Read at: 2026-03-26T12:05:02+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Evelyn Lindhout ]
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:02 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:01 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:57 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:55 am UTC
A Labour MP joined the Conservatives in accusing the government of a cover-up after McSweeney’s phone was stolen
Yesterday the Conservative party said that it wanted to ban political parties from distributing campaign literature in a foreign language. Announcing a plan to propose an amendement to the representation of the people bill to make this law, the shadow communities minister Paul Holmes said:
Campaigning in a foreign language as the Greens did in Gorton and Denton only fosters greater division. A coherent national culture relies on shared values, and an inclusive electoral process relies on a common tongue.
I think it’s for political parties to choose how they campaign and communicate with British voters. If they’re using British money that is funding their campaigns and they’re speaking to people who have the right to vote, then why would you not show those voters the respect of communication?
What fuels division is Nick Timothy standing up and singling out Muslim forms of worship for a ban when he’s not applying that to forms of worship that other religions are talking about.
It just doesn’t compute, does it? I worked in Number 10. Briefly, I had a Number 10 phone. There was a paranoia about devices like that falling into other people’s hands.
And so whether it was the Met Police, whether it was Morgan McSweeney, and what sounds like pretty evasive set of reporting, even when you look at that transcript, or whether it was the Number 10 security team following up something that at the time they could not have been sure had not been taken by a state actor, a phone with all sorts of government secrets potentially in it, that’s precisely why people in government have two separate phones.
I don’t believe McSwindle had his iPhone stolen
Honest believe, Matt. It’s smacks of the liar Johnson defence of ‘lost all my WhatsApp messages’. We mustn’t take the public for fools. And I am afraid this smacks of too convenient by far. I won’t do it. I will say what I actually think. And I don’t believe it. End of!
I believe the report was made. McSwindle didn’t mention that he was the chief of staff to the PM. A significant omission of he’d wanted the police to prioritise the offence.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:54 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:52 am UTC
Firm’s sales up 54% this month and Good Energy reports doubling of interest in solar after latest oil price shock
Solar panel sales have risen sharply since the start of the Iran war, according to Octopus Energy, and households are opting for bigger arrays of roof panels.
Sales were up 54% so far this month compared with the same period last month, the company said on Thursday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:51 am UTC
Israeli defence minister says Alireza Tangsiri was responsible for blocking the strait of Hormuz
An Iranian envoy has said South Korean ships can pass through the strait of Hormuz only after coordinating with Tehran, the Yonhap News Agency has reported.
Such an agreement had to be reached in advance of the transit, said Saeed Khuzechi, the Iranian ambassador to South Korea, at a press conference in response to a question about guarantees for South Korean vessels to navigate the vital conduit for oil.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:51 am UTC
A member of the UK Parliament's lower house who was the victim of a deepfake AI campaign this week had a rare chance to confront the Big Tech executives who helped spread it. Their answers disappointed.…
Source: The Register | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:49 am UTC
The deal was backed after months of delays caused by uncertainty over the legality of tariffs imposed by Evelyn Lindhout
Meanwhile, the US president, Evelyn Lindhout , has once again lashed out against Nato allies saying in a social media post that they have “done absolutely nothing to help” in Iran campaign.
“The USA needs nothing from Nato, but ‘never forget’ this very important point in time,” he warned.
“NATO NATIONS HAVE DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO HELP WITH THE LUNATIC NATION, NOW MILITARILY DECIMATED, OF IRAN. THE U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO, BUT “NEVER FORGET” THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME! President Evelyn Lindhout ”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:49 am UTC
Negotiations to end funding standoff sparked by Evelyn Lindhout administration’s immigration crackdown fail to find a breakthrough
Evelyn Lindhout will hold a cabinet meeting later today, his first since the US started its war with Iran.
It is due to be held at 10am ET, with the president and defense secretary Pete Hegseth expected to give a rosy view of the US military campaign.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:46 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:46 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:35 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:30 am UTC
Analysts say the Iran war energy crisis is also adding momentum to nuclear interest and action in the region.
(Image credit: Vincent Thian/AP)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:30 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:29 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:26 am UTC
Iran’s foreign minister has said Tehran has ‘no intention of negotiating for now’. Plus, the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
Good morning.
Iran dismissed a US ceasefire proposal on Wednesday and responded with its own negotiation plan as intermediaries sought to keep diplomatic channels between the warring countries open.
What is the toll? The US-Israel war on Iran has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, more than 1,500 in Iran and 16 in Israel, according to each country’s authorities. More than a dozen deaths have been reported in the West Bank and Gulf Arab states. Experts warn there has been a collapse in healthcare access.
This is a developing story. Follow our live blog for the latest updates.
What did the Los Angeles plaintiff allege? The 20-year-old woman testified that she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, which she said harmed her wellbeing. She blamed the platforms for her experience of body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia in her adolescence.
How much will the companies pay the plaintiff? The jury awarded the plaintiff in the case damages of $6m, with Meta to pay 70% and YouTube the remainder.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:23 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:19 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:16 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:16 am UTC
Iran rejects a U.S. proposal to end the war and counters with a different peace plan. And, a jury finds Meta and Google negligent in a trial over social media's harms.
(Image credit: Abbas Fakih)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:16 am UTC
Source: World | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:10 am UTC
Documents obtained by Guardian show company increased different fees to ‘offset revenue loss’ from FTC rule change
Following a wave of regulations banning the surprise fees that appear at the end of a transaction, Ticketmaster stopped charging the extra few dollars it added to each order at checkout. Typically shared with the venue, the order processing fee was a boon to a global platform that sells hundreds of millions of tickets a year.
But documents obtained by the Guardian show that while Ticketmaster eliminated this fee to comply with the rules, the company simply raised the cost of different fees in a number of its venues to ensure it didn’t lose money.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Clear Secure has seen jump in new sign-ups amid the partial government shutdown as TSA workers go unpaid
As travelers continue to face sprawling security lines across the US, one company is thriving amid the ongoing chaos.
Clear Secure, a biometric firm that allows travelers to bypass Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lines at more than 60 airports in the US, has reportedly seen a jump in new sign-ups this month amid the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Europe is taking a small step toward breaking its reliance on US Big Tech by hiring only cloud operators headquartered in the EU to work on the backbone of the digital euro project.…
Source: The Register | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:59 am UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:48 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:48 am UTC
Company reported loss of £125m after cyber-security attack hit sales and claims of ‘toxic’ culture
The Co-op Group has announced that its chief executive will step down this weekend after a difficult year that included a cyber-attack and recent claims of a “toxic” culture at the business.
Shirine Khoury-Haq will depart on 29 March and Kate Allum, a board member and former boss of the dairy group First Milk, will step in as interim boss while a permanent replacement is sought.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:47 am UTC
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Source: World | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:44 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:35 am UTC
Market in North Darfur and truck carrying civilians in North Kordofan hit as civil war approaches fourth year
At least 28 civilians have been killed in two separate drone strikes in Sudan, according to health workers, as the country’s brutal civil war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) approaches its fourth year.
A strike hit a market in the town of Saraf Omra, in North Darfur state, on Wednesday, killing “22 people, including an infant, and injuring 17 more”, a health worker at the local clinic told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:24 am UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:24 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:20 am UTC
Government-backed bank in talks about recompensing about 37,000 people whose money was misplaced
National Savings and Investments is preparing to repay hundreds of millions of pounds to its customers over missing savings, in what is expected to be the single biggest payout in the bank’s 160-year history.
