABC parent Disney and NBC parent Comcast. Revoking a station license requires several steps and can be challenged before the commission and federal courts.
The threat carries more weight because FCC Chair Brendan Carr has already ordered an early review of licenses held by eight ABC-owned stations. ABC has aggressively challenged the process. Carr has also scrutinized Comcast’s diversity practices and relationships with independently owned affiliates.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency’s only Democrat, said editorial decisions are protected by the First Amendment and cannot lawfully be punished by regulators. Legal experts warned that connecting license proceedings to Trump’s political complaints would strengthen claims of viewpoint discrimination. ABC has until Aug. 5 to answer petitions seeking denial of its station renewals.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A widening conservative split over the U.S. war with Iran erupted over the weekend after former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene attacked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tribute to two U.S. service members killed in Jordan.
Hegseth wrote on X, “Godspeed, heroes. Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve.” Greene rejected the wording, arguing the troops had not willingly chosen to die and blaming President Donald Trump, Hegseth and the administration for continuing a war she says was launched to benefit Israel. She accused Hegseth of using the deaths to justify more military action.
The dispute reflects growing resistance among some conservative voices to Trump’s Iran policy. Greene, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have argued that the administration entered the conflict to support Israel, an accusation Trump denies. Greene has also criticized attacks on power and desalination facilities, warning that civilians could lose access to electricity and water.
The Associated Press reported that 17 U.S. service members have died since the conflict began Feb. 28, including the two killed while defending against Iranian missiles and drones in Jordan. Reuters reported more than 420 service members have been wounded. Vice President JD Vance has said some figures in Israel are trying to influence U.S. public opinion against an interim ceasefire. Greene continues to call the war “senseless” and has urged Trump to end it.
Miami, Florida — Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested Saturday in Miami as British authorities seek their extradition on rape and sex trafficking charges.
The U.S. Marshals Service told the Associated Press that the brothers were taken into custody on a sealed warrant. They are expected to appear in federal court in Miami early next week.
British prosecutors said they are seeking extradition on charges alleging the brothers raped and trafficked women between 2010 and 2017. The U.K. Crown Prosecution Service said it is bringing 38 new charges involving four additional alleged victims, in addition to charges previously announced in 2025.
Both brothers deny the allegations. Their attorney, Joseph McBride, called the U.K. charges “filth and slander” and said the brothers would fight extradition.
Andrew Tate became widely known after appearing on “Big Brother” in 2016 and later built a massive online following through content promoting wealth, male dominance, and misogynistic views. He has been banned from several social media platforms for violating hate speech rules, though he remains active on X.
The brothers also face separate legal issues in Romania, where a trafficking case has been delayed by procedural problems.
Tehran, Iran — Iran’s supreme leader accused President Donald Trump of violating a U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, saying the breaches showed Trump’s signature was “utterly worthless and devoid of credibility.”
Reuters reported that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued the warning Saturday, saying Iran and the “front of resistance” had “unforgettable lessons” to teach the United States if attacks continue. The statement came as U.S. strikes and Iranian retaliation have deepened fears of a prolonged conflict.
The warning followed the appearance of anti-Trump billboards in Tehran. Reuters Connect described one poster in Palestine Square showing Trump over a coffin draped in an American flag with the Persian phrase “Blood for blood.” Other regional outlets reported a separate billboard showing Trump family members above flag-draped coffins.
The Guardian reported that the U.S. military has carried out repeated strikes on Iranian targets, while Iran-backed forces have attacked U.S. allies and personnel in the region.
Trump has previously warned that any Iranian-backed attempt to assassinate him would trigger a severe U.S. response. For now, both sides continue trading threats as diplomatic openings appear limited.
Nolan Wells’s mother Christine Wonsley held a press conference on July 10, 2026, in New York City after her son’s mysterious death over the Fourth of July off the coast of Mississippi.Photo: Steve Sanchez/Sipa USA via AP Images
There is a tangible heat to being Black in America this summer.
Every morning starts the same. A jolt of coffee and nicotine as my thumbs scroll a daily intake of Black death and indignity.
