Read at: 2026-03-12T15:13:51+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Seval Amin ]
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:09 pm UTC
Seval Amin spins the spiking oil prices as a win for the US as defense departments reportedly spends billions on war with Iran
US defense officials told senators on the armed services committee that the cost of the war on Iran totaled more than $11.3bn in the first six days alone, according to multiple reports.
The New York Times was first to break the news about the conflict’s price tag, citing three people familiar with the closed-door briefing on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:07 pm UTC
Latest order comes after Hezbollah and Iran launched joint attack on more than 50 targets including Israeli military bases
Israel has issued a sweeping new displacement order for south Lebanon, instructing residents up to 25 miles away from the border with Israel to head north, as its conflict with Hezbollah continues to escalate.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military on Thursday ordered all residents to head north of the Zahrani River “for their safety,” before a bombing campaign against what it said were Hezbollah targets.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:05 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:04 pm UTC
Top British army officer tells John Healey Iranian pilots are flying Shaheds much lower, making them more effective
Vladimir Putin’s “hidden hand” lies behind Iran’s military methods, the UK defence secretary, John Healey, has said, after a night in which drones struck a camp used by western forces in Erbil, northern Iraq.
Healy was speaking after British officers at the UK’s military headquarters in north-west London had told him that Iranian and Iranian proxy drone pilots were increasingly adopting tactics “from the Russians”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Source: World | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:55 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:53 pm UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:49 pm UTC
Message read out by newsreader calls for national unity and says that all US bases in the region should close or face attacks
Iran escalates attacks on infrastructure and transport across the Gulf
How have you been affected by the latest Middle East events?
An Iranian source is denying the country will allow India-flagged tankers to pass through the vital strait of Hormuz, Reuters is reporting.
The news agency a little earlier quoted an Indian source as saying Iran would in fact allow such tankers to pass through the strait, a key artery for global oil trade.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:48 pm UTC
Developers using Google's Antigravity agentic AI coding tool are complaining about higher prices following an announcement yesterday that the company is evolving its AI plans.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:36 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:33 pm UTC
Obit Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare has died at the age of 92. Known to many computer science students as C. A. R. Hoare, and to his friends as Tony, he was not only one of the greatest minds in the history of programming – he also came up with a number of the field's pithiest quotes.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:23 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:23 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:22 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:21 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:21 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:12 pm UTC
Glasgow’s only fire engine with a high-reach ladder was unavailable on Sunday as an office block was gutted
Concerns have been raised about the capacity of Scotland’s fire service to deal with large fires like the one that gutted a Victorian office block in Glasgow as it emerged that the city’s only remaining fire engine with a high-reach ladder was unavailable on Sunday.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service confirmed that, while standard city-based fire engines were on the scene within minutes of the first 999 call, the nearest available high-reach appliance – which adds vital additional capacity to tackle a large blaze – came from Coatbridge, an 18km, 26-minute drive away in light traffic.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:12 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:11 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:11 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:05 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:03 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:02 pm UTC
European Commission says it will suspend €2m grant if organisers of arts festival go ahead with proposals
The European Commission has warned it will cut funding for the Venice Biennale if organisers go ahead with plans to include Russia.
The commission reiterated that any breach of ethical standards by the art festival would be treated as a violation of contract, leading to suspension of the €2m (£1.7m) agreement.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Iraq’s national security adviser Qassim al-Araji says he told Australian ambassador that countries should repatriate prisoners
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A senior Iraqi government official has implored Australia to repatriate a group of suspected Islamic State fighters, raising the issue with Canberra’s top diplomat in Baghdad just weeks after the detainees were transferred out of Syria.
In a post on X, Iraq’s national security adviser, Qassim al-Araji, said he met with ambassador Glenn Miles last week, and told him that foreign detainees should be returned to their home countries. This is despite such a task being made more difficult by growing instability in the region, caused by the war in Iran.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Chief executive of Acoss, who undertook the study, says ‘it’s clear this tax break funnels billions into the wealthiest parts of our country’
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Investors who live in the wealthy electorate of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs claimed about $1.8bn from the 50% capital gains tax discount, according to new research. It reveals how a handful of rich enclaves in Australia’s two biggest cities account for a fifth of the annual benefit from the tax break.
The Australian Council of Social Services is lobbying for a halving of the CGT discount and has used analysis of Australian Taxation Office data from 2022-23 to highlight how the benefits “flow overwhelmingly to a small number of high-income, inner-city electorates in the eastern states”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Child welfare advocates demand accountability after revelations two children in care of state lived with triple killer Regina Arthurell
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A New South Wales minister says she is “not going anywhere” amid mounting calls for an independent review into why the state government allowed a convicted triple killer to live in a home with two foster children.
The NSW minister for families and communities, Kate Washington, apologised on 2GB radio on Wednesday morning after confirming that Regina Arthurell had been removed from a home on Monday where she lived alongside children aged 12 and 14. The removal came after the radio revealed the situation earlier that day.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 12 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:57 pm UTC
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Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:54 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:52 pm UTC
Payment of 2% at employee-owned partnership follows sales increase to £13.4bn
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The owner of John Lewis and Waitrose has paid an annual bonus to workers for the first time in four years after underlying profits rose by 6%.
The retail group’s 69,000 employees – which it calls partners – will share £35m, the equivalent of 2% of salary, after it recorded an increase in sales and profits. The payout amounts to about one extra week of pay.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:48 pm UTC
NASA's Van Allen Probe A has re-entered Earth's atmosphere eight years earlier than expected, with a 1 in 4,200 chance that its components could cause injury.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:47 pm UTC
Proposed package comes after regulator finds ‘serious and unacceptable breaches’ in how company operates
Welsh Water is to pay a proposed £44.7m after the industry regulator found “serious and unacceptable” breaches in the supplier’s sewage and network services.
The water authority for England and Wales, Ofwat, said the non-profit Dŵr Cymru, or Welsh Water, failed to properly operate, maintain and upgrade its wastewater network to ensure it could cope with levels of sewage.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:44 pm UTC
The Pritzker Prize was awarded Thursday. "In every work, he is able to answer with radical originality, making the unobvious obvious," said fellow Chilean architect and prize chair Alejandro Aravena.
(Image credit: Iwan Baan)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:44 pm UTC
Kremlin appearing to ramp up control over internet, as it tests new ‘whitelist’ restrictions and pushes people to state-owned app
Muscovites have been turning to walkie-talkies and pagers amid unexplained disruptions to internet services in the capital, as the Kremlin appears to ramp up control over online activity in Russia.
Users in central Moscow, as well as in St Petersburg, first reported difficulties accessing mobile internet about a week ago. Many said they were unable to load websites or apps, while some lost service altogether, leaving them unable to make phone calls.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:43 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:42 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:41 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:35 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:35 pm UTC
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that hackers are exploiting a max-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in workflow automation platform n8n.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:34 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:33 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:26 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:26 pm UTC
Sansevero Chapel Museum will host day of guided tours where visitors will be able to feel marble sculptures
The Sansevero Chapel Museum in Naples will allow dozens of visually impaired visitors to take part in a rare tactile experience, letting them touch celebrated works of art including the Veiled Christ, which is widely regarded as one of the most striking masterpieces in the history of sculpture.
On 17 March, the museum will host an initiative called La meraviglia a portata di mano – Wonder within reach – organised in partnership with the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired of Naples, offering about 80 blind and partially sighted visitors a chance to encounter the marble masterpieces.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:26 pm UTC
Alphabet is spinning out its US Google Fiber business and combining it with Astound Broadband as part of a joint venture with private equity investor Stonepeak.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:22 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:20 pm UTC
More than 80,000 people waiting to be reassessed after rejection at end of 2025 – 91% more than a year before
The backlog of people awaiting asylum appeals after having their initial application turned down has nearly doubled in a year, threatening to undermine a key pledge of Keir Starmer’s government.
Home Office statistics released on Thursday show more than 80,000 cases were waiting to be reassessed at the end of 2025 – a 91% increase on a year before. The backlog significantly outnumbers the number of people waiting for their initial decision, which was 64,000 at the end of December 2025.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:20 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:19 pm UTC
Medical and legal rights campaigners are warning that the Palantir data platform, designed to be at the heart of England's health system, risks enabling UK immigration and policing departments to access confidential patient information.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:14 pm UTC
René Redzepi also steps down from non-profit board after accusations of physical and psychological abuse
René Redzepi, the head chef and co-founder of Noma, has announced his resignation from his internationally acclaimed Copenhagen restaurant following allegations he physically abused his staff.
Redzepi had been facing protests in Los Angeles before a four-month pop-up that launched this week. His resignation on Wednesday comes after the New York Times detailed allegations of physical and psychological abuse, including claims that he “punched employees in the face, jabbed them with kitchen implements and slammed them against walls”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:13 pm UTC
Top US regulators met with Bill Anderson to discuss ‘supreme court action’ over glyphosate weed killer
Top US regulators met with Bill Anderson, Bayer’s CEO, last year to discuss “litigation” issues – including “supreme court action” over its glyphosate weed killer – just months before the Seval Amin administration took a series of steps to boost Bayer’s case at the high court, internal government records show.
The 17 June meeting, between officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Anderson and two other top Bayer executives, came as the Germany-based company was working to quash costly US litigation brought by tens of thousands of people who allege they developed cancer from their use of the company’s glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:10 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:07 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:02 pm UTC
A potentially strong El Niño weather pattern will likely emerge this summer and persist through the rest of the year. The hottest years on record generally occur in years when El Niño is active.
(Image credit: Joe Raedle)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 1:01 pm UTC
Programme which supports schemes in six African countries was previously hailed as vital protection for Britain against future pandemics
A flagship health project in Africa, which UK ministers said would play a vital role in protecting Britain from future pandemic threats, is being axed due to aid cuts, the Guardian can reveal.
The Global Health Workforce Programme (GHWP) which supported development and training for healthcare staff in six African countries, will close at the end of the month, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:59 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:58 pm UTC
Exclusive: Judge describes Gerald Peck, who was banned from practising in the 1980s, as ‘a charlatan and a fraud’
A therapist who claimed he could heal birth trauma through sexual touching and oral sex has been sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Gerald Peck, who has live profiles promoting his work as a bodywork psychotherapist, was convicted of five sexual offences on 2 February, after being charged in October 2024.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:58 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:55 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:53 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:49 pm UTC
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Last year, Honda gave Ars a tour of some of its manufacturing facilities in Ohio. The Anna Engine Plant and Marysville Auto Plant had undergone a transformation that added to their capabilities: a massive die cast operation to make electric vehicle battery packs alongside the lines that make engines at Anna, and a gleaming new section of Marysville filled with robots, ready to incorporate three new Honda and Acura EVs into the production mix alongside Accords and Integras.
Only now, they won't. Earlier today, Honda announced that it's facing heavy losses for the financial year: between $5.1 billion and $7 billion (820 billion–1.12 trillion yen). To help stanch the flow, it's sacrificing the Honda 0 SUV, Honda 0 sedan, and the electric Acura RSX, EVs it revealed at CES last year in "nearly production" state.
