Read at: 2026-03-20T10:17:04+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Doha Blanker ]
Opinion Last week's UK government consultation on its plans for digital identity had quite a few things missing. It did not include a price estimate - something it said was due to decisions yet to be taken on the scheme's scope - or how long the government would keep "audit trail" records of ID checks.…
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Richard Hermer, the attorney general, has challenged Kemi Badenoch to say whether she would object to Jewish prayer in public, after the Conservative leader backed one of her shadow ministers who said an Islamic prayer event was intimidating and un-British, Peter Walker reports.
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Keir Starmer has granted the US permission for “defensive” action against Iranian missile sites from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
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Jesus Javier Gomez Islas, 23, says in filing against LAPD he has permanently lost vision in one eye due to unjustified munition fired at his face
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Jesus Javier Gomez Islas filed a claim against the LA police department (LAPD) on Thursday stemming from permanent injuries he says he suffered at a 31 January demonstration outside the Metropolitan Detention Center. The federal facility has been the site of frequent protests against Doha Blanker ’s immigration crackdown and was the site of “ICE Out” rallies that week.
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The Smile mission is set to launch on a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on Thursday 9 April at 08:29 CEST/07:29 BST/03:29 local time. Follow along as we communicate on the final preparations for launch. Journalists are invited to join online media briefings in English, French, Spanish, Italian and German.
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From the White House to Iran’s former crown prince, proponents of the U.S.–Israel war on Iran sell it to the American people — and Iranians themselves — as a crusade for liberation. Instead, the regime remains in place as the death toll grows, environmental hazards proliferate, and civilian infrastructure is decimated.
As if the destruction inside Iran itself wasn’t enough, the war is starting to have serious ramifications for the global economy and, more to the point, expanding into neighboring countries.
Lebanon, in particular, has come into Israel’s crosshairs, with increasing Israeli incursions and missile strikes deeper into the country. The number of dead there is approaching 1,000 with Israeli missiles razing entire apartment blocks in central Beirut this week and a ground invasion getting underway. More than 1 million Lebanese people have been displaced.
“I think the Lebanese are suffering now, and there’s not really anyone who’s trying to save them,” says Afeef Nessouli, a Beirut-based journalist, speaking to The Intercept Briefing. “They know that, and they know that they’re just political pawns who are always at the worst end of the stick along with Palestine.” He adds, “The fear is that [Israel] will occupy south of Litani [River] … and just take people’s homes, take their land, and never give it back, make settlements for their country.”
“It’s been really stunning to watch that so many people fall for this idea of ‘This is a human rights intervention’ — and yet it’s accomplished through massive human rights violations,” says Ali Gharib, a senior editor at The Intercept. Commenting on Israel’s strategy of making failed states out of its adversaries in the region, he notes, the Israelis “don’t need [Reza] Pahlavi to work. They don’t need him to go in there and become this democratic leader. They just need him to lead a movement that damages the regime enough to put Iran into some kind of fractured state or state failure where it’s not a threat to Israel anymore.”
“We’ve had in the last 20 to 25 years, especially since the Iraq War in 2003, a lobby pushing for regime change in Iran,” says Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini, a veteran peace strategist. “The Iraq version of regime change ended up being a catastrophe from a U.S. perspective, but actually from an Israeli perspective and from a Saudi perspective, and even from a UAE perspective, the decimation of Iraq has been a success because if Iraq had turned out to be a liberal democracy, it would’ve challenged Israel on the question of Palestine. It would’ve challenged Saudi Arabia on the question of Islam and what is Islam.”
It’s a region in upheaval, and at the center are Israeli and American fictions about liberatory bombs.
“I’ve been on podcasts with Israeli journalists where they’re telling me the Iranians wanted us to go in and liberate them,” says Naraghi-Anderlini, “And my response to them is: Liberate their bodies from their souls?”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Ali Gharib: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Ali Gharib, and I’m a senior editor at The Intercept. The U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran is stretching into its third week, with attacks having started on February 28. The bombardment of Iran has remained relentless. At least 1,400 people have been killed and more than 18,000 have been injured.
Civilian infrastructure has taken a hit too, including Iranian hospitals, pharmaceutical plants, educational centers, and civilian energy depots. Iran, for its part, has retaliated by launching missiles and drones into Israel itself, as well as attacking U.S. bases in the region. It has also targeted energy infrastructure in the nearby Gulf Arab states.
Meanwhile, Israel has increased its attacks on Lebanon, killing more than 900 people and displacing more than 1 million, and it’s preparing for a ground invasion against the paramilitary group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
On Wednesday, Israel expanded its airstrikes into central Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, where it razed residential buildings.
Afeef Nessouli, is a journalist and Intercept contributor based in Lebanon, where he has been reporting since November. He joins me now from Beirut.
Afeef, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Afeef Nessouli: Yeah, thanks for having me, Ali. I appreciate it.
AG: Afeef, what can you tell us about what it’s actually been like in the parts of Lebanon where you’ve been reporting, since Israel increased its attacks on the country following the strikes against Iran?
AN: So I’m in an area of Beirut called Tayouneh. Tayouneh is hundreds of meters away from the evacuation orders that have been all over the southern suburbs — it’s just right north of the southern suburbs — so it’s very loud here. Right outside of my area, there’s hundreds of tents lined up.
It’s right outside of the park. Horsh Beirut is this public space, and families from the southern suburbs have just lined up their tents and have had to make do with such little resources.
It’s really so hard to see so many people without shelter. It’s just a catastrophic situation.
AG: It’s not entirely surprising to hear that you might be seeing people there in tent cities, given that, I think I read that 1 in 5 Lebanese people were displaced now, and especially with Israel expanding its attacks into Beirut and central Beirut, as we saw on Wednesday, decimating parts of central Beirut and imploding with missiles buildings in the center of town.
So what have you been seeing, what have you’ve been talking to people there, internally displaced people?
AN: So on Wednesday, Israeli airstrikes hit central Beirut. They killed at least 12 people, wounding 41 people.
Going to the strike areas is really just awful to see and awful to witness. Buildings are rubble. It’s causing panic and fear among people in places that were not told to evacuate.
I talked to a mother who was displaced from the southern suburbs, a neighborhood called Bourj Al Barajneh. She’s been staying under this huge statue of a crescent moon right outside of Al Amin Mosque in downtown Beirut. She’s mostly just worried for her kids — worried that they’re not getting enough to eat, worried about them just being terrorized, and also it’s just so cold.
You have to understand: Everything is all hands on deck. So a lot of schools are being turned into shelters. The stadium has been turned into a shelter.
One I visited in Ras, Beirut, which is in northwestern Beirut, over 200 families I think were in and out of that shelter. People are sleeping on the floors. I spend a lot of time with an organization called Truth Be Told that’s passing out hot meals from donations and prescription medication around Horsh Beirut, where all the families are lined up in tents.
What you’re mostly hearing is that people don’t have anywhere to go. They have nowhere to sleep. And everywhere they do have to sleep is incredibly uncomfortable. There are men sleeping in their cars. There are cars everywhere. People are struggling. They’re struggling to survive in an economy that was already just decimated from the last few years.
AG: I’m curious, on the geopolitics, Afeef — how do you think these attacks have affected Hezbollah, the Lebanese paramilitary group from the south of the country but has become a central player in Lebanese politics and obviously a group closely linked with Iran? Is your sense that Hezbollah has been weakened by these attacks? Is the group continuing to be diminished or are they holding pretty firm at this time?
AN: I can say that a lot of people inside of Lebanon and a lot of people outside of Lebanon had seemed to count Hezbollah out, for the most part. They had seemed decimated, especially after the Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was killed. It seemed like they were taking a long rest period.
So a lot of the criticism is, Israel had had over 10,000 ceasefire violations — and it took the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to be assassinated for the group to push into the war and take decisive action.
AG: And of course, you’re talking about Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of Hezbollah who was killed by Israel during an earlier round of its war with Lebanon — [after] a pager attack that Israel lodged against Lebanon, where it loaded pagers with explosives and meticulously distributed them to Hezbollah officials, killing scores of Hezbollah officials as well as countless civilians. And Ali Khamenei was the supreme leader of Iran until he was assassinated by Israel at the outset of this latest war with Iran.
AN: After the supreme leader was assassinated, I went to the public mourning in Dahiyeh. It was literally the evening of when Israel started striking the southern suburbs, and you could tell that the emotion was palpable. People were crying, people were wailing, people were chanting, people were angry. It was extremely well attended, it was extremely big.
Ultimately, the same night, I was awoken in the middle of the night by two really loud strikes on Dahiyeh. It was really clear that Hezbollah had decided to take Lebanon into the war. And a lot of Lebanese people were pretty upset at that. They felt like they weren’t given any consent; they were not able to consent to this sort of act. It’s become a pretty polarizing subject.
A year ago, when Hezbollah entered the war on behalf of Gaza, I think people were more amenable to the idea. They understood that Israel wanted to make incursions into the country and occupy land. I think in the last year, having not really responded to a lot of ceasefire violations in the south, but responding to Ali Khamenei’s assassination was just a disappointment to a lot of Lebanese people who felt, “Well, are you acting on behalf of Iran, or are you acting on behalf of our best interest?”
It seems like they’ve lost some support on the ground. So there is that, there is a decimation of their reputation right now, from what I am at least gathering on the ground. But also there’s a lot of people who understand or the people who are on the front lines, they’re the ones who have to self-help when all of their houses are demolished. And there’s military access roads for Israeli occupation soldiers to literally making their demolished houses gone forever because now there’s military access roads paved on top of them.
“It feels like this big psychological operation done to Lebanese people for decades to separate them into sects, into tribes, and to get them destabilized.”
In Lebanon, there’s so many political opinions. And when something like this happens, it really feels like the people of the country are pitted against each other. It feels like this big psychological operation done to Lebanese people for decades to separate them into sects, into tribes, and to get them destabilized, while all of these outside forces are manipulating their lived experience, their day-to-day experience. I think most people really just want to have a Lebanon that they can depend on economically, that they can depend on politically, and that they can depend on in general for having a life that isn’t burdened by cycles of violence every few months.
AG: Touching on that a little bit, I’ve talked to my friends, Lebanese friends, who admittedly are probably very self-selecting, but it seems they have sensed a resentment. You were sort of touching on this, a resentment of the fact that between the so-called ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, and the Israeli assassination of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, there were some tens of thousands of Israeli ceasefire violations recorded, and none of these prompted a response from Hezbollah. But their willingness to go in retaliation for the assassination of a foreign leader — do you sense that kind of resentment? Is that one of the things contributing to Hezbollah’s diminishing stature?
AN: Yeah, so I spoke to one woman last night. She’s in her mid-30s. She has family from the south. Someone who theoretically supported Hezbollah getting into the war on behalf of Gaza after October 7. Someone who understands having land in the south — family homes in the south — that have been under fire for, really, decades. She says that, in the last year and a half, since the so-called ceasefire was brokered, after 10,000 violations from Israel, after Hezbollah really didn’t respond to all of the violations, and yet they woke up on behalf of the supreme leader’s assassination — just doesn’t sit well with her. She doesn’t see the reason why Lebanon would have to be in this fight.
But on the other hand completely, there’s also this sophisticated understanding, obviously, that there’s a neighbor to the south that has occupied an entire country and wants to have the Litani River be its northern border. There is this idea that Israel has been manipulating and manufacturing this feeling for a while, that they are coming in and they were going to come in and they were attacking Lebanon much before Hezbollah had ever come around.
The fact of the matter is that Israel really does want to sow discord in the sectarian populations of Lebanon. They have dropped leaflets a couple days ago in central Beirut saying, “Lebanon is yours. You can inform on Hezbollah” and like they shared a QR code.
“What ends up happening is that a lot of people discriminate against people from the south, people from Shia backgrounds, because they’re basically afraid.”
And then they target residential buildings and say, “We’re coming after Hezbollah” and cause psychological damage and physical damage and ruin so much peace for so many people. Ultimately what ends up happening is that a lot of people discriminate against people from the south, people from Shia backgrounds, because they’re basically afraid that if they let them into their buildings or try to take care of them, they’re going to be around people that are affiliated with Hezbollah and are going to be targeted.
A lot of these people are just displaced. They’re unhoused in rain, their houses have been destroyed, and then their fellow patriots are literally just terrified that being around them or letting them in is going to result in Israel killing all of them. That’s a real fear on the ground right now.
It’s something that feels very beneficial to Israel and the U.S. to have: sects in Lebanon fighting each other all of the time not paying attention to the slow incursions — the slow pushing forth — on the southern border. Also, it’s probably beneficial to countries like Iran to pour money, pouring arms, have proxies that are fighting its battles.
Ultimately what happens is that the situation on the ground becomes unbearable. Everybody’s trying to pressure the people to orchestrate some heroic political ends that is impossible for the people to do because they’re obviously being manipulated by powers much larger than them. I think the Lebanese are suffering now, and there’s not really anyone who’s trying to save them. And they know that. They know that they’re just political pawns who are always at the worst end of the stick — along with Palestine. So, yeah, it feels really dismal in Lebanon right now.