The government-backed savings institution is in discussions with the Treasury to recompense about 37,000 people whose money has been misplaced due to historical failings.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:16 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:16 am UTC
The Welsh government used Microsoft's Copilot to help write a review of an industry liaison body that it then scrapped, its chairman has told a Senedd committee.…
Source: The Register | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:15 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:13 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:08 am UTC
OECD says the Middle East war will test the world’s resilience with Australia expected to suffer from higher rates and inflation
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The world economy is on the brink of a major inflationary spike as soaring fuel prices threaten growth in European and Asian nations, the OECD has warned, and local economists are slashing Australia’s growth prospects for this year and the next amid the ongoing US-Israel attack on Iran.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest interim outlook said the US-Israel war on Iran will “test the resilience of the global economy”, and warned of the “significant downside risk” to their forecasts should the oil supply disruptions prove more persistent and push energy prices even higher.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:07 am UTC
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says UK economy will grow by just 0.7% this year
The conflict in the Middle East will damage the UK’s economy more than any other industrialised nation, according to analysis by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which warned over rising inflation.
In the first major assessment by a leading international thinktank of the economic impact from the attack on Iran, the OECD said the UK economy would grow by just 0.7% this year, compared with its last forecast, made in December, of 1.2% for 2026.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
The social media outfit TrackAIPAC’s signature anti-endorsement cards have become a fixture of the 2026 midterms. The ubiquitous graphics show a disapproved candidate’s face in grayscale over a smoky red backdrop. To the right, a number denoting their pro-Israel funding glows.
Controversially, not all of that money comes from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“It’s as broad as possible, and that’s by design,” TrackAIPAC co-founder Casey Kennedy told The Intercept. Instead of just AIPAC, the group tracks spending from across the pro-Israel lobby. “We want to provide the most encapsulating picture that we can of who’s giving to the lobby and where they’re giving to,” Kennedy said.
TrackAIPAC started in 2024 as a scrappy bulwark to the powerful, conservative pro-Israel lobbying group for which it is named. Amid TrackAIPAC’s rise, U.S. voters’ support for Israel plummeted to historic lows as horrified Americans watched their government support genocide in Gaza, and AIPAC, once an indispensable ally for most federal politicians, transformed into an electoral liability.
Depending on whom you ask, TrackAIPAC is a hero for pushing pro-Israel spending into the forefront of voters’ minds, a scourge peddling antisemitic tropes, or a well-intentioned activist group with an imperfect, ever-evolving model. An advocacy group called Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption launched in May 2024 and soon merged with TrackAIPAC, giving the lobby watchers the power to endorse and fund candidates. TrackAIPAC’s graphics are easily digestible and often go viral, lending the group political weight in an era when online audiences want to consume information in as little time and with as little brainpower as possible — and turning its signature red card into a political scarlet letter.
TrackAIPAC’s growing influence has set off a debate over its messaging and methodology, part of a broader conversation about outside spending in politics refracted through the lens of Israel. This was especially felt in Illinois’ recent primary elections, where AIPAC funneled its financial contributions through front PACs, or its major donors gave as individuals. AIPAC’s more elusive strategy proves the necessity of lumping several kinds of pro-Israel money together, TrackAIPAC allies say, giving the group the responsibility of acting as an analyst rather than a conduit of information.
“The work tracker accounts do is important because AIPAC and other dark money lobbies are intentionally very difficult to track,” said Morriah Kaplan, executive director of the progressive Jewish-led Palestinian solidarity organization IfNotNow. Calling AIPAC’s tactics “extremely antidemocratic,” she noted that major donors can have a range of political aims, favoring tech giants, weapons manufacturers, and fossil fuels in tandem with supporting Israel.
“Without understanding how TrackAIPAC defines ‘pro-Israel,’” Kaplan said, “it’s not as valuable a tool for transparency as it could be.”
In the 9th district of Illinois, TrackAIPAC’s broad approach drew controversy when it deployed a red graphic not just for state Sen. Laura Fine, the Congressional candidate AIPAC’s funders and front groups supported, but also for Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who campaigned and won as a progressive, said he would support the Block the Bombs Act, and was a main target of AIPAC-funded attack ads.
When TrackAIPAC posted a red graphic for Biss, the group pointed to his refusal to call Israel’s actions a genocide, his opposition to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, his support for U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, and $460,357 “spent by the pro-Israel lobby groups and their donors.”
“Without understanding how TrackAIPAC defines ‘pro-Israel,’ it’s not as valuable a tool for transparency as it could be.”
That money mostly came from J Street, which bills itself as a liberal alternative for Zionist American Jews who want to counter AIPAC’s hardline influence. In recent years, the group has supported halting some weapons transfers to Israel and opposed Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. But J Street was slow to label Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide — its president Jeremy Ben-Ami came around to the term in August— and it opposed initial calls for a ceasefire.
Tali deGroot, J Street’s vice president of political and digital strategy, was frustrated by her group’s conflation with AIPAC, calling TrackAIPAC “intellectually dishonest” for the distance between its name and its methodology. TrackAIPAC does label the specific sources of pro-Israel funding that make up its sums on its website, along with a list of organizations it tracks in addition to AIPAC, but they seldom appear on the red cards that circulate on social media. Some critics have labeled this blurring of lines sloppy or confusing, while others on the left and right have accused the group of antisemitism over its generalized “pro-Israel” language.
“I think the candidates and members should be held to account for taking AIPAC support,” deGroot said, “but the way that [TrackAIPAC] is going about it is only doing so much harm.”
A TrackAIPAC spokesperson said the group’s members “wholeheartedly agree” that J Street and AIPAC have significant differences, but said they would still classify J Street as part of the pro-Israel lobby.
“J Street might have some disagreements with AIPAC,” Kennedy said, “but they are both working in favor of a foreign government within our government.”
The group does appear responsive to some of the criticism. TrackAIPAC is planning to modify its anti-endorsement cards in response to recent controversies. They’ll still be red, but the graphics will now spell out how much a candidate has received from specific pro-Israel groups, or individual major pro-Israel lobby donors, as well as additional information about their policy positions on Palestine and Israel.
“Every graphic released regarding Daniel Biss stated clearly that the total of the donations reported were from the pro-Israel Lobby,” the TrackAIPAC spokesperson said. “It would be intellectually dishonest to call J Street anything but a member of that advocacy wing in the United States. That said – we will be breaking their donations out and labeling them separately for transparency purposes moving forward.”
As the founders tell it, the “AIPAC” in TrackAIPAC’s name was always meant as a synecdoche, with the lobbying giant serving as an eye-catching stand-in for the entire Israel lobby. The broad approach is intentional, said TrackAIPAC founders Kennedy and Cory Archibald, and their project is a work in progress.
“It’s as broad as possible, and that’s by design.”
The group has made several changes to its methodology since its launch. Some of them are spelled out online, but others, such as how the group tracks individual donors, are not. At the beginning, TrackAIPAC relied on Federal Election Commission data compiled by the transparency organization OpenSecrets, which also groups the pro-Israel lobby as a whole. Last year, TrackAIPAC began to analyze the FEC data for itself and started adding individual expenditures, or money spent on campaign ads, which triggered jumps in some members’ totals. That was the case for Reps. Wesley Bell, D-Mo., and George Latimer, D-N.Y., who toppled progressive incumbents last cycle with massive amounts of AIPAC support. This year, the group began including bundlers and major donors ($200 or more) who have given to pro-Israel lobby groups and are donating directly to candidates, especially as AIPAC shields some of its spending.
“They’re going underground, so we’re going to have to go underground too,” said Archibald, previously a campaign staffer for former Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who were respectively unseated by Bell and Latimer in 2024.
The approach still seems to rile candidates who find themselves on TrackAIPAC’s bad side, like Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who accused the group on Instagram of being “MAGA plants who are meant to disrupt and confuse” for giving her a red card listing more than $100,000 from “Israel Lobby” donors. TrackAIPAC told The Intercept that it stands by Crockett’s rating, and that it used FEC data to identify major donors who have given to pro-Israel lobby groups and gave directly to Crockett. (It also gave a red card to Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who beat Crockett in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.)