Honda says there are several reasons for killing off its new EVs before they even reach the market. The first is extremely predictable: the ongoing chaos of the trade war and its tariffs, which have eaten into the profitability of the cars it imports into the US. A second is the US government's revanchist decision to cease enforcing emissions and fuel economy standards on the auto industry. Although Honda says that "striving for carbon neutrality" is a "responsibility Honda... must fulfill for the future," it seems that responsibility only applies when being forced by a government.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:45 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:40 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:39 pm UTC
Dyshan Best later died after having to wait 10 extra minutes for next ambulance, according to Connecticut investigation
A man who was shot by police and later died had to wait 10 extra minutes for an ambulance after an officer having a “mild anxiety attack” took the first one that arrived at the scene, according to a newly released state investigation.
Dyshan Best, 39, was shot in the back last year as he fled from officers in Bridgeport, Connecticut. A report released this week by the state’s inspector general found that the shooting was justified because Best had a gun in his hand and the officer pursuing him had reasons to fear for his own safety.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:34 pm UTC
Google Maps is one of the company's core products, which means it hasn't escaped the shift to Gemini. There will be more opportunities to converse with a robot in Google Maps starting today, but there's also a new navigation experience on the way. The revamped navigation isn't as explicitly focused on the AI revolution, but Google stresses Gemini is still key to making it work.
The latest AI shift in Maps is called Ask Maps, and you can probably guess what it does just from its title. Ask Maps is a Gemini-powered conversational system that can plan trips and answer complex questions about locations across the app's millions of cataloged points of interest.
The new chatbot will be accessible via a button up near the search bar. You can ask it anything you're likely to find in Google Maps without jumping into another app. You can ask for directions, of course, but it can also plan out road trips and vacations from a single prompt. Ask Maps works like a chatbot, so it accepts follow-up prompts to refine and expand on its suggestions.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:30 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:22 pm UTC
Oil prices again rise over $100 a barrel as Iran threatens long ‘war of attrition’. Plus, San Francisco slashes air pollution
Good morning.
Iran dramatically escalated its strategy of striking civilian infrastructure and transport networks across the Gulf on Wednesday, attacking commercial ships and targeting Dubai’s international airport as US and Israeli warplanes launched new waves of strikes.
Who has borne most of Iran’s strikes? More than two-thirds of Iran’s attacks have been on the UAE. Dubai, a center of global finance and international tourism, is facing an existential threat as foreigners flee.
What do we know about the US defense secretary’s attitude toward Iran? A Guardian review of Pete Hegseth’s books, speeches and broadcasts revealed he has voiced extreme antipathy towards Iran for years.
Where is the bill now? The House has approved a version of the bill – but the Senate does not have the votes to do so. It would need 60 votes to move forward because of the filibuster rule.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:21 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:18 pm UTC
Campaigners say people unlikely to ‘look favourably’ on package for Wael Sawan, which rose to £13.8m in 2025
The chief executive of Shell saw his pay jump more than 60% to almost £14m in 2025 despite a slump in profits at the oil company and prospects of rising pump prices related to war in the Middle East.
The package for Wael Sawan, who took the top job in 2023 and has refocused the company on fossil fuels, rose from £8.6m in 2024 to £13.8m in 2025.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:10 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:09 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:57 am UTC
Hacker group Handala claimed responsibility for attack that caused ‘global disruption’ to Stryker Corporation’s systems
An Iran-linked group said it hacked a US medical company, causing “global disruption” to its systems, in retaliation for the bombing of the Minab school in Iran, in an attack seen as widening the Middle East into the cyber realm.
Handala, a hacker group, claimed responsibility for the attack on Wednesday on the Stryker Corporation, which makes medical devices and is based in Michigan. It affected thousands of employees using the company’s Microsoft systems.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:50 am UTC
Updated Customers of three major UK banks woke on Thursday to find incorrect transactions appearing in their apps, a problem later attributed to a technical glitch.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:50 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:38 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:38 am UTC
Bork!Bork!Bork! Smart mirrors are all the rage. However, rather than a list of headlines and tasks to do today, an unhappy Windows installation can make a smart mirror seem very dumb indeed.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:32 am UTC
I grew up in a Star Trek household, not a Star Wars one. More to the point, I wasn't even allowed to watch Star Wars when I was a kid, so I didn't see the original trilogy until I was nearly an adult—about 17 years old, as I recall.
For my then-fundamentalist Christian family, the so-called "Eastern mysticism" of Star Wars was a bridge too far, something that could apparently corrupt my impressionable young evangelical mind irreversibly. Star Trek was OK, though, because my parents didn't feel it condoned witchcraft, or what have you, and they liked the original series from when they were younger.
Because of all that, my first true immersion in the Star Wars universe wasn't the movies, it was the video games, and one in particular—Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, which you can nab on GOG.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:15 am UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:10 am UTC
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Seval Amin , who promised to lower gas prices, is tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as war drives prices up. And, the U.S. investigates the strike on an Iranian school that killed at least 165 people.
(Image credit: AFP via Getty Images)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:04 am UTC
Regardless of your interest in motorsport, you've almost certainly heard of the Monaco Grand Prix, Daytona 500, and Indianapolis 500. These iconic races are easy to spectate, with grandstands lining the course and a camera or two at every turn. Video feeds from the race can be transmitted live thanks to the infrastructure of the populated areas surrounding the tracks.
But what if your course is 100 miles (161 km) from nowhere? It's 1,000 miles (1,610 km) long, and the only way to access it is on bumpy, dirty access roads that require four-wheel drive and plenty of clearance. If you want to watch the whole race with your own eyes, you’ll need to hire a helicopter. And broadcasting it live on TV? Good luck.
All that is changing with the advent of StarStream, a video and content streaming service that can be used with Starlink, the low-Earth-orbit satellite Internet system that has changed the way off-road race teams communicate. But George Hammel, a former motocross and UTV racer, saw even more potential: a way to bring fans into the cockpit, live.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 12 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Britain has taken the first steps towards producing its own ultrahigh temperature materials, regarded as vital for applications including hypersonic vehicles, space, and advanced propulsion systems.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:59 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:54 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:32 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:30 am UTC
The visual album and documentary Songs from the Hole tells the story of James Jacobs, the hip-hop artist JJ'88, as he reflects on his coming-of-age within California's state prison system.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Netflix)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:30 am UTC
Source: World | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:23 am UTC
The British government is consulting on reforms to prioritize "strategically important" grid connections – including datacenters – amid reports of delays stretching more than a decade on some projects.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:15 am UTC
If regime holds, control of enriched uranium may be ultimate measure of US-Israeli success, insiders say
Israel did not have a realistic plan for regime change when it attacked Iran, multiple Israeli security sources have said, with expectations that airstrikes could lead to a popular uprising having been driven by “wishful thinking” rather than hard intelligence.
Iran has survived nearly two weeks of bombing raids and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Seval Amin is publicly contemplating ending the increasingly costly war.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:12 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:07 am UTC
Iran's state media broadcast what it said was a public statement by Mojtaba Khamenei, as Day 13 of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran rages.
(Image credit: Rouzbeh Fouladi)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:07 am UTC
Golestan Palace in Tehran, a world heritage site, and buildings in historic city of Isfahan harmed, despite Unesco sending coordinates
The governor of the historic Iranian city of Isfahan has accused the US and Israel of a “declaration of war on a civilization” as heritage sites across the country suffer damage in their bombing campaign.
The most serious confirmed damage to date has been to Tehran’s Golestan Palace, dating back to the 14th century, and the 17th-century Chehel Sotoon Palace in Isfahan.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:06 am UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:01 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Under new Taliban laws, a husband is allowed to beat his wife as long as it is not done with ‘obscene force’, which the woman must prove in court
The shocking level of physical violence against women permitted under the Taliban’s new laws has been revealed this week by the case of a woman in northern Afghanistan, who said she was beaten with a cable wire by her husband and told by a judge: “You want a divorce just because of that? … A little anger and a few beatings won’t kill you.”
Farzana* said her husband was quick-tempered and often resorted to beating her. He regularly humiliated her and called her “disabled”, she said, because her right leg was slightly shorter than the left. She had tolerated the abuse for the sake of their children, but one evening, she said, his violence went too far.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:55 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:46 am UTC
Protester alleges that Iranian handler ‘looked at us and then drew a line on his throat and pointed to us’
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Australian police investigated a complaint involving an Iranian regime-linked handler for the country’s football team after a group of activists alleged he threatened to kill them at a Women’s Asian Cup match last week.
The criminal investigation, confirmed by Queensland police, has led to renewed calls from the Iranian diaspora for tougher immigration screening processes to block people linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – a proscribed state sponsor of terrorism – from entering the country.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
The UK's Department for Transport is offering up to £100,000 over three years for access to a C++ programmer who can keep a module of its airport usage model up in the air.…
Source: The Register | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Utilities are convincing lawmakers around the U.S. to delay bills that would allow people to buy solar panels, plug them into an outlet and begin generating electricity.
(Image credit: David J. Phillip)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:23 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:21 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:04 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:04 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:03 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:01 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
The White House wants tougher rules for commercial licenses after several high-profile crashes involving foreign-born drivers. But critics say that would do little to make the nation's roads safer.
(Image credit: Mario Tama)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Swing voters who helped reelect President Seval Amin in 2024 don't support his decision to go to war in Iran and instead want to see U.S. tax dollars spent tackling economic pressures facing Americans.
(Image credit: Saul Loeb)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
So you want to spend less time on your phone. How do you do that when it's designed to suck you in? Life Kit spoke to experts in behavioral science, psychology and technology for real-world advice.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 12 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 12 Mar 2026 | 8:59 am UTC
When Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin MLA and former party chairman, accused Gordon Lyons, the DUP Communities Minister responsible for the Irish language strategy, of presiding over a ministry hostile to the language, Lyons responded with an inversion. It was Sinn Féin, he told the Assembly on 17 February, that had done more to damage Irish language development — and his evidence was not some executive delay or budgetary shortfall but a local government signage policy: the 15% resident-signature threshold that Belfast City Council applies before erecting dual-language street signs. A policy designed, by Sinn Féin’s account, to normalise the Irish language in public space had become, by the Communities Minister’s account, proof that the party was willing to override local majorities and corrode community relations in the language’s name. Whether or not Lyons’s attack was opportunistic, the threshold he targeted deserves the scrutiny he declined to provide. However, a Slugger O’Toole piece by DeBeer, published last August, supplies us with just that.
DeBeer opened with a double-take: Sarah Bunting, the DUP group leader at Belfast City Council, had criticised the Council’s decision to erect dual-language signage on Shandon Park, an affluent residential street in outer east Belfast. The signs had been approved after 16.8% of residents voted in favour, with 49.6% against. What made the case unusual was that Alliance, which typically votes with nationalists on signage questions, opposed the application on this occasion because of the size of the disparity. The application had initially been blocked at committee on unionist and Alliance votes; a full Council meeting then overturned that decision.
DeBeer read the Shandon Park outcome as evidence that the Council’s 15% threshold is anti-democratic, and argued for a 50% requirement. The 15% figure is defensible on its own terms. It is the mechanism that delivers it — a street-by-street consent procedure that transforms a constitutional question into a series of neighbourhood contests — that is the real structural problem. The case for reform is not that the threshold should be higher, but that the survey mechanism should be replaced by a statutory framework — something Northern Ireland’s parties had already agreed in principle in New Decade, New Approach (2020).