“Most people really just want to have a Lebanon that they can depend on economically … and that they can depend on in general for having a life that isn’t burdened by cycles of violence every few months.”
AG: You mentioned in the south, the razing of people’s homes to make roads for Israeli military infrastructure as they increase their ground incursions and seem to be making preparations for a full-scale ground invasion.
Of course, this is all fraught with the history of the rise of Hezbollah in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, an occupation that lasted for nearly two decades with ongoing hostilities in the two and a half decades since 2000, when Israel officially left south Lebanon. What is the mood among people today in Beirut and also more broadly in Lebanon with regard to fears of what an Israeli occupation could mean for the future of their country?
AN: I think most people in Lebanon look at Israeli occupation as something that’s just unacceptable. While there’s a lot of opinions that are diverse politically in Lebanon, sometimes in contradiction of each other, one thing I think that is mostly true is that most Lebanese people do not want any normalization with Israel. There are some people who do, but it’s not many.
The fear is that they will occupy south of Litani — the Litani River is Israel’s northern border — and just take people’s homes, take their land, and never give it back, make settlements for their country. The feeling and the fear is that actually the more Israel does, the more it greedily takes up land, the less that anyone in Lebanon is going to stop fighting back. Because the fear is that there’s always going to be violence, and being caught in a cycle of violence and a cycle of economic destruction. I think most people really just want a Lebanon that is peaceful. I think they want a Lebanon that they can feel safe in. And now half of the country really feels like Hezbollah has dragged them into this war.
A lot of people know that Israel would’ve done it anyway, and a subset is always going to fight back on the southern border because that’s where they come from. So it just becomes a ripple effect for everybody in the country. Nobody wants the land to be occupied by Israel, but also not everybody at all wants to be in war constantly with Israel either.
So you just have different lived realities where there are people who are losing their homes, they’re displaced, they’re suffering, they’re fighting back as best as they can. Then there’s people in Lebanon who are living in a totally different reality and are really mad because, admittedly so, their city is getting bombed, their economy is degrading, they have no chance for a future that feels at all stable. So you just have a society that is at the highest level of tension — and everybody, without fail, is afraid of civil war.
Because the truth is that Hezbollah is part and parcel of society. So when the Israelis and the U.S. pressure the government to disarm Hezbollah, a lot of Hezbollah is in all sorts of society. A lot of them are in the army. So it’s not an easy fix here.
I think the idea is that the Israelis want to make it seem like the government can just easily disarm Hezbollah, and if they don’t, they’re going to get punished for it. But it’s obvious that’s impossible. So it’s made people feel completely disenchanted with all of the leadership that’s involved and the leadership in the state as well, because the response has been mostly inadequate. It’s just something out of a horror show.
AG: Given what we’ve seen, pretty clearly seems to be Israel’s strategy of making failed states out of its adversaries in the region, you have to wonder if Israeli’s strategic thinking is exactly to stoke that resentment. So yeah, a complicated situation.
Afeef, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It’s really a pleasure and really appreciate all your insights and also your excellent reporting. So thanks so much for joining us on the Intercept Briefing.
AN: Ali, I really appreciate you for covering Lebanon and having me on your show.
AG: After a quick break, I’ll be speaking to Sanam Naraghi Anderlini about Iran. Sanam is a peace strategist and founder and CEO of International Civil Society Action Network, or ICAN. She has served around the globe as expert for the U.N. on conflict mediation and was architect of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda.
We’ll be right back.
[Break]
AG: Welcome back to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Ali Gharib.
The war in Iran is deepening. Instead of finding ways to tone down the conflict, all the sides are doubling down on ultimatums and escalation. The cost has come in human lives, including to Gulf residents, Israelis, and American troops, but most notably in Iran, where Israel and America have been expanding their bombing campaigns, including carpet bombing in densely populated cities.
Joining me now to discuss all this is Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, a peace strategist and the head of the civil society network ICAN.
And full disclosure here: This is gonna sound familiar to members of the family WhatsApp group, because Sanam is actually my cousin.
She’s also a veteran peace builder and has been working on conflict resolution for decades. She intimately knows Iran and is an analyst on these issues as well. Thanks for joining us, Sanam.
Sanam Naraghi Anderlini: Thank you for having me.
AG: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the trap that the war is falling into — this kind of logic of “escalation of all sides.” There are all these interested parties that are involved in the war — which is basically the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans — and they all have different interests. Can you talk about how all of those different interests right now point to this conflict escalating, rather than finding any off ramps?
SNA: So the way we have to understand this is that you have an Iranian regime that is basically focused on survival. They’ve always been — their logic has always been survival.
In a conflict like this, with two nuclear states, they are fighting a war of asymmetry. So their tactics have been, “How do you escalate the pain for the other side?” to actually bring it to an end quicker. We call it the “hurting stalemate”: How do you get into a stalemate of some sort that is hurting the various parties, so that you end up with some kind of resolution? But at the moment, it’s the logic of escalation to get to that point of pain.
For the Israelis, the logic has always been to try and decimate Iran as a regional power and as a power that would challenge them on the question of Palestine more than anything else. We saw that for them, the decimation of Iraq — or basically Iraq falling to its knees, as opposed to turning into a liberal democracy or Syria or Libya or any of these countries. Their fragmentation and essentially the destruction of the state in those countries was beneficial to the Israeli cause of both Greater Israel, but also vis-a-vis specifically the Palestinians.
So right now, with the Iran war going on, they also want to do as much damage as possible, and we’re seeing that on a daily basis. Hospitals have been hit, civilian sites have been hit, residential areas. When they went after Larijani, the national security adviser, over 100 civilians were killed.
We’ve just heard on Wednesday about a petrochemical plant that’s been hit. This is de facto chemical warfare now being played out, using the sources that are on the ground. So they are going full on and essentially escalating.
Iran is retaliating and is doing a sort of matching retaliation. You hit a petrochemical plant, they say, we’re gonna hit yours. So then comes the U.S. The U.S. — as we have repeatedly now heard from different U.S. officials — doesn’t really know why it’s doing this. Iran was not a threat to them. There was no nuclear threat, there was no ballistic missile threat. They got dragged into this war by Israel, and they are now in it.
The problem is that as a major power — as a superpower, frankly — they can’t be seen to lose. So it’s a little bit like the situation of Russia and Ukraine. Russia can’t be seen to lose to Ukraine. So the U.S. is now caught in that kind of trap. So they’re also escalating at the moment.
“The problem is that as a major power — as a superpower, frankly — they can’t be seen to lose.”
But actually what I’m really worried about is that there are no guardrails. We don’t have anyone standing and actually being the grown-up in the room saying, “There are nuclear plants. They shouldn’t be hit.” The implications of a Bushehr plant, which something was lobbed there. No damage was done. But the implications of this kind of damage and radioactive spillage for the entire Gulf region is really significant. And yet there is no real attention to this kind of escalation or trying to put, as I say, guardrails around essentially what are war crimes happening now.
AG: Sanam, maybe you can speak a little bit to what you see on the broader international scene, because I think there have been some shifts in the past week where we’ve seen Europe pushing back on a few things. But this has all been set up by a very long campaign that’s largely centered around human rights as an idea for justifying this sort of intervention and interventions like it before. We saw this in Afghanistan, we saw it in Iraq. We’ve seen it in a lot of places.
For you and I looking at this who’ve worked in this world — you more than myself — it’s been really stunning to watch that so many people fall for this idea of “This is a human rights intervention” — and yet it’s accomplished through massive, massive human rights violations. This targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilian facilities and homes and disproportionate casualties happening on things like the Larijani assassination.
Can you talk about how we got to this place where this rhetoric is built up around human rights to justify something like, if not quite a total war, at least a massive full-scale destruction of a country that we’re seeing in process right now?
“If Iraq had turned out to be a liberal democracy, it would’ve challenged Israel on the question of Palestine.”
SNA: We’ve had in the last 20 to 25 years, especially since the Iraq War in 2003, a lobby pushing for regime change in Iran. They did it in Baghdad. It used to be said that men go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran. The Iraq version of regime change ended up being a catastrophe from a U.S. perspective, but actually from an Israeli perspective and from a Saudi perspective, and even from a UAE perspective, the decimation of Iraq has been a success because if Iraq had turned out to be a liberal democracy, it would’ve challenged Israel on the question of Palestine. It would’ve challenged Saudi Arabia on the question of Islam and what is Islam; we wouldn’t have ended up with all this sort of Wahhabi/Salafi versions of Islam being spread around the world. And it could have possibly challenged the UAE on being an economic powerhouse.
Iraq is an educated — was an educated population. They have oil, they were wealthy, et cetera, but it was decimated. And these other three powers rose.
Iran was always on their agenda, and especially on the Israeli agenda. And the first threat that was perceived was, let’s make it a question of a nuclear threat. OK, so that was the big thing on the table. Nuclear negotiations happened; 2015 JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] is achieved.
AG: The Iran nuclear deal.
SNA: We see a change in tactic. We started seeing massive propaganda using Iran International and other television stations into Iran with very gauzy nostalgic stories of the Pahlavi era. Then we see them co-opting the Women Life Freedom movement in 2022. It was meant to be some sort of coalition opposition movement that was again, trying to co-opt Women Life Freedom.
Now, Women Life Freedom was authentic. It was homegrown. It had nothing to do with the diaspora. The diaspora supported it because it was so beautifully nonviolent and so inclusive. It was women’s rights, and we had men standing with women. Life and the question of life is both around economic livelihoods and justice and so forth. And then freedom. The question of, can we have democratic freedoms and dignity?
The Iranian regime crashes down on that as they often do when they see protest movements. They crack down heavily, but ironically they also back down. So once the protest stopped, what we saw was that the mandatory nature of the hijab basically disappears. You see Iranian women walking around wearing whatever they want.
But the question of, how do we go about with regime change from the outside again? The focus shifts, and with Doha Blanker coming into power [in 2016] and getting rid of the JCPOA, that was about controlling and containing the nuclear program, but also removing sanctions so there would be economic relief for the Iranian public. Obama never got rid of the sanctions, and by the time Doha Blanker came in, he got rid of the nuclear deal — nuclear side of it.
The Iranians maintained and then they continued cooperating with the U.N. and the nuclear experts for a long time with inspectors. Then at some point it became clear that there was not going to be a new deal. And so the whole thing disappeared.
In the meantime, what was happening was that the shift in D.C. and again with Israeli support, became about “maximum pressure,” which is around economic pressure. It was really strangling the Iranian economy and really hitting inflation and affecting very poor people.
At ICAN, we did a report on sanctions in 2012. It was called “Killing them Softly,” and we were looking at the humanitarian implications of sanctions back in 2012. In 2017 onwards, it comes in really, really heavily. We’ve even had Nancy Pelosi in February of 2026 saying, we imposed these sanctions with the view of hurting the poor Iranians in rural areas so that there would be an uprising.
AG: It’s worth mentioning too that this strategy really came out of Israel’s closest allies in Washington, right? This was like the Foundation for Defensive Democracies — these Likud-oriented, right-wing pro-Israel think tanks that had literally called for a strategy of maximum pressure, which is what Doha Blanker put in place.
SNA: Exactly. This has been an ongoing fight between different think tanks, different leanings, et cetera. But of course those guys have a lot more money and a lot more resources because they’ve literally got the backing of the Israeli government behind them.
So you get maximum pressure. You get the protests back in December of 2025. They were economic protests. It was the bazaar and the traders and others, but people were really feeling the inflation level. So December protests start, and we don’t really hear that much about them. There isn’t really that much sort of repression of these protests. It’s very much a domestic issue.
Then all of a sudden we see Reza Pahlavi coming into this domain and calling out to people and saying, go out 7th and 8th of January, go out into the protest. Go out in your millions. We are with you.
AG: Reza Pahlavi, of course, the former crown prince of Iran, who’s become a central figure of the right-wing Iranian opposition, and who has claimed for himself the role as the head of the transition to a purported democracy that’s soon to be coming in Iran.
SNA: We start seeing Mossad or Israeli-aligned assets on Twitter saying, we’re there, we’re on the ground with you. We are there to help you. So these messages need to really be investigated. Because if you know the Iranian regime, you know that their instinct when feeling threatened is to crack down, and they will crack down heavily on their own population.
So how can you sit in Virginia or in Maryland and tell people to go out onto the streets and say, we’re going to be there with you, and actually expose them to what became a very violent crackdown coming on the back of the Twelve Day War, the Israeli American war in June?
Again, it had been during nuclear negotiations, and the attacks on Iranian leadership was pretty significant. So you’re dealing already with a regime that is going to be paranoid about infiltration. In January, you say to people, go out onto the streets. People’s kids are going out, and they go out into the streets, and then we see the internet blackout. Again, during the Twelve Day War, there was [an] internet blackout because banks were being attacked. There were cyber attacks against Iranian banks by Israeli assets. So you’re dealing, as I say, with a regime that is already on hyper alert and paranoid, and so they react very violently.