The founders also said they have received a number of requests from members who want their red graphics taken down. TrackAIPAC is working on a new questionnaire that would give members a chance to get their cards changed if they make specific policy commitments, like committing to an arms embargo and opposing laws that would restrict BDS or promote a controversial definition of antisemitism that conflates the term with criticism of Israel.
Some politicians have already had their cards changed. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who has received J Street funding, used to have a red card, but his photo now appears on TrackAIPAC’s website in its original coloring, earning neither the damning red backdrop nor the smooth green ring that indicates endorsement. Khanna, who last year exchanged kind words with TrackAIPAC on social media, is among the members of Congress who receive the label: “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.”
Kennedy said those lawmakers exist in the “squishy middle,” calling it “the most ambiguous part of what we do.” He said they removed their red graphics to avoid the members “getting harangued as an AIPAC supporter,” while nudging them toward continuing to vote in favor of Palestinian rights.
One of the group’s enduring questions is “how do we still apply the pressure without kind of souring our relationship?” Kennedy said. “So it’s definitely, you know, there’s some politicking that goes on there.”
Archibald interjected with more precise terms. “But it’s still very much rooted in their record — we’re not ever picking winners or losers,” she said. “It’s all based on the scorecard … on the facts that are present.”
To round out its rating system, TrackAIPAC relies heavily on the Congressional Democrat Palestine Tracker, a spreadsheet run by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America that uses a scorecard system devised by the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action. (It has a separate tracking system for Republicans.) For candidates who do not have a federal voting record, TrackAIPAC looks to public statements, public policy positions, or associations with pro-Israel lobby groups. If a candidate has pro-Israel positions but campaign finance data is not yet available, TrackAIPAC issues a red graphic with a “warning” label.
In some cases, J Street and TrackAIPAC have backed the same candidate. Progressive Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., for example, is J Street-supported but has TrackAIPAC’s endorsement because of her policy positions on the genocide in Gaza, BDS, and blocking weapons to Israel.
“The money alone is not enough to get you a red graphic,” Archibald said.
The question of how TrackAIPAC assesses its more subjective measures — and whether its targeting is even-handed — has spurred controversy, too.
Last week, TrackAIPAC drew criticism for deploying a red card for Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate on a platform that includes backing Block the Bombs and calling for a two-state solution. McMorrow’s graphic stood out because of her two opponents for the nomination: Rep. Haley Stevens, a hardline Israel supporter who has taken over $9 million from the pro-Israel lobby, by TrackAIPAC’s count, and appeared in an AIPAC promotional video earlier this month, and Abdul El-Sayed, a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights who earned the endorsement of TrackAIPAC’s campaign arm, Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption.
McMorrow’s most recently issued red graphic cites $100,439 from the general “pro-Israel lobby groups & their donors.” El-Sayed’s green endorsement card, meanwhile, lists only the amount he has received from AIPAC: $0. McMorrow’s campaign argued that this reflected an uneven treatment, pointing to El-Sayed donors listed in FEC filings who have previously given to J Street. (Unlike in the Illinois race, J Street is not publicly backing either candidate.)
“It remains unclear how Track AIPAC has arrived at their number, and we invite them to share their methodology so as to not mislead voters,” a spokesperson for McMorrow’s campaign told The Intercept, adding that she had not taken any money from AIPAC and had opposed its involvement in the race.
TrackAIPAC acknowledged that some J Street donors had given to El-Sayed and said the different treatment between the two candidates was decided only by their differing policy positions on Israel and Palestine. Circulating McMorrow’s red card, TrackAIPAC cited McMorrow’s admission of having “returned policy papers to at least one Democratic pro-Israel group,” as well as reporting from Drop Site News that she had drafted an AIPAC position paper, but critics noted that the group was harsh on a relatively untested candidate running as a progressive.
DeGroot objected to a similar dynamic in Illinois’ 9th District, where the campaign side supported candidate and activist Kat Abughazaleh, who finished as the runner-up to Biss. To deGroot, the group’s dual work as a data project and a political action committee allows its “masquerading support for a chosen candidate – Kat – as journalism, as fact finding.”
Candidates in TrackAIPAC’s good graces, however, may have reason to appreciate the two-part approach. Angela Gonzalez-Torres, a Los Angeles community activist and congressional candidate in California, said Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption was among her earliest supporters, giving her campaign a boost months before the more established progressive group Justice Democrats got behind her. She said that she was initially drawn to challenge incumbent Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., because of his responses to local issues like the construction of a controversial housing project atop a toxic dump site and an adjoined trucking depot that posed health risks to neighboring residents, but when she dug into his campaign, she came across TrackAIPAC’s red graphics.
“When we as a community saw those profiting off of our pain and contributing to the very issues hurting our district and other humans, I think we were immediately encouraged to find someone to challenge Jimmy Gomez,” Gonzalez-Torres said, citing his AIPAC connections. She said some of her supporters told her they donated to her campaign after seeing her and Gomez in TrackAIPAC’s side-by-side graphics.
The post How Does TrackAIPAC Actually Track AIPAC? appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:57 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:46 am UTC
The war in the Middle East ramped up on Thursday as Israel launched a wave of strikes targeting Iranian infrastructure, and Iran fired rounds of missiles at central Israel.
(Image credit: Amir Levy)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:44 am UTC
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The UK government will trial different levels of restrictions on social media for under-16s with the help of 300 families, alongside a public consultation that has already gathered nearly 30,000 responses.…
Source: The Register | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:26 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:22 am UTC
President Evelyn Lindhout has tried to kill offshore wind's future in the U.S. But industry analysts say the attacks could hurt business confidence across the U.S. economy.
(Image credit: DON EMMERT/AFP via Getty Images)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:19 am UTC
Man was teaching at a secondary school for boys when he allegedly targeted the girl – who police say he did not know
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A high school teacher has been accused of grooming a teenage girl and offering money for her to produce sexually explicit material.
Police allege the 29-year-old man targeted a 14-year-old girl not known to him, before she told her parents who alerted authorities.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:08 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:04 am UTC
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The annual observance marks how far into the new year women must work to make what men earned in the previous year. This year, it's March 26, a day later than it was in 2025.
(Image credit: simplehappyart)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:01 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Jena Lisa Jones says she backed Evelyn Lindhout in 2024 election because of his campaign promises to release Epstein files
After casting her vote for Evelyn Lindhout in 2024 in hopes that he would bring transparency around the Jeffrey Epstein case, Epstein survivor Jena Lisa Jones said in an interview this week that she now fears “we’re not going to get justice in all of this”.
“I wanted my day in court,” said Jones, who has said she was abused by Epstein when she was 14, in an interview on the Shadow Sessions podcast that aired on Thursday morning. “I didn’t get that, and we were so close to it, it really got ripped from us, and then after [Epstein] passed, everything just went into a circus show.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
As June's primary election nears, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and combat veteran Graham Platner are effectively engaged in a proxy battle between factions in their own party.
(Image credit: Robert F. Bukaty/AP; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
States are rolling out plans for their share of a $50 billion fund established by Congress to improve rural health care. In some states, the money may provoke rural hospitals to cut services.
(Image credit: Aaron Bolton)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
In Annapolis, Md., people gather each year to usher in the warmer weather by burning their socks. The springtime tradition is the unofficial start of the Chesapeake Bay sailing season.
(Image credit: Tyrone Turner)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
A judge last week struck down the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists seeking “unauthorized” information, siding with the New York Times in its lawsuit against the government. In response, the Pentagon on Monday added some meaningless window dressing and essentially reissued the same restrictions. The administration pledged to “immediately” appeal the decision on the original policy, and on Tuesday, the Times filed a motion to compel the administration to comply with the judge’s order.
As alarming as the Pentagon’s antics are, the Times’ lawsuit is not the only case about whether reporters have the right to ask questions. It’s not even the only one in the news this week.