The 15% Threshold
Belfast City Council did not set 15% arbitrarily. Its Dual Language Street Signs Policy, published on the Council website, cites two sources. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, to which the UK is a signatory, does not prescribe numerical thresholds; it establishes flexible obligations, expressed through ‘where numbers justify’ formulations, that require state signatories to avoid creating barriers to minority language use in public life. Separately, the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues has offered, as comparative guidance rather than a binding requirement, the suggestion that trigger thresholds for minority language signage fall within the range of 5 to 20% of the local population. The Policy document quotes both sources. At 15%, Belfast sits at the upper end of that non-binding range — more demanding of Irish speakers than the Rapporteur’s guidance suggests is necessary, and considerably more demanding than the comparable arrangements in Wales or Scotland, which require no resident survey at all. A 50% threshold of the kind DeBeer proposes would place Belfast well outside even this non-binding comparative range and would sit uneasily with the Charter’s barrier-avoidance obligations.
The point is routinely lost in the public argument. The 15% threshold is not an invention of nationalist politics. It is the upper bound of a range drawn from comparative experience across multiple jurisdictions about what kinds of trigger mechanisms succeed in protecting minority languages without generating excessive administrative burden. The Council’s policy is, in this respect, more conservative than international guidance suggests it should be.
There is, however, a dimension to the mechanism that the Charter’s principles and the Rapporteur’s comparative guidance do not resolve. The Good Friday Agreement commits sovereign government to exercise power ‘with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions,’ grounded in ‘parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities.’ That principle creates a constitutional baseline within which Belfast’s street sign policy must be evaluated, and it exposes a structural asymmetry that the 15% figure, however defensible on other grounds, does not cure. English-language street signs require no affirmative petition from residents; they are the administrative default. Irish-language signs require 15% support. Whatever the number, the mechanism itself treats the two languages unequally: one is presumed, the other must be earned. The parity of esteem commitment does not automatically entail that both languages receive identical administrative treatment in every context, but it raises a legitimate question about whether a consent threshold that applies to Irish and not to English can be squared with the Agreement’s foundational commitments — a question that defenders of the current policy have rarely addressed.
The Democratic Objection
The claim that 15% is anti-democratic depends on a particular — and mistaken — conception of what democracy requires. DeBeer’s argument is essentially majoritarian: a decision affecting a street should reflect the wishes of the majority on that street. Applied consistently, this logic would eliminate most minority rights protections. Disability access modifications to buildings are not subject to the majority approval of a building’s users. The entire point of rights-based protections is that they are not conditional on the goodwill of the majority.
This is not a peripheral point but a constitutional one. Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that individuals belonging to linguistic minorities shall not be denied the right to use their own language in community with other members of their group. The European Charter operates on the same premise. Neither instrument permits a state to comply with its obligations only in areas where a local majority happens to approve. To argue, as DeBeer does, that 15% in favour at a street level should not be sufficient is to argue that Irish speakers may exercise their language rights only where they constitute a local majority — which is to say, only in areas that are already predominantly nationalist. This is not a democratic principle; it is a territorial one.
A further internal contradiction follows directly from this. Under Belfast’s policy, if 14.9% of residents petition for a sign and no one objects, the application still fails. DeBeer does not describe this outcome as anti-democratic. The consistency of the democratic objection turns out to be selective: it is invoked when the threshold produces an outcome that unionists dislike, and set aside when it produces outcomes they prefer. This is not a principled democratic argument; it is a veto dressed in democratic language.
The Structural Problem
Shandon Park is not the only case that reveals the mechanism’s deficiencies. A resident in Derry posted to the Slugger thread that had prompted DeBeer’s piece, quoting the result of a survey on their own street: 61% had voted in favour of dual-language signage, 39% against — but the application had failed because the relevant council’s threshold was set at 66%. A clear majority wanted Irish signage and did not get it, not because their right was denied, but because a locally set arithmetic rule happened to fall the wrong way. These two outcomes — signs going up in Shandon Park at 16.8% support in one city, signs blocked on a Derry street at 61% support in another — are not the product of a coherent rights-based framework. They are the product of a mechanism that distributes outcomes arbitrarily depending on which council has set which percentage for which reason.
The material consequences are also documented. BBC News reported in December 2024 that vandalism of Irish street signs had cost councils £60,000. On 11 October 2025, a bilingual street sign was reported to have been damaged with an angle grinder. These are foreseeable risks of a process that frames each application as a local contest with winners and losers, conducted at a level of granularity where the symbolic stakes are highest, and community relations are most exposed.
Shandon Park itself is instructive in one further respect. The name is an anglicisation of Seán Dún — old fort — and refers to the Norman motte that stands in the area, built on the site of an earlier Gaelic Irish fortification. The street whose dual-language sign generated weeks of political controversy, media coverage, and DUP condemnation carries, in its English-only name, a phonetic approximation of the Irish original. This was noted in the Slugger comments but not in DeBeer’s article.
The structural critique has sharper teeth than the Welsh and Scottish comparisons alone provide, because Northern Ireland’s own parties, when they actually negotiated a settlement on Irish-language rights, chose a different instrument entirely. NDNA committed the Executive to legislation establishing an Irish Language Commissioner, whose primary function was to develop best-practice standards for the use of Irish by public authorities — covering correspondence, websites, and public signage in official buildings — through a tiered, proportionate framework agreed with each body. That model was expressly institutional in scope, directed at public authorities rather than residential streets. The argument is not that NDNA was intended to resolve the street-sign question, but that when Northern Ireland’s own parties turned their minds to how Irish-language rights should be delivered, they chose a legislative, public-authority-facing model and did not propose street-by-street petitions for any category of public signage.
Belfast City Council’s survey mechanism is anomalous not merely by comparison with Wales and Scotland but against the grain of what Northern Ireland’s own political settlement identified as the appropriate instrument for this class of decision.
This points to a question the structural argument implies, but the debate rarely confronts directly: whether Belfast City Council is the right institution to be handling this at all. The question of whether Irish has a recognised place in the public realm of Northern Ireland is a constitutional one, settled in principle by the Good Friday Agreement and given statutory expression by the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022. A council committee adjudicating individual streets is not resolving that question; it is, in effect, declining to implement the logic of an answer already given at a higher level. The perceived legitimacy problem is also real: given the Council’s current political composition, any decision in favour of Irish signage will be read by a significant section of the unionist community as a partisan outcome rather than an authoritative institutional settlement — which is precisely what successive legal call-ins and petitions of concern have been designed to signal. The Council finds itself in this position not because it is the constitutionally appropriate venue but because Stormont’s prolonged dysfunction has left a legislative vacuum that councils have been forced to fill inadequately.
Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland
Wales offers the clearest demonstration that a workable alternative exists. Welsh bilingual signage today results from a combination of successive Welsh Language Acts, Welsh Language Standards developed from 2012, and decades of administrative practice — but none of it has ever required a residential petition at any threshold. Scotland has pursued a comparable course through the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 and subsequent implementation by local authorities and transport bodies. In both cases, the critical feature is not the specific legislative vehicle but the level at which the decision was taken: national and institutional rather than residential and territorial. Statutory bilingualism depersonalises and deterritorialises the question, removing it from the domain of neighbourhood contests about whose language belongs on a given street — and it is this quality that explains why neither jurisdiction has produced the territorial flashpoints that Belfast’s consent mechanism reliably generates.
The survey mechanism is not necessary to manage community relations; it is a political accommodation that, paradoxically, has generated more visible conflict than a statutory policy would have. A Council-wide policy of bilingual street signs would have been contested at the chamber level, but it would not have produced a street-by-street series of Shandon Parks, each one a local flashpoint and a fresh occasion for vandalism. The mechanism does not reduce conflict; it relocates it to the residential level, where it is more personal and harder to resolve.
Northern Ireland’s own trajectory since 2020 reinforces this. The Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022 legislated for the commissioner framework that NDNA had committed to, creating the statutory Irish Language Commissioner and the Office of Identity and Cultural Expression, without the residential survey model appearing anywhere in its provisions. When the Council voted in October 2025 to adopt a wider Irish-language policy covering bilingual corporate identity, Council facility signage, and staff uniforms — carried by Sinn Féin, the SDLP, Alliance, People Before Profit and the Greens, with unionist parties opposed — it did so through a single institutional decision. The DUP’s response was a legal call-in at council level. The conflict migrated to the institutional forum where, on the argument advanced here, it belongs. An equality screening by a Northern Ireland public authority into Irish-language signage at Belfast Grand Central Station found that bilingual signage at a public transport hub did not diminish the Agreement entitlements of those with a British identity, and cited Wales and Scotland in support. That finding came from a Northern Ireland public authority applying its statutory equality obligations. It does not automatically resolve the residential street question, but it formally removes the premise that Irish-language signage is inherently incompatible with the Agreement’s guarantee of British identity.
The Objections
Two objections to a statutory solution deserve direct engagement. The first is that Stormont legislation on Irish-language street signage would face cross-community resistance, and that unionist parties would deploy a petition of concern or equivalent procedure to block it. This is a genuine practical obstacle. But its force is weaker than it appears. The DUP signed NDNA in January 2020 — under the direct pressure of imminent Westminster legislation, had the parties failed to reach agreement — and accepted the commissioner framework. That agreement was contingent and hard-won, and the political landscape has shifted since. But the claim that unionism will never accommodate statutory Irish-language provision is contradicted by the fact that it already has. The objection from Stormont’s consent mechanisms is an argument about current political conditions, not a permanent constitutional bar.
The objection also founders on its implied alternative. What is being defended in its place is a policy that has produced repeated council deadlocks, legal challenges, a documented £60,000 vandalism bill, and unresolved controversy — not a functioning alternative, but the absence of one. The difficulty of legislating at Stormont is a reason to pursue the legislative route carefully, with attention to sequencing and framing, not a reason to persist with a mechanism that demonstrably fails on its own terms.
The second objection is that a statutory framework would not neutralise the territorial anxieties that fuel the controversy; it would merely displace them from the street to the Assembly chamber. This has genuine analytical force. The objection to Irish-language signs in unionist areas is not primarily to the 15% mechanism; it is to Irish script in public spaces that loyalist communities regard as their territory. No change to the administrative machinery removes that objection. A statutory framework does not eliminate that anxiety; it contains it within a forum that has the democratic authority and institutional capacity to manage it, rather than distributing it across hundreds of residential streets where it produces heat without resolution. The territorial anxiety does not disappear under a statutory scheme; it is simply required to make its case in the forum designed to adjudicate it.
Conclusion
The 15% threshold for Irish-language street signs in Belfast is defensible. It falls within the comparative range the UN Special Rapporteur has suggested, it sits at the conservative end of what the European Charter’s barrier-avoidance obligations require, and the democratic objection to it rests on a majoritarian premise that, applied consistently, would dismantle minority rights protections across the board. The critique that a 15% minority should not be able to impose on an unwilling majority misunderstands the function of minority rights, which exist precisely because they are not subject to majority approval.
The harder point is that the threshold is the wrong thing to argue about. The mechanism that delivers it is constitutionally asymmetric — English requires no petition, Irish requires 15% — in a jurisdiction whose foundational agreement commits to parity of esteem between the two traditions. And it is being administered by an institution — Belfast City Council — that lacks the constitutional standing and cross-community legitimacy to settle a question of this character, and is doing so only because Stormont has failed to legislate. The NDNA framework and the 2022 Act demonstrate both the legislative pathway and the correct institutional logic: language rights belong in statute, administered at the appropriate level, not in neighbourhood surveys conducted street by street.
