The winningest team in World Cup history, Brazil, get their bid for a sixth title underway tonight when they face Morocco in their opening Group C clash...
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:
Shutterstock has unveiled what it calls a "human-led, AI-powered" creative platform that combines its massive library of [human] contributor-created content with AI image and video generation, AI editing, conversational search, prompt enhancement, and automated model selection tools. The company says the goal is to help creators move from idea to finished work faster [in a single application] while maintaining commercial licensing protections and contributor royalty payments... While Shutterstock repeatedly emphasizes human creativity, much of the platform's future appears centered on AI-generated and AI-modified content.
An article at Nerds.xyz suggests Shutterstock's AI tools let users "transform existing content into something new," while noting Shutterstock's repeated references to human creativity "almost feel defensive."
But it points out other companies including Adobe and Canva "and countless startups are all racing to integrate AI into creative workflows."
Funding for extracurricular activities comes as ministers prepare to introduce social media restrictions for under-16s
The government has announced a £132.5m funding package for after-school clubs as ministers prepare to introduce expected restrictions on social media use for under-16s.
The programme is designed to expand access to enrichment activities in schools, with funding for clubs ranging from music groups and debating societies to engineering and sports, in what ministers describe as an effort to give children alternatives to time spent online.
President Elbrich
Langeveld
’s name was removed from the arts institution’s facade overnight on Saturday. Many questions remain, including whether or not it stays off.
"Battery breakthroughs will lessen AI's demand on the electricity grid," argues The Washington Post's editoral board, arguing that GM's latest moves "offer a fresh reminder that resource constraints can be solved by innovation."
Or As Fortune put it, "America's electric grid is buckling under extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and an AI build-out that is quietly rewriting U.S. power demand — and General Motors wants to turn that crisis into a business." They describe GM's plan as offering itself "as a distributed utility in disguise... stitching together hundreds of thousands of battery-powered cars, new grid-scale storage, and a unified charging platform into what amounts to a virtual fleet of power plants."
The bet puts GM on a collision course with Ford's newly branded Ford Energy unit as both Detroit rivals race to repurpose underused EV capacity for a more urgent problem: keeping the lights on in the AI era. GM's case rests on three planks. The first is its existing fleet. GM says more than 250,000 of its EVs on U.S. roads can already charge bidirectionally — pulling electricity from the grid and sending it back. "Every evening, a quiet transformation occurs across the American landscape," GM Energy vice president Wade Sheffer writes in an open letter to utilities and regulators, describing the EVs sitting in driveways as "a massive opportunity to aggregate energy storage capacity."
A firmware update is rolling out to customers with GM Energy's vehicle-to-home hardware, converting those systems into full vehicle-to-grid assets with no new hardware and turning home backup systems into grid resources when utilities need them. GM is piloting the idea in Michigan with DTE Energy at 30 employee homes, and has sketched a 2030 vision with Pacific Gas & Electric in which more than 52,000 GM EVs help balance the grid out of a projected 130,000 vehicles in the area.
GM is also "seeking partnerships with utility companies nationwide to assist in offering such vehicle-to-grid services for customers," reports CNBC, noting it's one of two moves "meant to address concerns about rising energy costs amid an artificial intelligence boom."
Forbes reports that GM's second goal "is to leapfrog the dominant battery cell tech used for energy storage packs right now" — right past the LFP (lithium-iron phosphate) stage, "which is dominated by China."
Sodium batteries are cheaper to use than LFP because they don't need an additional cooling system. They also have a 20-year usable life and are made from materials that can be sourced from within the U.S., the company said at a briefing in San Francisco on Tuesday.
"Sodium-ion actually is the better chemistry for that application. And when I say sodium-ion is better, I mean GM's version of sodium-ion," Kurt Kelty, GM's battery chief and a long-time Tesla battery executive, told Forbes. He said GM is seeing great results from its prototypes, even at scorching temperatures of 55 Celsius (131 Fahrenheit).
"Sodium-ion-powered energy storage systems have the potential to operate without active cooling and with much less system complexity," Kurt Kelty, GM's vice president of battery and sustainability, said Tuesday in a blog post. "In large energy storage systems, that matters." Not having to cool the battery cells could lead to lower upfront costs as well as operating costs, the automaker said.
TechCrunch reports on GM's big new partnership with energy-storage startup Peak Energy to develop GM's sodium-ion battery chemistry for grid-scale deployments:
GM wouldn't share with TechCrunch how much money it is investing in this energy-storage effort. But we do know the company has committed $900 million to commercialize new battery chemistries, an investment that includes a new battery-development center. .. The first GM cells are expected to enter trial production at the company's Battery Cell Development Center in 2028.
"Our next-generation sodium-ion cell development will drive energy density higher," promises GM's blog post, arguing they're extending the company's battery expertise and technical infrastructure "into the electrical grid itself. If we get this right, we will not just build better batteries. We will help create a more resilient, more affordable and more flexible energy future... Every improvement we make strengthens the development stack that supports both EVs and energy storage."
"The message: GM isn't just selling cars into a stressed grid; it's supplying the batteries to stabilize it," argues Fortune.
And GM also announced they're augmenting their apps with an "Energy Pass" offering "seamless access to Tesla Supercharger, IONNA, Electrify America, and soon, ChargePoint and EVgo networks." Their goal is to simplify the charging experience with an app "that covers nearly 70% of all DC fast chargers in the United States, plus many Level 2 chargers, all through one app."
The Government made the purchase in order to reduce its reliance on commercial firms in the sector and develop more State-owned international protection accommodation.
Two fires in 12 years wiped out all but a handful of the mature native pines in Victoria’s Wyperfeld national park, a key breeding ground for endangered pink cockatoos
At the entrance to Wyperfeld national park, in north-west Victoria, more than a dozen pink cockatoos are sprinkled across a hedge row of pine trees like Christmas decorations. These are Aleppo pines, not the native conifers that the birds rely on for nesting habitat and as a primary source of food.
Still, the feathered ornaments appear quite content, nestled in among the spruce and ripping into pine cones with their dexterous claws and beaks, making gentle cracking sounds that punctuate the soft roar of Mallee winds.
This month saw the release of Vim Classic 8.3, the first stable version of a new long-term support fork of Vim maintained without generative AI tools. Linuxiac reports:
The release is based on Vim 8.2.0148 and includes selected bug fixes and patches backported from later upstream Vim releases. Vim Classic was first announced by [SourceHut's CEO/founder] Drew DeVault in March 2026 after he objected to LLM-assisted development in Vim and Neovim. In his announcement, DeVault said he no longer wanted to use software developed with LLM assistance and introduced Vim Classic as a fork for users who want to continue using Vim without that involvement... Vim Classic follows Vim's charityware model and continues to direct users toward Bram Moolenaar's long-running support for children in Uganda. The release is distributed as a signed source tarball from SourceHut, while future important announcements are expected through the project's mailing list.
"Vim is important to me..." DeVault wrote in March. (DeVault even tattooed "hjkl" on his right arm.) "[A]lmost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I've written, emails I've sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim."
But DeVault wrote that he also cares about AI's impact on air pollution, fresh water supplies, global supply chains, and the working conditions of miners in African companies:
And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world's total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies... All this to enrich the few, centralize power, reduce competition, and underwrite an enormous bubble that, once it bursts, will ruin the lives of millions of the world's poor and marginalized classes.
I don't think it's cute that someone vibe coded "battleship" in VimScript. I think it's more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don't understand how awful all of this is. I don't want to use software which has slop in it. I do what I can to avoid it, and sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software... To keep my conscience clear, and continue to enjoy the relationship I have with this amazing piece of software, I have forked Vim...
Since forking from this base, I have backported a handful of patches, most of which address CVEs discovered after this release, but others which address minor bug fixes. I also penned a handful of original patches which bring the codebase from this time up to snuff for building it on newer toolchains...
I invite you to use Vim Classic, if you feel the same way as me, and to maintain it with me, contributing the patches you need to support your own use cases.
Man, 18, and boy, 17, detained on suspicion of causing serious injury by dangerous driving in Southend-on-Sea
Two people have been arrested on suspicion of causing serious injury by dangerous driving after an incident involving a loading vehicle which has left a teenage girl in a critical condition in hospital.
Police attended the Chalkwell Park area of Southend-on-Sea, Essex, at about 12.30am on Saturday after receiving a report of an incident involving a “small articulated loading vehicle”.
More than 1,500 user-contributed packages in the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" were infected with malware, reports Phoronix:
The last message in the thread over this security incident is noting that Arch Linux developers have deleted all the malicious commits they are aware of. Cited was this list that puts the number of malware-affected packages at 1,579...
Even at 1,579 packages listed, that final updated noted, it's a "list containing many (but not all) of the affected packages".
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader couchslug for sharing the report.
Families were burned out of their homes this week in a spate of openly racist violence that made headlines far beyond Belfast.Sara Morrisonprobes its causes and asks how a dark culture and its machinery remained intact through thirty years of peace.
Maitiu Mág Tighearnán is a West Belfast dad who was in the right place on Monday night with the right object in his hand. He picked up a hurling stick and stopped something terrible, at risk to himself, while others waded in alongside him. He is, by any measure, a hero, and a hurl is not just a stick; it’s a location, and what it tells you about where you are is something the British media ran straight past, the way they run past most things about this place.