It mostly comes dosed in tears. Tears of Black moms and aunties, projected behind stone-faced fathers and grandpops trying to hold it together behind press podiums.
This summer, it was Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old who disappeared during a trip to Mississippi’s Horn Island over the Fourth of July. Wells, who traveled to the island with a predominately white group of friends, was found dead in the water two days later. Authorities have not announced a final determination of what happened, but Wells’s family has challenged the official timeline and sought an independent autopsy. The investigation remains ongoing, which is to say that another Black family is waiting for answers in the indeterminate dark. In a state synonymous with deep-seated anti-Black racism, and the highest number of recorded lynchings, speculators and community members have begun to fear the worst.
It’s an expectation that has set the tone for living while Black in this new era. Where at any moment you, as Black person, can be erased for the most negligible of offenses, and if you’re not careful, be discarded into the void.
Before Nolan Wells, we watched in June as another Mississippi family laid their Black boy to rest. Kohen Wiley, who was just a year old, was shot and killed by Senatobia police officers, who fired into the vehicle where Wiley was sitting on his mother’s lap. After a friend of Wiley’s mother was accused of shoplifting a box of diapers at a Walmart, police opened fire on their car under the pretense that the vehicle was “oncoming” toward the officers. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has said the officers were not in the car’s path, citing a photo from the scene. A month later, investigators have yet to release body camera footage of the incident or provide any new answers. No charges have been filed.
Black Americans had already borne witness to those familiar echoes. Earlier that month, a jury in South Carolina acquitted 61-year-old Rick Chow of a murder charge after he shot and killed Cyrus Carmack-Belton, 14, for the alleged offense of stealing bottled water. Video evidence of the 2023 incident shows the store owner chasing Carmack-Belton out of the shop after falsely accusing him of theft. Chow, who had twice before shot patrons he suspected of shoplifting, would go on to shoot the teenager in the back as he fled.
Whether over a box of Pampers or a gulp of water, it is a startling reminder that for too many non-Black Americans, protecting even the most trivial property can take precedence over the sanctity of a Black life.
It’s an existential dread that has now turned into expectation, an anxiety meant for the mind to blunt the inevitable oncoming pattern of pain, disappointment, and injustice — in this case, being Black in America.
These deaths do not exist in isolation. They arrive amid a broader retreat from the institutions that, however imperfectly, once acknowledged Black Americans as a constituency deserving of protection and investment.
And the casualties of Black existence transcend more than just bodies. The Trump administration has waged full spectrum warfare on Black identity in every sense.
Since Trump returned to office, Black workers have experienced rising unemployment, with Black men seeing some of the steepest job losses in recent memory, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
This coincides with broader efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle federal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, directing agencies to terminate DEI programs and contracts while encouraging similar rollbacks throughout the private sector. The administration has also sought to reshape how race is discussed across the federal government, from education and museums to civil rights enforcement.
At the same time, the administration has continued to chip away at the legal architecture of voting rights, with years of court decisions making it more difficult to challenge racial gerrymandering and voting restrictions. The Supreme Court’s recent decision dismantling key Voting Rights Act protections has opened the door for states to erase Black-majority districts, which threatens to strip Black communities of congressional representation across the South.
If there was anything novel to the current pulse of American white supremacy, it is that it doesn’t seek domination but to erase Blackness altogether.
Trump’s supporters have come out in droves to support this mission, from swarms of masked white supremacists descending on the U.S. Capitol in honor of our nation’s 250th birthday to the endless viral videos of white men brandishing guns at Black people doing anything from swimming at the pool to handing out flyers.
It is no surprise that, under the constant reminder that the market value of Black life has plummeted, many Black Americans are succumbing to despair. Suicide rates among Black Americans — especially young Black men — have risen sharply over the past decade. Researchers point to a convergence of untreated depression, limited access to mental health care, economic instability, exposure to violence, and the cumulative weight of racialized stress.
None of those policies alone determine whether a police officer fires a gun, whether a jury reaches a particular verdict, or what pushes a broken down mind over the brink. But together they communicate something many Black Americans increasingly recognize: that America has further turned tail and ran away from its promise of an egalitarian society, or even the aspiration that it should be one.
