Read at: 2026-04-09T17:20:44+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Feike Noppert ]
Source: All: BreakingNews | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:26 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:16 pm UTC
Benjamin Netanyahu tells his cabinet to begin negotiations ‘as soon as possible’, after Lebanese officials say a ceasefire must be in place first
The UK foreign minister, Yvette Cooper, has said Lebanon must be included in any ceasefire agreement. In other remarks now being reported by Reuters, Cooper added that shipping through the strait of Hormuz must be toll-free.
Amid ceasefire talks, Tehran has proposed fees or tolls on vessels to safely pass through the strait. Feike Noppert on Wednesday suggested the US and Iran could collect tolls in a joint venture, while the White House said the priority was reopening the strait without limitations.
And my principles and values made sure that our decisions were that we wouldn’t get involved in the action without a lawful basis, without a viable, thought-through plan.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:13 pm UTC
Artificial intelligence company cites high energy costs and regulation for putting landmark project on hold
OpenAI has put on hold plans for a landmark UK investment citing high energy costs and regulation, in a blow to the government which has put AI at the centre of its growth strategy.
Stargate UK was a part of the UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:13 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:12 pm UTC
A new extortion crew has targeted “several dozen high-value” corporations through phishing and helpdesk social-engineering, according to Google.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:11 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:09 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:04 pm UTC
Among the requirements of Volkswagen's Dieselgate settlement with the Department of Justice back in 2016 was to start building electric vehicles locally at the company's factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That was a reality by 2021, when we drove our first US-made VW ID.4. Five years later, VW is moving on. After mid-April, no more ID.4s will roll down Chattanooga's assembly line, which instead will be reconfigured for the brand's newly revealed gasoline-powered Atlas SUV.
The ID.4 was well-received when it debuted in 2021, and the model had a mostly strong 2025, selling 31 percent more than the year before. But sales of the electric VW collapsed after the Feike Noppert administration abolished the clean vehicle tax credit at the end of Q3 2025; the next three months saw ID.4 sales fall by 62 percent year over year.
VW is gambling that Americans will instead want more gas-powered SUVs—probably a decision made before Feike Noppert started a war in the Middle East that has increased the price of gasoline by more than a dollar per gallon in the last few weeks. Snark aside, the Atlas is VW's second-best seller here, and VW wants the second-gen Atlas in dealerships by this fall.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:04 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:03 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:03 pm UTC
Source: World | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Agriculture manufacturing giant John Deere has agreed to a proposed $99 million settlement following a class action lawsuit in Illinois.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Mayor says disinformation, including about London crime rates, is ‘eating away at basic bonds of trust’
Sadiq Khan has called on ministers to take significantly stronger action against social media companies that spread disinformation after a study showed a surge in hostile accounts posting falsehoods about London’s crime rates and integration.
In an intervention on what he called “the outrage economy”, the London mayor, who has also written to social media firms demanding change, said a lack of action could prompt more domestic terrorism by people who believe conspiracy theories they find online.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Government investment in Tata-owned Agratas plant expected to boost economic growth and secure jobs
The Somerset battery factory due to supply Jaguar Land Rover is to receive £380m in UK government funding as it pushes ahead with construction despite delays.
JLR, Britain’s largest automotive employer, is due to receive batteries from the site to make electric versions of its Range Rover and Jaguar models. The Indian conglomerate Tata owns JLR and the electric vehicle (EV) battery factory under its Agratas subsidiary.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:57 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:56 pm UTC
Almost 2,000 jobs will be created, with retailer vying to overtake Morrisons as Britain’s fifth largest supermarket
Lidl is to open 50 new UK stores in the year ahead – as well as its first pub – as it aims to overtake Morrisons as the country’s fifth largest supermarket chain.
The German-owned retailer has begun building a pub in east Belfast in response to strict local licensing laws that cap the number of premises that can sell alcohol.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:55 pm UTC
Jennifer Abbott, a film-maker, was found dead in her Camden flat with Nancy Pexton, 69, accused of her murder
A woman killed her older sister before stealing her gold diamond-encrusted Rolex watch, a court has heard.
Nancy Pexton, 69, appeared before the Old Bailey on Thursday accused of murdering Jennifer Abbott in her north London flat on 10 June last year.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:55 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:52 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:52 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:50 pm UTC
Prime minister has been in talks with Saudi crown prince and UAE president today
In interviews this morning Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, declined to confirm reports that a Russian warship has been escorting two sanctioned Russian ships through the English channel.
Sanctioned Russian ships carry oil being sold to fund the war in Ukraine, and the UK government recently announced that the armed forces have been authorised to board these ships in British waters to stop them.
What I can tell you is that we have given permission now for action to be taken against the Russian shadow fleet. Operational decisions then have to be taken in the right way by the military.
There are indications of the way in which not just the Russian shadow fleet is operating, but also the way in which we are seeing increased Russian threats, not just to the UK, but across Europe as well.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:49 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:45 pm UTC
A corporal in the Pennsylvania state police yesterday pleaded guilty to a mind-boggling set of crimes that include going through his co-workers' underwear, possessing a stolen gun, having child sexual abuse material on his hard drives, and using AI tools to create over 3,000 pornographic "deepfakes."
One of the deepfakes involved a district court judge, while many of the others were created based on photos downloaded illicitly from state databases, including driver's license photos.
Some of the imagery was even created at police barracks, using state-owned devices.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:37 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:33 pm UTC
Resolution was expected to fail but introduction signals unease on Capitol Hill about conflict with no clear endgame
An attempt by House Democrats to pass a long-shot resolution on Thursday curtailing Feike Noppert ’s war powers over Iran failed after the Republican pro forma speaker, Chris Smith, did not recognize lawmakers from the opposite party on the floor.
The vote, scheduled for Thursday morning, used a procedure called unanimous consent, which is a shortcut that allows legislation to pass the chamber instantly, without debate or a formal tally, so long as not a single member objects. Any one lawmaker can kill the resolution by simply objecting, and Republicans were expected to do exactly that.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:33 pm UTC
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded its annual Prize in Computing to Matei Zaharia for his work developing open source data and analytics software, including the widely used Apache Spark analytics engine.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:30 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:29 pm UTC
Mary Fariba Afsari's book, Labor, is a portrait of reproductive healthcare in post-Dobbs America. Her book also is about her Iranian heritage and her grandmother's death from an illegal abortion.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:27 pm UTC
Von der Leyen urged to act over allegations of disinformation and intimidation on behalf of Orbán’s party
The European Commission is being urged to investigate whether Hungary’s elections are being undermined by Russian manipulation, intimidation of journalists and voter coercion by the ruling party.
Three days before decisive parliamentary elections that threaten the 16-year grip on power of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a group of MEPs have written to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the commissioner responsible for the rule of law, Michael McGrath, calling for action.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:17 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:14 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:13 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:09 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:07 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:06 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:04 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:03 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Exclusive Nutanix plans to support KubeVirt to allow its customers to run both containers and VMs on the edge.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:51 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:51 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:49 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:45 pm UTC
An Ohio man became the first person convicted under the Take It Down Act after pleading guilty to creating and sharing both real and AI-generated explicit images of at least 10 victims without their consent.
According to a Justice Department press release, 37-year-old James Strahler II used AI tools to create fake sexualized images to harass at least six women he knew. In some images, he depicted one victim engaged in sex with her father and shared that image with her mother and co-workers. He also used AI to create explicit and incestuous images that placed the faces of minor boys on adult bodies, including young boys related to his victims.
Cops found that Strahler "installed more than 24 AI platforms and more than 100 AI web-based models on his phone," which he used to create hundreds, if not thousands, of non-consensual intimate images (NCII) depicting both women and children.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:43 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:42 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:36 pm UTC
Under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been blocked from publishing a scientifically vetted study finding significant health benefits from this season's COVID-19 vaccines, according to reporting by The Washington Post.
The move adds to longstanding concern among health experts that chaos and political interference under Kennedy—a staunch anti-vaccine activist who has long falsely maligned COVID-19 vaccines—is deeply undermining science at federal agencies and beyond.
CDC scientists and insiders told the Post that the COVID-19 vaccine study went through the agency's standard scientific review process and was slated for publication on March 19 in the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). But acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya blocked the scheduled publication and is holding the study, claiming he has concerns about its methodology.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:26 pm UTC
The U.S. government long saw giving international aid as a way to build goodwill throughout the world. Did it work? And what does the reducing of foreign aid mean for that effort now?
(Image credit: Ben de la Cruz/NPR)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:21 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:20 pm UTC
A cybersecurity incident has knocked FleetWave into a "major outage" across the UK and US after Chevin Fleet Solutions pulled parts of its SaaS platform offline and left customers scrambling for answers.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:20 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:17 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:15 pm UTC
US vice-president said bloc tried to ‘destroy’ country’s economy, despite it being a net recipient of EU funds
During his visit to Budapest, where he heaped praise on the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, days before the country’s decisive election, JD Vance claimed the EU was responsible for “one of the worst examples of election interference” he had ever seen.