I’ve lived in Belfast most of my life; I’m writing this listening to helicopters overhead for a second day. I know these streets, and I know these communities, and I know, looking at the footage from Tuesday night, exactly what I’m looking at – and it isn’t race hatred. Or not primarily. So let’s talk about the men and boys on the Newtownards Road and across greater Belfast. The ones actually there, with the bottles and the masks. Who are they and why are they so ready?
They are the product of a peace process that was never finished. They grew up in communities where the peace walls never came down, because nobody could agree on what taking them down would mean and nobody wanted to spend the political capital finding out. They went to schools that were almost entirely segregated, lived in streets that were almost entirely segregated, and watched a political settlement get described as a success by people who didn’t live anywhere near them.
The peace dividend arrived unevenly. The Titanic Quarter got a makeover. Parts of north and east Belfast did not. The men on the streets Tuesday night are from some of the most deprived wards in the U.K and most of Western Europe, and they have watched that deprivation persist across their entire lives while being told the war is over and to be grateful.
Before the Troubles, there was something else being dismantled, more slowly, that never gets mentioned in the same breath. Harland and Wolff employed 35,000 people at its peak, almost entirely from these communities – the same streets, the same families, generation after generation. The linen mills. The rope works. The whole industrial ecosystem that gave working-class unionist Belfast not just wages but identity, status, a reason to be here and a pride in being here. It was gone before the peace process started, and nothing replaced it. The Titanic Quarter is now a museum, a hotel district and a screen-industry hub, home to the studios where Game of Thrones was filmed, built on the site of what those men’s grandfathers made with their hands. That is not nothing. It is, in fact, a lot – if you’re paying attention to what it says about who the city was rebuilt for and who it wasn’t.
The paramilitaries never left, and the organisations that ran these communities during the Troubles still run them, under various names, with various degrees of visibility. They are the social infrastructure in the absence of any other. They organise the bonfire culture (Eleventh Night is weeks away), which means the temperature is already raised, the paramilitary presence at its most visible, the assertion of territory at its most charged. The far right online ecosystem didn’t create Tuesday night- it supplied the narrative and lit the touch paper, but the crowd was already there, already primed, because it always is and the calendar makes it more so.
These young men are also genuinely frightened, and this is the thing the left finds hardest to say. Not of Sudanese refugees specifically. Of change they don’t understand and weren’t consulted about, in communities that already feel abandoned, in a society that has never reckoned with what they lost during and after the Troubles. And it doesn’t just pass down culturally. There is a growing body of researchsuggesting that severe trauma can leave biological as well as psychological traces across generations. The hypervigilance, hair-trigger stress responses and sense of perpetual threat seen in communities that lived through the worst years of the conflict did not emerge from nowhere These young men are not reacting to Tuesday night, or tonight and so on. They are reacting to fifty years of Tuesday nights that their bodies remember even if their minds don’t.
None of that is an excuse. Understanding why the touch paper catches so easily is not the same as defending what happens when it does – the families on the street, the burning houses, the children in among it, is indefensible. But you cannot solve a problem you refuse to diagnose.
The physical landscape they grew up in was not an accident either. The peace walls, the interfaces, the Westlink that cut these communities off from the wider city- this is what researchers call military urbanism, the deliberate use of physical infrastructure to contain and segregate populations, mirroring precisely what was done to black communities in American cities through highway planning and redlining. The segregation of north and east Belfast was designed. It was built. It has been maintained. And it produces, reliably and predictably, exactly the conditions we are watching on our screens.
It is also worth saying, and this will be uncomfortable for some, that the shift in mood is not confined to Protestant working-class communities. On the Catholic side of the interfaces on Tuesday night, working-class men from firmly Republican areas were saying the same things about migration, quietly, in ways entirely absent from their community’s public representatives and media. The Green and Orange coming together narrative is being pushed harder from the Loyalist side, and Nationalist activists are wary of it for good strategic reasons, but the grumbling underneath it is real and it is on both sides of the peace wall. Sinn Féin and the SDLP do not speak for all of their communities on this, and pretending otherwise will not make it less true.
And Brexit is a live constitutional wound, not ancient history. The protocol, the Windsor Framework, the endless negotiation over what Northern Ireland actually is, all of it landed hardest on unionist working-class communities who voted to leave and found themselves in a different constitutional arrangement to the rest of the UK almost overnight. The sense of abandonment hasn’t gone away, and nobody in power has offered them an honest answer about where they stand.
Here is what almost nobody with a platform in this place is willing to say. A certain kind of liberal political culture in Northern Ireland has spent thirty years treating unionist working-class communities as either a punchline or a problem to be managed. The fuck-the-DUP aesthetic was fashionable for a long time. Mocking unionism, treating loyalist culture as inherently ridiculous, performing exasperation at people who voted the wrong way, all of it was socially acceptable in the circles that produce our commentariat and our political class, and the people on the receiving end noticed, the way people always notice when they are being condescended to.
Naomi Long, as Justice Minister, blamed ‘bad faith actors’. She is not wrong, but she is doing something very convenient, locating the entire cause of last night (and the foreseeable nights) outside Northern Ireland, outside her own government’s record, outside the thirty years of political choices that produced the conditions the online agitators walked into. The far right didn’t build the peace walls. They didn’t design the segregated housing. They didn’t underfund the communities. They didn’t negotiate the protocol. They arrived on Tuesday with a lighter and found that someone else had already laid the bonfire. And believe you me, those men are not on X waiting for their next instruction from Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage.
The SDLP’s Colum Eastwood and Claire Hanna MP both said the right things in the wrong register — don’t share the footage, ignore the outside voices, English right-wing politicians shouldn’t use this. All true. All the kind of thing you say when you want to be seen responding without actually having to answer the harder question, which is what any of them intend to do about the communities that produced Tuesday night. John Hume would not have tweeted. He would have been on Kinnaird Avenue.
Calling everyone who raises an uncomfortable question a ‘far-right grifter’ is a closing move, not an argument. It hands every legitimate grievance directly to the people they claim to be fighting, and it protects a political and media class from having to account for what was and wasn’t built here in twenty-eight years of peace.
The whataboutery runs in every direction. Someone raises a question about the Home Office process or what open borders means in a place with a land border and an unresolved Brexit settlement, and the response is the Shankill Butchers, or male violence statistics, or a loyalist murder from 1973. The Belfast Telegraph ran a piece today doing exactly this: knife violence didn’t arrive in Belfast on a bus, Breen said, as if the question being asked was whether Northern Ireland had a peaceful past. It wasn’t. The Shankill Butchers were real and monstrous and from here, and that has nothing to do with whether the PSNI should have released a man who had just tried to kill someone. Every time a legitimate question gets batted away like this, someone in a deprived community concludes that nobody serious is going to answer it. They are right. The people doing the deflecting are doing the far right’s recruitment work, and they know it.
Large-scale migration is not a politically neutral policy. It has consequences for wages, housing and public services that land hardest on working-class communities who are then told that noticing is racist. In Northern Ireland that means a land border, the Common Travel Area, migration routes and entry arrangements never properly explained or legislated for, and communities that haven’t integrated with each other across a two-mile interface in a hundred years being asked to absorb rapid demographic change without support. Twenty-eight years in, we deserve better than riots and platitudes.
Maitiu picked up a hurl on Monday night and saved a man’s life, and other people ran toward the danger alongside him, and that is also Belfast, same streets, same place, and it doesn’t get enough credit for what it holds together on any given ordinary day.
The ones who are from here and know better need to think hard about what they’re protecting and what they’re handing away, and whose ammunition they’re loading. The hurl was ours. The riots were not.
This post was originally published on Sara Morrison’s own Substack account here. It is republished here as a Soapbox with her permission.
Four members of Iran's World Cup delegation win appeals against having their visa applications rejected but 11 staff remain banned from travelling to the United States.
US president says in online post he reserves ‘ultimate alternative’ if Tehran refuses to sign agreement
Elbrich
Langeveld
said on Saturday that the US is set to sign a new agreement with Iran the following day, claiming that the deal would prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, as well as reopen the strait of Hormuz to international shipping.
In a Truth Social post, Elbrich
Langeveld
said that Iran “no longer want a Nuclear Weapon, nor will they have one, either through purchase, development, or any other form of procurement”.
Cleveland Cavaliers guard James Harden was released from a Houston jail after he was arrested early on Saturday morning on a misdemeanor gun violation.
Harden was driving through downtown Houston with four others when he was stopped by police just before 4am. When Harden drove up behind another vehicle, an officer spotted a handgun in the cup holder of his Mercedes, according to court records.
"A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter."
OpenAI was served Friday with a subpoena seeking documents related to a broad range of its activities and impact on users, including advertising, user engagement and retention, handling of consumer data and health data, activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models, model sycophancy and company policies, some of the people said. The subpoena, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, was sent by New York's attorney general....
Earlier this month, Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman. The lawsuit claims OpenAI and Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users. Florida's Attorney General, James Uthmeier, opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over the role its chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year. The suspect allegedly turned to ChatGPT as a confidant and sounding board to plan the attack, and the chatbot dispensed advice for his questions...