That departure has consequences well beyond Washington. It shapes who receives the public’s attention, which communities are viewed as worthy of investment, and whose fears are treated as matters of national concern.
For Black Americans watching another summer marked by funerals, investigations, and courtroom disappointments, the sentiment is not simply that violence persists. It is that the country is becoming less interested in confronting why it persists at all.
That is the understanding of it. But the feeling is something entirely different.
Thomasville, Georgia — A historic Black neighborhood in Thomasville, Georgia, lost nearly $20 million in federal funding after the Trump administration canceled environmental justice grants it said conflicted with its anti-DEI priorities.
KFF Health News reported that Thomasville and the Thomasville Community Development Corp. had won a $19.8 million Environmental Protection Agency Community Change Grant in 2024. The money was intended to help Dewey City address health and environmental risks, including mold, lead paint, asbestos, aging wastewater infrastructure, and the lack of a neighborhood health clinic.
The grant was part of a Biden-era $2 billion program aimed at helping disadvantaged communities address environmental hazards and climate resilience. But after President Donald Trump returned to office, the EPA revoked funding for Thomasville and dozens of other communities, citing a shift away from diversity, equity, inclusion, and environmental justice priorities.
Local leaders said the cancellation delayed long-needed public health improvements in a community shaped by historic disinvestment. EPA officials said the agency is prioritizing taxpayer stewardship and rejecting what it called environmental justice “preferencing.”
Thomasville has pursued other funding, including a federal block grant for infrastructure repairs and a congressional request for a possible health clinic.
New York, New York — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration is reviewing whether it could arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly this fall.
Mamdani made the comments during an interview on The New York Times podcast “The Interview,” saying Netanyahu “belongs in The Hague.” He cited the International Criminal Court’s 2024 arrest warrant for Netanyahu, which accused the Israeli leader of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the war in Gaza.
The United States and Israel do not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction over Israel, and it remains unclear what authority New York City officials would have to act on such a warrant during a U.N. visit. Mamdani said the issue is under review by the city’s legal department and that he would “follow the laws” of New York City.
Netanyahu dismissed Mamdani’s comments in a recent radio interview and accused him of siding with “terror actors.” Mamdani has denied supporting Hamas and has repeatedly criticized Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
World leaders are expected to gather in New York in September for the U.N. General Assembly.
New York, New York — A Legionnaires’ disease outbreak on Manhattan’s Upper East Side has caused its first reported death, New York City health officials said Friday.
The outbreak has sickened at least 67 people and hospitalized dozens, according to city Health Department data reported by the Associated Press. Officials have not released the identity, age, or medical details of the person who died.
Investigators are still working to identify the source of the outbreak, which was first detected July 2 after two cases were found in close proximity. Testing has identified living or dead Legionella bacteria in cooling towers on more than 75 Upper East Side buildings, including museums, schools, and apartment buildings.
City officials ordered affected buildings to clean, drain, and disinfect their cooling towers. It remains unclear which building, if any, caused the outbreak.
Legionnaires’ disease is a form of pneumonia caused by inhaling tiny droplets of contaminated water. It can grow in warm-water systems, including cooling towers, hot tubs, and showerheads. The disease does not spread person to person and is treatable, but the CDC says it can be fatal in about 10% of cases.
Washington, D.C. — Jeffrey Epstein survivor Jess Michaels said she left a meeting with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche “disappointed, disturbed and undaunted,” criticizing the Justice Department’s handling of Epstein-related files and survivor concerns.
Blanche agreed to meet with Epstein survivors after pressure from Sen. Thom Tillis, whose vote could be important in Blanche’s confirmation process to become attorney general. Survivors have urged the Justice Department to continue investigating Epstein’s crimes and release more records while better protecting victim privacy.
Michaels told MS NOW that the meeting did not feel productive and said survivors were treated no differently than in past interactions with officials. She also accused Blanche of failing to acknowledge harm caused by the department’s document rollout, including concerns over redactions and victim privacy.