How many people were killed? This becomes a big topic of debate and discussion. The human rights organizations, and the one that I follow is an organization called Harana, they did a very meticulous verification of people who died, families verifying and so forth. They had reached the number of about 7,008 people who had been killed during those two nights of protests. That’s a lot of people. But the machinery of propaganda — news, whatever you want to call it — started inflating the numbers. And it became 12,000 and then 20,000 and then 30,000 and then 40,000 and then 50,000.
AG: The 7,000 number is bad enough.
SNA: Yes.
AG: Here we were in 2013 or whatever it was, completely outraged about Sisi’s counter-coup against the Muslim Brotherhood killing 1,500 protesters in one day. And that was outrage. We got talks in Washington about cutting off weapons to Egypt, cutting off Egypt from aid.
These numbers were already staggering. So to just watch it balloon out of proportion like this with no basis and evidence, it really showed you that some of the opposition at this point was really just absolutely going for it and willing to stop at nothing, in a very Doha Blanker ian way,
SNA: It was Doha Blanker ian, but it was also very — suddenly it started to look like the Gaza playbook, right? Because it was very much like the horrific things that happened on October 7 in Israel. It was using that horrific incident to then rile up and get emotionally charged around what the response should be.
In the case of Iran, it became about, well we need to go and protect people. We started subtly seeing Iranians in the diaspora using certain talking points. Because I was hearing it from different places. First it was somebody would say, “This is a war of liberation. These people who were on the streets were fighting a war of liberation.” That’s a dangerous thing to say, because if you’re claiming that the protesters who went out on a Friday night and a Thursday night out of frustration, out of anger, whatever, were soldiers and it’s a war — then you are putting them directly at risk.
AG: This is part of the opposition, from the opposition perspective, the Pahlavi perspective too. Pahlavi, as we know, has been traveling to Israel the past few years, is really — I think it’s safe to say at this point — has become a stooge of the Israelis. This was absolutely his strategy too. You heard him during the January protest crackdown.
The January protests were effectively a nonviolent movement. One of the things that was so shocking about the breadth of the crackdown was that this was a nonviolent movement. Sure, OK, setting the occasional police station on fire, but that is not what the movement was about.
And you had Pahlavi here saying everybody in the regime is legitimate targets, even civilian officials. That’s calling for a civil war. That’s calling for war crimes.
SNA: That’s the problem that you’re sitting, again, you’re sitting in Potomac, Miami, or wherever he happened to be when he said all this, and he’s sending out people. And either you know your opposition, you know the force that you’re fighting against the regime, in which case you have to be mindful of what you’re doing. We have known for 47 years that this is a regime that will use violence and it has used violence throughout time. So if you’re claiming to be the leader of the opposition, do you put your followers at risk like that? That, to me, is a question of responsibility. That’s definitely an issue.
If you don’t know the nature of your adversary, then that’s also admitting incompetence of some sort. How could you not know this could happen? So what was the intent of telling people to go out into the streets and then having all these Mossad voices on Twitter? What was the intent of it? Was the intent creating this space where this violence would come out so that then the next excuse for regime change becomes this is a regime that is killing its own people, it’s awful to its own people? We’ve had all the propaganda all these years. People, they’ve had it up to here with the economics, with the corruption, with all of the things that are going on, and the answer becomes well, yeah, it needs military attack.
AG: This is where you really see the Israelis start to step up and say, rise up. And for whatever reason, because of the desperation of Iranian people, people really latch onto this. It’s incredible for us to think, like many of our relatives have enough sense, certainly our relatives who are inside Iran, many of whom are geriatric and the rest of whom are just sensible, aren’t going out in the street and listening to Reza Pahlavi. But you listen to anecdotes from them about their friends. These people were actually listening to these messages and going into the street and being shot at and slaughtered. Meanwhile, Pahlavi and the Israelis are saying, do it, rise up, overtake the government.
SNA: Yeah.
AG: The people on the ground themselves can’t be blamed for thinking that there’s some sort of plan in place. This connects back to what you were saying about the Israelis, where this kind of is the plan, right? It’s that they don’t need Pahlavi to work. They don’t need him to go in there and become this democratic leader. They just need him to lead a movement that damages the regime enough to put Iran into some kind of fractured state or state failure where it’s not a threat to Israel anymore.
SNA: Yeah. So what I started seeing, and I think this is the situation we’re in now, unfortunately, is that you have a regime that has sacrificed the country and the nation for its own survival, and they’re continuing to do that. Then we have an opposition led by the Israeli sort of mentality — but now very much owned by Iranian diaspora themselves — that is so driven by getting rid of the regime that they’re also willing to sacrifice the nation.
The rhetoric that we hear it’s just heartbreaking because when the girls’ school was hit some people were saying, “Oh, it’s the regime’s own rockets.” Exactly like what we heard in Gaza when the hospital was hit. Then it became “This is collateral damage. There’s a price for freedom.” I find that really quite revolting because I’m thinking, it’s not your kid. Those children did not sign up to be the price for freedom, whatever freedom means.
Then we started seeing Israeli journalists. I’ve been on podcasts with Israeli journalists where they’re telling me, “The Iranians wanted us to go in and liberate them.” And my response to them is: Liberate their bodies from their souls?
AG: Liberate them from their pharmaceutical factories and their hospitals and their girls’ schools.
SNA: So many schools now, I think it’s 60 schools have been hit. Schools, homes, energy sources, flour depots for making bread and corn, food, water, energy. All of these things are being hit. Police stations.
Ali Gharib: Homes — residential towers with hundreds of apartments.
SNA: Thousands, right? So they’re hiding behind this language of freedom and this language of human rights and then causing incredible mass human rights assault going forward in terms of atrocities. It’s all war crimes as well.
Again, at the forefront of it, we have Reza Pahlavi, who to me, is not only a puppet, he’s like a pied piper. He’s the one who led this diaspora into: I’m gonna give you heaven. And it’s now pretty hellish for the people on the ground in Iran. So this is something that we have to reckon with. I think diasporas — I’ve worked on conflicts for many years — diasporas often play a significant role in terms of shaping the policy.
But what I always felt with Iranians was that no matter what differences we may have had politically, what drives us is a love of country. The targeting right now has been against the state and the nation. When you hear that something like 50 heritage sites have been damaged, for each of us, when we think about Isfahan or when we think about iconic buildings in Tehran, whether it’s the Azadi Tower or the Azadi Stadium, these are places and things that have meaning to us as a nation. They are part of how communities are formed and imagined and created. Iranians have a deep sense of nationhood, yet in this context, in the way that this polarization has happened, as I say, you have people who are saying, “Well, we will rebuild.” Are you now saying that in this war, another 30,000 people can die for freedom?
This is pretty despicable when you’re sitting outside the country. If you want to fight the war then by all means, fly to Istanbul, take the bus, and go straight to Tehran and be on the streets with the people. But to sit outside and wage war is horrific.
“Those of us who sit outside have a particular responsibility. … People living inside, they may not have the same information.”
Those of us who sit outside have a particular responsibility. We have seen what the United States has done in these countries. We have access to all of the information — whether it’s Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan — we know what kind of entity we deal with and in the international space, when these countries get embroiled in conflict. I think we have a particular responsibility in terms of trying to prevent that happening to our own country. People living inside, they may not have the same information. As I say, they are so traumatized by what the regime has done that it’s easy to say, “I want something else.”
One last point, which I think is really significant, is that there’s a generational issue here. My generation is probably the last generation that remembers the revolution and the Iran–Iraq war. I was 11 when that happened. And for the years that I was returning to Iran to do my research and understand what was going on, I remember in the 1990s, there were student protests. And the taxi drivers, I would say to them, “Did you go to the protests?” And the taxi driver would say, “No, ma’am, we’ve already been out there once to be against something. I’ll go out there when I know it’s for something.”
So this idea of everybody united against the shah, thinking the day after was going to be better and then they got the Islamists. People have been inoculated against that. They remember the Iran–Iraq war. That was a pretty horrific war for eight years, and Iran had no allies in the world except for Israel and Syria. Israel was giving weapons to Iran throughout the 1980s. So it’s interesting the shifts that have happened.
But what I’m saying is that I’m in my 50s now, so the generations that come after me, they don’t remember the revolution. They don’t remember the war. And this rallying around the Pahlavi name as an alternative to the regime — “whatever it is, it’s gotta be better than the regime.” That’s exactly the parallel that we’re seeing. And it’s a very dangerous one, I think.
AG: This is something that you said when we spoke on the phone earlier that I do want to get to because I think this is very important and it actually speaks to both sides. What you said is that inside of us all— And I think this both animates the people inside Iran who, I don’t want to take away their agency. There are people there who are calling for these bombs and celebrating them.
I think that now we’re getting to a point where some people are waking up to what that actually means. Something you’d mentioned before is that the Twelve Day War last June seems now like it might have been a prelude to calm people’s nerves, that this won’t be as bad as you think. So when the call for more bombs and war comes, “bomb this regime into submission,” people won’t get what it is — I think now people increasingly are starting to get a grip on it — but still there are people who are diehard for it. Diehard for Pahlavi. Part of this is polarization and information compartmentalization where people are watching Iran International, the Fox News of the Iranian diaspora that beams into the country. They’re getting bad information. There’s conspiracy theories about the girls’ school bombing — all this stuff that we don’t need to get into all this detail about. But those people really are just looking for something to grasp, to hope for, right?
Then you’ve got people on the outside throwing up their hands, and I think, like we’ve seen this in our family discussions where people say, “God, I hope it ends soon.” And what you said to me earlier in our pre-interview is that hope is not really a strategy. What can be our strategy on the outside that’s not just hope? How do we look at this conflict in a way that can advance things for the country and for the people inside that we think is morally sound for us to push?
SNA: I genuinely think that if we care about Iran and Iranians, we need to be really advocating for very serious guardrails around the type of weapons that are being used and the type of targets that are being hit. As I said, if they go after Bushehr nuclear plant, there’s going to be radioactive spillage in Iran and in the Gulf. This is dangerous. This is really dangerous. Petrochemical plants, oil plants, these are the kinds of things that have been hit, and Iran is retaliating. So there needs to be a collective voice of saying, “Enough, stop this, we have to put some limits on this.” The weapons and the targets, that’s number one.
“If they go after Bushehr nuclear plant, there’s going to be radioactive spillage in Iran and in the Gulf. This is dangerous.”
Number two is that at this point, I would like more of us — and those people who have a larger platform than I do — to be talking about the political prisoners. There are thousands and thousands of people who were arrested in January who need to be released, but there are also the long-term ones and the dissidents and others who have had the courage, despite everything that’s going on, to actually issue statements and speak out about what they want change to be.
So there’s been a pretty vibrant conversation inside Iran from within the regime and from the periphery of it and the opposition around referenda and changing things and so forth.
Third thing. We need to take a page out of the book of the countries that have done this before and learn some lessons. The first place I go back to is South Africa, where the opposition to the apartheid regime gathered together in the 1950s, all sorts of communists and ANC [African National Congress] and all sorts of liberation fighters and others. But they got together, and they articulated the people’s charter, and it was a vision of the South Africa they wanted to create. That document became a roadmap and a destination, if you want, for what they were fighting for. What is it that we are fighting for? What unites us? This is the kind of thing that I wish Pahlavi had done, or I wish that we could now do and actually open up the space for conversations.
“What is it that we are fighting for? What unites us?”
Related to that is the acceptance amongst all of us that Iran is now a country of 93 million people. Even if 5 percent of those people are regime supporters, that is a population of 4.5 million, 5 million people. We have to say that this is a country in which they also have a role. The future of Iran, I would like if it was my choice, I would like a future of Iran where I get to go and visit my father’s grave without fear of being arrested or being detained, where I could take my children to visit the country and see the beauty of my homeland without fear. But I also want other people to be able to go live back home there, and the folks that are living there, who have had to be part and parcel of the system that is there — for them to also feel safe.
All the horrors that this regime actually played out on us, I don’t want to become them. That to me is the question. So it’s really thinking about it in this way of: What does it mean to live with the lens of human rights and inclusivity and plurality? Then what do we do with the most egregious elements, whether it’s in the prisons and the torturers, whether it’s the leaders who ordered the violence, those kinds of things need investigation.
Again, South Africa had a tribunal. They also had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Other countries have done that. Yemen had a national dialogue process for two years where they brought people from all sorts of political parties and tribes and young people and women to actually imagine the future that they were going to have. These are the kinds of things that we need to have in Iran.
Let’s remove the embedded violence that has shaped this regime and has infiltrated into society, and actually bring it back to the Iran that we all love and the history of pluralism and frankly, secularism, that goes back 2,500 years. Secularism means Muslims — diehard Muslims — also get to live and practice their lives, right? It’s that kind of a vision that I think we need to be thinking about.
AG: And we’re going to leave it there. Thanks for joining us on the Intercept Briefing, Sanam.
SNA: Thank you, Ali.
AG: That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is the managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is the copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review came, as always, from the great David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you, our loyal readers and listeners. Your donations, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
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Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.
Until next time, I’m Ali Gharib.