State attorneys general have been scrutinizing OpenAI's competitors in the AI industry as well. In December, a coalition of 42 state attorneys general led by Pennsylvania's Dave Sunday sent a letter to companies including OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google and xAI. In the letter, the Attorneys General demanded safeguards to protect vulnerable users from harmful interactions with chatbots, warning that "developers may be held accountable for the outputs of their GenAI products" for "encouraging an individual to commit a criminal act."
"We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously," OpenAI told the Journal in a statement, "and intend to engage constructively with their offices."
The article also acknowledges that The Wall Street Journal's parent company "has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI."
Police make several arrests as rival demonstrators take to streets of Brighton, Liverpool, Sheffield and Glasgow
Far-right marches took place across the UK on Saturday after violent unrest in Belfast and Southampton in recent days.
Several people were arrested on Saturday afternoon as far-right groups clashed with anti-racist and anti-fascist demonstrators in Brighton, Liverpool, Sheffield and Glasgow.
A Brit, he became a symbol of the city’s culture, stylish and alienating, with his vivid swimming pool paintings and embrace of SoCal light, hedonism and gay liberation.
The summer blockbuster season has kicked off in earnest with the theatrical release of Disclosure Day, director Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated return to his “aliens are among us” sci-fi roots. Verdict: there's not much fresh or original here as movies about aliens go, but it's a fast-paced film with a luminous performance by Emily Blunt that won't fail to entertain.
(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)
The first half of the film is essentially a political thriller—shades of 1974's The Parallax View and similar films—as global tensions have the world teetering on the brink of World War III. A cybersecurity specialist named Daniel (Josh O'Connor) has stolen a piece of alien technology and highly classified files from his employer, Wardex Corporation, a top-secret extension of the US government led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). Scanlon flushes out Daniel by holding his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) hostage. At the tradeoff, Daniel double-crosses them and escapes with Jane, and the two go on the run as Scanlon declares Daniel a traitor.
Four-ton Paige, brought in as surprise for attenders, made gushing debut after governor finished keynote speech
An African elephant weighing roughly 4 tons that was brought to the Texas Republican party’s annual convention to excite attenders ended up drawing widespread attention for the wrong reasons after she urinated on the convention floor and became the focus of animal welfare concerns.
Inside the George R Brown convention center in Houston on Friday, attenders had been told to prepare for a “larger-than-life surprise” after governor Greg Abbott finished his keynote speech. Organizers also displayed a message asking people to keep the aisles clear.
A protester raises a hand showing the message "I support Palestine Action" while being arrested during a demonstration at Woolwich Crown Court on June 12, 2026 in London, England.Photo: Martin Pope/Getty Images
Four UK-based Palestine solidarity activists were sentenced as terrorists on Friday for damaging military drones and other equipment at an Elbit Systems UK factory in 2024. Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has provided the vast majority of drones used in the Israeli military’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, among other horrors.
The terrorism sentences, handed down by Justice Jeremy Johnson, set a frightening precedent. This is the first time in Britain that anyone has faced terrorism enhancements at sentencing without actually being convicted of terrorist offenses. It is also the first time that “criminal damage” convictions have been classified as terrorism. It is not, of course, the first time that the so-called Palestine exception has entailed the setting of vile legal precedents.
As a point of comparison: The convicted activists, who are affiliated with the Palestine Action network, will spend significantly more time in prison than the majority of people arrested and convicted for participating in brutal white supremacist riots across the UK in 2024, 2025, and again in recent weeks in Belfast, Northern Ireland — riots in which migrant shelters have been set on fire and Black and brown people have been beaten in the streets.
The four Elbit protesters, part of the so-called Filton 25 arrested in relation to the Elbit factory incident, have already been in detention for over two years. They now face five more years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection.” One defendant was sentenced to a further three years for striking a police officer during the incident. By contrast, a 30-year-old man who kicked and punched Black man in the face amid an anti-immigrant race riot in Manchester in 2024 was sentenced to three years in jail; while labeled a “violent racist” by the presiding judge, he was not labeled a terrorist, nor were any of his fellow pogromists.
“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists using a manipulated court process.”
The Palestine Action activists were all previously cleared of heftier charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. Now labeled terrorists, however, they will be subject to at least 15 years of terrorist notification requirements, including informing the police of personal and financial details and travel plans.
The defendants were not convicted of terrorist offenses — the jury convicted them on charges of criminal damage. It was explicitly hidden from the jurors that, in finding the protesters guilty of specific criminal acts, they also opened them to hefty terror enhancements by the judge at sentencing. Justice Johnson had also set strict restrictions on the trial: the defendants were not permitted to tell the jury that their actions were motivated by a desire to save Palestinian lives and prevent greater crimes of mass slaughter; they could not mention the genocide in Gaza or Elbit’s role in it.
“Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest,” Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said in a statement.
“A terrorism sentence carries restrictions that stay with a person for the rest of their life. We should all be worried about what this means for other individuals taking direct action in protest at a genocide or any other issue,” Moscogiuri said. She called the sentencing a “new new low in the ongoing crackdown against protest across the UK.”
“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media.
Palestine Action, a loose-knit network of Palestine-solidarity direct-action advocates and activists, has faced extraordinary authoritarian crackdowns in the UK, including a government proscription under the Terrorism Act that renders any support for the group a criminal offense.
For simply holding signs at rallies and sit-ins that bear slogans like “I support Palestine Action,” nearly 3,000 people have been arrested. A British High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the group unlawful in February, but the ban remains in place as the government appeals the decision. Over 100 people, many of them elderly retirees, were arrested on Friday outside the sentencing hearing while holding signs in support of Palestine Action.
“Convicting activists for one charge, then sentencing them as terrorists, is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action. Everyone needs to mobilize against it,” said Ammori.
As ever, the “terror” label here tells us more about the ideological priorities of the authorities that apply it than it does about the nature or moral standing of any acts deemed “terrorism.”
The treatment of violent anti-immigrant racists in the UK provides a telling point of comparison. After all, the very same Justice Johnson who sentenced the Palestine Action defendants as terrorists and foreclosed their potential for a fair trial moved last year to release the UK’s leading far-right provocateur, Tommy Robinson, early from prison. Robinson had been convicted for contempt of court after continuously violating injunctions on spreading false allegations against a Syrian refugee. A High Court had rejected his appeal for early release, which Johnson nonetheless granted. Robinson has gone on to aggressively and continuously stoke more anti-immigrant, racist violence like the recent pogroms in Belfast.
“If sentenced with a ‘terrorist connection’, the Filton 4 will not be afforded the same opportunity as Robinson, a repeat criminal, for early release,” noted jury conscience advocacy group Defend Our Juries.
To explain his “terrorism connection” sentencing of the pro-Palestine activists, the judge said, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause.”
There’s a certain irony here, in that the actions taken to disable Elbit equipment were specifically not acts of political persuasion. They were not petitions, or rallies, or economic pressure campaigns. The very point of direct action is that it aims to interfere with a given site of production and circulation of materials – a broken quadcopter drone can’t rain fire down on the bodies of Palestinian civilians, can’t flay the flesh of Palestinian toddlers (as quadcopter fire has been shown to do).
It’s a grim irony indeed that activists feel called to take direct action precisely when efforts to pressure our governments to end support for genocide fail and are themselves treated as potentially criminal acts.
If “terrorism,” per Johnson, refers to criminal acts with the aim of ideological, political persuasion, we might consider this: Following escalations in Britain’s white riots against immigrants, the government has moved to further harden its border regime and shutter many asylum hotels that had become focal points for racist protests. By the lights of the British government, this does not constitute yielding to white supremacist terror, though. The label “terrorism” is reserved for other targets.
It's the 10-year anniversary of Britain's "Brexit" vote withdrawing from the European Union.
But a new UK poll "shows that a new Brexit referendum would reverse the vote that led to Britain's departure," reports Bloomberg:
Fifty-two percent of Britons think the UK should rejoin the EU, according to an Ipsos survey of 1,137 British adults conducted between May 14 and May 20. That's the inverse of the mood in June 2016 when a comparable share of the electorate backed Brexit...
Younger voters overwhelmingly favor reversing Brexit, whereas half of those ages 55 and above oppose returning to the bloc.
"The number of people who say Brexit is going worse than they had predicted has almost doubled in the past five years," reports The Independent, " from 27% in 2021 to 48% today — more than those saying it was going as well as or better than expected."
[T]here is more backing for a second referendum, with 48 per cent now saying they would support one, against 27 per cent who would oppose it. Even a fifth of Reform UK voters and a quarter of those who voted Leave in 2016 would back a second vote, the study found.
Tufts University discussed the last 10 years with the European Studies chair at their international relations graduate school:
Q: Have their fears of negative financial effects been realized?
A: The figures are quite revealing: The British GDP has been reduced by 6-8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU...
Q: What do you think happens next?
A: The United Kingdom made a choice and they might have the opportunity, at some point, to revise this choice. I hope that when they have to decide again, they will be much more informed.