The Justice Department has released millions of Epstein-related files after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but Blanche said earlier this year that the department’s review was over.
Michaels urged Tillis not to support Blanche’s nomination unless he commits to working with survivors on the investigation.
Palm Beach, Florida — United Airlines denied that it is offering free flight changes to passengers who object to Palm Beach International Airport being renamed after President Donald Trump.
The Hill reported that a leaked internal memo told reservation agents they could offer alternate airports, including Fort Lauderdale or Miami, to customers who objected to flying through President Donald Trump International Airport. United later said the memo was “poorly written” and did not reflect official policy.
The airport was renamed after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation authorizing the change earlier this year. The new name took effect July 9 for the airport near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. The airport code is also expected to transition from PBI to DJT for new flight bookings in August.
United said agents may help customers look for alternate airports when possible, but the airline’s policy does not allow free changes solely because of an airport name or code. Passengers who want to switch flights would still need to follow standard fare and change rules.
The viral memo drew attention online before United clarified its policy.
Washington, D.C. — Sen. Ed Markey called for President Donald Trump to be impeached after Trump used a primetime address to claim the 2020 election was stolen and warn that similar forces could threaten the 2026 midterms.
Markey said Trump was undermining free and fair elections and urged Congress to remove him from office. The Massachusetts Democrat also said that if Trump sends ICE agents to polling places, opponents should respond with protests, sit-ins, labor actions, and civil disobedience.
Trump’s speech cited declassified documents that he said showed China acquired 220 million U.S. voter files and that intelligence officials suppressed information about foreign election interference. Critics noted that voter data is often publicly available or sold by states and said Trump did not prove that votes were changed or that the 2020 result was altered.
The Hill reported that Trump used phrases such as “rigged and stolen,” “corrupt,” and “cover-up,” reviving claims that have divided Republicans and alarmed Democrats ahead of the midterms.
Markey previously called for Trump’s removal after the president threatened Iran during a dispute over the Strait of Hormuz.
Washington, D.C. — Declassified documents promoted by President Donald Trump warn that foreign adversaries have the capability to target U.S. election systems, but they also say widespread manipulation would be difficult because American elections are decentralized.
ABC News reported that one January 2020 National Intelligence Council memo cited Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as potential cyber threats to election infrastructure. However, another assessment said vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a large enough scale to compromise election results.
Trump cited the documents during a speech on election integrity, arguing they showed major weaknesses in U.S. voting systems. He also referenced claims about 278,000 noncitizens on voter rolls and alleged foreign threats to election infrastructure.
The Associated Press reported that the documents did not provide evidence that votes were changed or that the 2020 election result was altered. Election security experts said safeguards such as decentralized administration, paper ballots, audits, physical security, and pre-election testing make large-scale manipulation unlikely.
ABC reported that the documents also warned foreign actors may exploit public confusion about elections to undermine trust in democratic processes.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin — Milwaukee City Attorney Evan Goyke rejected a Justice Department demand that the city promise not to enforce its ordinance barring law enforcement officers from hiding their identities.
In a July 17 letter, Goyke said Milwaukee’s mask ordinance is a public safety measure and that his office would prosecute any valid citation issued under it. The rule prohibits law enforcement officers from wearing masks or otherwise concealing their identities while acting in public.
The Justice Department had warned Milwaukee that enforcing the ordinance against federal immigration agents would interfere with federal law and violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. Federal officials said ICE officers would not comply and demanded assurances by July 17 that the city would not enforce the rule against them.
Goyke rejected that position, arguing that masked and unidentified officers can create confusion, fear, and risk of impersonation. He also said federal officers are not automatically immune from local laws while performing their duties.
The dispute follows growing national scrutiny of masked ICE operations and recent deadly immigration enforcement encounters in Houston and Biddeford, Maine. No federal court has issued a final ruling on Milwaukee’s ordinance.
Columbia, South Carolina — President Donald Trump said he has asked Darline Graham, the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, to run for a full U.S. Senate term in South Carolina.