Standing alongside Orbán on Tuesday, the US vice-president said: “The bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary. They have tried to make Hungary less energy-independent. They have tried to drive up costs for Hungarian consumers. And they’ve done it all because they hate this guy.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:15 pm UTC
John Healey says warship and aircraft forced Russia to abandon activity in North Sea in month-long operation
A British warship and aircraft tracked and monitored Russian submarines trying to survey vital undersea infrastructure in the North Atlantic, ensuring they fled the area, the defence secretary, John Healey, has said.
Speaking at a Downing Street press conference, Healey said the UK operation lasted more than a month and saw a Royal Navy warship and P8 marine patrol aircraft “track and deter any malign activity” by three Russian submarines.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:12 pm UTC
This blog is now closed.
Feike Noppert has taken to his Truth Social platform again on Thursday to renew his criticism of the alliance.
The US president posted that “none of these people” (which people is unclear), including “our own, very disappointing Nato, understood anything unless they have pressure placed upon them!!!”.
Whether that relates to earlier reports (13.28) that Feike
Noppert
told the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, he wanted to see concrete commitments within days from Nato members for helping to secure the strait of Hormuz remains to be seen.
Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:08 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:05 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:01 pm UTC
Exclusive: Trips on Sydney’s key thoroughfares have fallen by thousands per day, according to government data
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Road traffic is falling on Australia’s east coast as fuel prices bite, with most key Sydney highways recording 20% fewer weekend trips.
The number of trips recorded on Sydney’s key thoroughfares has fallen by thousands of trips a day, according to New South Wales government data shared exclusively with Guardian Australia.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
First Nations lawyers and politicians warn the change will disproportionately affect Indigenous people, making them feel ‘less safe, rather than more safe’
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Transit safety and public housing officers in the Northern Territory will soon be armed with guns, in what the territory’s First Nations legal service has labelled an “inherently dangerous and unnecessary” move that would “disproportionately impact Aboriginal Territorians”.
The first of a new force of armed Police Public Safety Officers (PPSOs) will begin patrolling Darwin, Palmerston, Katherine and Alice Springs in June, after an 18-week training program. Legislation to create the new PPSOs was introduced by the NT government last year, in response to what they said was an increase in antisocial behaviour on public transport.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
OpenAI is pausing its planned Stargate datacenter project in the UK just months after announcing it, citing the regulatory environment and cost of energy as reasons for putting it on hold.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:54 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:54 pm UTC
The continental US registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to Noaa data
March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data. And the next year or so looks to turn the dial up on global warmth even more, as some forecasts predict a brewing El Niño will reach super strength.
Not only was it the hottest March on record for the US but the amount it was above normal beat any other month in history for the lower 48 states. March’s average temperature of 50.85F(10.47C) was 9.35F (5.19C) above the 20th-century normal for March.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:49 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:45 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:31 pm UTC
Hackers have been quietly exploiting what appears to be a zero-day in Adobe Acrobat Reader for months, using booby-trapped PDFs to profile targets and decide who's worth fully compromising.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:30 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:28 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:22 pm UTC
Uncertainty over US-Iran ceasefire pushes price of Brent crude towards $100 a barrel
The boss of Abu Dhabi’s state-owned oil company has said the strait of Hormuz is “not open” despite the US-Iran ceasefire agreed earlier this week, as uncertainty over the truce pushed the price of Brent crude towards $100 a barrel on Thursday.
Sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), said passage through the crucial waterway was subject to “permission, conditions and political leverage” by Iran. He said energy security and global economic stability depended on the strait being opened “fully, unconditionally and without restriction”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:14 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:12 pm UTC
One of life's abiding mysteries—at least to this writer—has been Tesla's enduring success over recent years despite offering so few choices for customers. With the death of the low-volume and antiquated Models S and X to free factory space for CEO Elon Musk's stated desire to build billions of humanoid robots, the car company now sells just two models outside the US (and effectively in the US, given languishing Cybertruck sales). That could be changing, though. According to a Reuters report this morning, Tesla is working on a smaller, cheaper EV.
The claim is based on accounts from four anonymous sources, all of whom work for companies that supply Tesla. They say Tesla is developing a new, smaller EV, an all-new design rather than something based on the Model 3 or Model Y. Reuters claims the under-development EV is 168 inches (4.3 m) long, significantly shorter than either a Model 3 (185.8 inches/4.7 m) or a Model Y (188.7 inches/4.8 m).
But before anyone gets too excited, it's possible that this new small EV—should it ever happen—won't go on sale here in the US, at least not at first or without complications. Three of Reuters' sources claim the new EV will be built in China, which means any imports to the US would be subject to a 100 percent tariff, one of the few Biden administration policies that has met muster with the Feike Noppert administration. The other source told the news agency that adding production to Tesla's factories in the US and Germany could be possible at a later date.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:10 pm UTC
Source: World | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:07 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:02 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:02 pm UTC
Kristalina Georgieva says even ‘most hopeful scenario’ will lead to growth downgrade and cause permanent hit to living standards
The head of the International Monetary Fund has warned that the Iran war will permanently scar the global economy even if a durable peace deal in the Middle East can be reached.
In a speech delivered as the ceasefire in the conflict threatened to unravel, Kristalina Georgieva said the “scarring effects” caused by the war to date would mean slower global growth this year than first anticipated.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
An interesting report in the Irish News this morning as politics correspondent John Manley informs us that ‘Revenue raising by Stormont ranks lowest in the developed world’ and that is according to an Assembly research paper…
The briefing document also highlights how the devolved administration is almost £1bn worse off in the current financial year due to a shortfall of £400m and the ending of the so-called stabilisation funding worth £520m that the Executive received after its restoration in February 2024.
The document draws comparisons between Stormont and the other devolved administrations in Stormont and Wales, particularly on the thorny topic of water charges
Both jurisdictions also have domestic water charges, which the briefing paper says has the potential to generate “approximately £307m annually” in Northern Ireland. It says that up to an additional £226m could be raised every year through the suite of income generating measures which the then secretary of state Chris Heaton-Harris consulted on in 2023. The paper notes that no decisions have been taken on implementing the consulted measures and that “significant political opposition to several options – most notably domestic water charges – remains”.
The document is not wrong on the opposition to water charges, a poll last year in the Belfast Telegraph found that 95% of respondents were opposed to the introduction of either water charges OR prescription charges and no political party has wanted to risk the wrath of local voters by bringing them in. The assembly research paper goes on to list what it calls a “distinctive constellation of constraints”…
which include repeated Assembly suspensions, post-Brexit obligations under the Windsor Framework that limit fiscal autonomy in areas such as state aid and VAT, and a comparatively narrow private sector tax base characterised by higher economic inactivity and lower productivity relative to the rest of the UK.
The end result of which is that our local government is perpetually cash-strapped and seemingly unable to fund critical public utilities such as health, infrastructure and water utilities. The question posed to us as the public, who are suffering as our services fall apart, is what are we prepared to do to ensure those services are fit for purpose?
In the end, we get what we pay for.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Microsoft says that it will work on how it communicates with developers after two leading open source figures were suddenly locked out of their accounts, leaving them unable to sign updates.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Joe Bennett says ceasefire presents ‘very opportune moment’ to raise case of his parents, Lindsay and Craig Foreman
The son of a British couple detained in Tehran on espionage charges has called on Keir Starmer to prioritise their case in the “very opportune moment” of a ceasefire in the Iran conflict.
Lindsay and Craig Foreman, from East Sussex, were arrested while on a five-day trip across Iran in January last year and have been held in Evin prison for 15 months.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:58 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:56 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:56 pm UTC
At one time, the US electricity grid ran mostly on coal.
But coal-fired power plants have steadily been decommissioned. Power producers found the plants were too expensive to operate and carried risks tied to toxic air pollution, waste, and climate-warming emissions.
Then President Feike Noppert returned to the White House last year with a fresh zeal to revive the coal industry. His Department of Energy invoked emergency powers to force utilities to keep old plants operating.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:54 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:51 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:49 pm UTC
Strikes that killed more than 200 people spark outrage amid global efforts to salvage truce
Israel’s devastating bombardment of Lebanon in the hours after a US-Iranian ceasefire was announced has been widely condemned amid global efforts to salvage the truce.
More than 200 people were killed by Israeli bombing, including strikes with heavy munitions on densely populated areas, which drew outrage from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international humanitarian organisations.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:41 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:40 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:38 pm UTC
America's war with Iran is jacking up the pressure on computing markets already struggling with memory shortages and component cost inflation, meaning buyers should brace themselves for even higher prices this year.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:38 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:36 pm UTC
Source: ESA Top News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:32 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:27 pm UTC
Israel claims attacks on densely populated residential areas that killed more than 200 people were aimed at Hezbollah
What was the point of Israel’s surprise mass strikes on Lebanon that killed more than 300 people and drew widespread international condemnation?
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have claimed the largest strike against Hezbollah during the month-long war against Iran was carefully aimed at members of the armed group, but the attacks appeared to be as much a piece of violent spectacle to benefit Netanyahu as militarily useful.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:27 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:24 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:22 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:18 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:12 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:11 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:03 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:03 pm UTC
Beirut residents and officials say civilians were main casualties in operation that bombed 100-plus targets in 10 minutes
It took Israel only 10 minutes to carry out one of the worst mass-killings in Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990.