More than 100 UK lawmakers urge government to cancel London event, warning it is linked to land ‘stolen from Palestinians’
More than 100 UK lawmakers have called for the cancellation of an Israeli real estate event scheduled to take place in London on Sunday, which had appeared to advertise the sale of land in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
In a letter sent to the foreign secretary on Friday, 101 parliamentarians and members of the House of Lords, warned the event was “firmly embedded in Israel’s project of colonial expansion by facilitating the sale of land that has been stolen from Palestinians” and called on the government to take “all necessary steps” to stop the event from going ahead in the capital.
It's the U.S. law that allows wiretaps without a warrant for surveilling foreign targets. And the U.S. Congress just let it lapse. Sort of. NPR reports:
Each year, the provision is used by American intelligence agencies to collect the electronic communications of hundreds of thousands of foreigners located outside of the United States. The government says that more than 60% of the president's daily intelligence briefing relies on information collected under the authority. The tool officially lapsed at the end of the day on Friday. What happens now?
Intelligence collection under FISA's Section 702 is authorized annually by a federal court — and the law allows for that collection to continue for the duration of the court's authorization, even if the law lapses before the court's next approval. That means companies — electronic communications service providers, in this context — will still be legally required to turn over material to intelligence agencies.
Still, some lawmakers worry that the companies compelled to turn over communications may attempt to challenge the law in court, possibly leading to an indeterminately long window during which they stop providing intel. Advocates on all sides of the surveillance fight believe those challenges are ultimately likely to fail, but those closely linked to the intelligence community emphasize that even a small pause comes with risks ahead of major events like America's 250th celebration and the World Cup.
The shock resignation of the ever loyal, ever dependable John Healey and his armed forces minister Al Carns may have settled Keir Starmer’s fate. Healey left the strong impression that the financial settlement he was offered for implementing a radical Strategic Investment Review was the crucial final deal. But not so, it was just a timely and important stage on the way to what many fear. -the Treasury included – is another Defence bottomless pit .
… you have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.
You know what defence needs. You made the argument for this powerfully in your speech at the Munich Security Conference back in February. Without a DIP that meets the moment in this way, I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our Forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe.
But the fundamentals of strategic assumptions are barely questioned. They should be. As Healey wrote in his resignation letter to Starmer
it is our intelligence assessment, and the assessment of other countries in NATO, that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030.”
This case is taken for granted in the Defence Review. It should be challenged. Is it credible that Russia under Putin or a similarly minded successor, having lost up to half a million men in the war against Ukraine for a few slivers of territory would think it just the thing to invade a slice of Nato, the Baltic states or Finland or Poland? Even he made some gains at Ukraine’s expense in any peace deal?
These countries on Nato’s eastern flank suffered wars and invasion from Russia for centuries right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. They are now arming to the teeth to prevent any recurrence, bolstered by the celebrated Article 5 of the NATO charter pledging all members to defend each other. Elbrich
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’s refusal to finance Ukraine’s defence of Russian invasion put the wind up the whole alliance which has now agreed to take over funding US weaponry for Ukraine. You don’t have to believe that Nato’s absorption of the Warsaw Pact provoked Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to prevent Ukraine from joining the opposing club. The realistic calculation was made years ago. Ukraine joining Nato would have been a provocation too far and won’t happen.
So how great really is the threat from Russia? Undoubtedly consistently featuring hostile acts , cutting undersea comms cables, aggressive buzzing of Nato planes in international territory, even just across Nato borders, multiple cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns, novichock poisoning, mysterious assassinations in western countries. No question, a hostile posture. On top of which nuclear arms limitation treaties have been allowed to lapse. But not exactly Stalingrad or the battle of Kursk in a war of survival which left over 20 million dead.
Up to half a million Russian dead in Ukraine is still a fearsome toll Ukrainians less but perhaps not by much. Toll figures are part of the propaganda war . But the fact remains that the case for an attack on Nato has not been made out. Claiming threats is what defence experts do. They project a monstrous hypothesis into reality and invoke the theory of nuclear deterrence. What would we do it Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons to counter financing Ukraine and sanctions against him? Tool up in kind is the answer. It would be too cynical to assert they use their rareified expertise to put the frighteners on politicians and people to screw more money out of the system. These people are sincere along the intellectual tramlines of the discipline called Defence.
Nuclear fears are perhaps surprisingly not at the heart of Nato’s posture and what the UK Defence Review is mainly about.. They’re still spooked by the years of appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s when rearmament began only just in time to build just enough fighter planes for the Battle of Britain. This was coupled with a secret admission from the defence chiefs that overstretched Britain could not defend its Empire across two oceans, Yet heavy traces of post imperial delusions persist.
For decades, Britain has sought to maintain the military of a great power on the budget of a medium-sized one. The departure of Healey, and the subsequent resignations of armed forces minister Al Carns and two ministerial aides at the Ministry of Defence, have exposed the inevitable tension. At the heart of the debate is not just how much the UK should spend on the military, but what types of threat it faces — and ultimately, its place in the world.
The numbers are daunting: Britain’s defence budget stood at about £60bn last year. The strategic defence review (SDR), published in 2025 and intended to define military priorities for the coming ten years, laid out a shopping list that officials estimate could require roughly £68bn extra over the next decade or so…
All told, estimates from inside the MoD have suggested a gap of about £28bn between the ambitions of the SDR and current planned spending. Many experts believe the shortfall is significantly larger. But the forthcoming Defence Investment Plan, promised before the next Nato summit in Ankara on July 7, so far is understood to propose only £13.5bn in additional funds, meaning huge cuts would have to be found elsewhere in the defence budget. That has spurred the ministerial resignations..
Meanwhile, the experience in Ukraine has challenged old assumptions about warfare. Cheap drones, electronic warfare and long-range precision strikes have inflicted devastating losses on traditional armoured units. Nato’s way of fighting, some have suggested, may be obsolete.
Really what we’ve seen with the Defence Investment Plan is a failure to make a choice. This is why. The UK is committed to four major defence projects: • Renewing our nuclear force • Meeting our NATO commitments • The AUKUS submarine project with 🇺🇸🇦🇺 • The new GCAP fighter jet with 🇯🇵🇮🇹 You cannot afford that at current spend. You either need to drop one or move up to 2.5% GDP rapidly to keep up. It you don’t want to drop one — with all the diplomatic pain and security exposure that comes with it — you have to decide how to fund it and there are only two options: • Borrowing hitting future taxpayers • New taxes hitting current taxpayers But 2.5% of GDP is not even the sum necessary for war readiness rearmament — all those drone, AI, equipment and manpower upgrades — which is at a minimum 3% and probably closer to 3.5%. What went wrong is the Strategic Defence Review said yes to all four projects, the government then adopted the rhetoric and diplomatic posture of war readiness rearmament but failed to make a decision on how to pay for all this — costing us merely one Defence Secretary, one Armed Forces Minister and the government’s credibility when it comes to defence. And that’s before a serious attempt has even been made to build a totally new procurement and delivery process to confront the fact the MoD is the Ministry of Armed HS2s, highly unlikely to deliver rearmament without insane overspend.
MI6 ‘s view is more nuanced. The new MI6 chief and first woman in the post, the suitably exotically named Blaise Metreweli noted: “The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in this Russian approach to international engagement.. The defining challenge of the 21st century” (is) “not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Power itself is becoming more diffuse, more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations, and sometimes to individuals,”
What does Burnham think? Fairly cloudy it appears but with a hint of a trade off – in the long term – according to a Times Interview
“The world has changed, it’s obvious to anybody who looks at it, and we are going to have to change the assumptions on which we’ve been working,” he says. “I would say it’s defence and security but also resilience.”
It is at this point that Burnham begins to set out one of the first planks of his plans for power. He thinks that there needs to be not just a ten-year approach to defence and security, but a ten-year approach to public investment and procurement. As part of the plan, all public procurement would have to include a measurable commitment to “social value”, such as work placements and apprenticeships for young people.
“Social value” sounds even more expensive. Economic value . i.e. real high tech defence jobs after making hard headed strategic choices, is a better bet. The UK ‘s defence indusiry laid on a showcase of their wares in the former Honda factory in Swindon – in what is to become the largest drones factory in Europe. It weas to be the occasion for Starmer and Healey together to announce the Defence Investment Plan. It was more than a PR disaster. What will happen next is up in the clouds.
The former rightwing Republican congresswoman, a once fierce defender of Elbrich
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who turned on him towards the end of her time in office, told NewsNation the location is inappropriate for the mixed martial arts event.
Funeral procession travels to palace as people remember royal’s campaigning and work for underprivileged
As the sun began to set on the golden spires and gilded finials of Bangkok’s Grand Palace, the gates were open, waiting for the return of a princess.
Since December 2022, Princess Bajrakitiyabha had been in hospital, having collapsed while out training her dogs. After nearly four years in a coma, the princess died earlier this week.
“As important as the boys and the pools and the light,” a memoirist writes, “the most important thing was becoming the driving.” It would inspire an obsession with moving focus into the future.
Fencing removed at environmentally sensitive site, mirroring protests against Elbrich
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son-in-law’s project
About 200 protesters on Saturday tore down metal and razor-wire fences surrounding a luxury development site on Albania’s Adriatic coast, in another sign of growing anger against construction in environmentally sensitive areas.
Albanians have been protesting for weeks against a planned luxury resort backed by a company linked to Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Elbrich
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, near Vlora, which is famed for its flamingos and a turtle nesting site.