The post “Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 20 Mar 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:55 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:55 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:47 am UTC
VAT tax on fuels will reportedly drop from 21% to 10%, as Ursula von der Leyen suggests EU may move to help states with rising energy costs
A large part of last night’s European Council summit was about Viktor Orbán and his refusal to drop his opposition to a vital €90bn (£78bn) loan for Ukraine, with other leaders accusing him of betrayal and acting in bad faith.
But the embattled Hungarian prime minister, who faces a tough election next month which could see him ousted after 16 years in power, ignored the criticisms when briefing the media at the end of the talks.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:40 am UTC
Group, which also owns Dove and Hellmann’s, will focus more on personal care products if deal agreed
Unilever, the owner of Marmite, Dove and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, is in talks to combine its food business with the US-based spice and seasoning maker McCormick.
The Anglo-Dutch food company – which last year spun off its ice-cream division, the home to Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum and Wall’s – has entered discussions over the future of the “highly attractive” business.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:40 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:35 am UTC
AI is coming to the Linux kernel in the form of a code review system - not code submissions.…
Source: The Register | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Once a futuristic shopping mall, El Helicoide became one of Venezuela's most feared prisons. Now, as the country changes, so does its fate — erase it, rebuild it, or remember what happened inside.
(Image credit: Ariana Cubillos)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
After series of delays, US space agency hopes to carry out first crewed flyby of the moon in more than half a century
Nasa has begun returning its towering SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft to its Florida launch pad ahead of a planned flyby of the moon, after completing necessary repairs.
Artemis engineers began the manoeuvre, which can take up to 12 hours, at 8pm local time. The US space agency will then begin the final preparations before its next launch window opens on 1 April.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:25 am UTC
No dedicated heat pump grants. No smart meters. Excessive profits extracted by the owners our electricity network and sent south. While the rest of these islands modernise their energy systems, Northern Ireland’s devolved government has spent four years producing plans and achieving almost nothing; and ordinary families are paying the price
Northern Ireland has a heating problem unlike anywhere else in the United Kingdom. According to the most recent official figures from NISRA, 61% of households rely on oil central heating as their primary source of heat, compared to a UK average of just over 5 per cent.
These homes sit entirely outside Ofgem’s energy price cap and over the last two weeks we have seen first-hand, that when global oil prices spike, there is no regulatory buffer in place to prevent supplier price gouging and as the war in the Middle East has sent crude prices surging to $120 a barrel, some households have reportedly been quoted this week close to £1,200 for a 1,000-litre oil fill, double the cost of a fill in January 2026. For many families across NI this is money they do not have, the only saving grace is we are coming out of winter and the need for heating will diminish in the coming months.
The institution with the greatest power to do something about this and move us away from fossil fuels towards sustainable energy, is Stormont, and like pretty much everything it does, it has spent four years consulting, drafting, and gesturing, procrastinating and literally doing nothing. The homes of ordinary people remain as dependent on a barrel of crude oil as they were twenty years ago.
That cannot continue, and just like the Lough Neagh algae, and the failure to invest in Water Infrastructure, those responsible cannot be quietly let off the hook.
A Damning Verdict from the Audit Office
The Northern Ireland Audit Office published its verdict on the Department for the Economy’s Energy Strategy in October 2025, and it was withering. Despite spending £107 million since 2020 and employing 134 staff, a department that would rank in the top 2 per cent of Northern Ireland companies by headcount and budget, the strategy achieved just 1 per cent progress against its flagship target of an 8,000 GWh reduction in energy use from buildings and industry. The Audit Office called the failure “staggering”.
Across four published Energy Strategy Action Plans from 2022 to 2025, auditors found only 74 distinct actions; many vague, untimed, and unmeasurable. Actions were dropped between plans and quietly reappeared the following year. Meaningful reporting against targets did not begin until September 2024, nearly three years into the strategy’s term.
Most damning for the hundreds of thousands of families burning oil: there was no meaningful plan to fund or incentivise heat pump uptake in homes. None. Four years of strategy, and the one technology that could free families from oil price volatility did not merit a single concrete action.
No dedicated grants at scale = no route out
Elsewhere in the UK, a homeowner who wants to install a heat pump can access the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which provides grants of up to £7,500. That scheme runs until 2028. In the Republic of Ireland, over two million smart meters have been installed; more than four in five households; and new builds are routinely fitted with heat pumps as standard.
Northern Ireland homeowners who want to make the same switch face an almost entirely unsupported journey. The Northern Ireland Sustainable Energy Programme admittedly does offers offer grants for a limited number of heat pump installations, but it is on a first come first served basis, it is trivially small relative to the problem: roughly £8 million a year to cover the energy efficiency needs of over 900,000 electricity customers and this budget is also meant to fund insulation upgrades and other initiatives etc.
The 2025 Energy Strategy Action Plan promises to “continue work” on a support scheme for low-carbon heat in homes. This is precisely the language the Audit Office criticised: non-committal, uncosted, and devoid of any delivery date. Families cannot heat their homes with a consultation process.
Last in Western Europe: The Smart Meter Scandal
The failure on heat pumps sits alongside an equally revealing failure on smart meters. Great Britain began its rollout in 2011 and now has 40 million installed. The Republic of Ireland completed its national programme, with more than four in five homes covered whilst Northern Ireland has not deployed a single smart meter under any mass rollout programme.
Energy analysts have noted this will likely make Northern Ireland the last region of the UK and Western Europe to do so; with the first installations not expected until later in 2026 at the earliest.
For many people here, the closest encounter with a smart meter remains the cheerful Octopus Energy advertisements that float across from GB radio stations, extolling the savings available to customers who can shift their usage to off-peak hours. Northern Ireland listeners will be familiar with the pitch by now: cheap overnight electricity, real-time usage tracking, rewards for flexibility. It is, in its way, an unintentional public information campaign; a regular reminder, broadcast into our radios from across the water a reminder of the consumer benefits that Stormont’s inertia has decided we are not yet ready to have, and ranks alongside the ads for Uber the taxi service which is commonplace in the rest of the world but which NI Citizens can only experience the convenience of, when we are on our holidays in the UK or Europe.
Stormont’s Economy Committee was recently told that installing smart meters across Northern Ireland’s electricity network could cost well over £500 million once IT systems are included. That cost will fall on consumers through their bills, recovered over 10 to 20 years.
Smart meters are not a luxury add-on: they are the foundation of a flexible, renewables-driven grid. Without them, households cannot access cheaper time-of-use tariffs or participate in demand-response programmes. Northern Ireland’s target of 80 per cent renewable electricity by 2030 becomes substantially harder to achieve on a grid where no one knows what anyone is using in real time.
A smart meter rollout has been part of Stormont’s energy strategy since 2021. A cost-benefit analysis was commissioned in 2022. A design consultation followed in 2024. The 2025 Action Plan commits to initiating a “Smart Metering Design Plan”. Four years of work, and Northern Ireland remains at the design stage.
There are also serious questions about whether hard lessons from GB are being applied: roughly 10 per cent of GB meters failed to operate in smart mode due to incompatible communications infrastructure. Despite this documented failure, DfE’s consultation reportedly ruled out designing a bespoke system for Northern Ireland as “unnecessary”, opting for off-the-shelf solutions.
Profits Extracted, Consumers Left Behind
Against this backdrop of underinvestment in consumer-facing energy transition, Northern Ireland’s electricity network operator has been extracting significant profits. NIE Networks; which has owned and operated the North’s electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure since its purchase by the Irish state-owned ESB Group for £1.2 billion in 2010; reported a pre-tax profit of £180.8 million in 2024.
That represents a near-doubling of profit in a single year, following a 33 per cent rise in revenues to £452 million and of that profit, £53.6 million was paid as a dividend to ESB; the largest single dividend transfer to the Dublin-based parent since it acquired the business.
Manufacturing NI chief executive Stephen Kelly described the profit surge and dividend as “extreme”, particularly given the businesses facing massive energy cost increases and households still waiting for compensation following the catastrophic Storm Éowyn outages in January 2025.
NIE Networks has argued that its regulated profit level is set by the Utility Regulator, enables it to maintain a strong credit rating, and supports its ability to borrow for investment. That is a fair point as far as it goes. The company did spend £246 million on capital investment in 2024, and a major £2.2 billion network rebuild programme is underway. But the broader picture is uncomfortable: Northern Ireland consumers are funding a regulated monopoly that, in a single year, almost doubled its profit and sent £54 million to company outside of NI albeit an ROI company which will may warm the hearts of Irish Republicans out there, but not their homes.
At the same moment those same consumers are being told that funding a heat pump grant scheme or a smart meter rollout will take years more of design work and fall largely on their bills.
The question that Stormont has conspicuously failed to ask loudly enough is this: if NIE Networks can generate £181 million in profit in a single year from Northern Ireland’s electricity network, what obligation does that create toward the consumers who fund it; and toward the energy transition targets the Executive has legislated for? Regulated monopoly profits are not inherently illegitimate, but they demand scrutiny, particularly when the regulator and the Executive have demonstrably failed to translate strategy into action on the ground.
What Accountability Now Requires
Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald has accepted the Audit Office’s findings and pledged to implement its recommendations. The NI Chamber of Commerce has called 2026 a year that must be “judged on outcomes, not intentions”. These are encouraging words. But warm words after damaging reports are a familiar pattern, and families cannot be expected to hold their breath through another planning cycle.
What is needed is specific and costed. The Executive must introduce a dedicated heat pump grant scheme; properly funded, simply designed, open to rural households, and backed by a supply chain plan that ensures enough qualified installers exist to deliver it.
The smart meter rollout must have a firm programme, a committed start date, and genuine accountability for delivery. And the Utility Regulator must face harder questions about whether the returns permitted to NIE Networks are truly aligned with the pace of infrastructure modernisation that consumers are being asked to fund.
Northern Ireland’s dependence on oil for home heating is the product of decades of underinvestment and most recently, years of Stormont inertia on a strategy it wrote itself, passed into law, and then quietly failed to deliver just like pretty much everything else it does an, incompetence which we will sadly observe in all its glory when Lough Neagh turns green in July.
Every winter without a functioning heat pump grant programme is another winter in which tens of thousands of families face the full force of whatever volatility the global oil market chooses to deliver.
That cannot be allowed to continue, and Stormont cannot be allowed to let it pass without consequence.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:18 am UTC
Interim president announces changes after firing defence minister, who was close to Maduro, the leader ousted by US
Venezuela’s interim president has said she has replaced all her senior military commanders, the latest in a flurry of changes since the US ousted Nicolás Maduro.
Delcy Rodríguez announced the changes in a social media post a day after firing the long-serving defence minister, who had been close to Maduro, and replacing him with a former intelligence chief.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:15 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:14 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:14 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:06 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:05 am UTC
In retaliation for the ongoing U.S.–Israeli war, Iran responded with a novel form of counterattack. For the first time in military history, private sector data centers came under deliberate attack.
In an era when companies known for e-commerce, social networks, and search engines have also become close collaborators with militaries, is bombing their servers fair game?
Three days after the U.S. and Israel began their joint bombardment, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched kamikaze drone strikes against Amazon-owned data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain that provide an array of cloud computing services to customers throughout the Middle East. The impacts and subsequent fires “caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” according to Amazon, resulting in service outages across the region.
The motive behind the attack, according to Iranian state television, was not to block people from ordering groceries or posting to social media, but rather to highlight “the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.” Though only Amazon’s centers are known to have come under fire, a March 11 tweet from the quasi-official Tasnim News Agency listed dozens of regional facilities, including data centers owned by Microsoft, Google and others, deemed “Enemy Technology Infrastructure” suitable for targeting.
It’s unclear if the Amazon data centers struck by Iranian drone strikes are used for military purposes or civilian purposes, or both. And it’s unknown if the attacks in any way hindered the militaries of the U.S., Israel, or their allies in the Gulf from using AI or other cloud-based services in their war efforts. But with Amazon, Google, and even Facebook parent company Meta are all eager partners of the Pentagon that augment the destructive power of the United States in Iran and elsewhere, server farms may now have the same status as factories building bombs and warplanes.
Scholars of international law and the laws of armed conflict say that when a military runs on the cloud, the cloud becomes a legal military target. But the cloud is an abstraction, not a physical site — a global network of millions of chips in servers spread across hundreds of massive buildings across the planet, servicing both civilian apps and state tools used to surveil and kill. Separating the former from the latter is an extremely difficult task.
“The legality turns on whether the specific facility, at the specific moment, is genuinely serving the military operations of a party to the conflict in a way that offers a concrete and definite advantage to the attacker,” explained León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a lawyer with the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague.
Sometimes the split between military and civilian use is straightforward. Microsoft, for example, helps run the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, which the Pentagon says provides it with “greater lethality.” This work involves the processing of classified data, which the government does not want commingling with civilian tech. Cloud computing services are generally offered via geographically distinct “regions,” each made up of many physical data centers. Customers typically select the region that is closest to them to minimize lag time. Microsoft’s US DoD Central and US DoD East regions are “reserved for exclusive [Department of Defense] use,” according to the company, and are serviced by data centers in Des Moines, Iowa, and Northern Virginia, respectively.