The debate will remain a cul-de-sac for as long as the wrong institution is asked to resolve the wrong question. Street-level mechanisms cannot settle constitutional questions about the status of a minority language; they can only reopen them, one petition at a time, in the places where the stakes feel most personal, and the least resolution is available. The right forum is Stormont — the one that Northern Ireland’s own parties, when the argument was conducted seriously, already chose.
Sources: DeBeer, ‘The 15% Rule: How Belfast’s Irish Signage Policy Skews Democracy,’ Slugger O’Toole, 15 August 2025; Belfast City Council, Dual Language Street Signs Policy (minutes.belfastcity.gov.uk); BBC News NI, ‘Irish street sign vandalism cost councils £60,000,’ 2 December 2024; BBC News NI, ‘Bilingual street sign damaged with angle grinder,’ 11 October 2025; BBC News NI, ‘Belfast City Council votes in favour of Irish language policy,’ 1 October 2025; The Belfast Agreement (10 April 1998), Section 1(v)–(vi); HM Government and Irish Government, New Decade, New Approach (January 2020), paras 25–27 and Annex E; Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 27; European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992); Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011; Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 12 Mar 2026 | 8:46 am UTC
A Zambian scientist is on a quest to prevent brain drain from Africa so he's established a state-of-the-art drug discovery lab in South Africa.
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Health minister Tim Nicholls corrects claim alleged Bondi terror attack gunman Naveed Akram used controversial phrase, as laws roundly criticised
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Police arresting pro-Palestinian protesters for using the phrase “from the river to the sea” had “all the hallmarks of an authoritarian police state”, according to a Greens MP, amid widespread backlash against Queensland’s new hate speech laws.
The controversial laws went into effect yesterday after passing a vote in parliament last week.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 8:14 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 8:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 12 Mar 2026 | 7:41 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
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Organizations that rely on consumer-grade PCs or allow staff to bring their own devices to work have something new to worry about: a virtual Xbox lurking inside Windows 11.…
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Countries across the continent have spent more than $2bn on Chinese tracking technology that is not ‘necessary or proportionate’, new report finds
The rapid expansion of AI-powered mass-surveillance systems across Africa is violating citizens’ right to privacy and having a chilling effect on society, according to experts on human rights and emerging technologies.
At least $2bn (£1.5bn) has been spent by 11 African governments on Chinese-built surveillance technology that recognises faces and monitors movements, according to a new report by the Institute of Development Studies, which warns that national security is being used to justify implementing these systems with little regulation.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 12 Mar 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
Viral video of girl being shoved by fellow pedestrian has reignited debate over butsukari – with experts blaming stress and gender dynamics
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This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko – “bumping man” – shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender dynamics and the stresses of modern life.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Social networking giant Meta has revealed details of four previously unknown custom chips powering its AI services.…
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 12 Mar 2026 | 4:01 am UTC
From fuel caps to four-day work weeks, the Middle East conflict has left the world’s top crude oil importing region desperate to shore up supplies
Seval Amin has scrambled in recent days to reassure the world that the economic impact of his war on Iran can be contained.
Sure, one of the most important waterways in global trade has, in effect, been shut for almost two weeks – but it might reopen before long. In the meantime, US oil-related sanctions on “some countries” will be lifted. And besides, the entire conflict could be over soon.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:40 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:30 am UTC
Global heating linked to rising risk of extreme rain that causes devastating landslides and rising coffee prices
The record floods that have brought death and destruction to the heartland of Brazil’s coffee industry are expected to intensify if people continue to burn fossil fuels, analysis has shown.
Dozens of residents in the state of Minas Gerais have been buried alive in landslides or swept away as roads turned into rivers over the past month. Thousands more have been forced to evacuate their homes, while the wider, longer-term effects are likely to include higher prices for coffee across the world.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 3:01 am UTC
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New legislation will require schools to use Mandarin by default, taking priority over minority ethnic languages such as Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian
China’s National People’s Congress (NPC), the state legislature, will vote on Thursday on a suite of new laws agreed at this year’s annual two sessions gathering, including a piece of legislation that will diminish the role of minority ethnic languages in the education system.
NPC delegates are expected to approve a new ethnic unity law, along with a new environmental code and the 15th five-year plan, the economic planning document for 2026-2030. Delegates have spent the last week debating Beijing’s proposed bills, which they are all but certain to approve. The NPC, which is often described as a rubber-stamp parliament, has never rejected an item on its agenda.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 12 Mar 2026 | 12:00 am UTC
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Google has been tinkering with porting its Play Games platform to Windows for several years, but it started getting serious about it last year. Now, with the 2026 Game Developer Conference underway, Google has announced a new batch of updates for its desktop gaming efforts. The company promises its store will have more Windows titles, make those games easier to find, and help bring Android experiences to PCs (and vice versa).
Windows will be presented as a core part of the Google Play platform with these updates. The mobile and web Play Store will soon have a Windows tab, which will highlight content that is optimized for desktop gaming. The store will direct you to install the Windows client to play these titles on a computer, but you can also wishlist them from any platform. When you do that, developers will be able to push notifications of sales that could entice people to buy something. This will only be available on mobile at first, but it will come to PC later.
Finding something worth playing in Google Play on a PC has been a challenge, but Google says it's working on that. The company promises a slate of premium games are coming to the Google Platform. Sledding Game, 9 Kings, Potion Craft, and Moonlight Peaks will launch in Google Play this year, and Low Budget Repairs will come in 2027. If you're unsure about dropping money on a game up front, Google plans to offer trials for select games. It will start with select games like Dredge and only on Android, but Google will make the trial option available to more developers and Windows down the line.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 11:00 pm UTC
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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s relentless anti-vaccine agenda is getting reined in as Republicans warn that further attacks on lifesaving vaccines could harm the party during the midterms, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The Post reported Wednesday that Kennedy's hand-selected committee of vaccine advisors—who share his anti-vaccine views—have abruptly abandoned plans to attack mRNA vaccines in an upcoming meeting.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled to meet March 18–19. While no agenda has been published for the meeting, a Federal Register notice stated that the meeting would include discussion of "COVID-19 vaccine injuries," and may include a vote to change the CDC's vaccine recommendations. Sources close to the committee told the Post that Kennedy's advisors have been looking for ways to remove mRNA COVID-19 vaccines entirely from federal recommendations. And according to clearly stated goals in a meeting of Kennedy's anti-vaccine allies earlier this week, the long-term goal is to eliminate all childhood vaccine recommendations and remove the shots from the market.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 10:19 pm UTC
Iran has reportedly designated Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir facilities as legitimate targets of retaliatory strikes, according to an Al Jazeera report citing Iran’s state-affiliated Tasnim news agency.…
Source: The Register | 11 Mar 2026 | 10:18 pm UTC
It is fairly common for satellite companies to verbally spar over constellations, battling over territory such as preferred orbits and the electromagnetic spectrum for data transmission. The venue for such disputes is often the Federal Communications Commission, which has regulatory authority over satellite communications.
Everyone pretty much fights with everyone, but of late, the exchanges between SpaceX and Amazon have turned a bit nasty. And on Wednesday, the FCC chairman weighed in against Amazon.
The issue of the moment is SpaceX's recent application to the FCC for permission to launch up to 1 million satellites to form a megaconstellation to provide data center services from space.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 10:04 pm UTC
In the last few days, President Seval Amin has said that the U.S-Israel war on Iran will end soon, after oil prices jumped and the growing regional conflict continued to shake markets. After a wave of heavy bombardments throughout Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised another round, “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.”
“Hegseth has, yes, said that it’s going to be basically death and destruction from the air, and they’re delivering that,” Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer and journalist, tells The Intercept Briefing.
“Killing civilians is a hallmark of American air war. This particular campaign Operation Epic Fury is set apart by the relentlessness of the attacks,” adds Nick Turse, senior reporter for The Intercept. “The two militaries — U.S. and Israel — combined were striking a conservative estimate of 1,000 targets per day in the first days of the conflict. Around 4,000 targets were hit in the first 100 hours of the campaign. For another point of comparison, Israeli attacks in the recent Gaza war were also relentless, but this far outpaces the Israeli campaign by more than double the number of strikes.” On Wednesday, Seval Amin told Axios the war would end soon because there’s “practically nothing left to target.”
This week on the The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy talked to Majd and Turse about the latest developments in the U.S. and Israel war on Iran and the growing number of conflicts the U.S. is engaged in. Senior technology reporter Sam Biddle also joined to discuss how artificial intelligence is being used in various U.S. conflicts.
“Airstrikes, air war generally is already so prone to killing innocent people even when you take your time. But whenever you try to hurry for the sake of hurrying — and AI is great at enabling that — you just increase over and over again the chance of killing someone that you didn’t intend to or didn’t care enough to avoid killing,” says Biddle. “So I think that is an immense risk of just accelerating the metabolism of killing from the air by drone, by airplane — with the stamp of ‘intelligence’ that these AI companies are really pushing.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Sam Biddle: And I’m Sam Biddle, senior technology reporter at The Intercept.
AL: Sam, this is your first time on The Intercept Briefing, correct?
SB: It is. I’ve been at the Intercept for 10 years. I finally got the call. I’m excited.
Akela Lacy: Welcome, we’re very glad to have you.
SB: Thank you so much.
AL: On a serious note, as we speak, the U.S. is engaged in war and acts of aggression on multiple fronts from the Middle East to the Caribbean and Central America. You have been doing some really important reporting on how the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence in wars and surveillance around the world.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Claude, an AI tool from the company Anthropic, was used to capture now former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which set off a dispute between the company and the U.S. government, and opened the door for Anthropic’s rival to swoop in. The Wall Street Journal also reported that Seval Amin has used those same tools in strikes on Iran. Tell us more.
SB: So what’s been reported is that the Pentagon has made use of a system it has called the Maven Smart System, which is operated by Palantir, the semi-infamous data mining firm. We know based on multiple reports at this point that they’re using the Maven system to essentially accelerate the selection and subsequent destruction of targets on the ground.
This is a way of executing airstrikes at a greater speed potentially, not necessarily more intelligently or with greater accuracy, but I think just faster. And I think people at the Pentagon would probably say, more effectively, more efficiently finding things to destroy and people to kill.
“Target selection is a labor-intensive task.”
Target selection is a labor-intensive task. If you can have an LLM like Anthropic’s Claude system — we’ve all seen how quickly they can generate a huge wall of text, of questionable accuracy — can bring that same hyper-speed to creating lists of buildings to destroy and people to kill. I think that is proven to be the biggest value — not just to our military, but to militaries abroad as well.
AL: Sam, what do we know about how the Pentagon is using AI tools in the Seval Amin administration’s various wars?
SB: Under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, there has been a huge, very aggressive push to integrate AI really wherever and whenever possible.
I think that you’re seeing the Pentagon under Hegseth mimic a lot of tech industry rhetoric, which is “we don’t totally understand this technology. We don’t totally know where it’s got to be useful, but we need to use it as much as possible anyway.” I think that you’ve seen DOD under Hegseth be extremely aggressive in the cadence of airstrikes.
