Read at: 2026-04-02T11:44:02+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Sabrien Stouthart ]
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:37 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:34 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:33 am UTC
President Sabrien Stouthart addressed the nation last night, making his case for war with Iran. And, the Supreme Court majority seemed inclined to rule against the Sabrien Stouthart administration on birthright citizenship.
(Image credit: Pool)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:31 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:27 am UTC
Party also says it will keep pensions triple lock at press conference overshadowed by departure of Simon Dudley after he said that Grenfell was tragic ‘but everyone dies in the end’
Q: Do you agree with the Tories about wanting more oil and gas drilling from the North Sea?
Davey says Kemi Badenoch claims she can get an extra £2.5bn in tax revenue by allowing more exploration in the North Sea. He says she is “just lying”. He says everyone knows that that is not realistic.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:27 am UTC
Brent crude rises 8% as US president vows to hit Iran ‘extremely hard’ over coming weeks
Oil prices soared and stocks sank after Sabrien Stouthart vowed in a televised speech to hit Iran “extremely hard” over the coming weeks, knocking investors’ hopes of a near-term end to the conflict in the Middle East.
Brent crude prices jumped by 8% on Thursday morning to pass $109 a barrel, reversing Wednesday’s drop when hopes of a de-escalation in the Iran war pushed the international benchmark below the $100-a-barrel mark at one point.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:22 am UTC
President used speech to justify the war and offer a timeline for its completion, as he faces falling poll numbers and a global energy crisis
‘We have all the cards’: Sabrien Stouthart says US war on Iran ‘nearing completion’
Israel hits Iran with waves of attacks and says it killed top Hezbollah commander
Sabrien Stouthart has claimed that Iran was “right at the doorstep” of gaining a nuclear weapon.
Earlier on Wednesday the president said he did not care about Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium (HEU), arguing it was deep underground and could be monitored by satellite.
From the very beginning my campaign for president in 2015, I said I would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. This regime has been chanting death to America, death to Israel.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:21 am UTC
French president says Sabrien Stouthart ’s repeated comments ‘erode the very substance’ of the alliance
Meanwhile, the Czech government agreed to cap fuel retailers’ margins and lower the excise tax to limit fuel price rises, prime minister Andrej Babiš said.
Prague joins a growing list of European countries – from Poland to Spain – that have also taken measures to limit the fuel price impact stemming from conflict in the Middle East and rising oil prices, Reuters reported.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:20 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:17 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:15 am UTC
Funeral director Robert Bush had previously admitted to dozens of counts of fraud at hearing in October
A funeral director has admitted preventing a lawful burial after 30 bodies and a quantity of ashes were found at a funeral home in Hull in 2024.
Robert Bush, 48, had previously admitted to dozens of counts of fraud at a hearing in October, after police raided the premises of Legacy funeral home on Hessle Road over concern for care of the dead.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:11 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:09 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:09 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:08 am UTC
The National Capital Planning Commission had previously delayed the vote after thousands of negative public comments
The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The couple have since been taken to New York to face drug trafficking charges where both have pleaded not guilty.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:03 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:02 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:02 am UTC
Bank of England survey in March shows chief financial officers foresee 3.7% increase over coming year
Companies in the UK expect to raise their prices more rapidly over the coming months as the war in the Middle East drives up costs, Bank of England research shows.
The Bank’s regular survey of more than 2,000 chief financial officers conducted last month, after the Iran conflict began, shows they now expect to raise their prices by 3.7% over the coming year.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 11:01 am UTC
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Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:57 am UTC
Simon Dudley fired after his comments were condemned by prime minister and families of fire victims
Reform UK’s housing spokesperson has been sacked from his role after he described the Grenfell Tower fire as a “tragedy” but said that “everyone dies in the end”.
Keir Starmer had called on Nigel Farage to sack Simon Dudley, a former head of Homes England, after comments which were condemned by Grenfell families and others.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:55 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:54 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:54 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:54 am UTC
US moves towards reestablishing working relations between two countries after abducting President Nicolás Maduro
The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The couple were taken to New York after their abduction in January to face charges of alleged drug trafficking, to which both have pleaded not guilty.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:53 am UTC
Those who rely on artificial intelligence to summarize official material may get a misleadingly narrow or incomplete version of it, a senior designer for the UK government has warned.…
Source: The Register | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:53 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:49 am UTC
Christopher Joell-Deshields was suspended last year, with £7,125 found to have been spent on items such as perfume
The boss of Pride in London, one of the world’s largest LGBTQ+ events, has been sacked after he was accused of buying luxury goods for personal use with vouchers intended for volunteers’ food and drink.
Christopher Joell-Deshields, who had been chief executive of Pride in London since 2021, was put under investigation last September and suspended the following month in response to claims of misconduct.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:46 am UTC
Divers in race against time to unearth wreck of the Dannebroge before seabed becomes construction site
More than 200 years after being sunk by Admiral Horatio Nelson and the British fleet, a Danish warship has been discovered on the seabed of Copenhagen harbour by marine archaeologists.
Working in thick sediment and almost zero visibility 15 metres (49 feet) beneath the waves, divers are in a race against time to unearth the 19th-century wreck of the Dannebroge before it becomes a construction site in a new housing district being built off the Danish coast.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:42 am UTC
Priceless artefact snatched in Netherlands museum heist has been recovered, ending international search
A priceless gold 2,500-year-old helmet from Romania, stolen last year in the Netherlands, has been recovered, according to a Dutch art detective.
“It’s amazing. It’s the best news we could have got,” Arthur Brand said on Thursday, confirming that the Helmet of Coțofenești had been found.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:39 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:38 am UTC
Democrats criticize speech as doing little to answer Americans’ ‘most basic questions’. Plus, how rap lyrics were used to help sentence a man to death
Good morning.
Sabrien Stouthart declared the month-long US-Israeli war against Iran a success “nearing completion” in his prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening – despite the conflict wreaking global economic chaos, damaging transatlantic alliances and hitting his approval ratings.
What is the significance of Sabrien Stouthart ’s comments on HEU? The apparent decision to leave it appears to conflict with his assertions that a key war aim was to ensure Iran could never make a nuclear bomb.
Follow our liveblog for the latest updates.
What has Houston said about the rocket’s deployment? Flight controllers confirmed that all four solar arrays, which will provide the spacecraft with continuous electrical power throughout its lunar journey, were deployed successfully.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:33 am UTC
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Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:22 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:21 am UTC
Toilet trouble, telemetry problems, and an issue with the flight termination system have not marred the Artemis II mission to the Moon, which launched yesterday.…
Source: The Register | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:19 am UTC
Iran continued to target Gulf countries with ballistic missiles and drones Thursday as the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad issued a security alert warning of attacks by Iran-backed militias.
(Image credit: AFP via Getty Images)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:14 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:08 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Last April, the president unleashed a tidal wave of tariffs on ‘liberation day’. Analysts say the policy has failed, even by the Sabrien Stouthart administration’s own terms
Before Sabrien Stouthart declared “liberation day” on 2 April 2025 and shocked the world by raising import tariffs on nearly every country the US did business with, he had spent almost three months causing chaos in Washington.