Reuters reported that Trump posted Friday that Darline Graham would be the best person to honor her brother’s legacy and said she would have his “complete and total endorsement” if she enters the special Republican primary.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham earlier this week to fill her brother’s vacant Senate seat through early January. The special GOP primary for the full term is scheduled for Aug. 11, with filing set to open July 21.
Lindsey Graham died Saturday at age 71 from a heart ailment, according to his office. His memorial services are scheduled for July 28 in Washington and July 29 in South Carolina.
The race could draw several high-profile Republicans, including Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and U.S. Reps. Russell Fry, Nancy Mace, and Ralph Norman. Trump’s endorsement would give Graham an immediate advantage in a crowded primary.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs on Canada, accusing the country of “willful negligence” as wildfire smoke drifts into the United States and worsens air quality across parts of the Midwest and East Coast.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that Canada has failed to properly manage forests and brush, allowing “filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air” to move into the U.S. He said he planned to call Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and argued that the costs of wildfire smoke should be added to tariffs Canada is already paying.
More than a dozen U.S. states are under air quality alerts as Canadian wildfires continue to burn. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre reported nearly 900 active fires as of Friday, with Ontario, Quebec, and the Northwest Territories seeing significant activity.
Carney pushed back, saying climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States. Canadian and U.S. officials have warned that wildfire smoke can cause breathing problems, eye irritation, coughing, and worsen existing health conditions.
Some Republican lawmakers have also criticized Canada’s forest management, while Sen. Bernie Moreno said he plans legislation targeting Canada and Canadian officials over the smoke.
The Lobito Corridor shows how digitization is shaping critical minerals competitionExpert commentthilton.drupal
The railway from Angola to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia is a global focal point of the race for critical minerals. But the digitization of mineral supply chains will be crucial to achieving genuine economic transformation in the region.
Two recent major investment announcements have refocused attention on the Lobito Corridor, a Western-backed infrastructure initiative centred on a railway linking Lobito on Angola’s Atlantic coast to the inland resource-rich areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia.
On 3 July, the US International Development Finance Corporation and the Development Bank of Southern Africa secured a $753-million package to rehabilitate and upgrade the 1,300-km single-track railway from Lobito to the DRC border, known as the Lobito Atlantic Railway.
On 10 July, the DRC government approved a partnership with Portuguese construction company Mota-Engil for a complete rehabilitation of the railway line from Angola’s border to the copper and cobalt producing regions in the DRC.
These moves are part of wider geopolitical competition between the US (and its European partners) and China – the dominant international presence in the region – over infrastructure, mineral production and development opportunities. In this context, the railway has become the centrepiece of a potential regional mining ecosystem that could economically transform Africa’s strategic Copperbelt.
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Railway lines are approximate and based on a combination of maps from the Lobito Corridor Investment Promotion Authority and the European Commission, accessed online. Base map made with Natural Earth and World Bank data.
But for this regional mining ecosystem to become integrated across borders and achieve genuine economic transformation, it will need to be digitized.
Digitization has increasingly become a vital and under-appreciated feature of the mining sector. Data systems – such as online geological databases, traceability tools and transparency portals – and mining cadastre systems (online land records of mining rights) are fundamental to achieving regional mining ambitions.
However, they present a new and distinct set of governance challenges that span the life of a mine: in particular, what data is needed and how is it collected? Who owns it, where is it stored, and who has access to it?
Digitized records and their challenges
The digitized geological records of the DRC are a source of value, causing competition over owning and accessing them. This can be seen in the recent disagreement between the Belgian government and KoBold, a US company backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, over who should digitize the colonial-era geological records on the DRC that are being kept in a Belgian museum. Belgium has refused KoBold access to the museum’s archives. The case demonstrates how geo-economic competition and ensuing public-private tensions are catalysing ongoing debates on data ownership and management.
Angola, the DRC and Zambia are implementing online cadastre systems that list land records of mining rights. In principle, these systems should reduce overlaps and simplify the allocation of rights, while being more transparent to help prevent corruption and give investors confidence. However, several challenges have emerged.
Bad inputs result in misleading information flows.