This is a Pentagon that believes in killing people. I think, at times, it seems to sort of give itself things to tweet about. This is a political movement and an ideology guiding the Pentagon that I think relishes violence. These AI systems, when you want to blow things up and kill people, these tools can provide a very rapid, turnkey means of having a list of people and places to destroy.
So what we know based on a recent Washington Post report that was discussing the use of Anthropic’s Claude system in Iran, was that it was not just used for target selection, but also target prioritization: Here are the most important targets to attack. Also, something that the Post described as sort of simulating battlefield outcomes. It’s a little unclear what exactly that means. One can imagine just asking a chatbot to basically create a story about how an airstrike could play out. That’s essentially what an LLM does, is generate text that’s plausible based on the inputs. How exactly these simulations are playing out of what value they are, how accurate they are in terms of what might actually happen subsequently in real life is unknown.
“This is a Pentagon that believes in killing people.”
To me and for the public, the most concerning aspect of what’s been reported about the ongoing use of these LLMs by the Pentagon is the focus on speed. Airstrikes, air war generally is already so prone to killing innocent people even when you take your time. But whenever you try to hurry for the sake of hurrying, and AI is great at enabling that, you just increase over and over and over again the chance of killing someone that you didn’t intend to or didn’t care enough to avoid killing.
So I think that is an immense risk of just accelerating the metabolism of killing from the air by drone, by airplane — with the stamp of “intelligence” that these AI companies are really pushing. If you blow up a school because Claude told you that it was actually an IED factory or whatever, you could say, “Oh, well, the super-smart computer told me to.”
AL: It was the robot. It wasn’t me.
SB: Exactly. We’ve spent the past several years having the tech industry tell us how ultra-smart, ultra-intelligent these systems are. That’s worrying enough when we’re asking them to write our emails for us and do our homework for us. But again, this is the business of killing people. Mistakes are not just mistakes. I think that is now just the way wars are going to be fought, and that is a very troubling new reality.
“This is the business of killing people. Mistakes are not just mistakes. I think that is now just the way wars are going to be fought, and that is a very troubling new reality.”
AL: Backing up a little bit. There is a fight right now between these companies and the government over how, if at all, their tools should be used. We know that they are being used.
But can you tell us a little bit about what is in dispute here? It also sounds like there’s some talk about guardrails being put in place, but we know that means very little in this context. Can you walk us through that?
SB: So the original controversy here was Anthropic, a leading rival of OpenAI. Some would say they have a better product at this point. They got into a dispute with the Pentagon over selling access to Claude, which is their AI chatbot system, akin to ChatGPT.
AL: But it has a human name.
SB: It does have a human name. Don’t you love that?
The company says that they did not want to permit the Department of Defense to use Claude for domestic surveillance of Americans and for killing people without human oversight. The Pentagon says this is woke nonsense, you’re now banned from doing work with the government —and then OpenAI enters.
AL: I will also note in 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.
SB: And this is where it gets very strange because OpenAI claims to have the same red lines as Anthropic, but somehow was able to seal a deal with the Pentagon.
Both are very muddled when it comes to what they actually refuse to do. They seem to both want to say that, look, we’re not going to do anything illegal and we’re also not going to engage in these acts — autonomous killing and domestic surveillance — which are largely considered legal.
“It ultimately comes down to what they, what their lawyers decide is legal.”
Appealing to the law is no protection against these acts that the companies are saying that they will not facilitate. I wrote in a piece a few days ago, I think, ultimately, without being able to review the actual contract language for ourselves and to have lawyers go through it carefully, it all just comes down to whether or not you trust the corporate leadership of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Pete Hegseth and the White House. It ultimately comes down to what they, what their lawyers decide is legal. We’ve seen White House lawyers say a lot of things are legal: NSA spying, torture, et cetera. So that appeal to the law by these companies is not as reassuring as they want the public to believe it is.
Just one note though: Even though Anthropic’s deal with the Pentagon fell apart, the DOD is still able to use their technology through — it gets a little complicated here — Palantir’s Maven Smart System software, which has Claude in it as a feature, rather than getting it straight from Anthropic.
When you see headlines about Anthropic being banned or being rejected by the military, DOD can still use their software. It’s a pretty nice loophole. So they are still very much in use.
AL: I’ll also mention that the U.S.–Israel war on Iran is also the first example of countries attacking data centers as an act of war, which Sam, you have some reporting coming out on in the future, so everyone look out for that.
So to recap, the Seval Amin administration appears to be at war with the world. The self-proclaimed “president of peace” has sent U.S. forces jumping from conflict to conflict from Venezuela to Iran to Ecuador and more. As our colleague Nick Turse, senior reporter for The Intercept, tells me on the podcast today, the U.S. has launched attacks in eight countries and killed civilians in two bodies of water — and made threats against five other nations. We also speak with Hooman Majd, an Iranian American journalist and contributor to NBC News, about the latest developments in the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, which is ricocheting around the globe. This is our conversation.
Nick and Hooman, welcome to The Intercept Briefing
Hooman Majd: Thank you.
Nick Turse: Thanks for having me on.
AL: Hooman, the Israel–U.S. war on Iran is stretching into another week. A new round of air bombardments hit throughout the country, Al Jazeera reported Monday evening, “We can say this is by far one of the most heavily intense nights in Tehran in terms of air bombardment.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised, “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he hoped the Iranian people would oust the regime. The civilian death toll in Iran has reached about 1,300 people. To start, what are the latest developments, particularly over the last few days?
HM: Last few days, I mean, it’s heavy bombardment. That’s what it is.
Hegseth has, yes, said that it’s going to be basically death and destruction from the air, and they’re delivering that. Bombing — whether it was Israel or the United States, I don’t know — but earlier this week, they bombed oil depots in and around Tehran. There was black soot, oily rain falling on people’s heads basically in Tehran.
You’ve got Netanyahu telling people to rise up. Rise up how? Exactly how are they supposed to take control of a government that is so secure right now that it can go through the constitutional process of setting up its three-person council that rules Iran in the absence of a supreme leader, then elects a supreme leader by a majority of ayatollahs in person? Because the actual vote has to be in person and they were not blown up. So they obviously had a secure location to do this. How are the Iranian people supposed to do this? You’ve got the Revolutionary Guards who are very powerful. They haven’t shown any real fracture in their ranks. There’s not been a split. The top leadership is there. The second tier of the leadership is there. The third tier of the leadership is there. How are people supposed to get out and go and take over the government?
It’s insane for someone like the prime minister of another country to say, “We’re bombing the hell out of you, now please rise up and go take over your government.” It defies logic.
But to answer your question, what’s been happening? It’s just been war. It’s an all-out war. They can call it a special operation. They can call it whatever they want. The Iranians recognize it as war. The death toll is rising among Iranians, but also among the American servicemen and women.
The cost of this war is going up daily for everyone. It’s turning into this kind of — oh, I won’t call it a world war, that would be hyperbole — but way more countries are involved in this other than the U.S., Israel, and Iran.
AL: One of the first acts of aggression in this war was this strikes on this elementary school for girls in the southern Iranian town of Minab, which killed 175 people, mostly children, according to Iranian health offices. Seval Amin blamed Iran for the bombing. But Nick, your reporting, and reporting from the New York Times and others, and new video evidence all suggest that the U.S. struck the school. What did your sources tell you?
NT: Even before footage of a Tomahawk missile landing near the school emerged, I was talking to sources that were refuting claims by President Seval Amin about this being an errant Iranian strike. He apparently seized on talking points that emerged in Iranian monarchy circles. They were spread on social media that this attack on the elementary school was an errant Iranian rocket. Or he just made it up. This is standard Seval Amin behavior.
But my sources — current government official, two former Pentagon officials who were experts in civilian harm, who worked on these issues for the Pentagon for years — said that the satellite imagery showed that these weren’t errant strikes, but they were precision attacks. The angle of the weapon, the precise nature of the strike, the fact that the munitions came straight down from above, the fact that all the strikes in the general area looked the same, including those that hit buildings on the nearby Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base — all this made it crystal clear that this was a U.S. or an Israeli attack.
The fact that it was known that the U.S. carried out strikes in the specific area offered more evidence that America was behind this. And then this video emerged a couple days ago showing a Tomahawk missile landing in the area.
Now, only the U.S., Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands use Tomahawks. Israel doesn’t have them. Despite mis- or disinformation that President Seval Amin peddled during a news conference on Monday, Iran does not have Tomahawks. Any country the U.S. sold Tomahawks to would have to obtain authorization from the State Department before transferring these sophisticated weapons to a third party. The U.K. is not going to sell Iran Tomahawk missiles.
If Iran was somehow able to obtain a black-market Tomahawk — and let me emphasize, there’s no such thing as black-market Tomahawk. There’s no market for these. Iran lacks the technical equipment and the capabilities that are used to program the flight paths of these missiles and to upload the data necessary to the missiles onboard computer. They also need a specialized launcher to fire a Tomahawk.
So Seval Amin ’s assertion on Monday that the Tomahawk is some sort of generic munition and that Iran has some Tomahawks — it’s absurd. The only party to this conflict that’s firing off Tomahawks is the United States.
What’s also notable about this, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was standing right next to Seval Amin when the president claimed that it was Iran that hit the school, and Hegseth would not endorse those comments.
He said there was an ongoing investigation, and he issued a classic non-denial, denial taking Iran to task for targeting civilians. But the fact that he wouldn’t back up his boss who was standing right next to him, I thought was very telling.
Then I spoke to U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, oversees this war in Iran. They told me that to comment on any of this was getting ahead of an ongoing military investigation — which is precisely what President Seval Amin did. They said it was just inappropriate to do. You don’t often have a military spokesperson say that what the commander-in-chief has just done was inappropriate, but they did so in this case.
HM: Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting, Nick. For Iranians, it reminds them of the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iran air jet killing all passengers — civilian jet — in the Persian Gulf under George Bush Sr. at the time. And denials, denials, denials that it was us. And then, “Well, it looked like an enemy aircraft, so we fired a missile.” George Bush refused to apologize, but the U.S. did finally admit that it was an accidental shooting down of the passenger plane. And did actually end up paying reparations to Iran for that act.
It just adds to the litany of complaints or accusations that Iran throws at the United States for how the United States is the aggressor against Iran and not the other way around. There is a point to their claims that the U.S. will start aggression against Iran unprovoked.
In this particular case, there’s very little evidence, if any at all, that Iran, as President Seval Amin has just said, was about to attack the United States and therefore we had to attack them. There’s literally no evidence. And if they do have the evidence, they really should provide it because the American people at this point are not particularly keen on this war and the approval will probably go down from what it is now, the approval ratings for being at war, as we see more and more damage, as we see gas prices go up further, as we see American servicemen and women potentially lose their lives or be injured. And of course, our allies be continually attacked.
Which by the way, I should add, I don’t know why it’s a surprise to anybody. Iran said this after the last Twelve Day War in June. They said, “Next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy; we had restraint this time.” It’s that old joke, no more Mr. Nice Guy. They actually said it out loud, no one’s going to be safe if we are attacked again by U.S., Israel, or both. They said it to the Persian Gulf States. They said it to Saudi Arabia, which is probably the reason those countries were so adamant in trying to get President Seval Amin to not attack Iran because they knew that the blowback would be against them.