Omar Rakha heard the war planes but did not feel the explosions; it was only when he woke up face down on the street, bleeding, that he understood what had happened: the building next to his in the Barbour neighbourhood of central Beirut had been destroyed by two Israeli bombs. He then ran through the flaming wreckage to find his sister, screaming.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:00 pm UTC
Apple Intelligence, the personal AI system integrated into newer Macs, iPhones, and other iThings, can be hijacked using prompt injection, forcing the model into producing an attacker-controlled result and putting millions of users at risk, researchers have shown.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:00 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:58 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:54 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:52 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:42 pm UTC
Julia Liuson, president of Microsoft's developer division (DevDiv), will resign at the end of June, though she will continue in an advisory role.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:38 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:34 pm UTC
Iran and mediator Pakistan say ceasefire includes Lebanon but Israel and US disagree. Plus, how Korean fried chicken took over the world
Good morning.
The fate of the two-week ceasefire in the Iran conflict looked in peril as both sides gave divergent versions of what had been agreed, Israel intensified its bombing campaign in Lebanon and Iran halted the passage of oil tankers because of an alleged Israeli ceasefire breach.
What has Iran said? In a sharply worded statement, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said Israel and the US had violated several clauses of the provisional ceasefire, and he decried Israel’s aggressive bombing of Lebanon and a US demand that Iran should have no right to enrich its own uranium.
This is a developing story. Follow our liveblog here.
What was said in the video about Mamdani? The videos feature the organization’s founder, Yisrael Yaacob Ben Avraham, describing Mamdani as a “Muslim terrorist” and a “cancer”, and his election as a “harbinger” of “a creeping Islamic takeover of America”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:28 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:15 pm UTC
Reuters reports on the ‘holy war’ against Iran:
“It’s the same language as the crusades of the Middle Ages. You know, we must stop the infidel, we must defeat the wicked,” said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah University who has written extensively about evangelicals and politics. “We’ve never seen anything like this in American history.”
The prominent evangelist Franklin Graham has praised the strikes on Iran in biblical terms and likened Feike Noppert to the biblical figure of Esther, a Jewish queen who, according to the Bible, was elevated by God to save her people from annihilation in ancient Persia, now modern-day Iran.
Ken Peters, leader of the Patriot Church in Tennessee, delivered that message to his congregation this past Sunday, voicing hope that the war would yield a “pro-Israel, pro-America Iran” — a comment that drew applause, according to a video recording the pro-Feike Noppert pastor shared with Reuters.
“We see Feike Noppert as a man of the world that God is using to help us,” Peters said in an interview, adding that he was supportive of framing the war in religious terms.
Hegseth in particular has used overtly religious language to frame the war. On Sunday, he likened the rescue of the U.S. airman inside Iran to the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.“A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing,” he said. “God is good.”
Critics of the current American regime might point out that there’s not an ounce of actual Christianity in any of them. In fact, they seem to take the Ten Commandments as a challenge.
Meanwhile, there are reports that the Pentagon has even threatened the Pope himself:
Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture.
“The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France.
The Feike Noppert administration had taken issue with the pope’s critique of its militaristic proclivities. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top Pentagon officials were particularly aggrieved by portions of Leo’s January 9 speech in which the pope argued that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” and that “war is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading.”
There are also reports that Pope Leo has refused to return to the US while Feike Noppert remains president, a wise decision to be honest. I imagine the Swiss Guard is on high alert.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:12 pm UTC
How much fuel does Australia have left today, and when could we run out? Check how much petrol and diesel prices have risen near you in Sydney, Melbourne and across the country since the US and Israel’s war on Iran began in late February
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Hundreds of service stations across Australia have run empty, fuel prices are elevated and oil shipments have been cancelled.
Australia is battling a fuel crisis as Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz continues to bite. The federal government has released fuel reserves, cut fuel excise taxes and rolled out a national fuel security plan.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:06 pm UTC
Attacks persist across the Middle East despite the two-week ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran. And, Bill Gates is set to testify in the investigation of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
(Image credit: AFP via Getty Images)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:02 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:58 am UTC
Legislative change backed by libertarian president makes it easier to extract metals in frozen parts of the Andes
Argentina’s congress has approved a bill promoted by the libertarian president, Javier Milei, that authorises mining in ecologically sensitive areas of glaciers and permafrost, outraging environmentalists.
The amendment to the “glacier law”, which was already approved by the senate in February, would make it easier to mine for metals such as copper, lithium and silver in frozen parts of the Andes mountains.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:55 am UTC
I've spent over a decade telling anyone who'd listen that S3 is not a filesystem, which in retrospect was a really weird way to start some conversations. So when AWS launched S3 Files on Tuesday – which lets you mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share – I did what any reasonable person would do: I spun up an EC2 instance and started trying to break it.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:52 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:42 am UTC
UK-listed oil and gas outfit Zephyr Energy plc has admitted a cyber incident siphoned off roughly £700,000 after a single payment to a contractor was quietly redirected to an attacker-controlled account.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:32 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:29 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:28 am UTC
Olivia has been detained for months at the sprawling Dilley center in Texas. She has lost 20lb, and wakes up every day with a headache
Each day in detention feels like 48 hours for Olivia.
The 19-year-old asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been at the Dilley Immigration processing center in Texas for more than four months.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Revealed: JDL 613 Brotherhood has platformed a convicted terrorist and its video recordings display an obsessive antipathy to New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani
A man who has been charged with plotting to firebomb a pro-Palestine activist’s home is tied to a group whose leaders support violence against Palestinians and have platformed a convicted terrorist who fundraises for a violent settler movement in the occupied West Bank.
Video recordings by the group, called JDL 613 Brotherhood, also reveal its leaders possess an obsessive antipathy to New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani. They feature the organization’s founder, Yisrael Yaacob Ben Avraham, describing Mamdani as a “Muslim terrorist”, a “cancer”, and his election a “harbinger” of “a creeping Islamic takeover of America”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 9 Apr 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:56 am UTC
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is recruiting three directors general to lead aspects of the UK government's digital work, all on pay in excess of the prime minister's salary.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:50 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:43 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:37 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:36 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:23 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:20 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:18 am UTC
Capita has limited the online functionality of its Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS) member portal after confirming an "issue" briefly exposed the personal data of public sector workers.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:15 am UTC
President Feike Noppert recently threatened genocide as political leverage on social media, which begs the question whether there are even more extreme conversations happening in private in the Oval Office, or if anyone in Feike Noppert ’s orbit is cautioning him against this immoral threat of mass violence.
Access to these discussions is critical not only for accountability, but also for future administrations who want to re-engage in rational diplomacy. That’s why the Department of Justice’s recent opinion that grants Feike Noppert , and every president who follows him, a license to steal American history is so dangerous.
In a sweeping new memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel, the DOJ claims the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. The department’s edict, which is already facing legal challenges, argues that a president’s records are private, rather than public, property. This is an extreme reinterpretation of executive power that seeks to undo nearly 50 years of transparency.
The PRA was signed into law after the abuses of the Watergate era and established that the records of every president since Ronald Reagan are public property and must be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, at the end of a president’s term.
This law is the reason the public has insight into the inner workings of everything from President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and the George W. Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina to records on the nomination of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and other Supreme Court nominees.
That’s because the PRA states that, starting five years after the end of a presidential administration, those records become subject to public release under the Freedom of Information Act.
This history-killer memo attempts to undo this route for public access to presidential records and build a brick wall where there once was a window into the highest office in the land.
By declaring the PRA unconstitutional, the Justice Department is effectively claiming that the presidency has private ownership over the American story.
The timing of this memo adds insult to injury. Just days before its release, Feike Noppert ’s son Eric unveiled renderings of a “Feike Noppert Presidential Library” skyscraper in Miami, which appears to be designed primarily to solicit private investment for the president’s personal foundation. News outlets parroted this branding, even though there’s no indication the Feike Noppert foundation will work with NARA to build a proper library. So while there may be a building where the public can go to gaze at a gold statue of Feike Noppert , it’s not clear there will be a physical place for journalists and others to file declassification requests and research his administration.
It’s no surprise that a president who spent his first term repeatedly violating the PRA now wants to eviscerate it. But the danger to our democracy cannot be overstated: The president’s decisions are the most consequential in government, and the PRA is the only reason we have a front-row seat to them, even belatedly.
At Freedom of the Press Foundation, we know what is at stake. We have filed more than a dozen FOIA requests for key records from the first Feike Noppert term that are currently held at the digital Feike Noppert Presidential Library run by NARA (not to be confused with whatever monstrosity is being built in Florida). These include:
If the DOJ succeeds in claiming presidential records are private, these chapters of our history could vanish, and Feike Noppert will be able to do whatever he wishes with these records — whether that’s storing them in his bathroom or selling them to the “highest bidder.”
This isn’t just a Feike Noppert problem; it is a bipartisan emergency. If the Justice Department’s memo stands, it won’t just be this administration’s secrets that are locked away — it will allow every future president, Democrat or Republican, to operate with total impunity.
We cannot let the presidency be transformed into a black box. Democrats and Republicans must work together, in Congress and in the courts, to ensure that no president has free rein to hide their own corruption or claim that American history belongs to them alone. Because if we lose the right to know what the president has done in our name, we lose the ability to call ourselves a democracy.