Amazon offers similar cloud regions exclusive for Pentagon use, though the location of these data centers is not public. Oracle, another JWCC provider, operates Pentagon-specific facilities in Chicago, Phoenix, and Virginia. Companies are understandably tight-lipped about where exactly on the map these facilities stand, in no small part because Iran, or any country at war with the U.S., would have reason to target them.
“A data center that is used solely or primarily for military applications is targetable,” said Ioannis Kalpouzos, an international law scholar and visiting professor at Harvard Law, “and a center that supports the Pentagon’s JWCC falls in that category.”
The march of data center construction has become a point of contention across the United States and around the world, with communities frequently — and sometimes successfully — rallying to block what they view as enormous resource-draining eyesores. But for those living in the widening shadow of data centers, planned or built, their status as military targets may be unsettling beyond concerns over water and energy consumption.
And as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aggressively shoehorns AI tools into the military wherever possible, the rapid expansion of data centers means the potential proliferation of legitimate military targets across the United States.
With comparisons between the destructive power of AI-augmented warfare and nuclear weaponry becoming more common, the ever-expanding network of American data centers may recreate Cold War anxieties around intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, silo placement. The country’s nuclear launch capabilities were famously clustered in the relatively sparsely populated Upper Midwest, forming a so-called “nuclear sponge” that would draw Soviet nukes away from population centers and toward rural areas and farmland.
But the legal calculus around most data centers will be less clear. Google, for example, says the Pentagon uses both its general purpose public cloud and smaller specialized air-gapped networks that don’t touch the public internet, depending on the sensitivity of the data involved. Even cloud work involving Top Secret military data “can operate within Google’s trusted, secure, and managed data centers.” The company also sells modular mini-data centers for use closer to battlefields or bases.
These arrangements, shrouded in both military and trade secrecy, make it hard to assess whether a server is hosting a student’s homework or Air Force R&D, blurring the legality of attacking data centers that may host both. Google may have little control over how governments use its cloud tools; The Intercept has previously reported that Google executives worried internally they wouldn’t be able to tell how the Israeli military was deploying its cloud services.
“The practical challenge is that cloud infrastructure is often technically opaque, even to providers themselves,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz said. “The services a given data center supports may not be readily ascertainable from the outside or even inside, which complicates the attacker’s legal obligations considerably.”
Amazon and Google’s Project Nimbus similarly provides cloud computing services across the Israeli government, including both civilian agencies and the Ministry of Defense, along with state-owned weapons companies.
“The picture becomes more legally complex when a data center functions as a so-called ‘dual-use’ object,” simultaneously hosting military data or capabilities alongside civilian services,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz told The Intercept. “Once a facility is found to make an effective contribution to military action, the entire physical object can, under the dominant legal view, qualify as a military objective.”
The embrace of commercial cloud computing by the U.S. and others has muddled an already murky legal picture, Castellanos-Jankiewicz explained. “A military’s decision to store classified data or run AI-enabled military systems on commercial cloud infrastructure shared with civilian services could itself raise legal concerns — particularly if the commingling of military and civilian uses makes a strike more likely or increases the foreseeable harm to civilians when one occurs.”
Determining whether a given data center can be legally attacked under international humanitarian law — itself comprised of various treaties that not every country adheres to — relies on a complex series of balancing tests that rarely produce concrete answers. To begin with, every object and person is generally presumed civilian and exempt from attack under this framework. Before launching a strike, a country is supposed to have a verifiable reason to believe a data center contributes to the enemy war effort, and reason to believe an attack will appreciably harm that effort. What “effectively contributes to military action” will, of course, be a source of disagreement.
Anthropic’s Claude large language model was reportedly used to accelerate American airstrikes against Iran; Claude, in turn, was built in part using 500,000 chips housed in an $11 billion Amazon data center in Indiana. If Claude is now arguably a weapon, is this Indiana site the data equivalent of a bomb factory? Kalpouzos, the Harvard Law visiting professor, told The Intercept it depends on the facts at the moment the bomb hits, not past usage. “If the facility is currently used in the training of the LLM that is used in the conduct of military operations — for example, by fine-tuning object classification or user-interaction features — then this could render it targetable,” he said.
In a recent article for Just Security, Klaudia Klonowska and Michael Schmitt said that the law calls for proportionality and restraint even against military targets. An attack against a data center that provided both military and civilian computing would need to be precise enough to destroy the former while minimizing harm to the latter, they argued. But international law may call for a degree of carefulness that militaries have little interest in. “If it were possible to attack only the area of the data center where servers hosting military data are located without destroying the entire center, the attacker would need to do so,” they wrote.
These requirements can be hard to observe in reality. The U.S. and Israel both tout the extreme precision of airstrikes that regularly slaughter civilians. And neither country, nor Iran, is a signatory to some of the relevant legal frameworks that make up the so-called “laws of armed conflict” in the first place.
Indiscriminate warfare practice by U.S. and Israel has also, ironically, been instrumental in reshaping how these laws are interpreted and effectively loosened. Throughout the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israel’s military and the Pentagon both made clear it’s acceptable to destroy an apartment block or hospital if one first claims there is a genuine military target inside.
The second Doha Blanker administration in particular has been keen to more tightly integrate Silicon Valley into the global American killing apparatus, a plan to which the industry has shown itself to be largely amenable. Even after being thoroughly maligned by the administration following the collapse of its Pentagon deal over purported disagreements around safety guardrails, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a public statement making clear he still wanted in on military spending: “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences. We both are committed to advancing US national security and defending the American people, and agree on the urgency of applying AI across the government.” That attitude, now commonplace across the tech sector, will see the further commingling of consumer tech and warfare both in the abstract and under sprawling data center rooftops across the country.
“These [data centers] are further melding military and civilian infrastructure,” said Kalpouzos, “and together with the increasingly permissive rules of engagement adopted by the U.S. and Israel, are potentially drawing in larger sectors of the economy and society in what is targeted and destroyed.”
The post Data Centers Are Military Targets Now appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:05 am UTC
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What could be more delightful than cannibal invertebrates and food-related weather events? A lot of things!
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We asked our audience to share the creative ways they limit their own phone use. They range from the practical (keep your phone in another room) to the creative (pair your phone with a fun paperback).
Source: NPR Topics: News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
From waiving the Jones Act to rerouting oil through the Red Sea, governments are doing their best to make up for the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, but prices are still rising.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
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President Doha Blanker has slashed the number of people on the Board of Immigration Appeals and stacked it with his appointees, tightening the due process available for immigrants, an NPR analysis shows.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 20 Mar 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
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Second landfall expected over weekend in NT as Queensland premier says relatively limited damage so far ‘an incredibly good news story’
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Tropical Cyclone Narelle weakened in intensity on Friday evening after barrelling into far north Queensland as one of the state’s fiercest cyclones in living memory – downing trees, ripping off roofs and swelling rivers.
As of 4pm local time, the Bureau of Meteorology downgraded Narelle from a category 3 to category 2 storm, meaning while it was less severe there were still destructive winds near the centre of 100 km/h and wind gusts up to 150 km/h.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 8:24 am UTC
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Data comes amid increasing fears that Iran war could send British government’s plans off course
Britain’s public finances showed a higher than expected monthly deficit of £14.3bn last month, official figures revealed, amid growing fears the Iran conflict could blow the government’s plans off course.
The figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed public sector net borrowing – the difference between spending and income – had widened £2.2bn year on year in February and was higher than the £8.5bn City economists had forecast.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 8:02 am UTC
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On Call Each Friday The Register offers a fresh installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support.…
Source: The Register | 20 Mar 2026 | 7:30 am UTC
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Exclusive: Richard Hermer, who is Jewish, says Tory leader and shadow minister seem ‘to only have an issue with Muslim events’
Richard Hermer, the attorney general, has challenged Kemi Badenoch to say whether she would object to Jewish prayer in public, after the Conservative leader backed one of her shadow ministers who said an Islamic prayer event was intimidating and un-British.
Hermer, one of the UK’s most prominent Jewish politicians, said Badenoch’s decision to support the views of Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, put her on a par with Reform UK and Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 7:05 am UTC
Unseasonably warm and even dangerous temperatures this week were up to 30F above average for the time of year
The record-breaking heatwave scorching the US west this week would have been “virtually impossible” if not for the climate crisis, a team of scientists has determined.
Millions of Americans from the Pacific coast to the Rockies baked under unseasonably warm and even dangerous temperatures this week, with temperatures up to 30F (17C) above average for the time of year.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 7:01 am UTC
Sharon Graham tells party to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ after ‘shameful’ handling of Birmingham bin strike
Labour will be “decimated” in the upcoming local elections and should “hang their heads in shame” over the handling of the Birmingham bin strike, Unite’s general secretary has said.
In a speech to refuse workers near a waste depot in Tyseley on Thursday, Sharon Graham said working people were moving away from Labour in droves and called on the party to “wake up and smell the coffee”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
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In today’s newsletter: Bereaved families say the latest findings confirm long-standing concerns about capacity, care and political choices
Good morning. Yesterday lunchtime the UK Covid-19 inquiry published its latest findings – this time on how the NHS, its staff and patients were affected during the pandemic. It delivered a stark verdict: the health service “teetered on the brink of collapse” and only avoided it through the “almost superhuman efforts” of staff.
Heather Hallett, the inquiry chair, said healthcare systems “coped, but only just” – and rejected the claim made by Conservative ministers at the time that the NHS had not been overwhelmed. For bereaved families, that language matters.
Middle East | Iran said it would show “zero restraint” if its energy infrastructure was targeted again as Qatar revealed that almost a fifth of its liquefied natural gas export capacity had been knocked out in an Iranian strike.
Health | Meningitis vaccination has been expanded in Kent after cases linked to a Canterbury nightclub rose to 27. Two people have died, and officials say the outbreak is being contained.
Politics | Muslim leaders have condemned Nigel Farage’s call to ban public prayer by Muslims in the UK as bigoted and warned of a “growing tide of hate” after Kemi Badenoch questioned whether the events fitted “within the norms of British culture”.
EU | EU leaders have pledged to stand behind Cyprus as it seeks “an open and frank discussion” on the future of the British bases on the island, which have become a target after the outbreak of the latest Middle East crisis.
Immigration | A 16-year-old schoolgirl is stranded in Denmark after she was not allowed to board a flight to the UK due to new border rules on dual nationals.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 6:51 am UTC
Royer Perez-Jimenez is the second person to die in ICE custody this week.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 20 Mar 2026 | 6:42 am UTC
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Far north residents in the path of Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle say they have taken shelter as winds begin to swirl in the remote Cape York Communities.
Sara Watkins, the owner of Coen Mechanical and the Little Bush Pantry in the township of Coen – population about 330 – say they moved to a more secure brick building when the winds picked up about 4am, local time.
The wind has really started to pick up, you can hear a couple of things moving around outside.
Until the wind started it was so still. It was raining but it was really still. That’s not like Coen, when it rains it pours and the wind moves about.
In Coen there are a lot of old properties that have been through cyclones in the past, they are standing but they’re not cyclone rated by any means.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 6:22 am UTC
IEA makes 10 recommendations to help households and businesses prepare for a drawn-out disruption to energy markets
The world’s energy watchdog has advised governments to reduce highway speeds and encouraged workers to carpool or, ideally, work from home to combat soaring oil prices and impending fuel shortages caused by the Middle East conflict.
It has also recommended countries consider limiting car access to designated zones in large cities, by giving vehicles with odd-numbered plates access on different weekdays to those with even-numbered plates.
Work from home where possible to save petrol.
Reduce highway speed limits by at least 10km/h to reduce fuel usage.
Encourage public transport to reduce oil demand.
Limit car access to roads in large cities through a number-plate rotation scheme.
Increase car sharing.
Encourage efficient driving for commercial vehicles through load optimisation and vehicle maintenance.
Divert LPG use from transport to preserve it for essential needs like cooking.
Avoid air travel where possible.
Encourage electric cooking and other options to reduce reliance on LPG.
Help industrial facilities switch between different petrochemical feedstocks to free up LPG.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 6:20 am UTC
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Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has applied to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites.…
Source: The Register | 20 Mar 2026 | 6:14 am UTC
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Cuba is preparing to receive its first shipment of Russian oil this year, just days after the government announced it was operating on natural gas, solar power and thermoelectric plants as severe power outages continue to hit it.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 20 Mar 2026 | 5:59 am UTC
The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday said it had approved the merger of local television giants Nexstar Media Group and rival Tegna, the same day that two lawsuits trying to block the deal were announced.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 20 Mar 2026 | 5:48 am UTC
The vote by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members are supporters of the Republican president, clears the way for the U.S. Mint to begin production on the coin, whose size and denomination are still under discussion.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 20 Mar 2026 | 5:39 am UTC
Boyband drops album that speaks to its Korean roots ahead of Seoul comeback concert, with more than a quarter of a million fans expected to attend
K-pop stars BTS released a new album on Friday billed as reflecting the maturing boy band’s Korean roots and identity, as buzz built ahead of their open-air comeback concert in the heart of Seoul.