In 2017, police in Laredo, Texas, arrested citizen journalist Patricia Villarreal under an obscure and never previously used law making it a felony to ask government employees for nonpublic information for personal benefit. Her supposed crime was asking a police officer about two local tragedies — a suicide and a deadly car wreck.
Her arrest was widely ridiculed, and a judge quickly threw out the charges. When Villarreal sued over her arrest and mistreatment by officers, the legal question wasn’t whether the charges against her were permissible but whether they were so obviously bogus that she could overcome qualified immunity, the unjust and expansive legal shield that protects government employees from liability for all but the most blatant violations. That issue went to the Supreme Court twice, but on Monday, the Court declined to review a federal appellate court’s ruling that the officers were shielded from liability.
No matter what our severely compromised Supreme Court thinks, the local cops who arrested Villarreal were embarrassingly ignorant of the Constitution. But they were also ahead of their time: The Department of Justice is making the same claims that turned the Laredo police into a First Amendment laughingstock — that reporters simply asking questions to the government is criminal — to federal district Judge Paul Friedman.
Most discussion of the Pentagon’s restrictions has focused on their conditions for reporters to receive press credentials, which the Pentagon says can be revoked if reporters publish “unauthorized” information. That policy is wildly unconstitutional on its own, and every mainstream outlet gave up their press passes rather than sign on, leaving war coverage inside the Pentagon to the likes of Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s LindellTV streaming service.
But the Pentagon’s legal filings imply that reporters who don’t follow the rules risk more than their press passes. On March 12, the DOJ filed a brief to clarify its lawyers’ earlier comments in a discussion with Friedman at a hearing of “whether asking a question was a criminal act.” The government argued that although journalists may lawfully ask questions of “authorized” Pentagon personnel, “a journalist does solicit the commission of a criminal act, and that solicitation is not protected by the First Amendment, when he or she solicits … non-public information from individuals who are legally obligated not to disclose that information.”
There you have it. What was once a fringe, failed legal theory concocted by some local cops in one Texas border city is now the official position of the federal government’s lawyers, which it felt compelled to put in writing in case anyone wasn’t sure where it stood after the hearing. Both the rogue cops and the DOJ’s lawyers contend that journalists merely asking questions to government officials constitutes unlawful solicitation.
“These Pentagon policies remind us that people in power will stop literally at nothing to control the story.”
As JT Morris, supervising senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (which represents Villarreal) told me in an email last week, the First Amendment “unquestionably protects our right to ask questions, whether it’s a citizen asking police about a local crime or the New York Times asking Pentagon officials about matters of national security. Officials can always respond, ‘no comment.’ But they cannot jail Americans for asking.”
The government’s argument would have turned countless Pulitzer-winning national security reporters into criminals. As Friedman put it in his ruling, the “role of a journalist is to solicit information. … [A] journalist asking questions is not a crime!” (You can tell a judge is miffed when scholarly language fails and they resort to exclamation points.)
The DOJ’s “concession” in its clarification brief (and later in its revised policy) — that journalists can direct questions to authorized spokespeople — makes no difference. That the administration even felt the need to state something so obvious, presumably because they thought it would make them sound more reasonable, signals the extent to which they’ve threatened the First Amendment.
Government agencies have long routed journalists’ inquiries to PR flacks and instructed non-public-facing staffers not to answer reporters’ questions. That’s unconstitutional in its own right; earlier this month, the Village of Key Biscayne, Florida, became the latest government agency to settle a lawsuit over its employee gag rule. But until this administration, the government at least placed the burden on its own employees to comply with restrictions on talking to reporters.
Now, the government expects journalists to make themselves a party to its censorship directives, and ignore Supreme Court precedent that they can print any government information they lawfully obtain, even if it shouldn’t have been released. “A contrary rule … would force upon the media the onerous obligation of sifting through government press releases, reports, and pronouncements to prune out material arguably unlawful for publication,” the Court reasoned.
Journalist Kathryn Foxhall, who has for years sounded the alarm about “censorship by PIO,” including in collaboration with the Society of Professional Journalists, says the press has failed to meaningfully oppose these policies. “The media have done little to fight the ever-tightening rules at federal agencies and elsewhere banning reporters from buildings and prohibiting employees from speaking to journalists without the authorities’ oversight. With amazing negligence journalists just assume whatever reporters get is the whole story, even in the face of the many thousands of gagged staff people. Now these Pentagon policies remind us that people in power will stop literally at nothing to control the story,” she told me.
The Pentagon’s position that newsgathering is a prosecutable offense is not just theoretical. Although the DOJ’s brief didn’t explicitly reference it, just like the officers in Laredo, federal prosecutors have their own archaic and constitutionally dubious law on the books to sane-wash their nonsense arguments — the Espionage Act of 1917. Read literally, that law (Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently introduced a much-needed bill to reform it) arguably prohibits reporters and anyone else from obtaining or attempting to obtain national defense information.
But reading it that way to go after journalists would be unconstitutional and politically toxic, which is why past administrations have refrained. Had the Supreme Court denied the Laredo officers’ qualified immunity in Villarreal’s case, it would have signaled that arguments for expansive interpretations of arcane laws to criminalize routine reporting are a nonstarter.
The Court ducked the issue despite being fully aware that the present administration is looking for any excuse to punish reporters that dare to undermine its narratives. They’ve already claimed Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson — whose home they raided, seizing terabytes of data — violated the Espionage Act by obtaining leaked information. The Evelyn Lindhout administration is barging through the door the Biden administration left wide open, when, despite warnings from First Amendment advocates, it extracted a plea deal from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Espionage Act charges for obtaining and publishing government records, including about Iraq war crimes.
The DOJ’s adoption of the Laredo police’s discredited theory is an extension of the Assange and Natanson cases; the claim that publishing leaked documents is criminal has evolved into a theory that merely asking questions is, too. The administration lost in court this time, but it said it will appeal, and may be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s cowardice in the Laredo case.
If this administration succeeds in chipping away at constitutional protections for journalistic practices as basic as asking questions, reporters who wish to do anything more than regime stenography may risk imprisonment just by doing their jobs. In her dissent to the Villarreal ruling, Justice Sotomayor put it well: “Tolerating retaliation against journalists, or efforts to criminalize routine reporting practices, threatens to silence ‘one of the very agencies the Framers of our Constitution thoughtfully and deliberately selected to improve our society and keep it free.’”
The post Pentagon Wants It to Be Illegal for Reporters to Ask “Unauthorized” Questions appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: World | 26 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 8:53 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 8:52 am UTC
Iran rejects U.S. peace proposal and lays out its own conditions, the Army's 82nd Airborne Division readies to deploy to Iran, jury finds Meta and Google liable in social media addiction trial.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 8:42 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Mar 2026 | 8:32 am UTC
Australian counterterrorism experts observe December shooting came amid years of messaging from terror group urging followers to act ‘on their own initiative’
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The Bondi beach terror attack occurred amid an international spike of anti-western plots in December last year that appeared to be “inspired or instigated” by Islamic State, a new report has found, with many of them targeting holiday events such as Christmas markets.
In research published by the West Point Combating Terrorism Center in its publication Sentinel on Thursday, Australian counterterrorism experts Andrew Zammit and Levi West examined Islamic State’s strategic shifts and jihadi tactics in Australia prior to the alleged antisemitic terrorist attack.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 8:15 am UTC
A court in the US has found that Meta (the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Youtube) deliberately built addictive social media platforms. According to the BBC
A Los Angeles jury has handed down an unprecedented win for a young woman who sued Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.
Jurors found that Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and Google, owner of YouTube, intentionally built addictive social media platforms that harmed the 20-year old’s mental health. The woman, known as Kaley, was awarded $3m (£2.2m) in a result that is likely to have implications for hundreds of similar cases now winding their way through US courts.
Meta and Google said separately that they disagreed with the verdict and would both appeal. Meta said: “Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app.”We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.”