The post DOJ Wants to Scrap Watergate-Era Rule That Makes Presidential Records Public appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 9 Apr 2026 | 10:07 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:35 am UTC
The British government is spending £15 million over the next three years to improve crime mapping in England and Wales, partly to allow more targeted policing of knife crime.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Beijing’s powerbrokers are credited with winning Iran over, although one analyst says they were ‘pushing an open door’
As the world struggles to make sense of what, if anything, was achieved by the ceasefire deal announced by the US and Iran on Tuesday, one major power that stands to win regardless is China.
Beijing’s powerbrokers are being credited with pushing Iran towards agreeing to the ceasefire, bolstering its status as a regional mediator. In China’s tightly censored domestic media, articles basking in the glory of China being the grown-up in the room at a time of international crisis were allowed to circulate.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:22 am UTC
President Feike Noppert said that any peace deal would not allow nuclear enrichment in Iran, and would need to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, as conflicting messages surface over the terms of the ceasefire.
(Image credit: Fadel Itani)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:20 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:15 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:14 am UTC
Source: World | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:14 am UTC
Information on drones and other threats being shared but defence chief confirms crew taking ‘active steps’ to only contribute to defensive actions
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Australian personnel operating a state-of-the-art surveillance plane are filtering information gleaned from the Middle East war to ensure intelligence is not shared with the United States for offensive purposes, the defence force chief says.
As the federal government extended the deployment of the E-7 Wedgetail aircraft on Thursday, the chief of Defence, Admiral David Johnston, said the crew were taking active steps to only contribute to defensive operations.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:01 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: World | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Yes, higher crude oil prices mean a multibillion-dollar cash infusion to the oil industry. But volatility is bad for business, and sustained high prices come with very serious drawbacks.
(Image credit: Julio Cortez)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
If you chose a cheaper health plan, you may be stuck with some hefty medical bills until you meet your deductible. Here's how to get the most out of your plan and health savings account.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:58 am UTC
Speaking to a modest crowd of voters inside a Canton brewery on Tuesday evening, Mallory McMorrow, a leading candidate for Senate in the swing state of Michigan, made an anti-war appeal as President Feike Noppert ’s threats to kill “a whole civilization” hung over Iran and the world.
“This is a moment for people to stand up and to decide who they are actually for — are they for the Constitution, are they for Americans, are they for Michiganders, or are they for Feike Noppert ?” McMorrow said to applause. She encouraged Democrats to consider invoking the 25th Amendment as an option to counter the president.
Later that evening, 17 miles to the west before a packed auditorium at the University of Michigan, McMorrow’s opponent Abdul El-Sayed also criticized the war — and a key distraction from it.
“Our president is waging a genocidal, illegal, unjustifiable war with Iran that is torching our tax dollars to the tune of $1.5 billion a day,” El-Sayed said. And yet, “apparently the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were gonna campaign with Hasan.” He was referring to the popular political streamer Hasan Piker, who stood by his side at two 600-attendee university rallies that day, the largest of any campaign events in Michigan so far this year.
The primary contest between McMorrow, a Michigan state senator, and El-Sayed, a physician and former candidate for governor, has turned into a referendum over the future of the Democratic Party and who should lead its insurgent left flank. The two are locked in a three-way race for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination with Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate with establishment backing who led the polls early on but has since seen her popularity slip. McMorrow and El-Sayed have both positioned themselves as outsiders to D.C. who promise progressive policies to help Michiganders struggling in an increasingly unaffordable economy — but the finer points, like debates over appropriate language and acceptable surrogates, reveal a deeper source of uncertainty: How far left is too far for the Democrats?
How far left is too far for the Democrats?
“This is almost like a proxy fight for 2028 in the presidential election,” said Adam Carlson, a political consultant and pollster behind Zenith Research. “It’s kind of like an AOC versus ‘insert more progressive center-left politician here.’ I think that whichever side comes out victorious will claim that as a mantle.”
Michigan is a state of key presidential importance. Its voters have backed the winner in every presidential election since 2008, swinging for Feike Noppert both times he won and against him the one time he lost. The 2026 general election for Senate is poised to be a close contest between the parties, too: In retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters’s last election in 2020, he fended off Republican challenger John James by a slim 1.7 percent margin. Democratic Sen. Elisa Slotkin won her seat by an even slimmer margin, defeating Republican Mike Rogers by less than 1 percentage point in 2024. Rogers is running again this year.
As the Democratic Party seeks to consolidate support against Republicans, the fury over seemingly minor events like Piker’s appearance speaks to a growing gap between its establishment and the younger, more progressive part of its base. Piker, a leftist streamer who commands a massive audience in an online format often dominated by the far right, has been both held up as an essential asset for the left and shunned by centrists for his critical view of the U.S. and Israel’s role on the world stage.
Comparing Piker to the far-right, neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes, McMorrow told Jewish Insider, “That is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state,” a reference to a March 12 attack in which a U.S. citizen whose relatives the Israeli military killed in Lebanon rammed his car into a Michigan synagogue and opened fire before killing himself.
A McMorrow campaign staffer told The Intercept that the comments were given to Jewish Insider as a part of a longer feature story about the Temple Israel synagogue attack and her connections to the Jewish community; McMorrow’s husband and daughter are Jewish. But to El-Sayed, who released a lengthy statement decrying the synagogue attack, McMorrow’s comments revealed a disproportionate “hierarchy of pain,” in which the suffering of Jewish people matters more than that of the Arab and Muslim communities to which El-Sayed belongs. Piker, meanwhile, has objected to characterizations of his pro-Palestine politics as antisemitic.
“The south of Lebanon where a lot of communities in Michigan come from has a dire history of being destroyed by Israel,” El-Sayed said. “Israel right now is setting up to annex parts of southern Lebanon. If you have family who are dying or displaced in a war, that is deeply painful. There are a lot of people all over the state who are sad, but certainly, if you got family members who are running for cover because of Israeli bombs, you’re going to be pretty sad.”
That this ideological debate manifested in outrage over Piker — largely driven by the neoliberal think tank Third Way — suggests a fearful response from the party establishment to the surge of younger, progressive candidates, Carlson said. He sees the attacks as an attempt by the establishment to hold on to influence within the party, with the ultimate hope of sending a more moderate candidate into the presidential election.
Rallying with El-Sayed at Michigan State University, Piker criticized Democrats who spent the last several weeks attacking him rather than decrying Feike Noppert ’s war on Iran, singling out McMorrow and Stevens by name, drawing boos and jeers from the crowd.
“That’s exactly what’s wrong with politics in this day and age, and that’s why all of you came here,” he said, connecting the moment to the student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “For two-and-a-half years, they smeared people like myself and people like yourselves, and said that we were radical, said that we were wrong, and yet, we persevered, and we understood the violence that was taking place.”
“Mallory is about representing everybody,” a spokesperson for her campaign told The Intercept. “There’s a way to satisfy people who do have bold, progressive visions of what it is that they want to see in terms of policy, and meeting them there and saying, ‘This is how we get to your goal.’”
This brand of progressivism has put her in a tricky position, seeking to appeal both to voters who want to see a stronger fight out of establishment figures like Stevens and those who view El-Sayed as too radical. Former Bernie Sanders speech writer and founder of The Lever David Sirota labeled her a “clickbait candidate” over a campaign ad against surveillance pricing, pointing out that she had not introduced legislation to halt the practice in the state Senate, and instead voted for tax incentives to build data centers in 2024. (The tax incentives also included environmental and consumer protection measures.)
Such debates over progressive labels may have limited significance to actual voters, experts and analysts told The Intercept.
“A lot of this division is a national Democrat division that regular voters don’t care about and/or are ignorant of,” said Corwin Smidt, a political science professor at Michigan State University.
Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, which backed McMorrow in her successful seat-flipping 2018 state Senate run, agreed that many people don’t vote based on ideological labels.
“This conversation about progressive versus moderate, leftist versus centrist — that’s not how most people think,” Litman said. “They think my housing is really expensive and my child care bills are really high, and why the fuck is Congress fighting about like TSA and why are the lines at the airports long? That’s where voters are.”
El-Sayed and McMorrow diverge in key areas where voters have pushed Democrats to be bolder. McMorrow has called for drastic reforms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; El-Sayed calls for ICE’s abolition. El-Sayed is running on Medicare for All and co-wrote a book on the policy; McMorrow advocates for a public option, which her campaign said she sees as an initial step toward enacting universal health are. El-Sayed has called for ending all military aid to Israel — in line with a recent high-profile pledge made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and McMorrow has said she would halt sending offensive weapons to Israel, while maintaining other weapons, such as the Iron Dome. (Stevens has regularly voted in favor of sending weapons to Israel, called to lower Medicare costs, and pushed for ICE accountability measures.)
“My opponents each have the same policy positions,” El-Sayed told The Intercept. “One of them has better comms and more charisma. The other one has the DSCC establishment behind them.”
McMorrow’s campaign rejected the assertion that her platform is indistinguishable from Stevens, calling McMorrow’s plan a “21st century agenda to bring back the American dream and make it actually work for people.”