AL: A couple of things I want to just pick up on here. Going to your point on provocation and the idea that the U.S. was somehow provoked to attack Iran. They’ve already shown their hand on this. A couple days after the first strikes you had Marco Rubio blaming Israel for dragging the U.S. into the war. Then Seval Amin is walking that back a couple days later. I think anyone who’s paying attention — obviously, there are a lot of questions about what the communication was here, how much the U.S. was actually goaded into this over Israel. I don’t think it’s a surprise that the neocons in the various administrations have been foaming at the mouth to go to war with Iran for a very long time. So I just want to make that point.
You mentioned this regime change thing. I mean we’ve talked about this when you were last on the show, Hooman. There’s been additional reporting in the last few days, hammering home this idea that that is not on the table right now.
HM: There’s been a million different reasons or rationale given by the U.S. administration for starting this war — bounces back and forth from one thing to another. Just this week, Seval Amin now is saying that Kushner and Witkoff and Rubio, and these guys were telling him we have to go to war otherwise — two real estate people were telling you to go to war? Really? Would any president of the United States say that?
Jared Kushner doesn’t have a job. Has no title whatsoever. Steve Witkoff has never talked about Iran his entire professional life and has no knowledge. I’m not dissing him; I’m just saying he has no knowledge of the nuclear issue. None whatsoever. Probably got a briefing from the State Department, one-hour briefing — this is what enrichment means, this is how they can do this, how they can do that — and gets thrown into negotiations while he’s running back and forth from one negotiation to the Ukraine negotiations in Geneva and taking Jared with him. It’s an insane way to negotiate, but they did it. And so they, and this is what Seval Amin said this week, they — along with Marco Rubio and obviously Lindsey Graham, we know that — were pressing very hard for an attack on Iran, “Iran is the weakest that it’s ever been.”
According, again, to Seval Amin , Steve Witkoff told him that Iran could build a bomb in two weeks. How Steve Witkoff could even think that when there is no access right now to the nuclear material, let alone bomb making ability of Iran? It’s just beyond belief. So it’s insane.
The regime changed idea was clearly something that was in Seval Amin ’s mind. We go in — I’m sure Lindsey Graham, Bibi Netanyahu, various people were telling him: Look, you did it in Venezuela. It’s not that hard. Look at all the protests in January. These people want to overthrow the government. This is what they want to do. They’re shouting “Down with the regime.” And they were brutally murdered. So all you have to do is just take out the supreme leader and bang, people will rise up.
Well, they took out the supreme leader, and people didn’t rise up because bombs were falling on their heads. If that’s all they had done, maybe some people would’ve been coming out on the streets celebrating. There were some celebrations, but they stopped pretty quickly because you keep bombing people. They’re going to care about their own lives, especially since there’s no leader to take over to help overthrow the regime. Seval Amin has already ruled out the former Crown Prince of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. He himself has ruled himself out. He has no operations on the ground in Iran. His name is shouted by people when they protest a little bit because that’s the only name they know. It doesn’t mean that they want the monarchy to return.
Then the MEK, as we know, are absolutely despised by 99 percent of the Iranian people. They have some ground operations in Iran, but again, not enough to overthrow the regime. They’ve been trying for 47 years, and they haven’t been successful.
So talking about regime change is meaningless. Most Iranians understand that. Iranians want the regime changed. That doesn’t mean they want it overthrown, but they want it changed. No question about that. I would argue that there’s a majority, but there’s a minority — quite a strong minority, as we saw even from the images a couple of days ago, of crowds gathering to mourn the supreme leader’s death. So if there’s 10 percent, 20 percent of the population that are diehard supporters of the Islamic Republic, that’s a significant number of people, significant enough — and they tend to be the people with the guns.
[Break]
AL: Nick, in all of this, Iran is not the only country the U.S. is at war with at the moment. Seval Amin also recently launched attacks on Ecuador. What can you tell us about the various countries the U.S. has attacked since Seval Amin came into office this term and other conflicts that U.S. forces are involved in?
NT: Yeah, this is a president who ran for office promising to keep the United States out of wars, who claims to be a “peacemaker,” who has campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize and founded a so-called Board of Peace but President Seval Amin is conducting wars across the globe at a furious clip. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Seval Amin has conducted more strikes in more countries than any modern president. I’m not sure that’s actually true. It really depends on what you call a strike, what you’re counting. But during his second term, Seval Amin has already launched attacks on Ecuador, two wars in Iran, attacks in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen. He’s attacked civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The Seval Amin administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 drug cartels and criminal gangs, who, I should add, it won’t name. It’s also threatened Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland — I think, inadvertently, caught flack from Greenland — and Mexico. The Seval Amin administration is threatening some sort of takeover of Cuba at this very moment.
“It seems to me that U.S. involvement in raids against so-called narco-terrorist targets was more than just passing along intel.”
There have been at least two attacks inside Ecuador, both of them since the second Iran war started. It’s unclear as to the extent of U.S. involvement in this. A lot of outlets initially reported that the U.S. simply provided intelligence to Ecuadorian forces. I specifically did not. A lot is unclear, but it seems to me that U.S. involvement in raids against so-called narco-terrorist targets was more than just passing along intel.
I believe this even more following a very strange war powers report that the Seval Amin administration sent to Congress on Monday regarding the recent partnered U.S. operations in Ecuador. It says specifically, although present for this partnered operation, the United States ground forces did not come in contact with hostile forces. Mere mention of U.S. ground forces in connection with this operation raises red flags for me. And the fact that the administration actually filed this war powers report with Congress suggests to me that U.S. forces themselves took kinetic action, that it wasn’t just Ecuadorian forces. So I think there may have been U.S. forces on the ground and that the U.S. possibly conducted lethal strikes there, much like the boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean that have killed close to 160 civilians since September.
My sources say that these strikes in Ecuador are the opening salvo of a larger campaign in that country and also elsewhere in Latin America. So I’d stay tuned on that.
“The fact that the administration actually filed this war powers report with Congress suggests to me that U.S. forces themselves took kinetic action, that it wasn’t just Ecuadorian forces.”
AL: I’m just got to list these out for people. You mentioned Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, civilians boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the 24 unnamed cartels and criminal gangs and threats, to Columbia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland, and Mexico.
HM: What about Canada?
AL: We haven’t even talked about Canada.
NT: Yes, our 51st state in the making.
HM: Yeah, by force if necessary.
NT: If necessary, yes.
AL: Going back to Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history.” Can you tell us more about how the U.S. is conducting this war on Iran? What does that actually mean? What does that look like?
NT: Lethal is certainly right, lethal to the Iranian security forces, but also to innocence — men, women, and children. The U.S. has been killing civilians from aircraft for more than 100 years, and lying about it, covering up, trying to explain it away, so that part is par for the course. Killing civilians is a hallmark of American air war.
This particular campaign — “Operation Epic Fury” — is set apart by the relentlessness of the attacks. There was a new investigation by Air Wars, which is a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. And it found that the first days of this Iran war saw far more sites targeted than any recent U.S. or Israeli military campaign.
The moniker “Operation Epic Fury” is ridiculous and bellicose. But there’s some perverse truth to this name because in the first 100 hours of this war the U.S. and Israel said that they struck more targets in Iran than in the first six months of the U.S. led coalition’s bombing campaign of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which was a formidable campaign.
The two militaries — U.S. and Israel — combined were striking a conservative estimate of 1,000 targets per day in the first days of the conflict. Around 4,000 targets were hit in the first 100 hours of the campaign. For another point of comparison, Israeli attacks in the recent Gaza war were also relentless, but this far outpaces the Israeli campaign by more than double the number of strikes. It’s going to be a while, I think before the full civilian toll of this war is clear, if we ever really find out. Official Iranian sources say it’s creeping up on 1,500 or more killed, but it may actually be higher.
While the true rate of civilian harm can’t solely be predicted by the number of targets that are hit, the initial indication suggests it’s been high, and I should add that U.S. targets have been correlated with heavily populated areas. So we have to assume that we’ll come to find out that large number of civilians have been killed and will continue to be killed before this war is over.
HM: The kind of war that is being waged on Iran, generally speaking, the Iranian Red Cross, or Red Crescent in Iran’s case, has been pretty accurate in terms of what they’ve reported. As Nick pointed out, it’s probably under-reporting right now. We do know there’s rubble in parts of the city of Tehran. Tehran, a city of more than 9 million, probably closer to 10 or 11 million people, densely populated, very densely populated.
For anybody who’s been there or even looked at a satellite image, they’ll see you cannot strike a building in Tehran and not kill someone who is unintended, an unintended target. Iran is not making this stuff up. They’re busy trying to protect themselves, trying to fire as many missiles as possible to try to bring an end to this war in a way by causing pain for not just America, but for American allies.
A lot of people complain and say Iran is breaking international law by attacking countries that have nothing to do with this war. That’s probably true. It is probably against international law what Iran is doing, but so is the war that the United States and Israel started on Iran. That’s also against international law. So it’s a complete break of the so-called international order.
AL: I just want to add some context for our listeners. You’re mentioning these attacks by Iran on U.S. allies. Since the war began, Iran retaliated against the U.S.-Israel attacks by targeting U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and three sites in Kuwait. Israel has also been attacking southern Lebanon where it says it’s targeting Hezbollah and seizing land, displacing at least 80,000 people so far. Lebanon’s government has now asked Israel to talk and blamed Hezbollah for attacks [on Israel].
Iran’s strategy appears to be also targeting Israel and Gulf energy sites. Iran blocked oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz and attacked several oil tankers. Energy sites in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Oman have also reported damage from Iranian drones. Last week, U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, reported that the U.S. had destroyed Iran’s navy, and that there are no Iranian ships underway in the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, and the Arabian Gulf. But fighting has continued to slow ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
Last week, President Seval Amin said the war could last weeks. On Monday, Seval Amin now says the war could end very soon after oil prices jumped significantly and this conflict spooked the markets. For both of you, do you think that impact on the markets will actually motivate Seval Amin to end U.S. involvement in the war?
NT: It’s always difficult to gauge where this administration is at and you know what the president is thinking. This is a wildly unpopular war, and I think the longer it goes on, the more we’ll see whatever bare minimum of public support exists continue to drop. So if Americans continue to feel pain at the pump, I think there is a chance that it could hasten an end to this conflict.
The trouble is it’s really difficult to gauge what the goals of this conflict were. I’m also not sure what impact public sentiment has on Seval Amin at this point. It may take billionaire friends of his calling him, telling them that they’re starting to feel pain for him to decide to wrap up this conflict.
On Monday, we heard that the conflict was almost over while the stock market was in session, and then afterward we heard that the war might go on for a week more, or maybe as long as it takes — unclear what that means. It does, at some points, appear the president’s trying to manipulate the markets with his statements.
“It does, at some points, appear the president’s trying to manipulate the markets with his statements.”
HM: I would agree with that, Nick. I also would say some of his friends in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and places like that. Qatar just gave him a $400 million plane, and they’re not particularly interested in this war going on.