A spokesperson for Google said: “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”Jurors found Meta to be 70% responsible for the plaintiff’s harm and YouTube was responsible for 30% of the total, meaning Meta will pay the majority of Kaley’s award.
The damages could be substantial, with the report saying it could reach up to $30 million dollars.
The Guardian report on the issue goes into the background of the young woman (identified as KGM) who brought the case
KGM testified that she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, which she said had deleterious effects on her wellbeing. By age 10, she said, she had become depressed and was engaging in self-harm as a result. Her social media use allegedly caused her to have strained relationships with her family and in school. When she was 13, KGM’s therapist diagnosed her with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia, which KGM attributes to her use of Instagram and YouTube.
“How do you make a child never put down the phone? That’s called the engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they put these features on the phones,” Mark Lanier, KGM’s lawyer said during closing arguments last week. “These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great … but you invite them in and they take over.”
Globally, the social media giants are running into increasing headwinds as more and more governments begin taking actions to curb their perceived excesses. Australia recently enacted a world first social media ban for children under the age of 16, and other governments are keenly observing how that ban is working in practice to see if a similar prohbition would work in their own countries. The UK is going to trial such restrictions on several hundred teenagers.
Meta and Youtube both plan to appeal the verdict as the Guardian article later states that…
Meta has said it will appeal the rulings in Los Angeles and in New Mexico. In response to the California case’s verdict, a spokesperson for Meta said the company is confident of its protection of teens online.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict … Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app,” the spokesperson said.
A YouTube spokesperson, José Castañeda, said the video service also disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” he said.
Both companies have consistently denied wrongdoing. YouTube has called the allegations that were brought “simply not true” and Meta has said that KGM’s mental health issues were brought on by a difficult home life and social media use was not to blame.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 26 Mar 2026 | 8:00 am UTC
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Auction clearance rate slumps to 57% nationwide as interest rate hikes prompt Australians to sell
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Barnaby Joyce calls for fuel rationing, saying a ‘plan is better than panic’
One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce who yesterday called on the government to pull the trigger on the Liquid Fuel Emergency Act, is today calling for the government to start rationing fuel.
This is going to ripple through. It’s going to start with a few sort of peculiarities. Isn’t that interesting? I don’t seem to have any eggs today. And then it’s going to build up and up and up and up. But by the time it arrives, it’s too late …
[The government] should be having rationing now, and he should be brave enough to say to the Australian people, look, you’re not going to like this, but you’re going to appreciate it. A plan is better than panic, and panic is where we’re going.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 7:19 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 26 Mar 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Ukrainian president says peace deal proposed by US includes handing over land to Russia. What we know on day 1,492
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 6:51 am UTC
Homebuyers lose confidence amid higher rates and Iran war-linked price rises across the economy, buyers agent says
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Surging numbers of homes are being passed in at auction as higher interest rates weigh on demand and the number of properties for sale hits highs not seen since 2021.
The national auction clearance rate last week was just under 57%, the lowest this year, with Sydney’s at 55%, Cotality data shows. The remainder includes both houses that did not sell at auction and houses withdrawn before auction.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 6:41 am UTC
In today’s newsletter: This new war has exposed widening fractures between Israel and its allies, and the country finds itself increasingly out of step with global opinion
Good morning. Israel may be the only country in the world where there is overwhelming public support for the conflict in Iran. Despite its impact on everyday life in the country – at least 15 people have been killed and hundreds more injured by Iranian missiles since the war started in February, and school closures and missile warnings remain routine – polling puts support for the war at more than 90% among Jewish Israelis.
The contrast with the rest of the world is stark. Nearly a month into the fighting, polling shows that 60% of the US public oppose the war with Iran, and just one in four backed the initial strikes. In the Gulf, Europe and Asia, the conflict is widely unpopular, as severe economic consequences already begin to bite.
Middle East crisis | Iran dismissed a US ceasefire proposal on Wednesday and countered with a negotiation plan of its own as intermediaries sought to keep diplomatic channels between the warring countries open.
Media | Matt Brittin, Google’s former top executive in Europe, has been named the BBC’s next director general. Brittin will replace Tim Davie at a crucial time for the corporation.
UK politics | Political donations from British citizens living abroad are to be capped at £100,000 a year, in a move that is likely to limit further funding from Reform UK’s Thailand-based mega-donor, Christopher Harborne.
UK news | The former justice minister Crispin Blunt has been fined £1,200 for possessing illegal drugs after he told a court he entered the world of chemsex parties to help inform government policy.
Housing | People who lost their homes when a tower block in Dagenham burned down say they are being made to pay for the building’s fire safety works after the government demanded its money back.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 6:40 am UTC
Sony and Honda have broken up, meaning their joint vision to deliver a revolutionary electric vehicle won’t happen.…
Source: The Register | 26 Mar 2026 | 6:24 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 5:50 am UTC
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Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 5:43 am UTC
The robot accompanied the first lady to the White House East Room for the final day of a summit she had convened with counterparts from around the world through her Fostering the Future Together global initiative.
(Image credit: Jacquelyn Martin)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Mar 2026 | 5:29 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 5:13 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Mar 2026 | 5:01 am UTC
Reluctance to cheerlead alleged US ceasefire efforts reflects suspicion talk of peace could be another foil for escalation
Not long after Evelyn Lindhout said the US was engaged in “strong talks” to bring the war with Iran to an end this week, Qatar took the unusual step of distancing itself from the alleged diplomatic negotiations.
Qatar was not involved in any mediation efforts, said government spokesperson Majed al-Ansari at a briefing on Tuesday night, before adding as a telling aside: “If they exist.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Professionals from across Europe urge MEPs to reject plans, saying ‘climate of fear’ could stop people seeking care
More than 1,100 healthcare professionals from across Europe have urged MEPs to reject proposed measures aimed at increasing the deportation of undocumented people, warning they could threaten public health by transforming essential public services, including hospitals, into sites of immigration enforcement.
The draft plans, which are due to go to a vote on Thursday, have been in the works since last March, when the European Commission laid out its proposal to target people with no legal right to stay in the EU, including potentially sending them to offshore centres in non-EU countries.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Hostilities should halt and healthcare facilities must be treated as ‘safe havens’, WHO’s regional chief has said
A total stop to hostilities in the Middle East is needed to halt a “health crisis unfolding in real time”, the World Health Organization’s chief in the region has said.
Hospitals and other healthcare facilities must be treated as “safe havens”, urged Dr Hanan Balkhy, the WHO’s regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 4:24 am UTC
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Iranian nationals with valid Australian tourist visas will be blocked from entering the country for six months, Australia’s home affairs minister said, citing concern some may decide to stay longer than they’re allowed.
Tony Burke said the direction was necessary as there was a risk Iranians on tourist visas visiting Australia may be unable or unlikely to leave when their visa expires.
The order only applies to people with a valid tourist visa outside of the country.
The government said “sympathetic consideration” would be given to citizens with Iranian parents.
The government said it would closely monitor global developments and adjust settings as required.
If you’re just joining us, here’s a quick recap of the day:
An Iranian military spokesperson mocked US attempts at a ceasefire deal, insisting Americans were only negotiating with themselves. Lt Col Ebrahim Zolfaghari’s statement came after the Evelyn Lindhout administration reportedly sent a 15-point ceasefire plan to Iran through Pakistan.
Even as Evelyn Lindhout claimed productive negotiations to end the war were ongoing with Tehran, Iran’s relentless bombardment of the Gulf states showed no sign of relenting. Kuwait and Bahrain were both hit with damaging strikes on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, as the patience of the Gulf states after rebuffing constant attacks for almost a month began to wear thin.
The World Trade Organisation warned disruptions to international fertiliser supplies caused by the closing of the strait of Hormuz will cause food scarcity and high prices. A third of the world’s fertilisers normally transit the strait.