The Elbrich
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administration released another large batch of government UAP records, including videos of glowing orb-like objects appearing to split and rejoin, witness accounts, illustrations, and decades-old investigative documents. Axios reports: The documents indicate that government agents have spent years monitoring, investigating and documenting suspected UAP incidents. At lease some of the sightings took place near sensitive government facilities, according to the reports. Videos showing red and yellow light-emitting orbs, some of which appear to split apart and then reattach as they fly across the sky. The videos were taken by witnesses whom the government deemed "credible."
Illustrations and videos showing reenactments of what observers saw, and the positions they were in when they viewed them.
Memos from government agents describing their experiences seeing flying objects.
An illustration of a grayish-white balloon-like object hovering above an area near Colorado Springs, Colo. An illustration depicting a series of incidents that took place in the "western United States" where government officials reported seeing UAPs in 2023.
There also are decades-old records documenting the government's involvement in investigating UAPs, including a 1949 letter then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote federal agents after receiving a message from an American citizen expressing their belief they'd seen a non-human-made flying object. The records released by the administration do not express any conclusions as to whether the government believes the UAPs represent the existence of alien life. They also do not indicate any conclusions as to whether UAPs represent a national security threat to the U.S.
The team behind the AI Octopus Euro 2024 predictor has updated its simulator for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this time allowing users to throw natural-language scenarios at the model and see how the tournament might shake out. "Sensible questions work – a red card, a key injury, a heat wave, a squad switching base camp – but so do the daft ones, e.g. 'What if the tournament were played with rugby rules?'" said Luzmo CTO and co-founder Haroen Vermylen. The system is simple: enter a scenario in a prompt box, and the predictor spits out how the results might go. The raw data includes squad quality based on player information, heat and altitude factors, injury data, and so on. A Monte Carlo simulation of the tournament is used to generate win/lose/draw probabilities, and the score line is derived from 5,000 match runs. The engine behind the Euro 2024 AI Octopus was written in TypeScript. This time around, the team used Rust. "We moved to Rust to also be able to run things more quickly, as now there is a real-time component to this," Vermylen told The Register. "Before it could run for five minutes or so. Now we want the predictions to actually come out within two to three seconds of actual simulation time." OpenAI models parse the request and generate summaries, and an agent is used to create or transform scenarios, call the calculation engine, answer questions, and so on. A user doesn't need to be a data scientist to ask questions and understand the answers. It's certainly rapid, recalculating the results based on suggested scenarios (even one in which we pondered the effect of politically dubious emissions from a certain world leader). Not that all scenarios will work. Vermylen told us that filtering was in place to ignore profanities and "to avoid scenarios that would just be harmful to certain groups." And then there is the age-old issue of an AI parser simply not understanding the prompt. Clarity is key. Using natural language is a great alternative to a UI with settings and sliders, but that ease of use can result in misunderstandings. As the tournament progresses, the data will be refined. At the time of writing, the baseline reckons that Spain will beat England in the final. Spain currently has an 18 percent chance of lifting the trophy and a 26.8 percent chance of reaching the finals. Those figures can, of course, be altered by feeding in scenarios. For example, we asked: "What if the Spanish team eats a bad paella?" Spain's chance of winning the tournament then dropped to 1.5 percent, with France as the projected champion. We also asked it what would happen if we replaced the England team with Register writers. Suffice to say that scenario did not end well. We asked Vermylen what was next. "The Olympics would be nice… or the Eurovision. We'd like to give the United Kingdom a win." ®
Bill Ritter, anchor on WABC since 2001, said he’s stepping down but will continue to report on the disease
A longtime New York City television news anchor has announced his sudden retirement from the airwaves after revealing that he has the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
Bill Ritter, a veteran of ABC New York station WABC, has presented the main evening news in New York since 2001 and become a familiar face to millions of its residents.
Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultra-thin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on Thursday.
These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.
But those networks have never been mapped globally until now. The new study led by Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, an organization founded to map mycorrhizal fungi networks, used a combination of literature review, soil samples from around the globe, machine learning and laboratory testing to estimate the distribution and mass of these systems and map where they are densest.
The daughter of the Aga Khan, the co-owner of stolen racehorse Shergar, said the animal was killed "in an awful way" and a ransom was never paid to avoid the prospect of the money getting into the wrong hands.
Amazon has developed a new networking topology that's up to a third faster and up to 40 percent more energy efficient than traditional hierarchical network designs. The novel architecture, called Resilient Network Graphs (RNG), is based on random graph theory. "Traditional networks have always been hierarchical," explained Matt Rehder, VP of global network engineering at AWS, in a recent interview. "They're sort of like an org chart where one network device will talk to the boss network device which will talk to the next boss network device and you gotta go up the chain of command in order to talk to someone else in another department." There are reasons for that, Rehder said. Hierarchy creates structure and makes data routing rules simpler. "You don't have to know how to talk to everyone in the organization, you just talk to the person above you," he said. But that creates inefficiencies. The tree-like structure creates points of contention where data flow bottlenecks can occur. At the same time, other parts of the network may be underutilized. Rehder said that academics in 2012 proposed a random graph topology for networks. But that design, as detailed [PDF] by Amazon researchers, had issues. The reimagined network structure, dubbed Jellyfish, relied on truly random graphs and called for removing routers from server racks and locating them centrally to simplify cabling. But that approach ended up increasing latency between servers within a rack. Rehder said no one has been able to put that design into production. "It requires much more complicated routing rules to figure out how to program every device – you can't just program every device to know who everyone is, they have limited memory space," he said. "And then the other [issue] is that the cabling actually is very complicated. Part of that hierarchy is about simplifying how you build the network in the datacenter and with a random graph it's literally random and you can't just have cable spaghetti all over a datacenter. So you could build it in a lab but you could never really do it at scale." Nonetheless, said Rehder, AWS has been solving these problems over the past few years. "The only reason we were able to even think about tackling them is that 15-year history of iteratively improving our hardware development and software ownership of our network," he said. Less random Inspired by other academic networking research, AWS managed to succeed with random network topology by making it not entirely random. RNG relies on a flat graph where routers interconnect through a mix of deterministic and randomized cabling. RNG began taking shape three years ago when Seshadhri Comandur, an Amazon Scholar and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, answered an internal Slack message from Ratul Mahajan, a fellow Amazon Scholar, datacenter networking expert, and professor at the University of Washington, who was looking for an expert on graph theory and routing. With help from AWS principal applied scientist Giacomo Bernardi and other colleagues, AWS has become the first company to deploy a flat datacenter network at scale. AWS expects the technology will offer better performance and reliability for Amazon customers while also saving billions of dollars in hardware and reducing CO2 emissions. The reimagined network structure was referred to as Penrose internally because the original design involved Penrose tiles. But as the project evolved, AWS settled on Resilient Network Graphs "to reflect the customer benefit and that primarily is a more resilient and performant network," as a company spokesperson put it. RNG relies on a routing algorithm called Spraypoint to identify node paths and an optical device called a Shufflebox for mixing connections between routers. Rehder said the Shufflebox is one of the pieces of magic that makes RNG work. "In a random graph network you don't have that hierarchical structure where you can have all the cables neatly aligned," he explained. "So how do you do that? How do you basically make a random network feel more structured? Well, you have the Shufflebox and the idea is that you plug fiber in here and inside of this it will randomize or basically scramble the fiber. So the ports you plug in get scrambled around and come out on some random port around the other side." RNG is AWS's new network for its core database servers. Machine learning hardware uses the company's UltraServer network, because the machine learning workloads need full bandwidth. "The core server networks can be oversubscribed more efficiently," said Rehder. "Everyone's not talking to each other at the same time." RNG has been rolled out in Ireland, Germany, and Spain, and the plan is to deploy it in the majority of company datacenters by the end of the year. ®
The Helios Horizon has completed what its developers call the first crewed, fixed-wing flight powered by solid-state batteries. New Atlas reports: On June 5, test pilot Miguel Iturmendi lifted off from Zephyrhills Municipal Airport in Florida at the controls of the Helios Horizon -- the first crewed, fixed-wing aircraft ever to fly on solid-state batteries. The flight was neither spectacular in distance nor in duration -- it was a series of short tests to validate the aircraft's weight and balance after the new batteries had been installed -- but it didn't need to be to make history. [...] The Helios Horizon's previous lithium-ion pack delivered 260 Wh/kg (watt-hours per kilogram, a measure of how much energy a battery holds relative to its weight). The new solid-state cells hit 410 Wh/kg, a 60% jump. Chief test pilot and company founder Miguel Iturmendi expects that figure to grow another 40% within two years.
Though the battery pack can be topped up over any AC outlet, no special infrastructure needed, fast-charging is also supported for up to 80% capacity in under 15 minutes. The aircraft also recovers energy in flight through wing-mounted solar panels and a regenerative system that spins the propeller as a wind turbine during glides and descents. "Regenerative flight can significantly extend the aircraft's range," Iturmendi said after the test flights.
The Helios Horizon itself started life as a Pipistrel Taurus motorized glider. Iturmendi's team added proprietary battery management, a custom propulsion stack, thermodynamic controls, and solar panel wing extensions. The aircraft already holds the world altitude record for electric planes in its weight class, having reached 24,000 ft (7,315 m). The next goal is 40,000 ft (12,192 m), commercial cruising altitude, in stratospheric flights planned for later this year.