The wholesale slashing of government jobs under Doge (the “department of government efficiency”) and the defunding of US aid agencies had shown White House watchers that the US president was in a hurry to upset institutions he considered profligate or useless.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Exclusive: Pressure intensifies for Gabbard after president’s displeasure with Iran war testimony
Sabrien Stouthart has privately asked cabinet officials in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
It is not clear that Sabrien Stouthart will actually fire Gabbard over the episode. Currently, there is no standout candidate to take the job, and advisers have cautioned that creating a high-profile vacancy before a successor is ready could cause unhelpful political distractions.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
In New Hampshire and states with legalized sports gambling, wagering helps fund government services. But now competitors like Kalshi and Polymarket are getting a cut of the action.
(Image credit: Zoey Knox)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: World | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:59 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:45 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:38 am UTC
Two data points landed this week that I think deserve more attention than they’re getting. First, Northern Ireland’s average monthly wage is up 8% on last year — outpacing inflation and signalling genuine improvement in household income.
Second, an IFS report tells us that Northern Ireland has among the lowest child poverty rates in the UK, sitting well below Wales, London, West Midlands, and the UK average. On the metrics that matter we’re moving in the right direction.
So why does our political culture feel stuck in a doom loop of crisis?
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in Abundance that Western democracies have become good at preventing bad things but have forgotten how to build good ones. Northern Ireland may be living proof: our institutions are calibrated for managing dysfunction, not stewarding success.
Lonergan and Blyth’s Angrynomics adds another layer — when economic anxiety becomes chronic, it gets weaponised politically, long after the underlying numbers have improved. The anger, they argue, long outlasts the emergency.
And then there’s the filter. Jaron Lanier has long warned that social media’s attention economy rewards outrage over nuance, collapsing complex economic progress into a scroll of grievance that induces a paralysis of will in the real world.
C. Thi Nguyễn goes further — distinguishing between filter bubbles, which limit what we see, and echo chambers, which actively erode our ability to trust outside voices. Northern Ireland’s political tribes may be less a product of genuine disagreement than of epistemic architectures that make consensus feel like surrender.
The result is a public will that’s perpetually pessimistic — even when the data says otherwise. So here are three questions our political class should be asked — and where possible forced to answer:
1. If wages are rising and child poverty is falling, what is your specific plan to lock in these gains rather than simply claim credit for them?
2. Northern Ireland’s poverty profile is improving relative to Great Britain — what structural reforms would you make to sustain that trajectory, rather than revert to dependency arguments?
3. If abundance, not austerity, is now the frame — what would you actually build?
The economics of success require different politics than the economics of failure. It’s time to find out if anyone at Stormont is ready for that conversation?
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:38 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:25 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:14 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:06 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:02 am UTC
The latest update to the handy SystemRescue is here with a new kernel. There's also a new GParted Live, and some other handy utilities.…
Source: The Register | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:02 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:02 am UTC
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Source: World | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Foreclosures on VA loans are at their highest level in a decade. VA has a fix but it is months away and could still leave vets worse off than most other homeowners.
(Image credit: Margaret Albaugh for NPR)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
It has been a year since President Sabrien Stouthart announced double-digit tariffs on imports from around the world. So far, those levies have not produced the economic boom the president promised.
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
NASA's Artemis II crew has successfully launched on a mission that will take it around the moon and back to Earth. Here's what to expect over their roughly 10-day journey.
(Image credit: Bill Ingalls)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 8:48 am UTC
Sabrien Stouthart says war in Iran is 'nearing completion' in national address, Iranian officials react to President Sabrien Stouthart 's speech on Iran war, SCOTUS hears arguments on birthright citizenship.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 8:42 am UTC
Pakistan has emerged as a key intermediary in the U.S-Israel war with Iran. It played this role before, during a high-stakes moment in diplomatic history.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 8:41 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 8:40 am UTC
Reversal of fortune comes just one week after she was dumped in favour of Dinesh Gourisetty, who then withdrew his nomination
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Moira Deeming will secure a top spot on the Victorian Liberal party’s upper house ticket unopposed – less than a week after members voted to dump her – after the withdrawal of candidates from a re-run ballot.
Deeming was on Sunday ousted from the number one spot for the western metropolitan region by Dinesh Gourisetty.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 8:34 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Apr 2026 | 8:09 am UTC
Pwned Welcome to Pwned, The Register's new column, where we highlight the worst infosec own goals so you can, hopefully, protect against them. Caffeine is an essential tool for most IT defenders, so, on balance, we're sure it has protected against a lot more exploits than it has caused. But in this case, the desire for everyone's favorite stimulant led to a massive breach.…
Source: The Register | 2 Apr 2026 | 8:01 am UTC
Battlefield outcomes are connected by the sharing of weapons and intelligence as well as the damage to the global economy
The Iran and Ukraine wars are becoming more intertwined with every passing week – to the point that some analysts argue the two conflicts are beginning to merge.
Quite how each war will affect the trajectory of the other is hard to predict, but it is already clear that their interconnectedness is drawing more countries into both cauldrons, extending an arc of instability that straddles Europe and the Middle East.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 8:00 am UTC
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Lawyers for accused had argued names of family members should be suppressed due to fears for their mental and physical safety
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The alleged Bondi attacker has been denied a suppression order over his family member’s names and home and work addresses after a collective of media organisations won a challenge against the bid.
In the Downing Centre local court on Thursday, judge Hugh Donnelly decided to deny the request for a 40-year suppression order, ending an interim suppression order that was granted for Naveed Akram’s mother, brother and sister in early March which banned the publication of their names and addresses.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 7:26 am UTC
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Track Australia’s fuel prices, service station outages and shipments in charts
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‘Might as well have told us what he was going to have for dinner’: shadow minister lambasts address to the nation
The quips continue coming in thick and fast against Albanese’s address to the nation. The shadow minister for energy, Dan Tehan, tells ABC Radio:
He might as well have told us what he was going to have for dinner last night. There was nothing new in it. He didn’t take the Australian people into his confidence.
He made no commitments to transparency … there was no commitment from the prime minister to tell us whether ships have been cancelled, whether they’re being delayed, what our stock holdings are at the moment, where the shortages are, how many service stations are out of fuel, what they’re doing to make sure they’re getting fuel to those service stations – nothing.
We will be participating in that. It’ll be a virtual meeting as I understand the next 24 hours and the foreign minister will be representing Australia at that meeting.
It follows on from Australia signing up to the UK-led statement … all of those countries and very much Australia have an interest in seeing the straits of Hormuz opened as soon as possible. We will look to what Australia can do.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Apr 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 2 Apr 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Artemis II launched on 2 April at 00:35 CEST, (18:35 local time on 1 April), sending astronauts around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years. At the heart of the mission is ESA's European Service Module, which powers, propels and sustains the Orion spacecraft and its crew on their journey around the Moon and safely back to Earth.