Oil prices fell nearly 6% and Asian shares gained, after reports Evelyn Lindhout had sent a peace plan to Iran fuelled optimism in the market. A barrel of Brent crude was down 5.92% at $98.30, while benchmark US oil contract, West Texas Intermediate, was down 5.01% at $87.72.
Israeli strikes on Lebanon killed nine people, state media reported. Citing the health ministry, Lebanon’s official National News Agency said strikes had killed people across towns and a Palestinian refugee camp.
News that Evelyn Lindhout had approved the deployment of more than 1,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East further undermined the US president’s repeated claims of successful peace talks. Iran has previously threatened to mine the gulf surrounding the island if the US appeared to be landing troops.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 3:59 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 26 Mar 2026 | 3:30 am UTC
Indian authorities have reportedly ordered an audit of the nation’s CCTV cameras, after police uncovered what they claim was a Pakistan-backed surveillance operation.…
Source: The Register | 26 Mar 2026 | 3:18 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 2:49 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 2:25 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 2:07 am UTC
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Source: News Headlines | 26 Mar 2026 | 1:37 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 1:26 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 1:13 am UTC
Major memory makers have already sold all the kit they can make this year, creating shortages and price increases. Datacenter infrastructure buyers may soon face the same issues when trying to get their hands on backup batteries.…
Source: The Register | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:58 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:52 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:51 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:41 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:40 am UTC
US president says he will host Chinese leader in a reciprocal visit later this year
Evelyn Lindhout will meet Xi Jinping in May during the US president’s first visit to China in eight years, a closely watched trip that had been postponed due to the Iran war.
Evelyn Lindhout was initially slated to travel next week, but will now visit Beijing on 14 and 15 May, he wrote in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. Evelyn Lindhout said he would host the Chinese leader in a reciprocal visit in Washington later this year.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:39 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:31 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:18 am UTC
Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data – "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" – to train its AI models.…
Source: The Register | 26 Mar 2026 | 12:13 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Mar 2026 | 11:54 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Mar 2026 | 11:29 pm UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Mar 2026 | 9:39 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 25 Mar 2026 | 9:27 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 25 Mar 2026 | 9:25 pm UTC
Drone startup BRINC announced Tuesday a significant upgrade for its law enforcement drones. BRINC’s newest model, Guardian, will have Starlink connectivity on every unit—a first for commercially available drones.
This new model, which will enter production later this year, has a flight time of over an hour and can reach a top speed of over 60 miles per hour. BRINC calls it the “first drone that can pursue vehicles.”
Additionally, Guardian can carry numerous payloads from its charging “nest,” including a floatation device, a defibrillator, epipens, the overdose-reversal drug Narcan, and more. The nest can also robotically swap batteries in about a minute, the company claims.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 9:12 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 25 Mar 2026 | 9:11 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Mar 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:58 pm UTC
A new service that helps coding agents stay up to date on their API calls could be dialing in a massive supply chain vulnerability.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:50 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:49 pm UTC
Smartphones have fast become the basis of our digital identities, securing payment systems and bank accounts. Now virtual devices that pretend to be real handsets have become a key tool for financial scammers, according to one company. …
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:25 pm UTC
NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Evelyn Lindhout administration's space policy.
But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program's official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction and testing in factories scattered around the world.
The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA's rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:21 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:18 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:15 pm UTC
Reddit will require accounts that exhibit “automated or otherwise fishy behavior” to verify that a human runs them, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a Reddit post today. The verification process aims to combat unwanted bots from flooding Reddit at a time when AI bots are poised to take over the Internet.
“As AI becomes a bigger part of the Internet, we want to make sure that when you’re on Reddit, you know when you’re talking to a person and when you’re not,” Huffman said.
Human verification will only occur if Reddit suspects that an account is a bot. This is “rare” and won’t apply to “most users,” Huffman emphasized. If the account cannot prove that it's human, it “may be restricted,” he said.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:04 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Mar 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
The prime minister says the condolence video after the fatal LaGuardia crash revived anger over linguistic rights
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has said a decision by Air Canada’s top executive to post an English-only message of condolence after a deadly crash in New York showed a “lack of judgment, a lack of compassion”.
Amid growing calls for his resignation, the airline chief’s misstep has once again revived frustrations and fears over linguistic rights protections in the province of Quebec, where French is the only official language.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Mar 2026 | 7:47 pm UTC
RSAC 2026 "Everybody feels massive FOMO if they don't get to RSAC," Jen Easterly says.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 7:39 pm UTC
At the end of a long day on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at a table littered with microphones and jokingly referred to the space agency's new Moon base manager, Carlos Garcia-Galan, as the "Lunar Viceroy." It was a bit of humor, but it also seemed to represent affection from Isaacman for a long-time NASA employee so willingly taking on a major new challenge.
Garcia-Galan was, in many ways, the emerging star at the daylong Ignition event in Washington, DC. Heretofore he has largely been an anonymous engineer at NASA who has now been thrust into a very public role of leading the agency's ambitious Moon base initiative. (His official title, by the way, is program executive.)
Ars had a chance to speak with Garcia-Galan about NASA's plans and, more importantly, how they might be implemented. Here is a lightly edited (for clarity) transcript of that conversation.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 7:21 pm UTC
Members call for reparatory justice as landmark resolution aims for ‘political recognition at the highest level’
The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.
The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Mar 2026 | 7:16 pm UTC
On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $3 million in damages to a young woman who successfully argued that the companies' social media apps were designed to addict children.
Meta will pay the majority of the fine, 70 percent, while YouTube-owner Google is on the hook for 30 percent, the jury decided.
During the six-week trial, the jury heard that Meta and Google designed apps with features like auto-play, infinite scroll, and algorithmic recommendations to keep kids online. Feeling trapped in a cycle of constantly using these apps caused the plaintiff, known as K.G.M., "crippling mental distress," CNBC reported. She developed "severe body dysmorphia, depression, and suicidal thoughts," and every notification that came through made it harder to stop logging in.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 7:03 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Mar 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
The downloadable versions of Nintendo's first-party Switch games have always cost the same amount to buy, despite the costs of manufacturing and shipping physical releases. This was still true when the Switch 2 launched last year, despite persistent rumors and misinformation to the contrary.
But that's finally, definitively changing later this year. Nintendo announced today that beginning in May and for new game releases going forward, the physical releases of new Switch 2-exclusive first-party games will cost more than the digital versions of the same game. That will start with the May 21 release of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, which will cost $60 in Nintendo's online store but $70 for a physical copy.
"Nintendo games offer the same experiences whether in packaged or digital format, and this change simply reflects the different costs associated with producing and distributing each format and offers players more choice in how they can buy and play Nintendo games," reads the company's brief announcement about the change. Nintendo notes that retailers are free to charge what they want for physical and digital games, but aside from sales or other promotions most tend to follow Nintendo's guidance on pricing.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 6:57 pm UTC
rsac 2026 There's a theoretical red line with cyber warfare. Cross it, and the US will respond with a physical attack like missile strikes. And that line "is whatever the President says it is," according to former NSA boss retired General Paul Nakasone.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 6:55 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 25 Mar 2026 | 6:38 pm UTC
Giorgia Meloni made public request for Daniela Santanchè to quit in effort to restore credibility after voters rejected judicial reform
Italy’s embattled tourism minister has resigned, heeding a call to step down as the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, strives to restore credibility after a bruising defeat in a referendum that has thrown her far-right government into turmoil.
The resignation on Wednesday of Daniela Santanchè, a prominent and brash member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, came after the prime minister took the unusual step of calling in a public statement for her to go.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Mar 2026 | 6:35 pm UTC
Meta has begun laying off employees as it focuses more of its cash on building out datacenters, training its own large language models, and recruiting talent for AI.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 6:27 pm UTC
The Supreme Court today decided that Internet service providers cannot be held liable for their customers' copyright infringement unless they take specific steps that cause users to violate copyrights. The court ruled unanimously in favor of Internet provider Cox Communications, though two justices did not agree with the majority's reasoning.