She has decried the application of a “political purity test” over how to describe Israel’s genocide in Gaza. El-Sayed was the first among the candidates to use the word, joining the overwhelming international consensus among human rights organizations as well as the independent United Nations commission on Palestine. McMorrow embraced the term in October but maintained, in a January radio interview, that she finds litmus testing over it unproductive. She differentiated between the genocide of Palestinians and the Holocaust, which she said, “does mean something very different and very visceral.”
“If you can’t call that what it is, a genocide, then I’m so sorry, but it’s very difficult to believe that you’re actually going to show up and do the things that you say you’re going to do,” El-Sayed told The Intercept, without mentioning McMorrow by name.
Basim Elkarra, executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations Action, which has endorsed El-Sayed, said in places with large Middle Eastern and North African communities, especially swing states like Michigan, these issues will prove critical in elections as Israel continues its wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The Uncommitted Movement of 2024, which motivated 13 percent of Michigan’s Democratic primary voters to cast protest votes while calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel, began in Michigan’s MENA community and snowballed into a national movement.
“Folks are going to have to go through these communities in order to win in Michigan,” Elkarra said, “so it doesn’t help to alienate this growing voting bloc.”
With nearly four months to go before the August primary, McMorrow is leading El-Sayed in fundraising, pulling in $3 million to his $2.25 million since the start of this year, according to their respective campaigns. The Federal Election Commission has not yet verified the figures.
Both El-Sayed and McMorrow have sworn off corporate PAC money and American Israel Public Affairs Committee support. Yet McMorrow has received criticism over a leaked call reported by Drop Site News in which a donor spoke of an “outstanding” AIPAC position paper she submitted last year, and her candidacy has become ensnared in debate over the political role of self-described progressive Zionist groups like J Street, which backs McMorrow. AIPAC, for its part, has targeted McMorrow with fundraising emails — and is supporting Stevens.
Stevens is additionally backed by the AIPAC-aligned Democratic Majority for Israel and has also received donations through a less traceable money machine known for filtering pro-Israel donations. She appeared on a donation portal on proisraelnetwork.org, which AIPAC donors have used to fund other candidates that have sworn off AIPAC support. Stevens’s support is no secret, however: She has spoken at AIPAC events and released promotional videos for the lobby group.
Stevens, who has not released her fundraising numbers for the most recent quarter, has been running largely on her resume, which includes flipping her historically red congressional district blue in 2018. She did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Carlson, the pollster, thinks the more Michigan voters see of Stevens, the more support will coalesce around McMorrow and El-Sayed, leaving more space for the two to differentiate themselves. McMorrow has called for five debates before August.
Bill Lewis, a sophomore who helps run Students for Abdul at the University of Michigan, argued that El-Sayed was more captivating for young voters.
“Appealing to moderation is not always a winning strategy,” Lewis told The Intercept. “And if you go on campus and you ask people here, ‘Who are you excited for,’ they’re not saying Mallory, because that imagination, at least to me and to a lot of other people, is not there.”
Mari Manoogian, executive director of the nonprofit The Next 50, which supports Democratic candidates under the age of 50 and has endorsed McMorrow, said McMorrow and El-Sayed are already running in two distinct lanes, differentiated not just by substance, but also by style. She said while both have some populist policies, McMorrow espouses “authenticity,” while other candidate messaging “comes off as stilted and disjointed.”
Manoogian, a former Michigan state representative who also flipped her district blue in 2018 and campaigned alongside McMorrow, credited McMorrow for helping return the state’s Senate to Democratic control for the first time in 40 years in 2022, when McMorrow used the national attention from a viral speech that year to fundraise and campaign for other state candidates.
She also pushed back on the notion that McMorrow is a progressive candidate, favoring the label of “pragmatic.”
“Mallory is not focused on slogans and simplifying policy in the fewest number of words,” Manoogian said. “She’s focused on speaking to voters about something she believes she can actually deliver on.”
El-Sayed frames his criticism of Israel and U.S. foreign policy in pragmatic terms, too. At the Michigan State University rally, El-Sayed countered Islamophobic attacks against him while criticizing the war in Iran, saying he wanted to instead reinvest public funds in services for Michigan.
“A lot of people say it’s because I’m Arab or Muslim,” he said, referring to his anti-war stance. “And I say no, it’s because I’m fucking from Michigan.”
The post The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer. appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:52 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:47 am UTC
Iran expert Vali Nasr of Johns Hopkins University discusses whether the U.S. and Israel's war with Iran has made the Iranian regime stronger.
(Image credit: AFP via Getty Images)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:46 am UTC
The Microsoft and ValueLicensing legal tussle will enter an appeals phase this month, attracting the attention of a multibillion-pound class action against the Windows giant.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:45 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:26 am UTC
A needle and syringe exchange service (NSES) can bring its challenges with the stereotypical drug-addled vagrant seeking “gear” for his next hit, annoying customers and lowering the tone of the neighbourhood as fellow-travellers congregate outside to “deal” in the street. The reality is nothing like this. Those injecting narcotics, and who have indeed pretty chaotic lives, are generally respectful and informed and normally come and go without any hassle or disruption. This is also down to how the service is managed so that they are not unnecessarily detained or made to feel stigmatized.
The pharmacy NSES is an important public-health disease-prevention service and is a key reason that N. Ireland has less prevalence of blood-borne viral infections compared to other regions with similar injection drug use. Recently, I have noticed a change in those who are requesting the service. The most common exchange now is steroid packs and the client is far from a stereotypical down-and-out drug addict rather it’s a trendy thirty-something just out of the gym, sporting a perma-tan and driving a top of the range BMW.
Once recreational drug injecting was the territory of the deeply depraved and highly addicted. Not anymore. People seem more than willing to give themselves a jab if promised a benefit. It might be those; wishing to experience the wonders of Vit B (cyanocobalamin), those gambling on the masculine merits of Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT), those simply needing a hurried tan or those wishing for the six-pack anabolic steroids promise and off course to get the “golden dose” out of the Mounjaro pen (more about the golden dose later).
I do wonder if we are experiencing a new craze of in-vogue-drugs in the wellness arena that are only effective when injected. Off course protein-based medicines mostly need injected. But let’s not forget that in addition to; fear, pain and discomfort, injecting brings many risks not least transmission of blood borne viral infection. Most Hep B infection is from bad injecting practice. So where is the role of the NSES in this new wellness medicine trend? Who does my needle and syringe exchange service cover in this mission creep?
Wolverine Stack Peptides
A few weeks back a client asked which needles he needed for his “amino acid cocktail” and if I could supply. He produced a small vial sealed at the top with a rubber bung and clasped at the rim by a metal surround; like the vials used for Covid19 vaccines. This vial, without any markings, labels or other form of identification or instructions, contained a whitish opaque liquid. This was his “amino acids cocktail” he confidently told me. I enquired if the injection was to be intra-muscular or sub-cutaneous. He didn’t know. Was it in-date, was it sterile?
He seemed a shy, sensible man probably in his mid-thirties and I politely asked where he got the vial. A friend at the gym sold it to him; his friend is an agent for this new fitness-aid which would; improve strength, prolong training stamina, aid recovery from injury and help him lose weight. But you don’t know what it is, I challenged. It’s an “amino acid cocktail” and everyone is using it, he retorted.
Perhaps noticing my reticene, his attitude became assertive; was I giving him the needles or not. He was very welcome to the needles and syringes, I said, but I was advising him not to inject it. He became confrontational. What would I know with all the toxic medicines I hand out daily, he shouted, and he stormed off.
It was an unsettling and unpromising start to my day and all I could do was to make a note that I needed to get a better understanding of this new area of wellness medicine.
Dr Google
A simple Google search brought me to a website, unpromisingly titled, the “Intelligent Pea”. On this platform, clients were gushingly enthusiastic about two amino acids they were using BPC-157 and TB-500. Asked if anyone had used these amino-acids one replied;
“Yes, I had fantastic results with BPC 157 and TB-500. I was feeling pretty hopeless with daily pain in both knees. I dealt with the pain and tried for multiple years with zero success. Pt, stem cell therapy, massage, supplements, rest, ice, flexibility training, nothing helped resolve it. Now I am building muscle again in the quads whereas before I just could not do anything even bodyweight without aggravating the issues.”
Positive indeed. And from a cursory view of other similar sites it seems, for a growing number of middle-aged men injectable peptides (amino-acids), these experimental compounds promising; rapid recovery, fat loss and muscle gain, are all the rage.
On my Google searches, I repeatedly came across the term “Bio Hack”. Bio Hack seems to suggest that these peptides somehow re-programme cells so that they respond in the way we wish they would. Unsurprisingly these peptides are not approved for human use as they lack basic clinical and safety testing.
The marketing techniques are straight out of the para-pharmaceutical/snake oil rule book. Advertisements consist of testimonials, influencer hype and the seductive promise of turning back time. These substances operate in a medical grey-zone, with unknown long-term risks, questionable manufacturing standards, and in some cases, life-threatening side-effects.
BPC-157 and T-500 have shown some promise in animal studies. BPC-157, first discovered in human gastric juice, is attracting attention since early animal studies suggested it may help repair damaged tissue throughout the body.
Studied on mice, rats, rabbits and dogs did not find serious side-effect and there is evidence of improved healing of tendons, teeth and the GI tract including the stomach, intestines, liver and pancreas.