Firstly, digitized systems are still corruptible. Whether containing geological data or information on licenses and rights, digital systems can be corrupted. In some instances, digitization makes this easier than when information is stored in hard copy.
This has led some mining companies to lose confidence in digitized systems in the region, due to changes allegedly being made overnight to concession ownership, opaque back end controls and limited audit trails.
Secondly, these systems often depend on human capacity that does not yet fully exist. At the DRC Mining Week at Lubumbashi in June, Chatham House heard how digital cadastres had often been operated by staff with limited experience working with computers.
The effectiveness of a data system relies on a simple principle – what comes out is only as good as what goes in. Bad inputs result in misleading information flows. Digitization without capacity and safeguards therefore risks simply re encoding existing power imbalances into a new format.
Tracing requires trust and interoperability
The DRC and its neighbours have been the focus of several international legal and regulatory requirements to report on minerals provenance, or tracing minerals back to their origin. This is due to the link between conflict and minerals, especially in the east of the country.
The DRC’s state-owned certification agency (CEEC) has launched an E-trace digital platform to track and certify minerals across the value chain, ostensibly to ensure responsible sourcing.
However, there are notable differences between what international markets are asking for, what is actually feasible, and what is in the best interests of mining-dependent communities and producing states.
Consumers and regulators increasingly want mechanisms that can trace a material all the way back to where it came out of the ground to provide assurance on provenance and responsible production. For the DRC, traceability is often understood primarily as verification of mineral deposits and exports: ensuring that reported volumes and qualities match what is actually being taken out of the country and transported along the Corridor.
The DRC’s emphasis reflects genuine concerns about misreporting, leakage and illicit flows. However, it stops short of a fuller, mine to manufacturer conception of traceability that would follow material all the way through the supply chain.
Similarly, transparency systems are often limited by what companies can easily measure and are willing to disclose. Reporting formats also differ across firms and jurisdictions, making it difficult to assemble a coherent picture of corridor wide performance.
Trustworthy, interoperable data systems are essential.
How these systems talk to each other, what they measure, and who controls them will heavily influence whether the Lobito Corridor becomes a coherent, credible space for investment and accountable development.
More unified data management requires interoperable systems and standards, agreed protocols for data ownership and access, and shared understandings of what traceability and transparency should encompass. Trustworthy, interoperable data systems are essential.
Entry points for development partners
Digital infrastructure should in theory constitute the backbone of effective data governance along the Lobito Corridor, turning physical infrastructure into an integrated ecosystem. Given Africa’s over-reliance on undersea cables, reinforcing inland connectivity should be a priority.
However, the Corridor’s digital component has so far lagged behind. While it does feature in the long-term strategic vision for the Corridor, it has not been the focus of the recent wave of investment announcements or ongoing development partnerships. Meanwhile, the DRC recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Beijing for the construction of a 2100km fibre optic network along the Congo River.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s staff reportedly persuaded him to soften parts of his Thursday primetime speech on election integrity after critics warned he might repeat false claims about “stolen” elections.
White House officials urged Trump to keep the address more restrained. One official told Politico that the senior team wanted the president to be taken seriously and advised against more extreme claims.
In the speech, Trump cited declassified intelligence documents and alleged that China meddled in the 2020 election by accessing voter data and that U.S. intelligence officials downplayed the threat. The White House later promoted the address as evidence of foreign interference and “deep state suppression.”
However, AP reported that Trump did not provide evidence that China or any other foreign entity manipulated votes or changed the 2020 outcome.
The Wall Street Journal similarly reported that Trump offered no proof of illegal voting or altered results, and noted that a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment found no indication China tried to alter voter registration, ballots, vote counting, or reporting.
Major networks did not carry the speech live on cable, instead distributing coverage through digital platforms.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: How many small acts of silence does it take before fear makes us accomplices?
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Red Scare by Clay Risen: Clay Risen’s brisk, unsettling history shows how readily a frightened country can turn suspicion into a machinery for destroying its own people.