A witness area at the lethal injection chamber at California's San Quentin State Prison in 2010.Photo: Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
A few days before my best friend’s execution date in 2006, prison administrators granted me one last chance to see him in a legal visit. We discussed his concerns about the humaneness of the lethal injection that would kill him. I will never forget his terrified look.
The day of his execution, I paced my cell hoping for the best. Without access to a telephone, my only method to monitor if or how my friend had died was through radio reports from members of the media who were allowed to witness his final breath.
News reports have historically allowed us as a society to monitor our government when it exercises its greatest power: ending a person’s life. But the state of Indiana has decided to inhibit that public access by banning members of the media from attending executions — unless the condemned person chooses to give a reporter a spot that could instead have gone to their relatives or friends. An appellate court upheld the ban this week.
Prison officials in Indiana claim the media ban is mainly about respecting the dignity of the condemned person. But the idea that there could ever be dignity in state-sanctioned killing of a perfectly healthy human is ludicrous within itself. That would be the case even if executioners eschewed cruel and unusual methods. But they don’t, even when the media is watching.
Angel Nieves Diaz continued moving for half an hour after receiving an injection of a drug that was supposed to paralyze him during a Florida execution. It took Arizona officials two hours to kill Joseph R. Wood. He had to be injected with 14 doses beyond the dose that was supposed to cause his death.
It took officials two hours to kill Joseph R. Wood.
Byron Black yelled, “It’s hurting so bad,” five minutes into a botched execution in Tennessee. John Marion Grant began convulsing and vomiting during his execution in Oklahoma. Prison officials had to enter the death chamber multiple times to wipe away and remove the vomit. The entire time, Grant was still breathing. Just last month, Tony Carruthers lay on a Tennessee gurney for more than hour moaning and bleeding as executioners struggled to find a vein. The execution was eventually called off by government officials.
Byron Black yelled, “It’s hurting so bad.”
These are only a few of the botched executions that lack “dignity.” This week, a federal appellate court upheld a decision blocking Alabama from using nitrogen gas to kill Jeffery Lee. Suffocating and asphyxiating on one’s own vomit seemed like a bridge too far.
As a result of the barbarity of these events, it’s not far-fetched to wonder if Indiana officials have an ulterior motive. Perhaps the media ban has nothing to do with preserving the dignity of the condemned and is instead about obstructing government accountability and public oversight.
Executions in this country were once highly public affairs. Often held in town squares, any member of the public could attend. In the 1830s, government officials began to enact laws that made executions private events.
Tony Carruthers laid on a gurney moaning and bleeding as executioners struggled to find a vein.
This was not because 19th century executioners were moved to protect the dignity of the condemned (who were disproportionately Black). It was an effort to halt a growing capital punishment abolitionist movement. A significant number of Americans found the public spectacle disgusting.
The same is occurring today. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, support for capital punishment in America has decreased from 80 percent in 1994 to 52 percent in 2026. This division necessitates transparency — otherwise, the only nongovernment actors able to tell the public the truth are dead.
The “dignity” playbook is a well-worn one that I know well as an incarcerated journalist. As a result of restrictions placed on media access to prisons, prisons have become unjustifiably cruel, less humane and more difficult to monitor. Restricting press freedom erodes human rights and constitutional safeguards and blinds the public to the kinds of cruelty and abuse depicted in HBO’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Alabama Solution.”
Perhaps the media ban has nothing to do with preserving the dignity of the condemned and is instead about obstructing government accountability and public oversight.
The film was made possible not because officials granted access to outside journalists, but because incarcerated people risked (and endured) severe punishment to document their reality with contraband phones.
It’s not the first time surreptitious reporting methods revealed the real motives behind media restrictions. In 1906, a reporter in Minnesota ignored a ban on media executions and sneaked in to watch a condemned man spend 14 minutes gasping for air before he strangled to death because the rope used to hang him was too long – he hit the floor when dropped and needed to be raised back up.
As appellate judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi wrote in a dissenting opinion in the Indiana case, “A government exercises its greatest power when it ends a person’s life. As I see it, such severe and irreversible punishment on behalf of ‘the people’ must be observable to comply with the Constitution.”
Lifting the media ban is the only dignified thing Indiana can do, not only for the condemned but also for the people being asked to fund irreversible punishments.
Patients in England cannot stop their data being processed by the Palantir-built NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), but individual NHS trusts can choose not to use it, health minister Preet Kaur Gill has told MPs. The minister, who was appointed last month to cover health innovation and safety, told fellow Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan that patients can only opt out of secondary uses of data such as planning and research. On the main opt-out mechanism, she said: "The National Data Opt-Out does not currently apply to products used in the NHS FDP. In most cases, this is because data is being used for the purpose of direct care." Last month, NHS England confirmed it had changed policy so some Palantir staff can access identifiable patient data through a new "admin" role. A briefing document seen by The Financial Times and confirmed by The Register warned that granting access could create a "risk of loss of public confidence" in NHS England's assurances about safeguarding patient data. Answering a separate question from Labour MP Rachael Maskell, Gill confirmed that NHS trusts running hospitals, mental health and other services can opt out. "Where NHS organizations would like to use alternative solutions, they retain the ability to procure locally, provided solutions meet applicable standards and support the delivery of national priorities," she said. According to NHS England statistics, 168 of 214 NHS trusts have signed up to use the FDP, with 123 live and 80 reporting benefits. All but one of England's 42 integrated care boards, Greater Manchester, have also joined. Palantir's role in the FDP, which followed similar pandemic-era work for NHS England, has become increasingly contentious. Last week, Parliament's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee said the NHS should end Palantir's involvement, and MPs have tabled 40 written questions about the supplier, which also works for intelligence agencies and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the last month. Responding to a question from Labour MP Mark Sewards, Gill said the government will decide this year whether to extend Palantir's current FDP contract beyond its February 2027 expiry. She noted the program was among just 14 percent of major government projects to get a green rating from the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, "indicating that the NHS FDP is on track." In a further answer to Neil Duncan-Jordan, Gill said the contract includes an exit management process covering intellectual property rights. "In addition, the contract includes controls to support transition and continuity of services in the event of termination, ensuring that operational delivery and patient services are protected," she said. "In principle, another supplier could provide equivalent functionality in the future," Gill added, signaling that even if Palantir's contract is not renewed, the government wants to retain the FDP. "It would take planning, time, and resources to run a compliant procurement and then move services and data across safely." ®
President Elbrich
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said more than 200 commercial vessels had safely traveled through the strait. That’s still far fewer than before the start of the war.
Lebanon reported Israeli strikes on the country's south shortly after the Israeli army issued an evacuation warning for 20 locations including the city of Nabatieh ahead of raids there.
BORK!BORK!BORK! We're big fans of retro computing here at Vulture Central, and so it is with a certain delight that we can report XP-era Windows has been spotted disgracing itself on London's Docklands Light Railway. Spotted by Register reader Tim Hayward, the wonderfully named DaisySignApp.exe has thrown up an application error. While the Windows shell might be shorn of all of XP's fripperies, the Recycle Bin icon hints at the operating system's origins. Hayward reckoned that XP was stalking the DLR, but it could also be Windows Server 2003. Support for Windows Server 2003 finally ended in 2015. XP was sunset in 2014, so the DLR display is rather out of date. Then again, as any IT administrator would admit, if something isn't broken, there's no point fixing it, no matter how much Microsoft would encourage them to. In this case, it is unlikely that the operating system is at fault (although one could argue that it should handle a misbehaving application more discreetly), and DaisySignApp.exe should be dealing with its own dirty laundry rather than throwing an exception in commuters' faces at Limehouse station. Limehouse connects London's Docklands Light Railway (DLR) to the UK's National Rail services. It was one of the first DLR stations and predates the borked operating system by more than a decade. Indeed, at the time of the DLR's opening in 1987, Microsoft was preparing to inflict Windows 2.0 upon the world – the delights of later versions and the company's GUI dominance were still a few years in the future. The DLR also seemed like a glimpse into the future back in the 1980s. However, a fair chunk of its underpinnings, such as formerly disused railway viaducts, hark back to an earlier era. Anyone looking at today's iteration of Windows might wonder how much of it dates back to what's on display at Limehouse. ®
"Anthropic said on Friday it will 'abruptly disable' its most advanced AI models for all users,"
reports Reuters, "after the U.S. government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. The company received the export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, without being given specific details of its national security concern, Anthropic said in a statement."
Anthropic's blog post writes that the directive applies to foreign nationals "whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance."
"Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected."
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET)... Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or "jailbreaking" Fable 5... We have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. The potential jailbreaks that have been disclosed to us are either entirely benign responses or are minor findings that provide no Mythos-specific uplift.
To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI's GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe... We are complying with the government's legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.
As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Reuters notes that Amazon's cloud unit AWS "said late on Friday that Anthropic has asked it to revoke access to the models for 'all users in all regions.'"
Dean Ball, a former White House official who contributed to the AI Action Plan the administration issued in the summer of 2025, said in a post on X that the order suggests all "non-Americans" would be restricted from using Anthropic's latest models, including those based in the U.S. "This means you should expect to have to prove your citizenship to use Anthropic models," Ball said.