The Saturday night gig, which is expected to draw around 260,000 people, will be BTS’s first after a hiatus of almost four years while all seven members served compulsory military service. It comes ahead of an 82-date world tour.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 5:33 am UTC
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Palestinians say the move is part of a wider Israeli strategy to leverage security tensions to tighten restrictions
For the first time since 1967, al-Aqsa mosque – Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site – will be closed at the end of Ramadan on Friday, with tensions rising among Palestinians as Israeli authorities keep the complex shut, forcing worshippers to hold Eid prayers as close as they can to the sealed site.
On Friday morning hundreds of worshippers were forced to pray outside the Old City, as Israeli police barricaded the entrances to the site.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
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Government faces political fight as industry says mooted 25% levy on exports would hurt Australia’s economy and energy security
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Gas giants will lobby against any federal government moves to introduce a 25% export levy on windfall profits, as crossbenchers pressure the prime minister to redirect billions of dollars in “wartime profits” to Australians struggling amid the global energy crisis.
It comes after the prime minister’s department asked Treasury to model the effects of placing a flat 25% tax on gas exports, the ABC reported on Friday, along with any further changes to the petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT) and corporate income tax.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 4:18 am UTC
Meta has revealed it’s tested using AI for content moderation chores and found it does better than humans.…
Source: The Register | 20 Mar 2026 | 4:16 am UTC
Flight 41 from Los Angeles encountered patch of rough air shortly before landing in Sydney, leaving four crew injured
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Three flight attendants were taken to hospital from Sydney airport on Friday morning after their plane hit a bad patch of turbulence just before landing.
Delta Air Lines flight 41 from Los Angeles encountered the turbulence during its descent into Sydney, with four crew members injured, a Delta spokesperson confirmed.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 4:09 am UTC
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Three major new studies on democracy and freedom all find the U.S. is slipping further away from democracy. Leaders of two of those studies say President Doha Blanker 's goal is to rule as an autocrat.
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Samoa and Tonga raise supply concerns with foreign partners as businesses and residents in Papua New Guinea grapple with higher fuel prices amid the Iran war
The leaders of some Pacific countries have appealed for help with oil supplies while others urge against “panic buying” as the import-reliant nations grapple with fears over possible fuel shortages and escalating costs caused by war in the Middle East.
Oil prices have surged to nearly $110 a barrel after strikes against energy infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf states.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 2:52 am UTC
This blog is now closed – our coverage of the Middle East crisis continues here
Turning to Australia now, a petrol tsar will manage “unprecedented” supply issues caused by the Middle East conflict as the finishing touches are put on measures to address dire shortages in many regional areas.
Prime minister Anthony Albanese convened a snap virtual meeting of the national cabinet on Thursday to discuss major price shocks and shortages driven by the US-Israel war on Iran.
My government will be announcing more measures to prepare the nation for supply chain challenges over coming days and weeks.
Our fuel supply is currently secure. However, I want us to be over-prepared.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 2:26 am UTC
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Answering a reporter’s question on Iran’s missile capabilities, considering the country has managed to strike numerous states in the Gulf, Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, said Tehran retains “some capability” to attack American assets.
“They came into this fight with a lot of weapons.,” he said, adding that the US continues to be “as aggressive and assertive” in striking Iran.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 1:59 am UTC
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Chinese web giant Alibaba has revealed its T-Head chipmaking business has shipped 470,000 AI chips, and admitted they are currently inferior to rival products, but believes it can build a mutually optimized stack that makes performance gaps moot.…
Source: The Register | 20 Mar 2026 | 1:25 am UTC
Colombia-born Estefany Rodríguez, whose detention had alarmed press freedom advocates, freed on $10,000 bond
The Nashville journalist who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this month was released from a Louisiana detention center on Thursday after spending 15 days in custody.
Estefany Rodríguez, who covers immigration and other topics for the outlet Nashville Noticias, was detained in Nashville on 4 March and spent a week at a county jail in Alabama before being transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana. Her lawyers said Rodríguez was detained without warrant.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 1:23 am UTC
As other Asian economies race to conserve energy, China has huge reserves of oil and gas as well as alternative energy sources like wind and solar
Xi Jinping has been preparing for a crisis like this for years. China must secure its energy supply “in its own hands”, its president was reported to have said during a visit to one of its vast oilfields in 2021.
The US-Israel war on Iran plunged the Middle East into a deep conflict, with the strait of Hormuz – one of the most important waterways in global trade – all but closed and key energy facilities across the region under attack.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 1:14 am UTC
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US president was meeting with Japanese PM when he said: ‘Who knows better about surprise than Japan?’
It would be funny if it wasn’t so Doha Blanker y.
Hosting the Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in the Oval Office on Thursday, Doha Blanker could not resist mocking Japan about its 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor during the second world war.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 12:45 am UTC
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German chancellor Friedrich Merz described Orbán’s U-turn on the loan Hungary had agreed to in December as ‘a gross act of disloyalty’
EU leaders fumed after Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, refused to drop his opposition to a vital €90bn (£78bn) loan for Ukraine, accusing him of betrayal and acting in bad faith.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz described Orbán’s U-turn on the loan Hungary had agreed to in December as “a gross act of disloyalty” adding: “I am firmly convinced that it will leave deep marks.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 12:07 am UTC
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Mother and child held in notorious Rio Grande Valley detention centre despite presenting visa, family says
A Canadian mother and her seven-year-old daughter, who has autism, have been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Texas since Saturday, family members have said.
Relatives of Tania Warner and her daughter Ayla Lucas say they were detained unlawfully. They are uncertain about what problem ICE found with their immigration paperwork.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 20 Mar 2026 | 12:02 am UTC
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GTC DEEP DIVE At Nvidia’s GTC conference this week, CEO Jensen Huang finally addressed a $20 billion question he’s dodged for months: Why spend so much to license AI chip startup Groq’s tech and hire away its engineers rather than build it themselves?…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 11:41 pm UTC
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Akrotiri and Dhekelia bases have become targets for Iran after outbreak of Middle East crisis
EU leaders have pledged to stand behind Cyprus as it seeks “an open and frank discussion” on the future of the British bases on the island, which have become a target after the outbreak of the latest Middle East crisis.
Ahead of an EU summit on Thursday, Cyprus’s president, Nikos Christodoulides, said he wanted “an open and frank discussion with the British government” regarding the status and future of the British bases on the island.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 19 Mar 2026 | 10:58 pm UTC
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In his role as health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a long-time anti-vaccine activist with no background in science, medicine, or public health—has made headlines for his thorough perversion of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory panel.
In June, Kennedy fired all 17 independent experts who made up the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. The panel sets federal vaccination guidance that dictates insurance coverage and influences state school requirements. Kennedy then repopulated ACIP with mostly unqualified allies who share his anti-vaccine views. The corrupted board went on to hold several chaotic meetings in which they voted, without scientific backing, to change vaccine policies to align with Kennedy's anti-vaccine agenda.
The blatant undermining of ACIP led a federal judge this week to temporarily block Kennedy's installed ACIP members and the anti-vaccine changes they made to CDC guidance. But while ACIP's corruption has drawn the spotlight, it's far from the only advisory committee Kennedy has destroyed or corrupted.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 10:34 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 19 Mar 2026 | 10:12 pm UTC
Foreign minister issues warning after Israeli attack on South Pars gasfield and as Qatar reels from retaliatory strike
Iran said on Thursday it would show “zero restraint” if its energy infrastructure was targeted again as Qatar revealed that almost a fifth of its liquefied natural gas export capacity had been knocked out in an Iranian strike that is likely to have a years-long impact.
The warning, delivered by the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, followed Israel’s attack on Iran’s massive South Pars gasfield – which it shares with Qatar – which triggered Iranian retaliatory strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas complex and other Gulf neighbours, sending stock markets tumbling globally and triggering sharp increases in gas prices.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 19 Mar 2026 | 10:02 pm UTC
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James ‘Jimmy’ Gracey was at nightclub in Spanish city for spring break when he separated from friends at about 3am
The body of James “Jimmy” Gracey, a 20-year-old college student from Illinois, was found Thursday in the water off a Barcelona beach, police in Spain said.
Gracey’s body was found by police divers and positively identified, the press office for Catalonia’s regional police in Barcelona told the Associated Press.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 19 Mar 2026 | 9:54 pm UTC
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A trade association of cloud service providers (CSPs) filed an antitrust complaint today with the European Union’s European Commission (EC) over Broadcom's shuttering of VMware’s CSP partner program this year.
Since Broadcom bought VMware, it has drastically cut the number of channel partners VMware works with, a shift that began with the elimination of VMware’s partner program. Broadcom replaced the program with an invite-only alternative that favors larger partners working with enterprise-sized clients rather than small-to-medium-sized businesses.
There are even fewer CSP partners working with VMware today. Broadcom introduced a requirement that CSP partners operate at least 3,500 cores, rendering hundreds of CSPs ineligible for partnership. Before Broadcom bought VMware, the virtualization company had over 4,000 CSP partners, per a February 2024 report from The Register. Today, VMware reportedly has 19 CSP partners in the US and about nine in the United Kingdom, The Register reported.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 9:29 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 9:14 pm UTC
In a move clearly designed to strengthen its position among developers, OpenAI has acquired Python tool maker Astral. The house of Altman expects the deal to strengthen the ecosystem for its Codex programming agent.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 9:13 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 19 Mar 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 19 Mar 2026 | 8:58 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 8:44 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 8:30 pm UTC
There is enough evidence going back far enough that it's reasonable to conclude social media platforms are responsible for population-level mental health harms. …
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 8:30 pm UTC
iPhone hacking techniques have sometimes been described almost like rare and elusive animals: Hackers have used them so stealthily and carefully against such a small number of hand-picked targets that they're only rarely seen in the wild. Now a recent spate of espionage and cybercriminal campaigns has instead deployed those same phone-takeover tools, embedded in infected websites, to indiscriminately hack phones by the thousands. And one new technique in particular—capable of taking over any of hundreds of millions of iOS devices—has appeared on the web in an easily reusable form, putting a significant fraction of the world's iPhone users at risk.
Researchers at Google and cybersecurity firms iVerify and Lookout on Wednesday jointly revealed the discovery of a sophisticated iPhone hacking technique known as DarkSword that they've seen in use on infected websites, capable of instantly and silently hacking iOS devices that visit those sites. While the technique doesn't affect the latest updated versions of iOS, it does work against iOS devices running versions of Apple's previous operating system release, iOS 18, which as of last month still accounted for close to a quarter of iPhones, according to Apple's own count.
“A vast number of iOS users could have all of their personal data stolen simply for visiting a popular website,” says Rocky Cole, iVerify's cofounder and CEO. “Hundreds of millions of people who are still using older Apple devices or older operating system versions remain vulnerable.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 8:11 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 19 Mar 2026 | 8:07 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 19 Mar 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
Three years after saying it had stopped buying location data of Americans without a warrant, the FBI acknowledged it has restarted the purchases. During questioning at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing yesterday, FBI Director Kash Patel said the location data purchases have produced valuable information, and he did not commit to stopping the practice.
In March 2023, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed that the agency had previously bought location data of US citizens without obtaining a warrant. "To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from Internet advertising,” Wray, who led the agency during Doha Blanker 's first term and during the Biden era, said at the time. “I understand that we previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that’s not been active for some time.”
At yesterday's hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recounted Wray's 2023 statement and asked Patel, "Is that the case still and, if so, can you commit this morning to not buying Americans' location data?"
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:57 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:54 pm UTC
If a battle is fought in space, it will look nothing like those depicted in the Star Wars franchise, with sleek TIE fighters blasting enemy ships with laser cannons and mag-pulses. Instead, these battles will be cerebral and unhurried, somewhat like the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal, a slow-burning political thriller with a plot that somehow mixes tension with clinical precision.
In that film, an assassin sets out to murder the French president. The main character's moves are meticulously planned, with backup plans for backup plans. A police commissioner, just as clever, must pursue the assassin and stop the conspiracy. The events play out over weeks and months, not seconds and minutes.
True Anomaly, which emerged from stealth just three years ago, is planning for The Day of the Jackal in space. The startup's primary hardware product, aptly named Jackal, is a war-ready satellite platform designed for mass production. In nature, jackals are known for their intelligence, adaptability, and hunting prowess. True Anomaly's Jackal boasts similar traits in space.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:45 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:16 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:13 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:05 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:02 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 19 Mar 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
Unknown baddies are abusing yet another critical Microsoft SharePoint bug to compromise victims' SharePoint servers, the US government warned.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:54 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:53 pm UTC
UK’s bilateral aid to African countries, which funds areas such as schools and clinics, to be cut by almost £900m by 2028-29
Some of the world’s poorest countries will lose out on UK aid that funds programmes such as schools and clinics, due to budget cuts set out by the foreign secretary.
The UK’s bilateral aid to African countries will be reduced by almost £900m by 2028-29 – a 56% cut – as part of more than £6bn in cuts which are funding an increase in defence spending.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:46 pm UTC
OpenAI announced Thursday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Astral, the company behind popular open source Python development tools such as uv, Ruff, and ty, and integrate the company into its Codex team.