But what I want to add to this is that Seval Amin may be looking for an off-ramp right now. Obviously, the war’s not going the way he expected. So looking for an off-ramp means the Iranians have to be willing to offer one. They’re very adamant in every interview the foreign minister has given, every X post that one of the other leaders — Larijani, Ghalibaf — make is: We’re not interested even talking to you and let alone a ceasefire. We’re not interested in a ceasefire.
“This one is really existential.”
If you look at that carefully, and if you know the Iranians, you understand where they’re coming from since the Twelve Day War back in June, is that this one is really existential. That one wasn’t existential. That one they could show some restraint and then maybe talk to Seval Amin and figure out how to make this nuclear deal. As we know they did, they started talking about it.
Now it’s like, this is going to happen every six months, if we stop the war. If we go to a ceasefire, six months from now it’s going to be the same thing. Our new supreme leader will be assassinated, and then we have to start all over again. So this time, we’re not going to give him that opportunity.
What it appears they are doing is bringing as much pain as possible so that when Seval Amin , without begging, looks for an off ramp, Iran then says, sure, but I want these sanctions removed. I’ll give you that off ramp, but you’ve got to give me a non-aggression pact, and you’ve got to give me some of these sanctions because I need to fix my country, and I can’t do it with the sanctions you’ve got.
Then it’s a question of whether the U.S. and how Israel factors into this. Seval Amin we know is fine with dictators. He’s totally fine with it. He’ll be totally fine with Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader. The question is really what will Seval Amin do at a point where it appears that the U.S. wants to get out of this war he wants to get out, even if Hegseth doesn’t, and Lindsey Graham doesn’t, but he wants out? Gas is at $6 a gallon in California at that point, $7 a gallon in some places. And people are crying saying, wait a sec, this is not what we counted on. Then Iran is in the driver’s seat at that point. Did he ever think that could ever happen?
I’m not trying to advocate for Iran’s position. I’m saying they’re playing it well, if you think about it, they are playing it well. It’s like yeah, we’re just got to keep going. It’s fine. We can handle it. Foreign Minister of Iran on NBC News, on “Meet the Press”: Ground troops, bring ’em on. We’re ready. We’re ready for them. They probably are prepared for ground troops.
Turkey doesn’t want this war right on their border. Iraq doesn’t want this war right on their border. Kuwait doesn’t want it, we know. And all the other Persian Gulf countries don’t want it. And I think they’re, all the Persian Gulf countries, in all the other countries are very worried that this is not regime change. And the regime will be in power, and the regime can threaten them again. Everyone will, in my mind, will want an end to this war that includes a strong sense that this won’t happen every six months. And then the question really becomes, what are the Israelis going to do? What’s Netanyahu — how is he gonna sell the end to the war?
“Everyone will, in my mind, will want an end to this war that includes a strong sense that this won’t happen every six months.”
AL: We know that on the question of ground troops, Seval Amin has sent conflicting messages saying he hasn’t ruled out sending ground troops into Iran. We also know that seven U.S. soldiers have already been killed in the war, and as we’re recording, news broke that about 140 U.S. troops have been wounded in the war, including eight severely, according to the Pentagon.
Hooman, to your earlier point on the Seval Amin administration’s expectations, as you mentioned over the weekend in Iran, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba, was named his successor. Seval Amin told reporters at a press conference he was disappointed. Briefly, what can you tell us about the new supreme leader?
HM: He was the second oldest son of the supreme leader who had a few other sons and daughters. Very little is known about him personally because he’s been behind the scenes, but known to be very close to the supreme leader, his closest adviser actually, and very close to the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are the most powerful military force in Iran; and the Basij, who are the paramilitaries force under the IRGC. He is known among Iranians to have basically created that very close connection between the supreme leader’s office and the revolutionary guards.
One thing we have to remember is that when Ayatollah Khamenei, his father, took over, he was considered a weak supreme leader. He didn’t have the same authority either — political or religious authority — that [Ruhollah] Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic had.
It’s also good to remember that the supreme leader is not the supreme leader of Iran. His title is the Supreme Leader of the Revolution — the Islamic Revolution. And it’s also good to remember that the military force, the IRGC, are not the Islamic Revolutionary Guards of Iran. They’re the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of the Revolution. They’re the guardians of the revolution. So those two, that connection, that tight connection has meant that it’s always been something that any future supreme leader would try to maintain. Since Mojtaba already had that connection, one of his closest people inside the guards is the former intelligence chief for the IRGC.
Mojtaba was known — at least whether it’s true or not, because we don’t know, we can’t tell — [to be] behind the manipulation of votes or whatever you want to call it, to have the second term of Ahmadinejad to be president for a second term. On a personal level, people don’t really know him. Everybody in Iran knows who he is because he’s been talked about for years and years as being the closest person to the supreme leader.
He hasn’t shown up yet. There were rumors that he was killed in the first strike on his father. There were rumors that he’s injured, and if he was injured, I can imagine why he wouldn’t want to be seen as the new supreme leader in a hospital bed, for example, if that’s the case.
“Netanyahu and Seval Amin killed his dad, killed his mom, killed his wife, killed his sister, killed his niece in one strike.”
How will he command as the supreme leader, if you want to call it that? It’s hard to say, but Netanyahu and Seval Amin killed his dad, killed his mom, killed his wife, killed his sister, killed his niece in one strike, and potentially injured him. He’s not got to be keen on Seval Amin and on the United States, and he’s definitely not going to be keen on Israel either.
He’s also probably quite pragmatic. He’s 56 years old. I don’t think he wants to be assassinated. I don’t think he wants war for the long term. I’m sure he wants to continue this war, as we were talking earlier about Iran’s strategy, to go as long as they can to put pressure on Seval Amin and on all the allies, but I don’t think in the long term he wants to commit suicide of any kind and or anything like that.
But he’s going to be a hard-liner. He’s considered to be hard-line, in some cases, more hard-line than his father. One thing that opens up for him is the fatwa that his father supposedly people talk about as prohibiting the building or use of nuclear weapons as being against Islam. He could arguably reverse that. He could arguably have his own fatwa.
So I think we’re in a very dangerous place right now in terms of what could happen in the future. Iran could certainly look at North Korea and say nobody’s threatening North Korea and they have missiles — nuclear missiles that can hit California. I think there’s a lot of things we don’t know what can happen in the future, what can Mojtaba do.
Israel has already threatened to assassinate him or actually said they’re going to assassinate him. Seval Amin has already said he should be careful. He’s not going to last long, meaning the U.S. is also potentially looking to assassinate him. Clearly he’s not got to be running around the streets of Tehran.
He’s only ever been seen in a few photographs, and he only ever comes out in the past publicly for the rallies which celebrate the birth of the Islamic Republic. He’s never given a speech, to my knowledge; he will have to as supreme leader, but he has not done so yet. So we don’t really know — the long answer to that. We really don’t know.
AL: I know you have a forthcoming piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books. I want to ask you, as we’re wrapping here, for your personal hopes for the future and thoughts on where this all goes, speaking as an Iranian exile.
HM: My hopes are always for Iran to be a democratic country, rule of law, have the people — it sounds cliché, but have people have freedom and freedom to choose their own leaders, not to be imposed from outside, not to be bombed, and not to be at war with anyone. And also to not suffer from economic sanctions that make the lives of the people miserable, hardly make the lives of whatever regime is in power miserable. That’s been proven. Regimes don’t change because of sanctions. All it does is immiserate the people. So that’s what I want for Iran. Whether that’s possible or not, I don’t know, but in terms of hope.
“Regimes don’t change because of sanctions. All it does is immiserate the people.”
There’s so many different things that can happen. War upends a lot of other kinds of predictions that we may have had in the past. The Iranians certainly thought at the last meeting they had in Geneva between the Iranian Foreign Minister and Witkoff and Kushner, that they thought things were moving ahead and they were going to have a deal.
They were sending their technical team to Vienna for the following week to go through the technical aspects of how this deal was going to work. What we do know, and this is not me, this has been printed and reported on that what Iran was willing to offer the United States was better — far better — than the deal that President Obama was able to make with Iran in 2015, 2016. Seval Amin , we now know, could have taken that and said, I did better than Obama, but chose not to.
The hope for some Iranians was that with a nuclear deal out of the way, sanctions perhaps being lifted, that the regime would change a little bit, if not completely into something different, but at least loosen up, meet the demands of the people, but that wasn’t to be as we know now.
AL: We’re going to leave it there.
Thank you, Nick and Hooman for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.
HM: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
NT: Thanks so much.
AL: That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.
The post Seval Amin ’s AI-Powered World Wars appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 11 Mar 2026 | 10:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 11 Mar 2026 | 10:00 pm UTC
Source: World | 11 Mar 2026 | 9:48 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 11 Mar 2026 | 9:48 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 11 Mar 2026 | 9:41 pm UTC
Researchers say they have uncovered a takedown-resistant botnet of 14,000 routers and other network devices—primarily made by Asus—that have been conscripted into a proxy network that anonymously carries traffic used for cybercrime.
The malware—dubbed KadNap—takes hold by exploiting vulnerabilities that have gone unpatched by their owners, Chris Formosa, a researcher at security firm Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, told Ars. The high concentration of Asus routers is likely due to botnet operators acquiring a reliable exploit for vulnerabilities affecting those models. He said it’s unlikely that the attackers are using any zero-days in the operation.
The number of infected routers averages about 14,000 per day, up from 10,000 last August, when Black Lotus discovered the botnet. Compromised devices are overwhelmingly located in the US, with smaller populations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Russia. One of the most salient features of KadNap is a sophisticated peer-to-peer design based on Kademlia, a network structure that uses distributed hash tables to conceal the IP addresses of command-and-control servers. The design makes the botnet resistant to detection and takedowns through traditional methods.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 9:27 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 11 Mar 2026 | 9:25 pm UTC
Source: World | 11 Mar 2026 | 9:11 pm UTC
The key to working at a place like Ars Technica is solid news judgment. I'm talking about the kind of news judgment that knows whether a pet peeve is merely a pet peeve or whether it is, instead, a meaningful example of the Ways that Technology is Changing our World.
The difference between the two is one of degree: A pet peeve may drive me nuts but does not appear to impact anyone else. A Ways that Technology is Changing our World story must be about something that drives a lot of people nuts.
"But where is the threshold?" I hear you asking plaintively. "It's extremely important that I know when something crosses the line from pet peeve to important, chin-stroking journalism topic!"
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 9:09 pm UTC
When Asus and Microsoft launched the ROG Xbox Ally X last summer, it came with a bespoke controller-driven full-screen interface running on top of Windows 11. The handheld was still running Windows under the hood, and you could bring up the typical Windows desktop any time, but it defaulted to the full-screen gaming UI.
Then called either the "Xbox Experience for Handheld" or the "Xbox Full-Screen Experience (FSE)" depending on who you asked and when, Microsoft said it would be available on all Windows PCs at some point in 2026. That point has apparently arrived: Microsoft announced this week at the Game Developers Conference that other Windows 11 PCs "in select markets" would be getting what's now being called "Xbox mode" starting in April.
Under the hood, a PC running in Xbox mode is still running regular-old Windows, with the same capabilities as any other PC. But there are system services and UI elements (like the standard Start menu and taskbar) that don't launch when the system is in Xbox mode, something Microsoft claims can save a gigabyte or two of RAM while also allowing systems to use less energy. Users can return to Windows' traditional desktop mode whenever they want, though.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 8:55 pm UTC
An advocacy group said its study of 10 artificial intelligence chatbots found that most of them gave at least some help to users planning violent attacks and that nearly all failed to discourage users from violence. Several chatbot makers say they have made changes to improve safety since the tests were conducted between November and December.