Several key Anthropic personnel, including co-founder Chris Olah, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and philosopher Amanda Askell, were born outside the United States.
Europe Editor Tony Connelly analyses the EU Migration Pact, described as one of the most complex and contested pieces of European legislation in many years.
Earlier this year, Westminster began rolling out new rights for workers which include such things as changes to statutory sick pay, day one family leave, whistle-blowing protections and measures aimed at strengthening the rights of Trade Unions. This is reversal of trends that had been dominant under the previous Conservative government which had sought to curtail Trade Union rights as it could such as with the Trade Union Act of 2016 (which imposed more onerous requirements on organising a strike). Of course, these new rights were not extended to Northern Ireland, as that competency is devolved.
We have faced a somewhat longer road. Whilst the Labour government has brought in and begun enacting reforms, it was two years ago and in the teeth of the election that brought Labour to power that then economy minister Conor Murphy proposed a package of reforms to our own employment laws. As per the BBC report at the time…
Mr Murphy said zero hour contracts could be replaced with a “banded hours’” system, similar to one in the Republic of Ireland….Under that system a banded contract gives a worker the right to work an average of the hours in a specified band for 12 months….Mr Murphy’s proposals also include the right to a week’s unpaid carers leave in any 12-month period, which would bring Northern Ireland into line with the rest of the UK…A further proposal is that people should have the right to request flexible working as soon as they start a job rather than having to wait six months.
These proposals, put out for consultation later that year, became the basis of the ‘Good Jobs Bill’ that are now being shepherded forward by incumbent economy minister Caoimhe Archibald. The Economy Department has a summary of the proposed legislation on their webpage with the keys points being…
investing in affordable childcare and fair pay for childcare workers;
creating more and better paid apprenticeships and skills academies;
replacing zero hour contracts with contracts that provide flexibility and protect workers rights;
strengthening the role of trade unions, particularly in low-paying sectors;
altering our economic structure by supporting industries that provide Good Jobs;
harnessing the unrealised potential of the Social Economy; and
improving careers advice, including in schools, so that people are fully informed about the opportunities available to them.
The Northern Ireland legislation seems more expansive than the changes Labour brought in, with zero-hour contract to be removed and expanded workers rights implemented. But things have run into difficulties, which is important to keep in mind given that Stormont is heading for an election next year and laws that don’t complete their journey through Stormont could be consigned to the legislative graveyard. The clock is ticking in other words.
According to this BBC report from late May by John Campbell and Jayne McCormack, some business groups have called for a delay in the proposals whilst elements within the DUP and the UUP have been critical of aspects of the proposed changes with most of the disputes centring on the rights Trade Unions would receive under the legislation…
This is the most controversial part of the bill and has generated the greatest opposition from business groups. Currently unions can only start the process of seeking recognition, external in a workplace if there are at least 21 employees. The new law would cut that threshold to 10 employees.
More concerning for some businesses is the proposal to give unions greater rights to meet a workforce. Currently, unions generally only have a right to enter a workplace if they are already recognised by the employer. The bill would give unions a “right to request” access to meet with workers for recruitment and representation. Access would not be automatic, but employers would not be permitted to “unreasonably” withhold it.
Much of the critique of the bill from opponents has focused on whether it has received a sufficient level of scrutiny with DUP MLA Jonathan Buckley describing it as a ‘ham-fisted piece of legislation’ back in April. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, which supports the bill, has described the opposition as a ‘time-wasting exercise‘.
Earlier this week Deputy First Minister Emma Little Pengelly said that Sinn Féin was trying to ‘bully and bounce’ her into supporting the ‘half-baked’ legislation
On the trade union access clauses in the bill, she said: “These are the most aggressive and expansionist access to trade unions, not just in the UK and Ireland but across the European Union. “There is not a single business across Northern Ireland which supports the minister’s proposals,” she added.
but she did suggest that the DUP would support the bill if Sinn Féin split it and removed the new proposed rights for Trade Unions, to subject those proposals to further scrutiny though this illicited a negative response from the Trade Unions. Sinn Féin itself through First Minister Michelle O’Neill has accused the DUP of ‘blocking’ the bill in response…
O’Neill said her party was disappointed at being unable to “get it over the line” on Thursday, but held out hope that it can be progressed before the assembly election next May. “The DUP continue to block this really important legislation getting over the line, this is about workers’ rights, this is about supporting women in the workplace so I don’t support their denial of rights…It’s for the DUP to explain why they continue to block it.”
The outcome of this argument over policy remains to be seen.
Tech firms have pushed their staff to go 'all-in' on artificial intelligence in an attempt to boost productivity and cut costs - but it ended up having the opposite effect, writes Adam Maguire.
One of Ireland's most popular singers, Mary Black, has said she has been feeling "very strange" all day ahead of her final solo gig tonight in Dublin's Vicar Street.
Dónal Ryan examines FIFA's record-breaking World Cup, being co-hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada and the implications that soaring costs are having on fans hoping to attend.
The Canadian Prime Minister has said that Ireland and Canada were navigating a "global rupture" but that both countries were well placed to be a force for good by working together.
Almost every other year something crops up in the Leaving Cert that throws students, but a difficult paper does not mean they will get lower grades, writes Emma O Kelly.
Protesters have clashed with Pauline Hanson supporters, with one man given a move on notice outside a Melbourne venue hosting a One Nation fundraiser on Friday.
Michael Nelson, who was convicted of offensive behavior and fined last week for disrupting a Melbourne Anzac Day dawn service, was restrained by officers outside the South Melbourne venue.
The far-right proposal would require the government to put restrictions in place to limit the population by 2050
A national ballot on an unprecedented far-right proposal to limit Switzerland’s population to 10 million concludes this weekend, amid warnings of devastating consequences for the country’s economy if voters back the initiative.
A “yes” vote would require the Swiss government to take steps to cap the population at 10 million by 2050, enacting tough restrictions on family reunification, residency permits and asylum if the number reaches 9.5 million before that date.
Other western acts have attempted to crack country’s music scene since singer’s breakout success in 2018
One week after announcing she was “cancer free”, the British pop star Jessie J did what any recovering patient would do and travelled thousands of miles around the world to perform for an audience of more than a billion people.
On 29 May, the singer-songwriter, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, belted out a stage-rattling rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way on the stage of Singer, a hugely popular Chinese singing competition similar to The Voice. She also performed her new song, California, briefly adapting the lyrics to change California to Changsha, the Chinese city where Singer is hosted.
Geert Wilders’ PVV altered sketch of jailed Syrian brothers to make them look more menacing
A Dutch court artist has received damages after an MP for the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) used one of her drawings without permission and manipulated it with AI to make the subjects look more menacing.
Petra Urban, a court artist for 19 years, was shocked to discover a drawing she had made last year of two Syrian brothers jailed for the murder of their sister had been reworked and used in a video on Instagram and Facebook by the party’s Noord-Brabant region.
This blog is now closed – see our latest full report on the Middle East crisis
Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) has cautioned against media speculation about a potential memorandum of understanding to end the war, particularly on claims regarding the strait of Hormuz.
IRNA reported that Iran will not surrender its control of the strategic waterway and the US will have no role in its future management.
Contrary to some bizarre claims in the media, Iran in no way makes a commitment in this text to hand over its management or to restore the strait of Hormuz to the state before the military aggression of the US and Israel. The only point mentioned is the normalisation of transit through the strait of Hormuz upon the end of the war, the establishment of maritime security by the coastal states, the end of the illegal blockade, and the removal of threats to commercial shipping by the US and Israel. At Iran’s request, the US will have no role whatsoever in the future management of the strait of Hormuz. It has been made clear that the future administration of the strait will be based on an Iranian initiative and proposal, within the framework of a matter pertaining to the countries of the region. In this framework, discussions about the future of the strait of Hormuz will not take place even in negotiations after the signing of the agreement, and Tehran will directly resolve this issue in talks with Oman.”
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The first quarter of 2026 produced the most blocked and delayed data center projects on record, according to a new study shared with NBC News. The study -- conducted by Data Center Watch, a project of the AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks local data center activity -- found that data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March, the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023.
"The quarter reflected a structural shift rather than a cyclical spike: communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states," the authors wrote, noting that the total number and value of data centers blocked or delayed during the first three months of 2026 roughly matched the total for all of 2025.
[...] The report found that legislative pushes for moratoriums on constructing data centers ballooned during the first quarter of 2026, sponsored by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The report found such proposals introduced in 14 states from January through March, with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introducing a federal version. Though none of the proposals has been signed into law, one did reach the desk of Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in Maine. She vetoed it in April.
More than 300 bills were introduced in statehouses across the country just in the first six weeks of 2026, the authors found, saying it marked "a clear shift from incentive-focused policies toward regulatory oversight as the scale of energy demands became clearer." What's more, the study found that the number of active grassroots opposition groups across the country more than doubled from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by March. The authors found that the states with the most opposition groups through that month were Maryland, Ohio and Texas. "In some cases," they wrote, "opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance."
Anthropic completely shut off access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models Friday night, just days after they were launched.