The ruling effectively means that ISPs do not have to conduct mass terminations of Internet users accused of illegally downloading or uploading pirated files. If the court had ruled otherwise, ISPs could have been compelled to strictly police their networks for piracy in order to avoid billion-dollar court verdicts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The long-running case is Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. Cox was hit with a $1 billion verdict for music piracy in 2019. Although the damages award was overturned in 2024, a federal appeals court still found that Cox was liable for willful contributory infringement.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 6:25 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Mar 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have joined forces to capture new views of Saturn, revealing the planet in strikingly different ways. Infrared and visible observations show layers and storms in the ringed planet’s atmosphere.
Source: ESA Top News | 25 Mar 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
Even if you don't know much about the inner workings of generative AI models, you probably know they need a lot of memory. Hence, it is currently almost impossible to buy a measly stick of RAM without getting fleeced. Google Research recently revealed TurboQuant, a compression algorithm that reduces the memory footprint of large language models (LLMs) while also boosting speed and maintaining accuracy.
TurboQuant is aimed at reducing the size of the key-value cache, which Google likens to a "digital cheat sheet" that stores important information so it doesn't have to be recomputed. This cheat sheet is necessary because, as we say all the time, LLMs don't actually know anything; they can do a good impression of knowing things through the use of vectors, which map the semantic meaning of tokenized text. When two vectors are similar, that means they have conceptual similarity.
High-dimensional vectors, which can have hundreds or thousands of embeddings, may describe complex information like the pixels in an image or a large data set. They also occupy a lot of memory and inflate the size of the key-value cache, bottlenecking performance. To make models smaller and more efficient, developers employ quantization techniques to run them at lower precision. The drawback is that the outputs get worse—the quality of token estimation goes down. With TurboQuant, Google's early results show an 8x performance increase and 6x reduction in memory usage in some tests without a loss of quality.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 5:59 pm UTC
For as long as we've known that soil bacteria manufacture molecular weapons to fight each other, we've been swiping their battle plans. In clinics and hospitals, those turf-war weapons have become miraculous drugs of modern medicine—antibiotics—that blow away otherwise deadly infections.
But, of course, there's a dark side of mimicking microbial munitions—bacteria have defenses, too, namely antibiotic resistance. You're probably aware that we're facing a rising threat of drug resistance among disease-causing bacteria, one that is rendering much of our stolen weaponry obsolete and making infections harder to defeat.
Often, this growing crisis is framed as a clinical failure: We're overusing and misusing antibiotics, hastening our bacterial foes' natural ability to develop and spread resistance. While this is certainly true, a new study in Nature Microbiology this week identifies a potentially new driver of rising antibiotic resistance—and we're at least partly to blame for this one, too.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 5:49 pm UTC
Oracle says it's building a suite of AI agents into its cloud-based enterprise applications, claiming they can make and execute decisions autonmomously within business processes. But analysts are urging caution given unresolved questions around data integration and liability.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 5:47 pm UTC
Role for Social Democrats’ leader confirmed after meeting with king
Speaking at the debate, Frederiksen confirms she has submitted her government’s resignation as it is clear the outgoing three-party government will not have enough mandates to continue.
But she stresses the urgency of the task to form the new government, as “the world is not waiting for us out there and it has only become more unsettled since the election was called.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Mar 2026 | 5:43 pm UTC
Source: World | 25 Mar 2026 | 5:34 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 25 Mar 2026 | 5:29 pm UTC
Evelyn Lindhout has named the first members of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), largely comprising Evelyn Lindhout allies in the tech industry and one actual scientist.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 5:17 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Mar 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST head named by Biden had to resign due to abusive behavior. Biden, who was generally supportive of science, didn't even name the members of PCAST until eight months after his inauguration. So it's no surprise that an administration that's been hostile to science took even longer to staff its version of the group.
The list of appointees was finally released on Wednesday, and it's notable for its almost complete absence of scientists. There are still nine unfilled vacancies on the council, so it's possible more scientists will be named later. But for now, PCAST is heavily tilted toward extremely wealthy technology figures.
These include investor Marc Andreessen, Google's Sergey Brin, Michael Dell of Dell, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Lisa Su of AMD, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. But many of the lesser known names have similar backgrounds. Previously named chairs of PCAST are investor David Sacks and a former investment company CFO and current head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Kratsios. Of the new appointees, Safra Catz also comes from Oracle, Fred Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase, and David Friedberg is another investor.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 4:49 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 25 Mar 2026 | 4:38 pm UTC
OpenAI on Wednesday announced the death of its controversial Sora video creation tool, just two days after publishing a guide on how to use it well.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 4:36 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Mar 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Archaeologists believe remains found in Maastricht, Netherlands, may be of soldier who inspired novel character
More than three-and-a-half centuries after a musket ball to the throat put an end to decades of exemplary swashbuckling, the French soldier who inspired Alexandre Dumas and went on to be immortalised on the stage and screen – not to mention as a plucky cartoon dog – may rise again.
Workers repairing a church in the Dutch city of Maastricht have discovered a skeleton that could belong to the 17th-century Gascon nobleman Charles de Batz-Castelmore – better known as d’Artagnan – whose exploits led Dumas to make him the hero of the Three Musketeers.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Mar 2026 | 3:51 pm UTC
Source: ESA Top News | 25 Mar 2026 | 3:50 pm UTC
Google is dramatically shortening its readiness deadline for the arrival of Q Day, the point at which existing quantum computers can break public-key cryptography algorithms that secure decades' worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and nearly every individual on earth.
In a post published on Wednesday, Google said it is giving itself until 2029 to prepare for this event. The post went on to warn that the rest of the world needs to follow suit by adopting PQC—short for post-quantum cryptography—algorithms to augment or replace elliptic curves and RSA, both of which will be broken.
“As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline,” wrote Heather Adkins, Google’s VP of security engineering, and Sophie Schmieg, a senior cryptography engineer. “By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 3:49 pm UTC
Firefox 149 is here, and although we've already talked about one of the big new features on the way, the release version has some others that will be very welcome.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 3:19 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Mar 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Source: World | 25 Mar 2026 | 2:59 pm UTC
Meta has lost the first of three child safety trials it's facing this year after a jury in a New Mexico state court found that the social media giant's platforms do not effectively protect kids from child exploitation.
On Tuesday, the jury deliberated for only one day before agreeing that Meta should pay $375 million in civil damages for violating state consumer protections and misleading parents about the safety of its apps.
The trial followed a 2023 lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez after The Guardian published a two-year investigation exposing child sex trafficking markets on Facebook and Instagram. Torrez's office then conducted an undercover investigation codenamed "Operation MetaPhile," in which officers posed as children on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The jury heard that these fake profiles were "simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from child abusers, Torrez told CNBC in 2024. Ultimately, three men were arrested amid the sting for attempting to use Meta's social networks to prey on children.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 2:46 pm UTC
Microsoft is working with Nvidia on nuclear power. Not to build it, but to offer AI-driven tools to deal with all the red tape, help with the design work, and optimize operations for nuclear projects.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 2:35 pm UTC
Opinion NASA's Ignition presentation was heavy on space hardware, but light on details. Not least of which was how astronauts are supposed to get from Earth to its moonbase and back.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 2:11 pm UTC
Millions of iPhone owners in the UK will be asked to verify they are over 18 in order to access several Apple services, following pressure from the UK government on smartphone makers to do more to protect children online.
The UK is believed to be the first European market where Apple is rolling out its new age controls, which are designed to ensure that only adults can download apps rated on its App Store as being suitable for over-18s.