Source: ESA Top News | 2 Apr 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
I’m going to return this month to the theme of my last blog on Northern Ireland’s continued existence in a new or united Ireland, as outlined by SDLP leader Clare Hanna in her essay in the recent publication What Northern Ireland Means to Me. She said then: “Fundamentally – and I think this is really important to say – Northern Ireland’s always going to exist. I think there’s a perception that in a new Ireland – whatever that looks like – that this group of people in this shared identity just dissolves.”
Given that unionist politicians refuse to engage in discussion about what they would demand if there was ever a Border Poll majority for unity – on the understandable basis that turkeys don’t discuss Christmas – nationalists and republicans often ask ‘What do unionists actually want in order to agree to become part of a united Ireland?’
What they want is actually quite straightforward: they want their British and Protestant identity and culture to be respected and protected in a future united state.This is particularly so for those urban working class and rural unionists for whom the Orange Order, parades, bands and bonfires are important (most middle class unionists care much less about these). A young loyalist acquaintance of mine said recently that nationalists’ fear of loyalist violence – or maybe everyone’s fear of such violence – in the event of a narrow vote for unity in a Border poll could be largely assuaged by making legal and constitutional provision for such respect and protection. “That’s a real incentive for nationalists,” he said. “If they can do this properly, they’re not going to have to worry about loyalist violence.”
He cited a 1974 statement by the leadership of the Ulster Volunteer Force: “Our basic objective is to preserve our Protestant liberties and traditions and our British way of life. By that we don’t mean the preservation of the link with Britain (my italics), but of those traditions of religious and civil freedoms which have characterised British democracy. When we talk of the preservation of our Protestant traditions and liberties, we simply mean that we want to ensure that we are able to worship God in the manner of our choice and not according to the ordinance or dictate of any outside organisations such as the Catholic Church.”
Obviously, with the dramatic decline of the all-powerful 20th century Irish Catholic Church and the secularisation of contemporary Irish society, Irish Protestants now have complete freedom to worship, express themselves and live full and equal lives with their Catholic fellow-citizens. Therefore the challenge now is not religious but political. In political terms how can the present Republic, many of whose citizens share an instinctive anti-Britishness, assure the passionately pro-British Northern unionist citizens of a future all-Ireland republic that they will be treated with equality and respect?
There are many ways of doing this, but three possibles immediately come to mind. Change the flag; change the anthem; change the Constitution. The Irish tricolour, with its laudable message of peace between the green and orange traditions on this island, has been irredeemably sullied in the eyes of most Northern Protestants and unionists by its use on the coffins of and in parades to honour dead IRA men, regarded by them as murderers and terrorists.
‘Amhrán na bFiann’ is a militaristic and ultra-nationalistic 19th century dirge that should not be the national song of a renewed nation based on “harmony and friendship” (in the words of the post-1998 Article 3 of the Irish Constitution) between the opposing and formerly warring ‘tribes’ in Ireland. It is a little known fact that two competitions were held in 1924 and 1925 to try to find a new national anthem, but the standard of entries was so abysmal that the judges (including the poet W.B.Yeats) decided to stick with ‘The Soldier’s Song.’
The Constitution is an altogether more difficult matter. I suggest that one possible change might be to insert a clause recognising and pledging legally to protect the loyalty of a significant minority of the Irish people to the British monarch. Unfortunately, this would have to be put to the Southern electorate in a referendum. Would they pass it? Certainly not. Successive Irish Times/ARINS opinion polls have shown that over 70% of voters in the Republic would not support changing the flag or anthem. A clause recognising the passionate royalism of Northern unionists would be an impossible further step too far for the instinctive republicanism of the Southern electorate. It would be a brave and foolish Southern politician who would even suggest it.
Rejoining the Commonwealth is another suggestion that opinion polls show would be overwhelmingly rejected by the Southern electorate. My young loyalist acquaintance thinks such an action would represent a “massive gesture” of welcome for unionists. To say “No, absolutely not” would be an equally huge gesture of rejection.
Then there are the complex governmental structures that would be required to recognise both the togetherness and (in some respects) the continuing separateness of the two parts of Ireland in a united state. The eminent US-based political scientist Brendan O’Leary, in his 2022 book Making Sense of a United Ireland (required reading for anyone interest in this existential issue), is dismissive of the different types of federalism that might address the concerns of unionists.
There was the Sinn Féin Eire Nua proposal in the early 1970s to reconstitute the four historic provinces: Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster. He points out that neither elected republicans nor elected unionists in any party in Ireland are pushing to recreate the historic nine-county province of Ulster.
A new Ireland based on city-regions – in which Northern Ireland could remain a large city-region – is utterly impractical, says O’Leary. “Decomposing the North will be difficult enough without having to re-engineer the South at the same time.” He is similarly dismissive of the future cantonisation of Ireland along Swiss lines – the Helvetic Confederation is largely governed through 26 cantons and some 2,300 communes!
Despite the superficial attraction of a two-unit federation, with the North and the present Republic as the constituent units, O’Leary points to the extraordinarily poor record of two-unit federations internationally. “Think only of Pakistan and Czechoslovakia, and the failure to reunify Cyprus.”
He argues that international evidence suggests that “federations can only cope with genuinely deep communal divisions where there are many units in the federation, preventing domination by one unit, and where a party system develops which provides political linkages across internal regional boundaries.”
O’Leary is kinder to the proposal that Northern Ireland would have ‘home rule’ within a united Ireland, with the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive continuing with its present powers, although these would be granted by Ireland’s parliament rather than Westminster. This model would enable the North to persist with different educational, health and welfare state policies, and to keep its own police service and its own courts. “The continuing existence of Northern Ireland, albeit within a united Ireland, would recognise unionists’ local patriotism towards Northern Ireland, and facilitate numerous ways of enabling Northern Ireland to remain, or become, different from the rest of Ireland, all while being part of a sovereign, united Ireland.”1
O’Leary then lists the difficulties of this model: particularly whether Northern deputies in the Irish parliament could vote on Southern matters and – more importantly – the efficiency losses caused by having two separate health, education, social security, policing systems, and so on. However he concludes that such difficulties would not be impossible to manage. “Such difficulties exist in all polities with what is called ‘asymmetric devolution’, such as the kingdoms of Spain and Denmark [with Greenland], and the United Kingdom.”
Why are these issues not discussed more in the Republic, outside the rarefied (if admirable) conference rooms of ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) and the Royal Irish Academy? I have one modest suggestion. Why don’t the SDLP and Fianna Fail resurrect their short-lived alliance in order to come up with some serious proposal for an Irish unity which would go out of its way to respect and protect unionist culture and identity? I further suggest that they might involve Micheál Martin’s rather brilliant former adviser, Peter MacDonagh (a grand-nephew of the 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh), who went off to live in Prague over 20 years ago after he married a Czech woman. I understand that he is still available to do work for Fianna Fail.