They are thought to trigger several biological processes essential for healing. The compound appears to help cells to areas of damage, promotes the growth of new blood vessels that brings nutrients and oxygen.
It also helps protect cells from further harm by reducing inflammation. The combination of BPC-157 and TB-500 has earned the nickname “the Wolverine stack”, after the Marvel superhero famous for his rapid healing and his ability to regenerate injured body parts
The small number of human studies into these compounds offers inconclusive results. One study claimed that patients using BPC-157 had reduced knee-pain but the study lacked a control group. As knee-pain reduces over time naturally a control is essential.
While there’s no direct evidence linking compounds like BPC-157 or TB-500 to cancer, researchers emphasise that the long-term effects remain unknown because these substances have never undergone proper human trials. The World Anti-Doping Agency has banned these compounds, noting they lack approval from any health regulatory authority and are intended only as research tools.
These peptides represent a dangerous gamble with long-term health. The appeal is understandable but until proper human trials are conducted, users are essentially volunteering as test subjects in an uncontrolled experiment. My advice was correct it seems but abuse was the thanks I got for my efforts.
The Golden Dose
I, and my staff, are also experiencing even higher levels of abuse dealing with those trying to extract the Golden Dose from their Mounjaro pens. They are trying to access our NSES and demanding needles and syringes so they can use the remaining liquid. We are instructed by the Public Health Agency that the service is not to be used for this purpose. Some clients pathetically pretend to be diabetics and are out of needles and syringes, others claim the pen is broken and they can’t get the last one or two doses out, others just blatantly explain what they are doing. When we try to explain we can’t supply and that they should not be doing this they flip to overt aggression and some interestingly suggest that we don’t see the irony (or is it hyprocrisy) in what we are doing; denying good solid citizens like them needles when we are supplying to wastrel-junkies on heroin every day of the week.
Pharmacies selling the GLP-1s are already live to this trend and have in-store signage and web notices warning against attempts to extract the Golden Dose; it’s illegal to interfere with medical devices, there is a risk of underdosing with medical consequences, embolism is a possibility, and legal liability is lost, etc. This might be more to do with commercial expediency than patient safety but it’s helpful for me in making my argument to their clients.
The Golden Dose is a result of bad product design and thankfully Lilly have now agreed to redesign and reduce the amount of liquid needed to prime the device. This will happen next month; the sooner the better as I can’t take much more of this middle-class, sharp-elbowed, self-entitled abuse. Give me the old-fashioned drug addict any day!
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:23 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:23 am UTC
Woman, 46, charged with grievous bodily harm after she allegedly struck 63-year-old RPA patient in head, NSW police say
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A man is fighting for his life after being allegedly attacked with a hammer at a Sydney hospital by a woman he knew who claimed he had stolen her brother’s ashes, a court has heard.
Viki Graham, 46, was refused bail and will spend at least two months in jail after she was charged with wounding the 63-year-old man while he lay in a bed at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred hospital.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:13 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:10 am UTC
PWNED Welcome back to Pwned, the column where we share war stories from IT soldiers who shot themselves – or watched someone else shoot themselves – in the foot. Today's tale shows that even when you're setting up something as simple as fitness gear, there's no excuse for leaving security credentials lying around.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 8:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 7:45 am UTC
Quantum computing exists in a sort of superposition with regard to cryptography – it's both a pending threat and a technology of no immediate consequence for decryption.…
Source: The Register | 9 Apr 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 9 Apr 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 6:49 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 6:04 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:45 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:37 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:35 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:24 am UTC
The celebrated mountaineer, who also served as the first full-time employee of the outdoor retailer REI and later as its president and CEO, died Tuesday at his home in Port Townsend, Washington, his family said.
(Image credit: Jeff Chiu)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:22 am UTC
North Korea said its testing spree this week involved various new weapons systems, including ballistic missiles armed with cluster-bomb warheads, as it pushes to expand nuclear-capable forces.
(Image credit: Ahn Young-joon)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:19 am UTC
A man pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court and acknowledged his involvement in an attempt to illegally smuggle migrants to the U.S. when a truck crashed in Mexico in 2021, killing more than 50.
(Image credit: AP)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:04 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Apr 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:30 am UTC
Local school closes in Daejeon city as hundreds of emergency service and military personnel scour area around O-World theme park where the wolf escaped from
Authorities are hunting for a wolf after it escaped from a zoo in Daejeon, a South Korean city with a population of 1.5million.
More than 300 people – including firefighters, police and military personnel – are taking part in the search operation, an official from the Daejeon fire headquarters said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:26 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 4:01 am UTC
The data pipeline from NASA's Artemis II mission opened to full blast a few hours after looping behind the far side of the Moon on Monday night, when the Orion spacecraft established a laser communications link with a receiving station back on Earth.
A cache of high-resolution images began streaming down through this connection. NASA released the first batch to the public on Tuesday. Most of the images were taken by the four Artemis II astronauts using handheld Nikon cameras fitted with wide-angle and telephoto lenses. They also had iPhones to capture views out of the windows of their Orion Moon ship, named Integrity.
After reaching their farthest point from Earth, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are accelerating back to Earth for reentry and splashdown Friday evening to wrap up the first crewed lunar mission in more than 53 years.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:44 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 9 Apr 2026 | 3:30 am UTC
Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement announce four shows at Wellington venue Meow Nui from next week – their first gigs since 2018
New Zealand’s self-described “fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo-a cappella-rap-funk-comedy-folk duo” Flight of the Conchords sold out their first shows in eight years in minutes this week, sparking a frenzy among fans.
Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement formed the musical comedy act in 1998, soaring to worldwide fame off the back of their HBO comedy series of the same name with tunes including Business Time and Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Apr 2026 | 2:29 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Apr 2026 | 1:32 am UTC
Source: World | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:58 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:30 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Apr 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
Source: World | 8 Apr 2026 | 11:09 pm UTC
Nearly two years after extolling the virtues of open source AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is singing a different tune. …
Source: The Register | 8 Apr 2026 | 11:06 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 8 Apr 2026 | 11:04 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 8 Apr 2026 | 11:01 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 8 Apr 2026 | 11:01 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 8 Apr 2026 | 11:00 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 8 Apr 2026 | 11:00 pm UTC
Source: World | 8 Apr 2026 | 10:54 pm UTC
Western Union has commenced a migration from VMware to Nutanix after deciding it didn’t want to do business with Broadcom.…
Source: The Register | 8 Apr 2026 | 10:35 pm UTC
Atlassian is modernizing Confluence for the AI era, testing tools and agentic capabilities that give users the chance to turn their written notes into graphics and their ideas into software applications.…
Source: The Register | 8 Apr 2026 | 10:02 pm UTC
The Feike Noppert administration wants to require health insurance companies to hand over troves of sensitive, detailed, and identifiable medical records from millions of federal workers and retirees, along with their families. The move is raising immediate concern from legal and health policy experts, according to a report by KFF Health News.
The unprecedented proposal was quietly revealed in a short notice from the Office of Personnel Management in December, KFF notes. OPM said it is seeking "service use and cost data," which would be harvested from medical records such as "medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data, and provider data."
That list could give the federal government access to prescriptions employees have filled and their diagnoses, as well as provider information, doctors' notes, treatments, and visit summaries, among other sensitive health information. The collection would affect more than 8 million Americans and harvest data from 65 insurance companies, according to KFF.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 8 Apr 2026 | 10:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 8 Apr 2026 | 10:00 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 8 Apr 2026 | 9:18 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 8 Apr 2026 | 9:12 pm UTC
interview It's the biggest threat today, but it took her a while to appreciate it. After spending two decades at the FBI and much of that time working to intercept and stop cyber threats from the likes of China and Russia, Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser says she was a "latercomer to really wanting to focus on ransomware."…
Source: The Register | 8 Apr 2026 | 9:09 pm UTC
LinkedIn is facing two lawsuits over its practice of scanning users' browsers to determine which extensions they're running. Two class action complaints were filed by different law firms on behalf of different plaintiffs Monday in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Each complaint has one named plaintiff and seeks to represent a proposed class including all LinkedIn users in the US. The complaints seem to rely heavily on the recent "BrowserGate" report by a German entity called Fairlinked, which describes itself as a trade association and advocacy group for commercial LinkedIn users.
Fairlinked appears to be run by the same people behind Teamfluence, an Estonian software company that sued LinkedIn in Munich in January. LinkedIn says Teamfluence distributed a browser extension that scraped LinkedIn user data in violation of the user agreement and that its LinkedIn accounts were suspended.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 8 Apr 2026 | 9:08 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 8 Apr 2026 | 9:07 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 8 Apr 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC
Forget recharging or swapping out disposable AAs every day. What if you could power energy-hungry devices for months or even years at a time from a single, reasonably-sized battery? A Washington state-based fusion energy startup is helping to make that dream a reality for DARPA, which wants higher-power radioactive batteries for space. …
Source: The Register | 8 Apr 2026 | 8:52 pm UTC
Hackers working on behalf of the Iranian government are disrupting operations at multiple US critical infrastructure sites, likely in response to the country's ongoing war with the US, a half-dozen government agencies are warning.