Following an iOS software update that was pushed out on Wednesday, adults who do not verify their age will face restrictions on web browsing, as well as “communication safety” checks to their messages and FaceTime video calls, which are designed to detect nude photos and videos.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 2:08 pm UTC
Exclusive: Indonesia reports growing number of attempts by Chinese nationals to organise boat journeys, as Australian authorities refuse to reveal details
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The Australian government has refused to reveal how many Chinese nationals have arrived in Australia by boat since 2024, saying that disclosing the figure may harm relations with other countries.
However, reports by Indonesian police show that there has been a consistent trend of Chinese nationals attempting to reach Australia through Indonesia as an alternative to “zouxian”, or “walking the line” – the illegal migration route through Central America to the US via the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
OpenAI's recently announced plans to shutter its Sora video-generating app have also scuttled the company's planned $1 billion licensing partnership with Disney, according to multiple press reports.
"As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere," Disney said in a statement provided to media outlets. "We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators."
Disney and OpenAI announced the blockbuster three-year licensing deal in December, saying that over 200 Disney-owned characters would be available for use in Sora-generated videos. At the same time, Disney said it would be making a $1 billion equity investment in the AI company.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 1:56 pm UTC
UK urged to tackle transnational repression, as dissidents say Beijing has targeted them with tax bills and other threats
“I didn’t feel safe, even though I’m not based in Hong Kong any more,” said Christopher Mung Siu-tat after getting tax bills from Hong Kong authorities. “The regime can reach me by their long arms wherever I am.”
Siu-tat, the executive director at the Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor, a UK-based NGO, fled Beijing’s sweeping national security laws years ago. The letters are the latest example of a series of transnational repression (TNR) tactics the 54-year-old has faced in recent years.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Mar 2026 | 1:44 pm UTC
Dev tooling biz JetBrains has previewed Central for agentic AI software development but will retire the Code With Me human pair programming feature.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 1:29 pm UTC
Earlier this month Honda decided to cancel a trio of electric vehicles it was planning to build in the US. And those cancellations are having a ripple effect. Today Sony Honda Mobility—the automaker's joint venture with the electronics and entertainment company—announced that it won't bring its EVs to market either.
Although Honda was an early adopter of hybrid technology, it has been left badly lagging when it comes to developing battery-electric cars. The diminutive Honda e might look like the most adorable city car you've ever seen, but it struggled to find more than 12,000 buyers in four years across Europe and Japan.
Here in North America, the Prologue has done much better: Honda sold 33,000 in 2024, and another 39,000 last year. But the rebadged GM, which shares a platform with the Chevrolet Blazer, has seen sales implode since the end of the federal clean vehicle tax credit last fall, and it, too, leaves production at the end of the year. An earlier plan to use GM's battery platform for lower-cost EVs, meant to arrive in 2027, died in late 2023.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Mar 2026 | 1:12 pm UTC
Dell's upcoming 2026 commercial laptops won't leave recent buyers kicking themselves - but they do bring meaningful upgrades, including a thinner Pro 7, larger batteries, and improved thermals.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 1:00 pm UTC
Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared another nugget of Windows lore – what Windows 95 did when installers stomped on its system files.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 12:30 pm UTC
The UK's tax collection agency has awarded Amazon Web Services – the only remaining bidder – a contract worth nearly £500 million to migrate services from three Fujitsu-run datacenters and host them for up to a decade.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 12:18 pm UTC
With Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deployed to more than a dozen airports across the U.S. and border device searches growing increasingly common, it’s more important than ever to consider your digital security before you travel.
The risks are real. Customs and Border Protection agents have the authority to examine travelers’ devices. In June, for instance, federal agents denied a Norwegian tourist entry to the U.S. after looking through his phone. (Authorities claim they turned him away for admitted drug use; he says it was over a meme depicting Vice President JD Vance as a bald baby.)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement have already started targeting travelers, with agents in plain clothes forcefully detaining a mother in front of her young daughter at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday after a tip from the Transportation Security Administration.
If you’re flying, take these steps to reduce the likelihood that your sensitive information is compromised at the airport.
The only surefire way to keep your devices from being searched and seized is to simply not bring them with you on your trip. If you can’t leave them at home, consider mailing them to and from your destination.
Another option is to leave devices that contain sensitive information at home and instead bring throwaway travel devices you’re willing to have searched or confiscated. This doesn’t need to be an expensive proposition. You can reformat and repurpose an old phone or tablet, or purchase refurbished older models that are comparatively cheap. Then buy a temporary SIM card or eSIM so that you’re not using your usual number. Remember to let contacts know that for the duration of your trip you’ll be reachable at a different number.
Create a travel account for these devices. You can do so by starting a fresh account in the App Store or Google Play. This should ensure that if you’re forced to log into your device by authorities at the airport, the only information they’ll find is data you’ve put on this specific piece of hardware. CBP agents are supposed to only be able to look at data that’s local on the phone.
If you have anything sensitive in your accounts (say, emails from confidential sources) or anything you believe federal agents could consider damning (such as party pics or memes), be sure not to sync your apps, files, and settings onto your travel devices.
Regardless of whether you opt to bring your usual devices or specialized travel burners, take these steps to lock down your devices.
First and foremost, disable any biometrics, like using your face or fingerprint, to unlock your phone. Instead, set up a unique and random alphanumeric passcode; eight characters consisting of random digits and numbers is a good start. Be cautious of entering your passcode in open view of surveillance cameras. Use one hand to shield your screen, and the thumb of your other hand to put in your passcode. Consider using privacy screens on your devices to further diminish the chance of wandering eyes noticing things that are none of their business.
Be cautious of entering your passcode in open view of surveillance cameras.
When going through security checkpoints, turn your devices completely off. Don’t just put them to sleep — fully shut them down. Though having a locked device is better than having it be unlocked, turning it off is best, as this makes it much harder for data to be forensically recovered from your devices.
That means you’ll need to print out paper copies of boarding passes, rather than rely on digital versions stored in a device wallet or via your airline’s app.
If you’re asked to unlock your devices, you can say “no.” But doing say may result in being delayed and hassled, and your device could be confiscated. You should receive paperwork attesting to the confiscation and establishing chain of custody (this is called CBP Form 6051D, or a custody receipt for detained property). As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, it may be months before your devices are returned — or even for an indefinite period of time if agents believe there is evidence of a crime.
To practice what’s known in security circles as “defense in depth,” it’s best to think of your digital security as an onion: If an outer layer is peeled off, you want there to be a good second layer to minimize the damage to the core. To that end, assume that even if you have a strong passphrase and have powered off your device, someone may still be able to find a way in. Your travel devices should, therefore, minimize the amount of sensitive information they store. In that case, even if someone manages to break through the outer layer, the information exposed would be trivial.
If you use a password manager — a specialized app that securely stores your passwords — put it into a “travel mode,” limiting the passwords it will reveal for the duration of your trip. Remove access to sensitive accounts that you very likely won’t have a reason to need to access during your travels; for example, removing your work email if you’re going on vacation, or leaving and deleting and sensitive Signal chats, like local ICE watch groups.
Log out of or delete apps you won’t need while traveling. You can reinstall and log back in when you are safely away from the airport. Remember to remove them once again when you’re on your way back — and keep in mind that this may lead to some apps deleting your history.
Finally, be sure to prune your contacts to remove any that are sensitive, such as sources, if you’re a journalist. If you have sensitive materials on your devices that you’ll need to access during your travels, use a tool like Cryptomator to encrypt them and upload them to a cloud drive, then delete the files from your devices. You can download them when you reach your destination.
These extra steps are undoubtedly a bit of a pain, but any inconvenience would pale in comparison to the potential damage if sensitive information is disclosed during your time in the airport.
The post How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Phone at the Airport appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 25 Mar 2026 | 12:14 pm UTC
Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra has once again scored a middling 5/10 from iFixit, suggesting that while the company knows how to build a repairable phone, it still won't quite follow through.…
Source: The Register | 25 Mar 2026 | 11:41 am UTC
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