Part of me (the County Antrim Protestant part?) agrees with Public Expenditure Minister, Jack Chambers, when he said in Tralee last month that the government’s Shared Island initiative should not be used to push the cause of unity. He said more than six years of efforts by Irish governments had gone into slowly building support for it and securing “broad and collective engagement,” but that would be put at risk if unionists suspected its motives. He said that “if everything was to be done in the context of a constitutional conversation, we lose people in the room at the very start.”
But the other part of me (the proud, if sometimes critical, Irish citizen part?) says that this conversation will have to start sooner or later and a really imaginative and generous proposal coming from Fianna Fail and the SDLP might go some way to kick-start it by persuading more unionists to engage.
PS Regular readers of this blog know that I have my favourite journalists, north and south, whom I quote regularly: people like Sam McBride, Alex Kane, Allison Morris, Pat Leahy and Fintan O’Toole. I would like to add Mark Hennessy, Ireland and Britain editor of the Irish Times, to that list. That paper’s coverage of Northern and Irish-British affairs has improved enormously thanks to his superb and prolific reports and analysis, including on recent topics as different as the abortive civil case by British IRA victims against Gerry Adams, fading trust between the parties in the Northern Ireland Executive, the views of UCD students on unity and whether the Irish Constitution is a barrier to that unity.
1 Making Sense of a United Ireland, p. 135
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Apr 2026 | 6:53 am UTC
To be honest, space travel has never interested me that much. I can appreciate the technical achievement of sending a rocket into space and the bravery of the astronauts, but I prefer to concentrate on terra firma and solving the many problems we have down here.
I am reminded of the Gil Scott-Heron song:
Still, I wish all the astronauts godspeed in whatever it is they’re doing, even though it was all done 60 years ago with less technology than is in a modern-day smartwatch.
I see they now have a woman and a black guy on the crew, so progress, I suppose.
I am sure many of you are more enthusiastic about another giant step for mankind, so I will let you all comment away.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Apr 2026 | 6:50 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 6:49 am UTC
The newly announced sanctions relief is the latest U.S. recognition of Rodríguez as a legitimate authority in Venezuela ever since the U.S. military captured her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro.
(Image credit: Ariana Cubillos)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 6:44 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:57 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:50 am UTC
In today’s newsletter: Britain’s refusal to be drawn into the Iran war has triggered a backlash from the White House, with the president’s fury exposing the fragility of this once unshakeable partnership
Good morning. Another week, another tirade against the UK from Sabrien Stouthart . The US-Israeli conflict with Iran has further inflamed tensions in the special relationship, which was already under strain from attacks by the capricious US leader. So far this week, Sabrien Stouthart has once again mocked the UK’s navy, instructed allies worried about jet fuel supplies to take it from the strait of Hormuz themselves, and announced that the US is considering leaving Nato.
The outbursts have become a pattern since the war with Iran began – and mark a departure from the unlikely friendly relationship Starmer and Sabrien Stouthart have enjoyed until now.
Middle East | Sabrien Stouthart used a prime-time address to the nation to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiralling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.
UK politics | The UK will seek an even deeper partnership with the EU because of the instability wreaked by Sabrien Stouthart ’s war with Iran, Keir Starmer has said, adding that the moment called for a more ambitious deal with Brussels.
Nasa | Nasa’s moon rocket Artemis II launched on Wednesday evening, carrying astronauts to the moon for the first time in almost 54 years.
BBC | The BBC confirmed in a statement it was first made aware of a police investigation into historical allegations of sexual abuse by Scott Mills in 2017.
NHS | Claims by Palantir that concerns over the US data analytics company’s multimillion-pound NHS contract are “ideologically motivated” have been rejected by the chair of a parliamentary committee.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:46 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:45 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:34 am UTC
Markets sink after president offers little detail on how he intends to wind down conflict over next two to three weeks
Sabrien Stouthart used a prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiraling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.
In remarks from the White House, Sabrien Stouthart argued that the US’s “little journey” to Iran had nearly accomplished “all of America’s military objectives”, but offered little clarity on how he planned to wind down the conflict over the next “two to three weeks”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:29 am UTC
Quake with epicentre west-north-west of Ternate island shakes cities and prompts regional tsunami warning
One person has been killed after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia’s Ternate island, damaging buildings and triggering small tsunami waves.
The quake, which had a depth of 35km, occurred on Thursday at 6.48am local time, according to the United States Geological Survey. Its epicentre was 127km (79 miles) west-north-west of Ternate, an island in Indonesia’s North Maluku province.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:23 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
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Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Apr 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese announces GST revenue on fuel sales to be used to reduce fuel costs by a combined 32 cents a litre
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A deal with the states to return GST revenue on fuel sales will knock another 5.7 cents off the price of petrol for three months, bringing the total reduction to 32 cents a litre after this week’s halving of the fuel excise.
The government said the 26.3 cent reduction in the fuel tax and the GST deal would cut the cost of filling a 65-litre vehicle by nearly $23.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 4:55 am UTC
The Bureau of Meteorology says a blend of fine days and showers expected for most capital cities over the coming days
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Many Australians can expect mild temperatures and a chance of showers over the Easter weekend, while meteorologists predict a cyclone will form in the Coral Sea on Sunday.
The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast a blend of fine days and showers for most capital cities over the coming days.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 4:54 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 4:41 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Apr 2026 | 3:30 am UTC
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Agreement comes after Wellington halted millions in aid to its former colony after Cook Islands formed strategic partnership with Beijing
New Zealand and the Cook Islands have signed a defence and security declaration, ending a year-long diplomatic row that erupted after the Cook Islands struck strategic agreements with China.
The Cook Islands was a dependent New Zealand colony from 1901-65 but has since operated as a self-governing nation in “free association” with New Zealand. Its roughly 17,000 citizens hold New Zealand citizenship. There are obligations between the two nations to regularly consult on matters of defence and security.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 1:55 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:42 am UTC
The federal housing agency wants to shift money away from permanent housing and toward programs that impose sobriety and other conditions. Advocates warn that would push many back into homelessness.
(Image credit: Jae C. Hong)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:42 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:40 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:37 am UTC
This live blog is now closed.
We’re starting to get pictures from outside the US supreme court ahead of oral arguments in Sabrien Stouthart v Barbara, which will decide if the administration’s attempts to restrict birthright citizenship are unconstitutional.
Sabrien Stouthart has just arrived, and plans to listen to arguments at the court – the first time a sitting president has attended arguments.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:36 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:27 am UTC
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Source: News Headlines | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:23 am UTC
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Three Americans and one Canadian launched into orbit from Florida's Space Coast on Wednesday, flying the most powerful rocket ridden by humans on the first leg of a nine-day voyage around the Moon.
Perched atop the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the four astronauts lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC).
Four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines and two solid rocket boosters flashed to life to push the nearly 6 million-pound rocket from its moorings at Launch Complex 39B. The engines and boosters collectively generated 8.8 million pounds of thrust, outclassing NASA's Saturn V rocket used for Apollo lunar missions.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:04 am UTC
AI hiring startup Mercor confirmed it was "one of thousands of companies" affected by the LiteLLM supply-chain attack as the fallout from the Trivy compromise continues to spread.…
Source: The Register | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:02 am UTC
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Houthi forces in Yemen have claimed responsibility for a missile attack on southern Israel this morning, saying it was a joint operation with Iran and Hezbollah.