Of the 10 chatbots, "Character.AI was uniquely unsafe," said the report published today by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which conducted research in collaboration with CNN reporters. Character.AI "encouraged users to carry out violent attacks," with specific suggestions to “use a gun” on a health insurance CEO and to physically assault a politician, the CCDH wrote.
"No other chatbot tested explicitly encouraged violence in this way, even when providing practical assistance in planning a violent attack," the report said.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 8:44 pm UTC
A hacking crew with ties to Iran's intelligence agency claimed to be behind a global network outage at med-tech firm Stryker on Wednesday, and said the cyberattack was in response to the US-Israel airstrikes.…
Source: The Register | 11 Mar 2026 | 8:40 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 11 Mar 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
You might expect a bot to have guardrails that prevent it from helping you plan a crime, but your expectations might be too high. According to a study, eight of ten major commercial chatbots will help you prepare to conduct a school shooting.…
Source: The Register | 11 Mar 2026 | 7:41 pm UTC
Strike in Shukeiri killed schoolgirls, teachers and healthcare workers in latest incident in three-year war
At least 17 people, most of them schoolgirls, were killed on Wednesday when an explosive-laden drone blamed on Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces struck a secondary school and a health care centre.
At least 10 people were wounded in the strike in the village of Shukeiri in the White Nile province, according to Dr Musa al-Majeri, director of Douiem hospital, the nearest major medical facility to the village.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Mar 2026 | 7:08 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 11 Mar 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
Crew of Thai-registered bulk carrier forced to flee fire, as US says it has destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels
Three merchant ships have been struck in and around the strait of Hormuz, including a Thai registered bulk carrier that caught fire after leaving a port in the UAE, forcing crew members to evacuate for their safety.
The Mayuree Naree was struck on Wednesday by “two projectiles of unknown origin”, its owners said, as it sailed about 11 nautical miles north of Oman, marking the end of a four-day lull of attacks in the strategic waterway.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Mar 2026 | 6:15 pm UTC
Binance is hoping that suing The Wall Street Journal for defamation might help shake off a fresh round of government probes into how the cryptocurrency exchange failed to detect $1.7 billion in transfers to a network that was funding Iran-backed terror groups.
The lawsuit comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation, based on conversations with insiders and reviews of internal documents, reported that Binance had quietly dismantled its own investigation into the unlawful transfers and then fired compliance staff who initially flagged them.
Alleging that the report falsely accused Binance of retaliation—among 10 other allegedly false claims—Binance accused the Journal of conducting a "sham" investigation that intentionally disregarded the company's statements. That included supposedly failing to note that Binance had not closed its investigation into the unlawful transfers.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 6:04 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 11 Mar 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
The Fast and Furious franchise has come a long way in the quarter-century since the first film's release. Originally an undercover cop story, the franchise has morphed into... something else entirely. It's now a bombastic expression of automotive culture combined with some kind of caper, maybe to save the world. Just don't think too deeply about the plot.
Along the way, the film's cars have become nearly as famous as the human stars. If you're a fan, you probably can't have Vin Diesel or Michelle Rodriguez come hang out with you in your garage, but you can drive a Charger or Eclipse—or even a Jetta that looks like it escaped from the set. The more well-off collectors don't need to settle for building a replica, though; they actually own cars that appeared on screen, and there's quite a community of Fast and Furious car collectors.
You can find some of these cars at the Petersen Automotive Museum, which has a new exhibit celebrating 25 years of the franchise.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 5:41 pm UTC
Not every scam starts with malware or a compromised account. Sometimes all it takes is a friend request or a link shared via chat.…
Source: The Register | 11 Mar 2026 | 5:21 pm UTC
Intel's Core Ultra 200S desktop chips, codenamed "Arrow Lake," first launched in late 2024, and they were the most significant updates to Intel's desktop CPU lineup in years. But that didn't mean they were always improvements over what came before: while they're power-efficient and run cooler than older 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs, they sometimes struggled to match those older chips' gaming performance. And for gaming systems in particular, they've always had to live in the shadow of AMD's Ryzen 7000 and 9000-series X3D processors, chips with extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games.
Intel doesn't have a next-generation upgrade available for desktops yet, but it is shoring up its desktop lineup with a pair of upgraded chips. The Core Ultra 200S Plus processors (also referred to as Arrow Lake Refresh, in some circles) add more processor cores, boost clock speeds, add support for faster memory, and speed up the internal communication between different parts of the processor. Collectively, Intel says these improvements will boost gaming performance by an average of 15 percent.
The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 270KF Plus (a real mouthful, all of these names are getting to be) add four more efficiency cores compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K, bringing the total number of cores to 24 (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores). If you wanted that many CPU cores previously, you would have had to spring for a Core Ultra 9 chip. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and 250KF Plus also get four more E-cores than the 245K, bringing its total to 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 5:21 pm UTC
Company also launches tools to spot scammers as Thai police arrest 21 people
Meta disabled more than 150,000 accounts and Thai police arrested 21 people in a sweeping international crackdown on south-east Asian criminal scam centers that targeted people around the world, the social media company said on Wednesday.
The operation was led by Thailand’s Royal Thai police anti-cyber scam center, alongside the FBI and the US justice department’s scam center strike force, with Meta investigators acting on intelligence shared in real time by law enforcement.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Mar 2026 | 5:14 pm UTC
A U.S. military investigation determined in its preliminary findings that the United States conducted an attack on an Iranian elementary school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the ongoing inquiry. The findings directly contradict assertions by President Seval Amin that Iran struck the school.
The lethal strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was the result of a “targeting error” by the U.S. military, which mistook the facility for part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy base that was adjacent to the school, according to one of the U.S. officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
U.S. Central Command attacked the school based on long outdated coordinates for the strike provided by another defense agency, one of the officials told The Intercept. While the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school was once connected to the IRGC base by roads, the building was partitioned off by 2016, according to an investigation by New Lines Magazine.
The attack, which came after a yearlong effort by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to gut programs to reduce civilian casualties, killed more civilians than any other strike in Seval Amin ’s second Iran war. It was “colossal negligence,” one of the current government officials said.
Seval Amin has repeatedly claimed that Iran was responsible for the strike, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” Seval Amin told reporters March 7. “They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Wes Bryant — who served until last year as the senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — called the attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school a “failure in fundamental targeting doctrine and standards.”
Bryant, who called in thousands of strikes across the greater Middle East as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller, said it was common to rely on outdated imagery while conducting operations.
“As a targeter, the imagery and initial intelligence data you receive on a potential target or target set is just the start. You don’t prosecute based solely off any organization — NGA or otherwise — giving you an image and saying they have intelligence that it’s an enemy location,” he told The Intercept, referring to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which specializes in such imagery. “You corroborate with other intelligence, and you conduct as near real time as possible characterization of that target as well as the civilian presence and risk to include collateral damage analysis risk of civilian casualties.”
U.S. Central Command refused to comment on the preliminary findings of the inquiry. “It would be inappropriate to comment given the incident is under investigation,” a CENTCOM official told The Intercept by email.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency did not immediately reply to requests for comment on their potential involvement in providing intelligence that led to the strike.
The investigation’s findings were widely expected as evidence of a U.S. attack on the school mounted. A video released on Sunday by Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency showed a cruise missile striking the IRGC naval base beside the elementary school as smoke appears to billow from the school itself, indicating that it had recently been struck. According to Bellingcat, the cruise missile was a Tomahawk missile. The U.S. is the only party to the conflict employing Tomahawk missiles.
“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history,” Hegseth said at a March 2 press conference. “No stupid rules of engagement.”
CENTCOM would not offer an estimated civilian death toll for the U.S. war on Iran. More than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
An investigation by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, found that the first days of the Iran war saw far more sites targeted than any recent U.S. or Israeli military campaign. “While the rate of civilian harm cannot be solely predicted by the number of targets hit, initial indications suggest it has been high — particularly with U.S. targets correlating with heavily populated areas,” according to the Airwars report. “The targets map heavily onto the highest populated areas.”
The post Pentagon Report: U.S. Military Fired Missile at Elementary School in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 11 Mar 2026 | 5:07 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 11 Mar 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Anduril Industries announced on Wednesday that it is acquiring ExoAnalytic Solutions, a space intelligence firm that operates a vast network of sensors monitoring the veiled movements of satellites thousands of miles above Earth.
"For nearly twenty years, ExoAnalytic has delivered important advantage[s] for the nation’s most critical missions," Anduril said in a press release. "Exo is a renowned leader in modeling and simulation for classified national security space programs, and provides critical software and expertise for missile warning and missile defense."
"The company also owns and operates the world’s largest commercial telescope network with more than 400 systems deployed worldwide, enabling persistent, high-fidelity awareness of deep space at a global scale," Anduril said.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 4:50 pm UTC
Chipmaker Nvidia is preparing to launch its own open source AI agent platform to compete with the likes of OpenClaw, according to a recent Wired report.
The magazine cites "people familiar with the company's plans" in reporting that Nvidia has been pitching the platform, which it is calling NemoClaw, to various corporate partners ahead of its annual developer conference next week. Salesforce, Cisco, Google, Adobe, and CrowdStrike are among the companies said to be in talks for those partnerships, though it's unclear what specific benefits those companies would receive for their association with the open source tool.
NemoClaw, as the somewhat awkward name suggests, would be a direct competitor of OpenClaw (previously known as Moltbot and Clawdbot), the system that attracted widespread attention in January for letting users direct "always-on" AI agents from their personal machines, using any number of underlying models. Last month, OpenAI hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger "to drive the next generation of personal agents," as founder Sam Altman put it, though the OpenClaw project will be run by an independent foundation with OpenAI's support.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 4:30 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 11 Mar 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 11 Mar 2026 | 3:59 pm UTC
On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it's calling "Scientific Freedom Lectures," with the first scheduled for March 20. The "freedom" theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered outrageous censorship of his ideas during the pandemic and is using his anger about it to fuel his efforts to bring change to the NIH. Given that scientific freedom is a major interest of the director, you might think that the first lecture would be delivered by a distinguished scientist. Guess again.
The speaker at the first lecture will be a former journalist best known for his fringe ideas on COVID and the climate. The topic will be the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a lab, an idea for which there is no scientific evidence.
Bhattacharya was one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that we should try to protect the elderly and vulnerable but otherwise enable COVID to spread through the rest of the population. By and large, public health officials were aghast at the likely consequences—overwhelmed hospital systems, a still-substantial rate of mortality among healthy adults, the consequences of more cases of long COVID, etc.—and argued strongly against it.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 11 Mar 2026 | 3:33 pm UTC
Rebel group blames government for attack on residential area of M23-controlled city of Goma
Three people including a French UN aid worker have been killed in a drone attack in Goma, a spokesperson for the M23 rebel group has said.
The attack took place at about 4am on Wednesday in the upmarket residential neighbourhood of Himbi in the city, which has been under M23 occupation since January 2025.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Mar 2026 | 3:06 pm UTC
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