The deal, whose financial terms were not publicly disclosed, will help OpenAI "accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle," the company said in an announcement post. Integrating Astral's tools more closely with Codex after the acquisition will "enable AI agents to work more directly with the tools developers already rely on every day," it continued.
Astral's most popular open source projects include:
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:44 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:38 pm UTC
It turns out you won't be limited to Google-verified apps an developers on Android after all. In the face of sustained community dissatisfaction with its developer verification requirement, Google has given Android users an out.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:30 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:24 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:18 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:10 pm UTC
A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:07 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:06 pm UTC
Discovery at Monte Verde puts north-to-south expansion theory back at centre of heated debate on continent’s human history
A groundbreaking new study may have once again upended our understanding of human prehistory in the Americas.
For years, the predominant theory of how humans arrived in the western hemisphere centred around the Clovis culture, which crossed the Beringia land bridge from Asia between 13,400 and 12,800 years ago, and spread south.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 19 Mar 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
The Pentagon wants $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for its war on Iran, a defense official told The Intercept. That sum is four times the amount originally floated by Pentagon officials. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said that number could even increase.
The request for the additional $200 billion has been sent to the White House, which normally reviews requests before they go to Congress, according to the defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely about the pending proposal. The $200 billion ask, first reported by the Washington Post, is in addition to a record-setting $1.5 trillion War Department budget request for 2027.
“Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth said when asked about the request during a press conference on Thursday. “As far as the $200 billion, I think that number could move.”
Hegseth spoke only in terms of immediate costs of the war. “We’re going back to Congress and folks there to ensure that we’re properly funded for what’s been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition is everything’s refilled, and not just refilled but above and beyond,” he explained.
Immediate war expenses will, however, be dwarfed by estimates offered by experts in the costs of war, lawmakers experienced with the Pentagon budget, and government officials briefed on Operation Epic Fury.
“Now, Secretary Hegseth wants $200 billion for a war that Congress never authorized?”
“Taxpayers haven’t gotten any clarity from the administration about the goals or costs of this war. To date, all we’ve seen are ballpark estimates, and lowballed ones at that. Now, Secretary Hegseth wants $200 billion for a war that Congress never authorized?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending.
Linda Bilmes, who co-authored “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” with economist Joseph Stiglitz, previously told The Intercept that short-term expenses — like munitions, costs of deploying aircraft carrier strike groups, and aircraft lost — will pale in comparison to long-term expenditures such as the costs of veterans’ benefits and interest on war debt. She said the cost of the conflict could ultimately reach into the trillions of dollars.
Costs will rise dramatically if the 50,000 U.S. troops deployed around the Middle East file disability claims at the typical rate due to exposure to “toxins, contamination, acid rain, dust from infrastructure destruction, and burning oil fumes,” Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said.
A new war also makes it more likely for Congress to approve a bigger Pentagon budget going forward, Bilmes told The Intercept. “That becomes the base budget and, over a decade, it’s another trillion dollars added to the defense budget.”
Murphy said the supplemental request raises fundamental questions for which the War Department and White House have yet to offer answers.
“$200 billion is 20 percent of the Pentagon’s budget this year. This is much more than the direct cost of the war so far, and likely more than will be needed anytime soon,” he said. “This request begs the question: Is the Pentagon just trying to pad its already-massive budget, or is the administration planning for a protracted war?”
The post Pentagon Claims It Needs Additional $200 Billion to Pay for War on Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:52 pm UTC
The dream of the metaverse may have died for now, but Meta has decided it's not completely giving up on the VR experience in Horizon Worlds, the virtual worlds service that it originally envisioned as the first step toward said metaverse.
The news was announced via the Instagram account of Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. "We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR," said Bosworth in an AMA on the platform in response to someone who expressed disappointment at the previously announced plan to end support.
He went on to clarify that only games and experiences that already support VR will continue to do so, while new games will be exclusive to mobile, and the majority of the team's development focus will be on mobile instead of VR.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:50 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:46 pm UTC
On Wednesday, Afroman won a widely watched defamation lawsuit that seven cops filed after the rapper made music videos mocking them for conducting a 2022 raid of his home that resulted in no charges and no marijuana found.
Videos for songs like "Lemon Pound Cake," "Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera," and "Will You Help Me Repair My Door" used real footage from the raid, pulling from security camera footage and videos shot by Afroman's wife. Cops from the Adams County Sheriff's Office alleged they were humiliated and received death threats after the videos went viral.
Accusing Afroman of defamation, cops individually sought damages as high as $1.5 million. But Afroman's lawyer, David Osborne, argued this was a clear-cut First Amendment case. At trial, Afroman testified that cops had no one to blame for the reputational damage but themselves, arguing that "if they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit," The New York Times reported.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:45 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:45 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:44 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:34 pm UTC
Google is planning big changes for Android in 2026 aimed at combating malware across the entire device ecosystem. Starting in September, Google will begin restricting application sideloading with its developer verification program, but not everyone is on board. Android Ecosystem President Sameer Samat tells Ars that the company has been listening to feedback, and the result is the newly unveiled advanced flow, which will allow power users to skip app verification.
With its new limits on sideloading, Android phones will only install apps that come from verified developers. To verify, devs releasing apps outside of Google Play will have to provide identification, upload a copy of their signing keys, and pay a $25 fee. It all seems rather onerous for people who just want to make apps without Google's intervention.
Apps that come from unverified developers won't be installable on Android phones—unless you use the new advanced flow, which will be buried in the developer settings.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:28 pm UTC
Distributor says authorities warned screening Tunisian film-maker Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama could harm India–Israel relations
The Indian release of The Voice of Hind Rajab, the Oscar-nominated Tunisian film about the death of a five-year-old girl during the Israel-Gaza war, has been blocked by the country’s ratings body, according to the film’s Indian distributor.
In a report by Variety, Manoj Nandwana of Mumbai-based Jai Viratra Entertainment said that he was told that if the film was released, it would “break up” India-Israel relations.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:24 pm UTC
Fiber-optic cables could be used to detect moonquakes, offering a simpler way to gather seismic data to support future missions.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:18 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 19 Mar 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
GNOME 50 is here, codenamed Tokyo after the location of the GNOME Asia Summit 2025, and the biggest change is in fact more or less invisible, unless you look for an options button on the login screen.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:54 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:52 pm UTC
Apple's MacBook Neo is impressive for its $600 price, but its A18 Pro processor is one of its biggest compromises compared to a modern MacBook Air—in our review, we found it was more than up to basic computing tasks, but for demanding workloads that benefit from more CPU and GPU cores and RAM, the Air is a better choice.
But those limited computing resources are still enough to run Windows on your Mac using the Parallels Desktop virtualization software—so says Parallels itself, which after some testing and benchmarking has declared the Neo suitable for "lightweight computing and everyday productivity, document editing, and web-based apps" while running Windows 11.
Parallels says the MacBook Neo's respectable single-core CPU performance keeps the Neo feeling "quick and responsive" when running multiple Windows-only software packages, including QuickBooks Desktop and other accounting apps, Microsoft Office, "light engineering and data tools" including AutoCAD LT and MATLAB, and "Windows-only courseware and education software" with "no Mac equivalent." In Parallels' testing, the Neo's single-core CPU performance in Windows was still roughly 20 percent faster compared to a Core Ultra 5 235U chip in a Dell Pro 14 laptop.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:50 pm UTC
It's been three years since an FBI director admitted to purchasing the location data of Americans, potentially in violation of the Constitution. Here we go again.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:43 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:21 pm UTC
Days after Doha Blanker won his second election to the White House, Democrats flocked to the New York Times to blame their stunning electoral defeat on alleged capitulations to minority groups — and cement themselves as the future leaders of the party.
Few appeared more eager than Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a moderate congressman and former presidential candidate with a reputation for bucking party leadership.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” Moulton lamented to the paper. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
That was over a year ago. Now, Moulton is running to unseat one of the most progressive members of the Senate, in the bluest state in the country, on a platform of generational change. And the anti-trans comments he’d hoped would establish him as a thought leader could help tank his campaign.
Polls consistently show Moulton trailing his opponent, incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, particularly among younger voters. Despite making a case for a new generation in office, Moulton has a 3 percent favorability rating among likely voters ages 18 to 34, compared to Markey’s 67 percent, according to a February 24 poll from the University of New Hampshire. Only 2 percent of likely Massachusetts primary voters under 34 said they would vote for Moulton if the race were held that day, while 53 percent said they would support Markey.
Though it’s still early — most Massachusetts voters won’t cast their ballots until September 1 — the state of the race suggests that Moulton, while attempting to style himself as the vanguard of a brash new Democratic party, picked up some serious political baggage.
Tatishe M. Nteta, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Moulton was far from alone in his post-mortem for Kamala Harris. “The problem is, those comments now have defined [Moulton], not just as a national figure who bucked Democratic viewpoints, but now within the state,” he said. “In order for him to win, he’s going to either have to walk it back or justify it.”
There were warning signs at the time. Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said the Salem congressman was “playing politics with people,” but Moulton refused to apologize. He argued that the backlash only reinforced his point and accused Democrats of forcing people to “change our values” to meet “the demands of one very small minority group,” by doing things like making them “put pronouns in their email signatures.”
“His ideas are from the last generation.”
“We were extremely offended by the comments that Seth Moulton made,” David Seaton, a college student at Tufts University and vice president of political affairs for the College Democrats of America, told The Intercept. “While Seth Moulton is running on a platform of generational change, his ideas are from the last generation, and his values are certainly from generations past.”
Moulton is now stuck in a political quagmire trapping other Democratic pundits and politicians, some with presidential designs, who tripped over themselves to blame Harris’s loss on the party becoming too woke and out of touch. But now, as voters seem more concerned with rising costs, mounting war, and waning access to health care than pronoun usage, those comments seem less like a prediction and more like a political liability.
“When you look at how much the world has changed since that moment,” said Josie Caballero, director of voting at Advocates for Trans Equality, “it just seems very out of touch with where we are now.”
It might seem obvious that transgender rights aren’t the losing issue that Moulton predicted in deep-blue Massachusetts, where in 2018 residents overwhelmingly voted to keep statewide protections for trans people in place. But Caballero pointed to elections that suggested similar trends in red and purple states like Maine, Texas, and Virginia, where Republican Winsome Earle-Sears’s campaign and affiliated PACs spent millions on anti-transgender attack advertisements targeting her Democratic opponent, now-Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
The former Virginia congresswoman did not capitulate on her positions regarding trans rights and not only trounced Earle-Sears on Election Day, but a poll of likely voters found they trusted her on “transgender policy” by a margin of 13 points.
In New York City, Zohran Mamdani won his mayoral election after running an advertisement celebrating trans history and pledging his support to the community, along with a detailed policy agenda.
Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the Transgender Law Center, said that voters this cycle are looking for candidates who can speak to universal issues like health care and affordability, instead of scapegoating vulnerable groups.
“I think we are living in a time where people are asking for an intersectional approach, where all bodily autonomy is respected, where people’s concerns are heard,” he said.
In Texas, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico has pivoted toward economic populism when addressing anti-trans attacks.
“The only minority destroying this country is the billionaires,” Talarico said on TV news, criticizing the media’s fixation on trans athletes. “Trans people are 1 percent of the population. We are focused on the wrong 1 percent.”
Graham Platner, who is running in a competitive primary for the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has similarly addressed the issue of transgender rights.
“An out-of-state billionaire is funding an anti-trans ballot question in Maine — so that we’ll spend our time fighting about trans people instead of raising his taxes,” said Platner in an interview with Slate.
Still, Chestnut said that while Platner and Talarico’s stances offer a necessary “starting point” for Democrats, they’ll also have to address the topic directly and advocate and explain their beliefs.
“The Democrats’ response was, let’s not say anything and hope it’s just a non-issue.”
“We’re also in a moment where not saying anything proved to also be a losing strategy. Our opposition in the presidential election, on every corner, was blaming transgender people,” he said. “The Democrats’ response was, let’s not say anything and hope it’s just a non-issue. And the reality of it is, it’s an issue.”
In Massachusetts, Moulton’s tone has shifted from his more reactionary rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, said Caballero.
“We went through the whole gay rights movement. We went through the whole civil rights movement. We never had to say, you know, ‘Seth Moulton: Straight’ or ‘Seth Moulton: White,’” he told WGBH at the time. “And all of a sudden, we have to change all our values to meet the needs or demands of one very small minority group.”
Now, Moulton appears to be walking a tighter line without apologizing or qualifying his comments. He has shied away from making additional comments about trans athletes or pronouns in recent interviews and has instead focused on emphasizing his voting record.
“Congressman Moulton is acutely aware of the trauma the transgender community is facing,” wrote a spokesperson for Moulton in a statement to The Intercept, echoing other recent interviews. “He is a career-long ally with a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign for his voting record, and is a member of the Equality Caucus.”
The spokesperson added that Moulton still believes that “Democrats must engage in difficult conversations” in order to keep the transgender community safe.
The tide has not completely turned. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the current unofficial front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has continued to fan the flames of hysteria over the participation of trans athletes in sports — despite the fact that there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of some 510,000 in the entire NCAA as of 2024.
“We just couldn’t figure out how to make this fair,” he told Katie Couric this month, referring to trans girls’ participation in track competitions.