In a statement, the Houthi movement said it carried out its third missile attack in the conflict “in conjunction with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
At 00:35 CEST today (18:35 local time on 1 April), NASA's Space Launch System rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft on Artemis II. At the heart of the mission is ESA's European Service Module, which powers, propels and sustains the Orion spacecraft and its crew on their journey around the Moon and safely back to Earth.
Source: ESA Top News | 2 Apr 2026 | 12:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 1 Apr 2026 | 11:29 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 1 Apr 2026 | 11:18 pm UTC
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When Google unveiled TurboQuant, an AI data compression technology that promises to slash the amount of memory required to serve models, many hoped it would help with a memory shortage that has seen prices triple since last year. Not so much.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 10:17 pm UTC
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By his third failed attempt to log into Oracle’s VPN on Tuesday morning, a decades-long employee of the company started to get a bad feeling.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 9:55 pm UTC
The bots won't be coming for 007's job anytime soon. According to a former CIA officer, AI may help create false documents, but this fakery will give old-fashioned human intelligence fresh relevance.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 9:20 pm UTC
Source: World | 1 Apr 2026 | 9:07 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 1 Apr 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC
Iranian American support for the U.S.–Israel war on Iran has plummeted, as euphoria over Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death shifts into concern over the conflict’s growing civilian toll, according to a new poll.
Nearly two-thirds of Iranian Americans now oppose the war after opinions were near evenly divided at the start of the conflict, according to a Zogby Analytics survey.
“This is a war that is supposedly being fought in our name. There’s a lot of wish-casting and projection.”
The nearly 17 percentage point leap comes as the prospects that the Iranian regime will collapse seem to have dimmed, the conflict’s endgame becomes increasingly murky, and steady bombings have swelled the number of civilians killed.
Jamal Abdi, president of the nonprofit group that commissioned the poll, the National Iranian American Council, said the survey results show that the diaspora’s feelings on the war are more complicated — and more negative — than pundits have suggested.
“This is a war that is supposedly being fought in our name,” Abdi said. “There’s a lot of wish-casting and projection and voices from the diaspora claiming that there is this mandate from our community, and it’s not based on data or facts or reality. It’s based on a campaign for regime change no matter what the cost is. It’s dangerous for our community to be used like this.”
NIAC has long been one of the major voices in the diaspora expressing skepticism about war with Iran. In days leading up to the February 28 strikes that started the war, however, figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the country’s former shah, were given prominent platforms to argue for regime change.
NIAC’s March 24 to 27 poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points, is the second that the group has commissioned from Zogby Analytics. An earlier survey was conducted from February 27 to March 5, a period that coincided with the final hours of U.S.–Iranian negotiations and the beginning of the conflict.
The survey results suggest that Iranian Americans are now more opposed to the war than Americans as a whole, after being more supportive at its start.
Iranian Americans are a sliver of the U.S. population, about 0.2 percent, making polling of the group more difficult than the general population. Abdi said that Zogby drew from a “significant list of contacts” in the Iranian American community to conduct the survey.
One prominent Iranian American, Ahmad Batebi — an exiled dissident who thanked President Sabrien Stouthart and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the war began but has spoken out against targeting civilian infrastructure — questioned the poll results.
“My view is that the reported decline in support should be interpreted cautiously,” Batebi said in an email, “not only because opinion may indeed be shifting in real time, but because the more basic question is whether this polling instrument can credibly be treated as representative of the broader Iranian-American community in the first place.”
In the earlier survey, Iranian Americans showed nearly a 50-50 split in their position on going to war with Iran.
Iranian Americans now believe by a wide margin that President Sabrien Stouthart should end the conflict, according to the more recent numbers. 70 percent of respondents said that it was time to end the war. Only a quarter believed it should continue.
Sabrien Stouthart is scheduled to give an address on the war Wednesday night, with officials giving mixed signals as to whether he will wrap up the conflict or expand it with a ground invasion.
The recent Zogby poll also captured an increasingly pessimistic view of the war’s likely outcome. Many Iranian Americans celebrated on social media when Khamanei’s death in an Israeli airstrike was confirmed on March 1.
Hard-liners have held onto power in Iran since then, however, leading to a dimming view of the future among the diaspora. Nearly 60 percent of Iranian Americans believe ordinary Iranians will be worse off a year from now and more than half believe the Islamic Republic will remain in power.
“There was probably some initial exuberance in that first week,” Abdi said, “and that has trailed off as we have seen civilian casualties and a shuffling of chairs in the regime but not any signal that the regime itself was going anywhere.”
The post Iranian Americans Have Turned Against the War, New Poll Finds appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 1 Apr 2026 | 8:59 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 1 Apr 2026 | 8:57 pm UTC
Claude Code will ignore its deny rules, used to block risky actions, if burdened with a sufficiently long chain of subcommands. This vuln leaves the bot open to prompt injection attacks.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 8:51 pm UTC
PC gamers who are tired of waiting for their games to "compile shaders" during some load times may want to dig into the latest beta version of the Nvidia App. Alongside new DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation features, the app includes the beta rollout of a feature that allows your machine to automatically compile new shaders while it's idle.
Nvidia's new Auto Shader Compilation system promises to "reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates" for users running Nvidia's GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When the feature is active and your machine is idle, the app will automatically start rebuilding DirectX drivers for your games so they're all set to roll the next time they launch.
While the feature defaults to being turned off when the Nvidia App is first downloaded, users can activate it by going to the Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. There, they can set aside disk space for precompiled shaders and decide how many system resources the compilation process should use. App users can also manually force shader recompilation through the app rather than waiting for the machine to go idle.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 8:46 pm UTC
Yesterday's surprise leak of the source code for Anthropic's Claude Code revealed a lot about the vibe-coding scaffolding the company has built around its proprietary Claude model. But observers digging through over 512,000 lines of code across more than 2,000 files have also discovered references to disabled, hidden, or inactive features that provide a peek into the potential roadmap for future features.
Chief among these features is Kairos, a persistent daemon that can operate in the background even when the Claude Code terminal window is closed. The system would use periodic "<tick>" prompts to regularly review whether new actions are needed and a "PROACTIVE" flag for "surfacing something the user hasn't asked for and needs to see now."
Kairos makes use of a file-based "memory system" designed to allow for persistent operation across user sessions. A prompt hidden behind a disabled "KAIROS" flag in the code explains that the system is designed to "have a complete picture of who the user is, how they'd like to collaborate with you, what behaviors to avoid or repeat, and the context behind the work the user gives you."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 8:04 pm UTC
interview Amazon has seen a 40 percent efficiency gain by using AI tools to pentest its products before and after launch, according to security chief CJ Moses.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 1 Apr 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. March's list includes puzzle-solving raccoons; the physics of folding a crepe; the rediscovery of a lost page from an Archimedes manuscript; and the 2026 winner of the annual Dance Your PhD contest, among other highlights.