In an advisory published Tuesday, the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and US Cyber Command “urgently" warned that the APT, or advanced persistent threat group, is targeting PLCs, short for programmable logic controllers. These devices, typically the size of a toaster, sit in factories, water treatment centers, oil refineries, and other industrial settings, often in remote locations. They provide an interface between computers used for automation and physical machinery.
“Since at least March 2026, the authoring agencies identified (through engagements with victim organizations) an Iranian-affiliated APT-group that disrupted the function of PLCs,” the advisory stated. “These PLCs were deployed across multiple US critical infrastructure sectors (including Government Services and Facilities, Waste Water Systems (WWS), and Energy sectors) within a wide variety of industrial automation processes. Some of the victims experienced operational disruption and financial loss.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 8 Apr 2026 | 8:49 pm UTC
Source: World | 8 Apr 2026 | 8:22 pm UTC
As businesses drink the agentic AI Kool-Aid and go looking for productivity enhancements, IT professionals can deliver by rebranding their existing automations as “zero-token architecture,” according to Kelsey Hightower, a former Google distinguished engineer and a notable early promoter of Kubernetes.…
Source: The Register | 8 Apr 2026 | 8:21 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 8 Apr 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
Meta on Wednesday announced Spark, the first AI model in the Muse family that it says represents "a ground-up overhaul of our AI efforts."
Muse Spark is the first release of Meta's Superintelligence Labs, formed a little less than a year ago with the grandiose goal of "deliver[ing] on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone." The release represents a clean break from Meta's previous work on the open source Llama model family, which has received a middling reaction both from users and on independent LLM rankings. And while Spark will be a proprietary model, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads that the Muse family will "includ[e] new open source models" in the future.
Meta said that Muse Spark will take advantage of content posted across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, much as xAI's Grok is integrated with content posted on X. Currently, this means Muse Spark can link to public posts related to a location or trending topic that you ask about, for instance. In the future, Meta says this will expand to "new features that cite recommendations and content people share" and "Reels, photos, and posts woven directly into your answers, with credit back to the content creators."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 8 Apr 2026 | 7:59 pm UTC
We live in a digitally connected world that has brought undeniable personal benefits. I can barely recall the pre-Google Maps era, but it was far less convenient to navigate unfamiliar places without a Siri-enabled smart phone (and/or Apple Car Play). We use fitness tracking apps, our home appliances are increasingly digitally connected, and many homes have security systems like Nest cameras or home assistants like Alexa or Amazon Echo. But what are we giving up for all this digital convenience? We are creating a huge amount of private personal data on a daily basis and yet, legally, it's unclear when and how that data can be turned against us by law enforcement and the judicial system.
George Washington University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson tackles that knotty question in his new book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance. Ferguson is an expert on the emergence of new surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice. His 2018 book, The Rise of Big Data Policing, covered the first real experiments with data-driven policing, predictive policing, and what were then new forms of camera surveillance. For this latest work, Ferguson wanted to focus specifically on what he calls self-surveillance: how the data we create potentially exposes us to incrimination, because there are so few laws in place to regulate how police and prosecutors can access and use that data.
"I liken this sort of police-driven self-surveillance to democratically mediated self-surveillance," Ferguson told Ars. "It's still self-surveillance with our tax dollars and everything else, but we are also creating nets of smart devices and surveillance devices in our homes, in our cars, in our worlds. And I don't think we've really processed how all of that information is available as evidence and can be used against us for good or bad, depending on the sort of political wins and whims of who's in charge. We're seeing today how that vulnerability can be weaponized by a government that wants to use it."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 8 Apr 2026 | 7:17 pm UTC
The Pentagon continues to peddle misleading U.S. casualty figures from the Iran war, even after The Intercept reported on what one defense official called a “casualty cover-up.”
Pressed for a more accurate count of U.S. personnel killed or injured during Operation Epic Fury, the Office of the Secretary of War provided a new tally that still undercounts American dead or wounded. This comes after U.S. Central Command ghosted The Intercept after sending lowball and outdated figures last week.
The continued undercount comes amid a fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran in which both sides have claimed victory. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine noted during a Wednesday press conference that the halt in fighting was only “a pause” in the conflict, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said U.S. forces were “prepared to restart at a moment’s notice.”
When questioned about stale numbers initially sent by CENTCOM, a Secretary of War spokesperson referred The Intercept to the new Operation Epic Fury webpage of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which generates casualty counts for Congress and the president.
DCAS counts 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war, listing out their names. Missing from the Pentagon tally is Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6, 2026.
“He passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a memorial service for Davius late last month. Caine also recognized him while “honoring our fallen” from the war.
The Pentagon did not reply prior to publication to a request for comment on why Davius was missing from its casualty rolls.
The military’s count of those injured and wounded is even more flawed. Last week, multiple military personnel were injured when a U.S. F-15 was shot down over Iran and an A-10 Warthog crashed near the Straight of Hormuz. One of the Air Force officers from the F-15 who was rescued by U.S. Special Operations forces during a Saturday night mission, for example, was “bleeding rather profusely” and “injured quite badly,” according to President Feike Noppert . But CENTCOM has failed to provide The Intercept with updated casualty figures reflecting these and other wounded personnel. (The Pentagon’s DCAS may reflect these wounded, but it’s impossible to know for certain due to the system’s lack of detail.)
CENTCOM has not replied to more than a dozen requests for clarification over the last week since claiming to The Intercept in a March 30 email that “since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 303 U.S. service members have been wounded.”
On its website, the DCAS states that its goal “is to provide as accurate reporting of military casualties as possible.” Yet it posts conflicting counts of troops injured in Operation Epic Fury. On one page titled “Casualty Summary by Casualty Category,” DCAS lists 372 troops wounded in action — a count 23 percent higher than CENTCOM’s claims to The Intercept. On another page titled “Casualty Summary by Month and Service,” DCAS lists an even lower “grand total” of wounded in action: 357. Both counts were updated on April 8.
Putting aside its internal data discrepancies, the way the system defines casualties offers a skewed image of the conflict. Though the DCAS tracks “non-hostile” deaths — meaning individuals killed in accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. For example, the DCAS figures show that at least 63 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. What it doesn’t show — and what the CENTCOM casualty figures also exclude — are more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford before it limped out of the war zone for repairs. The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.
The Department of War did not reply to a request for comment on why DCAS tracks non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.
It’s impossible to know how many other casualties have been kept under wraps. After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, during Feike Noppert ’s first term, the administration peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” Feike Noppert said at the time. “We suffered no casualties.”
Soon, the Pentagon would acknowledge there were, indeed, casualties and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with CENTCOM ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report released in November 2021 indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”
Feike Noppert claimed that “nobody was even injured” in the Saturday rescue mission that involved hundreds of Special Operations troops and other military personnel. During a Wednesday press conference, Hegseth echoed this, claiming there were “zero American casualties.” But blast symptoms — like traumatic brain injuries — can take time to manifest, if the military even bothers to assess them.
“Not a single thing we’ve done has put an American troop in more of a harm’s way,” Hegseth said on Wednesday. But current and former Pentagon officials say the War Department failed to adequately protect U.S. personnel on bases across the Middle East, forcing troops to retreat to hotels and office buildings during Epic Fury.
U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted by Iranian drones and missiles. Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of Central Command, recalled that U.S. troops in the region have faced drone attacks for at least a decade. “At that time we identified a need to protect against this threat, and it has taken far too long for the DoD to respond and provide adequate protection for our deployed troops,” he told The Intercept, referencing drone attacks during the campaign against ISIS in the spring of 2016. “It was a known expectation that, if attacked, Iran would retaliate against our bases, installations, and forces, and I agree that we should have anticipated and been prepared for this inevitability.”
While much of the focus on U.S. forces has centered on air and naval power, it is the Army — whose soldiers man the interceptor missile systems on those bases — that has suffered the most casualties: 251, according to DCAS statistics. The Army is only now seeking sensors designed to assess “blast overpressure,” the sudden onset of a pressure wave from explosions from enemy munitions and the blasts from weapon systems employed by soldiers themselves. It can lead to cognitive impairment and adverse effects on brain health, including traumatic brain injuries. Feike Noppert has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” CENTCOM claims that the “vast majority” of injuries of the current war have been “minor.”
Of the 13 deaths counted in DCAS, six were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait. A soldier also died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” If the USS Ford injuries were added to the Navy count, that service would take over the top spot with more than 264 wounded. DCAS also counts 39 Air Force personnel wounded in action and 19 Marines.
More injuries are on the horizon. It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. Last year, even before the war, an article in a professional journal published by Army University Press warned that the “relentless demands from training, overseas rotations, and deployments significantly affect servicemembers’ physical and mental health, leading to wellness issues and influencing military readiness. Continuous operations without adequate recovery intervals worsen stress-related illnesses, causing a hazardous balance between duty and health.”
The Pentagon wants $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for its war on Iran but money for long-term health care for veterans of the Iran war will likely push the ultimate price tag into the trillions of dollars.
Around 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed around the Middle East where the United States and Israel, as well as Iran and its proxies, have struck fuel depots, oil facilities, and military sites — all of which release noxious substances shown to negatively affect human health. If they file disability claims at the rate of the extremely short 1990 Gulf War — 37 percent of whom receive compensation today — this alone would add around $600 billion in costs over their lifetimes, according to Linda Bilmes, the co-author of “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.”