Rather than assuaging people with questions about transgender issues, these comments from Democrats help Republicans to make trans rights a “wedge issue,” said Chestnut.
Despite his controversies, an Emerson poll in February found that Newsom had a slight lead with likely Democratic voters if the presidential primary were held that day — though there are still more than two years and one midterms cycle to go before voters pick their next president.
For his part, Moulton has denied changing his opinion on transgender rights or his rhetoric. “His position has never changed, and his record reflects this,” wrote a spokesperson for Moulton, emphasizing his support for the Transgender Bill of Rights in 2023, ahead of the 2024 election. He co-sponsored the bill again in 2026.
But Bailey Kelly, a student at Tufts University and secretary of the College Democrats of Massachusetts, said they view Moulton as a fair weather friend on the issue.
“We see through that flip-flopping,” said Kelly, who runs the College Democrats of Massachusetts’ digital operations in support of Markey, after the senator won their endorsement. “And it’s insulting that he thinks we don’t see it.”
Authenticity is key for younger voters, said Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something. “People are allowed to grow and change,” said Litman, “but it has to come from a place of truth by the candidate, or they’re not gonna be able to compellingly sell it. And I think that is the challenge for [Moulton].”
In January, both College Democrats of America and College Democrats of Massachusetts announced they were endorsing Markey after he won their internal vote in a landslide. Seaton said Moulton’s comments were “of the utmost importance” in the group’s decision not to support him.
Redemption for candidates like Moulton is possible, Chestnut said. “There is nothing more powerful than some humility, and saying ‘you know what, I was wrong.’”
But to date, Moulton has not apologized for his comments, although he has stated that he “may not have used exactly the right words,” in an interview with CNN.
“Clarification is one thing, but walking back is another. And he has not done either up until this point, and Markey is going to seize on this,” said Nteta, the political science professor. “If Moulton is going to win, he is going to have to assuage the concerns of people in the state about how he is going to govern when he gets to the Senate.”
The post Seth Moulton Saw Trans Rights as a Political Liability. It Could Doom His Senate Campaign. appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:02 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:01 pm UTC
The US government has urged companies to better secure Microsoft Intune, an endpoint management tool that was abused in last week's cyberattack against med-tech firm Stryker.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 19 Mar 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
For decades now, Counter-Strike players have gotten used to tapping the reload button whenever they have a spare, safe moment. Yesterday evening, though, Valve announced that it had decided this system needed "higher stakes," overhauling Counter-Strike 2's reload mechanic in a way that could disrupt years of muscle memory for millions of players.
Until now, reloading in CS2 has meant dumping the remainder of your current clip "back into an essentially endless reserve supply," Valve wrote in the game's latest update announcement. From now on, hitting the reload button will instead make players "drop the used magazine and discard all of its remaining ammo. Instead of 'topping off' your weapon with a few bullets, a new full magazine will be taken from the reserves whenever you reload."
While most weapons will now come with three full clips of reserve ammo, Valve wrote that "some weapons will have less to reward efficiency and precision, or more to encourage spamming through walls and smokes." Counter-Strike specialist Thour did the math on the changes and found that seven weapons gained ammo, 16 lost ammo, and 12 saw their total ammo remain unchanged under this new system. Shotguns seem to have seen the biggest upgrades, while strategies that rely on "pistol spam" might have to be rethought from now on.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 3:59 pm UTC
Foreign minister claims Israel convinced Doha Blanker to make ‘grave miscalculation’ of waging war on Iran
Oman’s foreign minister has claimed the US has “lost control of its own foreign policy” and accused Israel of persuading Doha Blanker ’s administration to go to war with Iran – a conflict he described as a “catastrophe” and a “grave miscalculation”.
Writing in the Economist, Badr Albusaidi, the Omani minister who mediated the latest nuclear talks between Iran and the US, offered an unusually damning assessment of events leading up to the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran and the war it has triggered across the Middle East.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 19 Mar 2026 | 3:50 pm UTC
People in North America adopted the bow and arrow as replacement weapons for the dart and atlatl about 1,400 years ago, according to a new paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus. But the adoption was almost immediate in southern regions, while people living farther north initially adopted the bow and arrow as a complement to their existing toolkit, gradually phasing out the atlatl and dart over a thousand years.
That's according to the latest research from experimental archaeologist Metin Eren's Experimental Archaeology Laboratory at Kent State University in Ohio, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer a wide range of ancient technologies, from stone tools and ceramics to metal, butchery, and textiles. Eren achieved some notoriety for his 2019 debunking of an Inuit legend, testing rudimentary knives made of frozen feces to see whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon. That paper snagged Eren an Ig Nobel prize.
While such work might be colorful, Eren has always emphasized that what he does is very much serious science, not entertainment. His lab has conducted studies on the pitches and octaves produced from the percussive aspects of flint-knapping; common injuries suffered by flint-knappers; the butchering efficiency of Clovis points (field work done jointly with the MeatEater hunters and immortalized on YouTube); and ballistics experiments to test a 1970s hypothesis about whether some stone blades once had some sort of wood or bone backing on the flat, dulled edge (as opposed to the sharp cutting edge), which would have increased adhesion.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 3:45 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 19 Mar 2026 | 3:17 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 19 Mar 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 19 Mar 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
You'll use AI and like it too – if you work for PwC. Paul Griggs, US chief executive of the global professional services giant, has made clear there is no room at the corporation for AI skeptics.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 2:59 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 19 Mar 2026 | 2:39 pm UTC
Watch the replay of the media information session where ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and ESA Council Chair Renato Krpoun outline the key decisions and main outcomes of the Council meeting held in Interlaken, Switzerland, on 18 and 19 March 2026.
Source: ESA Top News | 19 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
The UK government has backed off plans to allow AI companies to access copyrighted material for free for training purposes by default.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 1:33 pm UTC
The UK's competition watchdog has published responses to its consultation over Google's strategic market status (SMS) covering search and search advertising services - and the tech biz is offering some concessions.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 1:31 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 19 Mar 2026 | 1:06 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 19 Mar 2026 | 1:00 pm UTC
QCon London A member of Anthropic's AI reliability engineering team spoke at QCon London on why Claude excels at finding issues but still makes a poor substitute for a site reliability engineer (SRE), constantly mistaking correlation with causation.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 12:22 pm UTC
Browser maker Vivaldi has opened up a new front in the browser wars by making itself disappear.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 12:15 pm UTC
Britain’s competition watchdog is opening an investigation into Adobe’s early cancellation fees on membership plans to ascertain if it breaks consumer law.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 12:05 pm UTC
The United States made war on three continents over three days earlier this month, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the Pacific Ocean. The globe-spanning scope of the attacks represents one of the few instances since World War II that the United States has been simultaneously involved in armed conflicts with such a wide geographic sweep.
The attacks in Ecuador, Iran, Somalia, and the Eastern Pacific from March 6 through March 8 are part of President Doha Blanker ’s escalating world war against variously defined “terrorists.” They highlight the administration’s increasing willingness to use the U.S. military as a solution to almost any perceived geopolitical problem.
“All war. All the time. Everywhere,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, of the wide-ranging attacks over just a few days. “It’s unprecedented given the absence of any fresh congressional authorization.”
This month, Doha Blanker has repeatedly referenced his relentless war-making and even lamented it on occasion. “I built the military and rebuilt it in my first term, and we’re using it more than I’d like to use it to be honest with you,” he said.
The region that has seen the most profound increases in this “use” of military power is the Western Hemisphere as part of what Doha Blanker and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine.” This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — a unilaterally claimed license to militarily meddle in America’s backyard — has led to attacks on civilian boats in the waters surrounding Latin America and an attack on Venezuela. The most recent location of U.S. attacks in the region, Ecuador, is also the site of the first strike in Doha Blanker ’s recent three-day, three-war spree.
“Yes — as @POTUS has said — we are bombing Narco Terrorists on land as well,” self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wrote on X on March 6, announcing a new strike in Ecuador. Days later, in a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in that country, the White House informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”
The next day, Doha Blanker announced an escalation of his latest war of choice in the Middle East. “Today Iran will be hit very hard!” he posted, writing, “Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time.” That same day, U.S. Central Command posted footage of the U.S. striking unspecified Iranian targets beneath a threat by Hegseth to hunt and kill those that “threaten Americans anywhere on earth.”
A day later, the U.S. conducted an attack as part of its war-on-terror-holdover conflict in Somalia. “In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) conducted an airstrike targeting ISIS-Somalia on March 8, 2026,” reads an AFRICOM press release. “The airstrike occurred in the vicinity of the Golis Mountains.” (This frequently attacked region was the site, last year, of what a top Navy admiral called the “largest airstrike in the history of the world.”)
On the same day as the recent AFRICOM strike, U.S. Southern Command announced the latest attack in its campaign targeting so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed almost 160 people in 45 strikes since September. “Six male narco-terrorists were killed during this action,” reads the SOUTHCOM announcement, which was accompanied on X by video footage of a boat exploding into a fireball.
During World War II, the U.S. fought a global war conducting combat operations simultaneously in Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as limited fighting in North America against Japanese forces in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska in 1942 and 1943. The fight against the Axis powers was, however, a declared war — America’s last — and one discrete conflict. By contrast, Doha Blanker ’s sprawling collection of undeclared wars include a remnant of the war on terror and several new unconstitutional wars begun by Doha Blanker .
“This is why the U.S. Constitution requires congressional authorization before using military force in this manner,” said Finucane. “It’s so the American public and their elected representatives can debate and deliberate whether the costs of a war are justified by the supposed benefits of this military operation. And whether the use of military force is the appropriate tool to solve the problem. And whether it’s even a problem that needs to be solved at all.”
The U.S. has rarely, if ever, conducted attacks — such as the airstrikes in Ecuador, Iran, and Somalia — on three continents over a 72-hour period since World War II. During the Cold War, the U.S. frequently conducted clandestine and covert operations, armed interventions, and wars across multiple continents, but not often analogous attacks. On August 21, 1998, in an early attack on Al Qaeda, the U.S. simultaneously attacked targets in Afghanistan and Sudan with cruise missiles. During the war on terror, the U.S. frequently was involved in simultaneous conflicts and interventions in numerous countries across the Middle East and Africa — and sometimes farther afield. In 2017, for example, a small number of Special Operations forces assisted troops in the Philippines in relieving a siege of the town of Marawi by ISIS-linked militants. U.S. forces were also attacking people in the Middle East and Africa that year, bringing combat to two continents.
The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions concerning the concentration of attacks over such a short period of time and how often this has occurred since World War II.
During his second term Doha Blanker has already launched attacks on Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Doha Blanker administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name.
“Today there are so many places in the world where the U.S. government is conducting military operations — including the war at home on migrants — that each event eclipses the last in terms of media attention,” said Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. “Each and every case merits a great deal of study and debate. Many U.S. citizens are trying to do this, but news of yet another act of U.S. war violence continues to crop up, drawing media attention away from earlier events and creating huge obstacles to meaningful, sustained work by U.S. citizens to hold their government accountable.”
The post U.S. Warmongering Hits Historic Level as Doha Blanker Attacks 3 Continents in 3 Days appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 19 Mar 2026 | 11:51 am UTC
Germany recently banned TCL from marketing some of its TVs as QLED (quantum dot light-emitting diode), with a Munich court ruling that the TVs lack the quantum dot (QD) structure and performance associated with QLED TVs. The decision increases pressure on TV companies to be more honest with their marketing.
Samsung has actively campaigned against TCL’s use of the term QLED. A year ago, Samsung sent Ars Technica results from testing performed by Intertek, a London-headquartered testing and certification company, on TCL’s 65Q651G, 65Q681G, and 75Q651G. The results showed that the TVs lacked sufficient amounts of cadmium and indium (two chemicals used in QD TVs, either individually or in combination). Intertek reportedly tested the optical sheet, diffuser plate, and LED modules in each TV using a minimum detection standard of 0.5 mg/kg for cadmium and 2 mg/kg for indium.
At the time, a TCL representative told me that TCL had “definitive substantiation for the claims made regarding its QLED televisions.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 19 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Complaints about Microsoft's startup credits and Azure AI Foundry keep mounting, with users reporting surprise credit card charges and invoices they never saw coming.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Report shows how minerals critical to defense readiness have seen a ‘near total’ disruption in seaborne trade
The closure of the strait of Hormuz is causing a “paralyzing, real-time problem” for any prospective manufacturing surge in the US defense industrial base, and even for the repair of defense equipment damaged by Iranian attacks, according to analysis published by West Point’s Modern War Institute.
In particular sulphur, a vital upstream input in the extraction of critical minerals including copper and cobalt, has seen a “near total” disruption of seaborne trade in the straits, which makes up half the world’s total shipments, and prices have spiked nearly 25% since the war began, and seen a 165% rise year on year, the report said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 19 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 19 Mar 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
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Five years after launching its rescue plan to lift ERP users to the cloud and switch them to the latest software, SAP is off target by about €2 billion, The Register can reveal.…
Source: The Register | 19 Mar 2026 | 10:15 am UTC
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