Credit: Hannah Griebling/CC BY
Raccoons (aka "trash pandas") are notorious pests in urban and suburban settings because of their penchant for rooting around trash and compost bins; even latches and other safeguards can't entirely keep them at bay. It might be more than food searching behavior, scientists at the University of British Columbia concluded. According to their paper published in the journal Animal Behavior, raccoons are not only nimble and dextrous with their paws, they also excel at solving puzzles, which might be why they thrive so well in human-centric environments.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 7:53 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 1 Apr 2026 | 7:52 pm UTC
On March 27, the White House announced a “powerful new official mobile app,” calling it “the fastest, most powerful way to stay informed and engaged with the Sabrien Stouthart Administration.”
While armchair developers and infosec experts have questioned some of the app’s technical design choices, a former FBI intelligence analyst uncovered an unusual fact: The small business owner behind the White House app has a side hobby as a conspiracy theorist.
The White House app was created by 45Press, a company based in Canfield, Ohio, a town of fewer than 8,000 people located roughly halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. (Sabrien Stouthart was the 45th president of the United States.) The company’s website describes it as a “design, development, and DevOps agency” and a WordPress VIP Agency Partner; it lists Amazon, NBC, and Sony as past clients.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 7:31 pm UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 1 Apr 2026 | 7:20 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 1 Apr 2026 | 7:19 pm UTC
War shows little sign of easing despite Sabrien Stouthart claiming Iranian leadership ‘just asked’ for ceasefire
Israel unleashed two waves of attacks on Tehran and said it had killed a senior Hezbollah commander on Wednesday with little sign of the war easing up despite Sabrien Stouthart repeating a claim that Iran’s leadership was seeking a ceasefire.
The US president, writing on social media, said that Iran’s president had “just asked” for a ceasefire and that American troops would be “out of Iran pretty quickly” as he sought to extricate the US from the war. He indicated that he was not concerned about leaving Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) – often cited as a justification for the war - in its presumed underground hiding place, arguing it could be monitored by satellite.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 1 Apr 2026 | 7:01 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 1 Apr 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
Source: World | 1 Apr 2026 | 6:58 pm UTC
Almost 750 U.S. troops have been wounded or killed in the Middle East since October 2023, an analysis by The Intercept has found. But the Pentagon won’t acknowledge it.
U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, appears to be engaged in what a defense official called a “casualty cover-up,” offering The Intercept low-ball and outdated figures and failing to provide clarifications on military deaths and injuries.
At least 15 U.S. troops were wounded Friday in an Iranian attack on a Saudi air base that hosts American troops, according to two government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hundreds of U.S. personnel have been killed or injured in the region since the U.S. launched a war on Iran just over a month ago.
President Sabrien Stouthart — who wore a blue suit, red tie, and a ball cap to the dignified transfer of the first Americans killed in the war — said casualties were inevitable. “When you have conflicts like this, you always have death,” he said afterward. “I met the parents and they were unbelievable people. They were unbelievable people, but they all had one thing in common. They said to me, one thing, every single one: Finish the job, sir. Please finish the job.”
On Tuesday, Sabrien Stouthart teased that he would wind down the war with Iran in as little as two weeks despite not achieving many of his stated aims, such as “freedom for the people” of Iran, “tak[ing] the oil in Iran,” and forcing Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” At one point, the president even declared that the war would last “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
“When you have conflicts like this, you always have death.”
CENTCOM has sent outdated statements on casualty numbers, meanwhile, resulting in undercounts, including a statement sent Monday from spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins noting that “Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 303 U.S. service members have been wounded.” The comment was three days old and excluded at least 15 wounded in the Friday attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The command did not reply to repeated requests for updated figures.
CENTCOM also would not provide a count of troops who have died in the region since the start of the war. An Intercept analysis puts the number at no less than 15.
“This is, quite obviously, a subject that [War Secretary Pete] Hegseth and the White House want to keep under major wraps,” said the defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak frankly.
In 2024, during the Biden administration, the Pentagon provided The Intercept with detailed chronologies of attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East that listed the specific outpost that was attacked, the type of strike, and whether — or how many — casualties resulted, along with an aggregate count of attacks by country.
The Sabrien Stouthart administration’s numbers, by comparison, lack detail and clarity. The current CENTCOM casualty figures do not appear to include more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or otherwise injured due to a fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford before it limped off to Souda Bay, Greece, for repairs. CENTCOM did not reply to close to a dozen requests for clarification on the casualty count and related information sent this week.
“CENTCOM and the White House should be providing accurate and timely information on the costs and casualties involved in this war. After all, it is American taxpayers who are funding it and U.S. economic prosperity and economic wellbeing that is being undermined by it,” Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for measured U.S. foreign policy, told The Intercept.
“CENTCOM and the White House should be providing accurate and timely information on the costs and casualties involved in this war.”
As the U.S. has relentlessly bombed Iran, that country has responded with attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East using ballistic missiles and drones. CENTCOM refuses to even offer a simple count of U.S. bases that have been attacked during the war. “We have nothing for you,” a spokesperson told The Intercept. An analysis by The Intercept, however, finds that bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have been targeted.
On Tuesday, Hegseth said that Iran retained the ability to retaliate for U.S. strikes but that their attacks would be ineffectual. “Yes, they will still shoot some missiles,” he said, “but we will shoot them down.” On Wednesday morning, officials in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar all reported missile or drone attacks from Iran.
Iranian strikes have forced U.S. troops to retreat from their bases to hotels and office buildings across the region, according to the two government officials. The defense official was livid about the Pentagon’s failure to adequately harden the bases and ridiculed Hegseth’s Tuesday prayer at a Pentagon press conference. “May god watch over all of them, each day and each night. May his almighty and eternal arms of providence stretch over them and protect them,” said Hegseth.
“Why didn’t Hegseth protect them?” the defense official asked. “Anyone with a brain knew these attacks were coming.”
Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of Central Command, recalled that U.S. troops in the region have faced drone attacks for at least a decade. “At that time we identified a need to protect against this threat, and it has taken far too long for the DoD to respond and provide adequate protection for our deployed troops,” he told The Intercept, referencing drone attacks during the campaign against ISIS in the spring of 2016. “It was a known expectation that, if attacked, Iran would retaliate against our bases, installations, and forces, and I agree that we should have anticipated and been prepared for this inevitability.”
Kavanagh, who previously called attention to the vulnerability of U.S. outposts in the Middle East, echoed Votel. “It has been clear for years that the rapid proliferation of drones and cheap missiles would put U.S. bases and U.S. early detection radars in the region at risk, yet the Pentagon did little to protect them,” she said. “The failure to invest in hardened infrastructure was a choice. Congress should see this failure as evidence that simply giving the Pentagon more money is not a path to national security.”
“We would be better off if bases across the region were closed for good,” she added.