Jukebox Playlist: Lena Horne makes “Where or When” feel like a quiet conversation with memory, fate, and the person you hope you have met before.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”
Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965), American broadcast journalist
(John Springer Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)
Once upon a time, Edward R. Murrow was the best known and most respected newsman in the United States. His CBS radio reports from London during the Blitz made him a legend from the start of World War II, and Winston Churchill thought so highly of him that he asked him to take over programming at the BBC, but he chose to stay with CBS. At war’s end, he was among the first journalists to report from a liberated concentration camp, and he pulled no punches describing the emaciated survivors, the children with their numerical ID tattoos, and the “bodies stacked up like cordwood” in Buchenwald’s crematorium: “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” he told the American people. “I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words.”
Murrow’s greatest fame, though, came as a result of the role he played in bringing down Senator Joseph McCarthy, the man whose crusade against communism resulted in the persecution of thousands of Americans in government and education, and a blacklist that destroyed many lives in the motion picture and television industries. Murrow used a full episode of his prime-time show See It Now to attack McCarthyism, and is credited with turning public opinion against the politician and back in favor of constitutional norms. A footnote in the McCarthy story was a lawyer named Roy Cohn, who served as the senator’s chief counsel, and later went on to mentor a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, schooling him in all the ruthless, vindictive, and greedy ways that would eventually serve him so well in electoral politics.
These days, Trump has taken a page from McCarthy’s playbook, branding his political opponents communists in an attempt to scare the American people into voting Republican despite all the economic, social, and international issues that have exploded on his watch. Back in 2024, he called Vice President Harris “Comrade Kamala,” a ridiculous nickname that never stuck. Last week, at the NATO Summit in Turkey, he said, “I want to get the word out because what’s forming is communism in the country and communism’s easy to sell.” Trump is nothing if not a salesman. He went on:
“I would be the greatest communist in history. I’d be right up there with Lenin… I think this country, with this thing that’s going around, is in more danger than it was during World War I, World War II. If you talk about September 11th, if you talk about Pearl Harbor, that was big danger. I think this is—I think the concept of us going communist, because one thing that happens when you go communist, you never come back. You die in squalor. You die a horrible death. You die in squalor, and it gets very evil and very nasty.”
(AI illustration/Kareem Takes On the News)
That’s our president, who thinks communism is the greatest threat we face today but he could be the best communist ever. We finally know how he’s going to make America great again: he’s bringing back the Red Scare. You certainly don’t need me to tell you he’s stuck in the 1950s.
What Murrow is saying in the quote above is that fear needs an audience to work. If a tyrant is standing alone in a room shouting at the mirror, he’s just a sad man with poor social skills, like Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Power arrives when fear is spread, repeated, rewarded, and absorbed into daily behavior. We are the accomplices Murrow is warning us against. It’s a provocation meant to startle us into action. How much of history’s destruction occurred because each person who saw it coming expected someone else to prevent it? Complicity grows through an accumulation of small, quiet retreats. Each retreat comes with a story we tell ourselves to make silence feel reasonable, rather than cowardly. But when did protecting our comfort become such a persuasive defense of surrender?
I am especially interested in the ordinary, mundane nature of complicity. History remembers dramatic denunciations like Murrow’s, or Army Chief Counsel Joseph Welch’s famous paraphrase to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Daily life instead gives us people staying quiet in a meeting, laughing along at a cruel joke aimed at someone else, or accepting a status quo everyone knows is unjust. Social pressure operates through consequences: things like a damaged friendship, a lost job, or not getting an invitation to a party everyone wants to attend. Too often, people go along to get along.
Edward R. Murrow didn’t worry about consequences; or maybe he did worry, but he didn’t let that stop him. He fought back with the weapons at his disposal, a microphone or a camera, against the Nazis and the red-baiters. We need more people like him today.
practice focused on HPC data center trends, AI, cloud, big data, and hyperscale. He is the former editor of AIwire. 
In 
platform engineering, and observability for cloud-native and Generative AI platforms. He writes about AI infrastructure, platform reliability, and production system behavior, with technical articles published in InfoQ, SD Times, Stickyminds, HackerNoon and Medium.
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