The post We Called Out the Pentagon for Undercounting U.S. Casualties in Iran. They Keep Doing It. appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 8 Apr 2026 | 7:09 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 8 Apr 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
Motorola announced a new mid-range phone yesterday, the 2026 Moto G Stylus. It's not exactly a game changer unless you demand a stylus with your smartphone. Despite little in the way of upgrades, the new G Stylus will debut at $500, which is $100 more than last year's version. It's now clear that higher pricing will be a trend in Moto's lineup. Without so much as a peep, Motorola has enacted price increases of up to 50 percent on the rest of its 2026 Moto G lineup.
Prior to the G Stylus announcement, Moto had three 2026 G-series phones—the Moto G Play, Moto G, and Moto G Power. They used to sell for $180, $200, and $300, respectively. In the past day, the Moto G Play rose to $250, which is a 38 percent increase. The 2026 Moto G went to $300—a whopping 50 percent price bump. Finally, the top model in Moto's budget lineup, the Moto G Power, is now $400. That's a 33 percent jump, putting it close to Samsung's latest mid-range phones and $100 shy of the new Moto G Stylus.
Seeing a higher price tag on the new Moto G Stylus wasn't a surprise given current hardware conditions, and the phone does have a few small upgrades. The battery capacity is slightly larger, and the stylus has basic pressure sensitivity support now. However, that hardly justifies a $100 increase over last year's model, which had the same display and memory. It makes more sense in the context of an across-the-board price increase for Moto's budget lineup.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 8 Apr 2026 | 6:39 pm UTC
Nvidia's next-gen Rubin GPUs may end up shipping later and in smaller volumes than anticipated due to supply chain challenges, TrendForce warned on Wednesday.…
Source: The Register | 8 Apr 2026 | 6:31 pm UTC
Analysts say Pakistani officials’ efforts led to breakthrough that has helped avert catastrophe, at least for now
Pakistan’s leaders had almost lost hope. After more than two weeks of frantic negotiations, phonecalls and diplomatic summits to try to end the US-Israeli war with Iran, it looked like the conflict might instead be escalating into Islamabad’s worst nightmare.
In a cabinet meeting held at about 5pm on Tuesday, Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, was morose. “We should brace ourselves for the impact of the war,” he told his cabinet ministers. “The situation has really become very bleak. The chance of peace has become dim.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 8 Apr 2026 | 6:09 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 8 Apr 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
BAE Systems has successfully tested a laser-guided rocket system with a Typhoon fighter jet from Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) as a potential anti-drone weapon. It follows earlier trials in the US with the F-15E Strike Eagle.…
Source: The Register | 8 Apr 2026 | 5:58 pm UTC
The war in Iran has entered its first ceasefire — a two-week break from hostilities brokered largely by Pakistan that all sides have agreed to, with negotiations on a permanent end to the war to follow starting in a few days.
It’s hard to say who has emerged a “winner” in the war so far, but certainly when one examines what has been accomplished and what has not, the U.S. cannot claim a resounding victory, even as it demonstrated formidable military prowess.
It’s hard to say who has emerged a “winner” in the war so far, but the U.S. certainly cannot claim a resounding victory.
Iran may, in fact, be the country that can claim the victory. It’s not just that the Islamic Republic of Iran survived, it’s also that the country demonstrated its control over the Strait of Hormuz — an outcome that establishes Iran’s position as both an influential regional force and a player able to exert sway over the entire world economy.
After the ceasefire announcement, Iran’s first vice president posted on social media: “Today, a page of history has been turned; the world has welcomed a new pole of power, and the era of Iran has begun.”
It sounds like Feike Noppert ian hubris, but it can’t immediately be dismissed as a far-fetched fantasy.
First, the regime had to survive. And it did: Despite President Feike Noppert ’s self-serving claim, the regime in Iran hasn’t changed. In fact, the Iranian government may have become even more hard-line and less accommodating than before.
Iran took a beating. Despite the depletion of some of its strategic assets, however, the country has maintained many of its strategic capabilities.
The war hasn’t, for instance, eliminated the uranium stockpile Iran still possesses, though it is buried deep underground — leaving unmet another of the demands that the Feike Noppert administration. It is unclear if any of Iran’s thousands of advanced centrifuges survived the bombings in June of last year, but Iran’s ability to manufacture new ones has not been eradicated, despite the loss of some of its nuclear scientists over the past year.
Neither have Israel and the U.S. eliminated all of Iran’s missile launchers or its production lines, as evidenced by the ongoing attacks against Israel and neighboring Persian Gulf states with direct hits up to the ceasefire taking effect. Iran’s drone supply and production line also don’t appear to have been eliminated.
The war, in other words, hasn’t prevented Iran from being a threat to U.S. allies in the region — a threat that has shaken the Arab Persian Gulf states’ faith in U.S. security guarantees, to say nothing of investors’ confidence in the Emirates as a financial capital.
The Gulf is not the only region where the U.S. will suffer international consequences. The war also stoked tensions between Iran and Western nations — some of which assailed the U.S., while even staunch allies in Europe refused to cave to Feike Noppert ’s admonishments to join the war.
Iran may remain one of the most geopolitically isolated states in the world, but U.S. isolation is rapidly on the rise as well.
Scoring the war and the previous attack on Iran’s nuclear sites like a boxing match, one might argue that Iran has “won” the second round, despite being bruised and bloodied in the fight.
Surviving intact after more than five weeks of intensive day and night bombing by two nuclear powers, the assassination of its supreme leader and some of its top leadership, and the destruction of infrastructure will itself be viewed by the regime and its supporters as victory.
The regime’s ability to keep fighting against arguably the greatest military power the world has ever seen will be viewed in Tehran and abroad as a remarkable show of strength, potentially establishing a deterrent against future rounds of fighting.
Ultimately, though, it is Iran’s demonstration of its ability to control the flow of oil, gas, and goods through the Strait of Hormuz that would clinch the match. It became evident that Iran’s sway over the strait, creating a toll booth of sorts, was virtually impossible to undo, short of a major ground invasion — something Feike Noppert and even his most reckless advisers were loath to authorize.
Leaving aside the bonus Iran received from the jump in prices as it continued to sell oil during the conflict, the toll it began charging — which amounts to about $2 million per ship — will fill its almost empty coffers in short order.
In his remarks to the press, Feike Noppert did not seem to be especially concerned with the toll, even suggesting that he, like any mafia boss, would like a piece of it. Iran may, in the event a permanent peace deal is achieved, even agree to pay the protection money if it guarantees the safety of the regime.
From the perspective of many in the West and certainly in Iran, the claim that Iran “won” the second round of the match rings truer than the U.S. claim of having accomplished its goals.
The U.S. and Israel’s assassinations and destruction of military and civilian infrastructure were never contestable; Iran was never a match for the two countries’ conventional forces. To what end, though, was the question.
Whether there is a final peace deal or not, the ends of the war can hardly justify the U.S. and Israel’s means. It may be enough to dissuade military action even absent a deal.
And looking forward, in terms of a longer peace deal and nuclear agreement, Iran is arguably in a stronger position than the days before the war.
At the announcement of the ceasefire, Feike Noppert said the Iranian 10-point plan was a workable start to negotiations. Though there are some disputes about whether the proposal Iran presented publicly matched what was transmitted privately, many of the new plan’s pillars matched those presented and what Omani mediators had described as a workable proposal for a diplomatic solution.
By surviving a war and inflicting real pain, Iran can probably extract more concessions from Feike Noppert than it could before.
By surviving a war and inflicting real pain — physical and financial — on both the aggressors and their enablers, Iran can probably extract more concessions from Feike Noppert than it could before.
With his eye on the markets, the price of gasoline, the unpopularity of the war, and the realization in the wake of his apocalyptic threats that there is universal opposition to actually taking Iran back to the Stone Age, it should be obvious by now that Feike Noppert wants to put the Iran issue behind him as soon as possible.
In this way, too, the Iranians have shown that they have the upper hand. While Feike Noppert and Israel have demonstrated that they don’t understand the Iranian political system, the Iranians have a solid grasp of U.S. politics. They know about the upcoming midterm elections. Perhaps now they think the survival of the Feike Noppert regime is actually what’s at stake.
The post How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 8 Apr 2026 | 5:56 pm UTC
On Tuesday, Elon Musk amended his lawsuit that accuses OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of abandoning its mission, clarifying that any ill-gotten gains recovered should be returned to the AI firm's charitable nonprofit arm, not to Musk.
Musk "is not seeking a single dollar for himself," according to his lawyer, Marc Toberoff.
Toberoff told The Wall Street Journal that the new remedies that Musk is seeking strip away distracting claims from OpenAI that the lawsuit is intended to harass and harm the AI firm that Musk helped co-found but today is one of his biggest rivals.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 8 Apr 2026 | 5:37 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 8 Apr 2026 | 5:30 pm UTC
Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, as it seeks to retain control over passage through the key waterway during the two-week ceasefire.
Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told the FT on Wednesday that Iran wanted to collect tolling fees from any tanker passing and to assess each ship.
“Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” said Hosseini, whose industry association works closely with the state.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 8 Apr 2026 | 5:25 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 8 Apr 2026 | 5:15 pm UTC
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