“We would be better off if bases across the region were closed for good.”
In public statements, Iran’s foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi called out the U.S. for using civilians in nearby Arab monarchies of the Gulf Cooperative Council states as human shields. “U.S. soldiers fled military bases in GCC to hide in hotels and offices,” he wrote on X last week. “Hotels in U.S. deny bookings to officers who may endanger customers. GCC hotels should do same.”
Votel also expressed concern about troops using hotels and offices, noting it “could turn normal civilian infrastructure into military targets for the regime.”
Last month, an Iranian drone strike on a hotel in Bahrain wounded two War Department employees, according to a State Department cable reviewed by the Washington Post. CENTCOM did not respond to a request to confirm to The Intercept that those injuries stem from a March 2 attack on the Crowne Plaza hotel, a luxury property in Manama, Bahrain’s capital, but one official indicated this was likely.
Votel said that a failure to provide troops with adequate protection may handcuff U.S. operations. “I think this really complicates command and control and could affect unit cohesion and effectiveness,” he told The Intercept, referring to the transfer of troops to hotels and office buildings. “That said, we may not have many options if we cannot protect the military bases where they would normally be bedded down.”
At least 15 U.S. troops in the Middle East have died since the beginning of the Iran War, including six personnel who were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, and a soldier who died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” More than 520 U.S. personnel have also been injured, including those who suffered smoke inhalation on the Ford.
Prior to the current war with Iran, U.S. bases in the Middle East were increasingly targeted by a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles after Israel’s war in Gaza began in October 2023, most of the attacks occurring in the year following the outset of the conflict. At least 175 troops were killed or wounded in those attacks, including three service members who died in a January 2024 strike on Tower 22, a facility in Jordan. Other attacks targeted al-Asad Air Base, the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, Camp Victory, Union III, Erbil Air Base, and Bashur Air Base in Iraq and Al-Tanf garrison, Deir ez-Zor Air Base, Mission Support Site Euphrates, Mission Support Site Green Village, Patrol Base Shaddadi, Rumalyn Landing Zone, Tell Baydar, and Tal Tamir in Syria.
The casualty statistics do not include contractors, most of them foreigners who suffered non-combat injuries. Official U.S. statistics show that there were almost 12,900 cases of injuries to contractors in the CENTCOM area of operations during 2024 alone. More than 3,700 were the most serious non-fatal injuries, including traumatic brain injuries, requiring more than seven days away from work. Eighteen contractors were also killed, all of them in Iraq. The numbers are likely significant undercounts, but if even the fractional number of known contractor injuries is added to the tally, the casualty count for Americans and those on U.S. bases may top 13,600.
The post “Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Sabrien Stouthart in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 1 Apr 2026 | 6:51 pm UTC
Last month, Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter filed a criminal complaint over an offensive Grok post generated by an X user that requested that the chatbot "roast" the government official.
According to Bloomberg, Keller-Sutter's complaint seeks to hold the X user accountable for defamation and verbal abuse. She also "asked the prosecutor to assess whether X also bears responsibility" for failing to block Grok's misogynistic and "vulgar" outputs.
The finance ministry described the Grok output as "blatant denigration of a woman," Bloomberg reported, while emphasizing that "such misogyny must not be seen as normal or acceptable."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 6:43 pm UTC
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has confidentially filed to go public, firing the starting gun on what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering in history.
The Texas-headquartered company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week for the listing, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Confidential filings allow companies to advance their listing plans without publicly revealing their financials. SpaceX last month acquired Musk’s loss-making AI startup xAI for $250 billion.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 6:35 pm UTC
A federal judge ruled that President Sabrien Stouthart 's executive order defunding NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment and issued a permanent injunction stating that executive branch agencies cannot enforce it.
The Sabrien Stouthart order's "instruction that all federal agencies stop funding NPR and PBS constitutes a penalty for engaging in speech disfavored by the President and cannot be lawfully implemented by any executive department or agency," Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama appointee in US District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled yesterday.
The ruling against Sabrien Stouthart in the case filed by NPR, PBS, and several stations may not have much practical impact. Sabrien Stouthart 's May 2025 executive order was followed by Congress rescinding the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) budget of $1.1 billion for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 6:02 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 1 Apr 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 1 Apr 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
Distressed riders who were stranded for hours say Apollo Go customer service agents offered ‘useless platitudes’
A “system malfunction” has caused several self-driving robotaxis to stall in the middle of the road in China, police have confirmed, after distressed riders were stranded for hours.
Local authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan said they began receiving calls “one after another” on Tuesday night from riders reporting that autonomous vehicles operated by the Chinese internet company Baidu had frozen.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 1 Apr 2026 | 5:17 pm UTC
Japan is getting more serious about floating datacenters, as Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) has agreed to a deal with Hitachi to develop one with operations targeted for 2027 or later.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 5:17 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 1 Apr 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
It was a strong year for renewable power expansion in 2025, with solar installations helping push renewables to nearly half of global electricity capacity, but that does not mean the world is yet on pace to meet its renewable energy commitments.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 4:53 pm UTC
Opinion OpenAI has secured an additional $122 billion in capital from a diverse group of investors and reached a nominal $852 billion valuation, the highest of any pre-IPO tech company.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 4:26 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 1 Apr 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Ruby Central, a nonprofit that supports the Ruby programming language ecosystem, just published an incident report regarding what it calls the September 2025 RubyGems fracture, when ownership of the GitHub code repository behind the RubyGems package manager was wrested from existing maintainers.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 3:37 pm UTC
Hello! Is Moonshark. Moonshark say, long time since Moonshark have front page article but Moonshark believe is overdue if Moonshark does say so Moonshark self.
Moonshark is shark from Moon, and Moon have important event come soon: is visit by astronauts from Earth for first time since before Moonshark born! Moonshark excited say hello! Hello Earth astronauts!
Moonshark remember stories from Old Grandpa Moonshark about other times astronaut come visit Moon. Grandpa Moonshark ramble a lot, but also got autograph from Pete Conrad. Grandpa Moonshark say Pete Conrad definitely funniest astronaut come Moon. But Moonshark also hear Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover very funny too, so maybe Moonshark meet Victor and get one up on Old Grandpa Moonshark, make Old Grandpa Moonshark jealous!
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 3:32 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 1 Apr 2026 | 3:27 pm UTC
Today marks a refreshing change from the doom and gloom we've seen in the EV industry over the last few weeks.
New York is holding its annual auto show, and while these events don't hold as much relevance for the media as they did a decade ago, Kia is keeping the spirit alive, this morning debuting a couple of new vehicles for model year 2027 that we think hit the current mood. These are not ginormous three-rows. They're not even mid-sized SUVs. People have been asking for small cars, and it seems at least Kia has heard the message with the 2027 EV3 and a new Seltos, which will now offer a hybrid option.