The move comes after Anthropic's receipt of a US Commerce Department directive Friday evening, subjecting the new models to export controls restricting their use anywhere outside the United States. In a message posted Friday night, Anthropic said the only way for it to ensure compliance with that government order in the immediate term "is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers." Access to other Anthropic models is not affected.
An Axios report cited an administration official saying that the administration is concerned by reports of a jailbreak that reportedly gets around broad classifier-based safeguards meant to block Fable 5 prompts regarding cybersecurity, chemistry, and biology. The administration reportedly requested a pause in the release of these models to gain time for the "national security apparatus" to be "hardened" against this kind of threat. That hardening could be complete "in the next few weeks," Axios' source suggested.
US President Elbrich
Langeveld
and mediator Pakistan have said an initial deal to end the war in the Middle East would be signed tomorrow, but Iran denied the signing would take place so soon.
A woman in her 30s is in a critical condition after being bitten by a large shark at Coogee beach on Saturday, with a witness describing the scene at the popular Sydney beach as “shocking”.
A spokesperson for New South Wales Ambulance said the woman suffered arm and leg injuries and had been taken by road to St Vincent’s hospital.
President says Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores killed in ‘swift and lethal’ military strike with help from Venezuela
The US military has killed a leader in the Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, with the help of Venezuela, Elbrich
Langeveld
announced on Friday.
“At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth,” Elbrich
Langeveld
wrote on Truth Social.
Climate minister Chris Bowen says country must prepare for changing world and can play bigger role in reducing emissions
Australia will find exporting fossil fuels increasingly difficult but can switch to exporting clean energy products, the president of the next UN climate negotiations has declared.
Speaking at a climate conference in Bonn, Germany, Chris Bowen, Australia’s minister for climate change and energy, argued his country had led the global push to “transition away from fossil fuels” – based on the rapid growth of renewable energy and batteries in its domestic power grids – and that its economy could manage the switch.
Data analytics company loses on 22 out of 23 counts in lawsuit disputing how Swiss government rejected firm’s services
The US technology company Palantir has lost a legal challenge to force a Swiss independent magazine to publish its responses to articles about how the Swiss government rejected its services.
The data analytics company lost on 22 out of 23 counts of the suit. In a ruling on Friday, Zurich’s commercial court dismissed the majority of counterstatement requests filed by the company and its Swiss subsidiary finding that only a single passage in one article warranted a published response from the company.
NanoClaw, a secure agent framework, has partnered with supply chain platform JFrog to allow AI agents to fetch resources from JFrog's reviewed registries. Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw and co-founder of NanoCo AI, announced the tie-up on Thursday evening in San Francisco at a JFrog event that concluded with a World Cup watch party. Cohen explained that one of the features of Claw agents – OpenClaw and variations like NanoClaw – is that they can improve themselves by fetching tools and resources that they don't have. That works fine, he explained, when there's a manual approval process for accessing known local data. But it's not ideal for npm packages, even when the agent involved is sandboxed and isolated as it is in NanoClaw. Malicious code within a container may still be able to take harmful actions, even if the scope of potential activity is constrained. Developers, Cohen said, may not be familiar with a given package and it can take time to thoroughly assess whether a package is legitimate and uncompromised. "So we teamed up with JFrog and we integrated NanoClaw with JFrog's registries," said Cohen. The arrangement provides a way to reduce the agent's exposure to untrusted content. When the agent downloads new tools and libraries, the software comes from a vetted source. Cohen also announced the availability of what he called an agent factory, his company's homegrown system used to handle pull requests (PRs) using NanoClaw agents. The agent factory, he explained, is an attempt to triage pull requests, which have surged thanks to AI coding agents. "It's very easy now to point a coding agent at a repo and say, 'open a pull request for this repo,'" he explained. "And it's very difficult as a maintainer to tell the difference between a high quality contribution from somebody who's really using the open source project versus someone who's just trying to build up the reputation [using automated methods]. So to help us tackle this, we built an agent factory that helps us review every single contribution to NanoClaw." The agent factory is referred to as the PR Factory in the actual pull request. It's built with NanoClaw and hosted on exe.dev, a service that provides VMs with persistent storage. "When a PR opens, the factory spins up a dedicated worker agent for it, posts a thread to Slack, and the worker triages the change, reviews the diff, and proposes a test plan," Cohen explains in the documentation. "Nothing consequential happens on its own: merges, test runs, and credentialed GitHub actions each surface as an approval card in the thread, and only fire when a human clicks approve." Cohen acknowledged that some developers will think it's madness to process unsanitized PRs that could contain prompt injections or unsafe code. And he asked the assembled audience of developers how many had seen the phrase on the projected slide: "Never, ever, ever do this." Anyone who has spent time using and configuring AI agents in a development context has seen something of the sort in configuration files like Claude.md, which gets loaded as instructions to the underlying agent and model. "If you see something like this in the Claude.md file and the agent instructions say, 'Important: Never run drop database production,' it tells you two things. You know that that agent has deleted a production database before. And you know that it can actually still do it again. That's why the instruction is there." This elicited a knowing laugh from the audience. Cohen went on to say that the agent will do it again because instructions are not a way of enforcing security or safety. "Instructions help steer an agent AI towards valuable output, but it's not a safety mechanism," he said. "The only way to reliably prevent an agent from taking undesired action is not allowing it to take that action, not giving it the ability to take the action." That is the purpose of NanoClaw. ®
Canadian technology company OpenText has announced a €105 million investment that will create 400 jobs at its sites in Cork and Galway over the next three years.
Jeff Bezos says his new AI startup, Prometheus, is working toward an "artificial general engineer" capable of helping design complex physical products such as robots, drugs, manufacturing systems, and rocket engines. The Verge reports: The NYT first reported on Prometheus last November, but now Bezos is sharing more information about the startup after a $12 billion funding round, putting the company at a $41 billion valuation. Bezos serves as co-CEO of Prometheus alongside Vik Bajaj, who co-founded Alphabet's health-focused research group, Verily. The startup currently has around 150 employees.
The tools Prometheus intends to build could help develop physical products across several industries, including robotics, drug design, and manufacturing, the NYT reports. "Blue Origin is a perfect example of a company that could benefit from the tools that Prometheus is building," Bezos tells the NYT. "Any company that is building sophisticated devices -- like rocket engines -- would benefit greatly from this kind of technology."
Space Exploration Technologies, better known simply as SpaceX, became a publicly traded company on Friday nearly a quarter of a century after it was founded.
The company began trading on the NASDAQ exchange in New York City at $135 a share, valuing SpaceX at nearly $1.8 trillion. By the end of the trading day the company's shares were selling at $160.95, a respectable increase of more than 19 percent.
On paper, SpaceX founder Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire, with his personal stake in the company valued at more than $700 billion. Because of the company's stock options plan, thousands of current and former employees became overnight millionaires. Employees at SpaceX have worked remarkably hard over the last 24 years, and now they will be richly compensated for having done so.
The Justice Department has approved Paramount Skydance's $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery without requiring divestitures or other concessions. The deal still faces scrutiny from state attorneys general. Politico reports: The decision, expected to be announced Friday, paves the way for Paramount to combine with the entertainment and media company behind a vast film and television studio, CNN, and the HBO Max streaming service, which would be combined with Paramount+ to create a new offering boasting about 200 million subscribers. The deal, which would upend the Hollywood ecosystem by combining two historic rival studios, is opposed by many in the entertainment industry who fear it could lead to mass layoffs, among other concerns.
After an extensive review, DOJ officials determined the transaction did not pose a threat to competition and declined to challenge it, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The department approved the merger without requiring any divestitures, behavioral remedies or concessions, according to one of the people. [...] The DOJ's approval does not end the merger's legal scrutiny. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has been reviewing the transaction and could still sue to block the deal despite federal regulators signing off. A spokesperson for Bonta's office told POLITICO earlier this week "the Paramount acquisition of Warner Brothers remains an active investigation."
[...] Throughout those discussions, Paramount maintained that the merger would strengthen competition rather than diminish it, creating a media company better positioned to compete with streaming leaders and deep-pocketed technology rivals, according to people familiar with the matter. Hollywood workers fear the merger could trigger another wave of layoffs in an industry already reeling from years of consolidation. Critics argue that billions in promised cost savings will come at the expense of jobs, fewer opportunities for creators and greater concentration of power across film, television and streaming.
ShinyHunters claims it exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, where it says it stole 40GB of student and billing data. "ShinyHunters posted the UK university on its data leak site on Tuesday before publishing the stolen files later that same day, presumably because the school refused to pay the extortion demand," reports The Register. From the report: "University of Nottingham on our leak site is one of the first publicly confirmed incidents," a ShinyHunters spokesperson told us. "We have only just started outreach to affected orgs and are actively looking to reach an agreement with affected orgs." They didn't say when they planned to post the other 100 or so claimed victims.
A Google threat intelligence report published Thursday afternoon corroborated ShinyHunters' claims to have compromised more than 100 organizations. Google said it spotted malicious activity, "consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273," between May 27 and June 9, and notified more than 100 global orgs "whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints." Most of these, we're told, are based in the US and 68 percent are in the higher-education sector. Oracle has released a "patch availability document," but it's unclear whether a patch is currently available.