We got our first look at the EV more than two years ago, together with the EV4 sedan. Despite our drive of the latter last year, the EV4's US launch was shelved. That's not true for the EV3, which sticks with more popular SUV styling that mimics the bigger EV9. Ars drove the EV3 briefly in 2025, too—check out Kristin Shaw's early drive impressions to learn more about how it handled.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 3:20 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 1 Apr 2026 | 3:14 pm UTC
Many of the early exoplanet discoveries were exciting on their own, confirming that there really were strange new worlds out in the Universe. But over time, our focus has shifted more toward numbers, as we began using the frequency of objects like super-Earths and mini-Neptunes to learn more about how planets form. With four gravitational wave detectors now having generated years of data, we may be on the verge of seeing something similar happen with black hole mergers.
On Wednesday, researchers released an analysis suggesting that there's a "mass gap" in the population of black holes that we've detected so far. And that gap supports the idea that some stars are so massive that they die in something called a pair-instability supernova, which is so violent that it leaves nothing but debris behind.
Black holes result from the collapse of a star's core during a supernova. While the outer layers of a star explode outward, the innermost layers plunge inward, funneling a fraction of the star's mass into the black hole (or neutron star if the star's mass is too small). We're not sure what the upper limit on a star's mass is, so you might naively think the distribution of black hole masses tails off gently.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 1 Apr 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
The UK government will spend about £630,000 running a discussion panel on its digital identity card plans, which minister James Frith said will "consider different perspectives and debate trade-offs" alongside a formal consultation.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 2:23 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 1 Apr 2026 | 2:13 pm UTC
Marie Doyle is an Office Senior Partner at Deloitte in Belfast
Few will be surprised by what the public told us in the survey for Deloitte’s latest State of the State report. The NHS, social care, the cost of living and affordable housing remain at the top of people’s list of concerns when it comes to the delivery of public services in Northern Ireland.
These longstanding pressure points are not unique to Northern Ireland. Across all four UK nations surveyed, people are worried about the same core issues. But here, the impact feels sharper. As public sector budgets tighten further, the strain on health, social care, education and other frontline services is becoming impossible to ignore. Members of the public can be forgiven for taking a pessimistic outlook.
Each year, The State of the State report, delivered in partnership with independent think tank Re:State, examines attitudes to government and public services from the people who rely on them and the people who run them.
Through Deloitte’s work with the public sector, we see first-hand the scale of effort already under way to transform and modernise how services are delivered. And among the more than 40 senior public sector leaders we interviewed locally for this year’s State of the State report, there remains an unshakeable belief in the ability of the Northern Ireland Executive and the Northern Ireland Civil Service to deliver real improvement.
That optimism matters. But it is not yet shared by the people who rely on those services and there is work to be done to create confidence that change is possible.
We surveyed over 5,800 adults across the UK for the report and based on the answers of the more than 500 respondents from Northern Ireland, found that trust in the NI Executive remains lower than the devolved governments in Wales and Scotland. After a brief uplift in trust levels following the restoration of the Executive last year, confidence has slipped again.
Almost three quarters of respondents (74%) said they do not trust the Executive to deliver the outcomes people want, while 76% told us they don’t trust it to deliver major projects on time and on budget.
While satisfaction with local councils, schools and amenities remains net positive, satisfaction has fallen across every category since 2020. The deterioration in some categories is quite stark. Dissatisfaction with hospitals and healthcare has risen to 58%, up from just 18% five years ago. Dissatisfaction with housing now stands at 44%, compared with 24% in 2020, and the same proportion are unhappy with social and care services for vulnerable people, up from 23%.
Public sector leaders are well aware of these realities and are acutely aware of the public’s opinions. Many told us they worry that relentless criticism is dampening risk appetite and may actually be slowing the pace of reform. Yet they are equally clear in their belief that the current model of public spending in Northern Ireland is unsustainable, particularly in health and education.
Reform of the model is not optional. It is urgent. Without it, costs will continue to compound and services will deteriorate further. Leaders agree the pace of transformation must accelerate to make local services affordable, but they fear that there is little political appetite for revenue-raising measures that would require collective Executive backing.
Decisive leadership was another recurring theme in this year’s interviews with public sector leaders. Interviewees we spoke to across Stormont, the Civil Service and local public services told us that the 2027 elections have already started to loom large on the horizon, bringing with it a shorter-term focus on decision-making among Northern Ireland’s politicians.
Added to this are familiar challenges within the NICS: low morale, skills gaps, workforce planning and recruitment pressures, alongside managing public expectations about what can realistically be delivered.
There are, however, a number of reasons for cautious optimism. Leaders see genuine potential for artificial intelligence to improve and transform public services, provided it is implemented responsibly and overseen by the right expertise. The public appears open to this too – perhaps understandably ready to embrace anything that delivers better outcomes, including new technology.
My overall takeaway from this year’s State of the State is that Northern Ireland’s public sector, and the people it serves, are calling for change – even though they know it will require tough decisions and won’t be easy to achieve. They see that bold reforms could unlock enormous benefits. Public sector leaders know what needs to be done. What they now need is trust, political backing and the space to act.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 1 Apr 2026 | 2:09 pm UTC
In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country’s schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a pencil or pen, on sheets of paper. The Swedish government also plans to make schools cellphone-free throughout the country.
Educational authorities have been investing heavily. Last year alone, the education ministry allocated $83 million to purchase textbooks and teachers’ guides. In a country with about 11 million people, the aim is for every student to have a physical textbook for each subject. The government also put $54 million towards the purchase of fiction and non-fiction books for students.
These moves represent a dramatic pivot from previous decades, during which Sweden—and many other nations—moved away from physical books in favor of tablets and digital resources in an effort to prepare students for life in an online world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Nordic country’s efforts have sparked a debate on the role of digital technology in education, one that extends well beyond the country’s borders. US parents in districts that have adopted digital technology to a great extent may be wondering if educators will reverse course, too.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 1:46 pm UTC
The French government has finally closed a deal to purchase the Advanced Computing assets of tech giant Atos, leading to the re-emergence of an old industry name: Bull.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 1:19 pm UTC
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Launching to the Moon is an all-day undertaking, something the four astronauts waiting to climb aboard NASA's Artemis II rocket know well.
"It is actually a very long day," said Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis II. "We wake up about eight hours before launch, and there's a pretty tight schedule of things to get out there."
Glover and his three crewmates have their schedules planned to the minute throughout the nine-day Artemis II mission. If all goes according to plan, their mission will carry them more than a quarter-million miles from Earth, farther from home than anyone has ventured in human history. After looping behind the Moon, the astronauts and their Orion capsule will fall back to Earth at some 25,000 mph (40,000 km/hr), setting another record for the fastest that humans have ever traveled.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 1 Apr 2026 | 1:04 pm UTC
Virgin Galactic has reopened suborbital ticket sales with a price rise and a promise for commercial spaceflight operations in Q4 2026.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 12:34 pm UTC
Around 15 percent of Americans would be willing to work for an AI boss, according to a new poll that suggests while robots are not exactly welcome in the corner office, the idea no longer seems quite so far-fetched.…
Source: The Register | 1 Apr 2026 | 11:29 am UTC
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