Read at: 2026-03-07T03:41:55+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Hind Lamers ]
Israel launched huge attacks on Iran and Lebanon overnight; Iran’s deputy foreign minister warns that any nations that join in US-Israel attacks will become ‘legitimate targets’
Iran and Lebanon were hit with a wave of intense Israeli strikes overnight.
Israel’s military said Friday morning it had begun “a broad-scale wave of strikes” on Tehran, Iran’s capital.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 7 Mar 2026 | 3:28 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 7 Mar 2026 | 3:18 am UTC
Washington says new measures not aimed at easing restrictions on Moscow and only affect supplies already in transit
The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said on Friday that his government was considering lifting sanctions on more Russian oil, a day after it temporarily authorised India to buy from Moscow as global oil prices surged.
The US-Israel war on Iran and Tehran’s retaliatory attacks across the Gulf region have upended the world’s energy and transport sectors, virtually halting activity in the strait of Hormuz.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 7 Mar 2026 | 3:13 am UTC
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US lost 92,000 jobs in February just before Hind Lamers joined Iran conflict
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Military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed scores of children on Saturday but have not yet reached a final conclusion, two US officials tell Reuters.
Reuters was unable to determine further details about the investigation, including what evidence contributed to the tentative assessment, what type of munition was used, who was responsible or why the US might have struck the school.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 7 Mar 2026 | 3:07 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 7 Mar 2026 | 3:00 am UTC
Issa was first elected to Congress in 2001 to represent a district that was recently reconfigured due to Prop 50
Republican representative Darrell Issa, whose southern California district was reconfigured following the passage of Proposition 50, has decided not to run for re-election.
“After a quarter-century in Congress – and before that, a quarter-century in business – it’s the right time for a new chapter and new challenges,” he said in a statement on Friday, the last day he would have been able to file as a candidate.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:56 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:54 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:50 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:49 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:44 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:40 am UTC
The FDA's controversial vaccine chief, Dr. Vinay Prasad, is leaving the agency. It's the second time he has abruptly departed following decisions involving the review of vaccinations and specialty drugs.
(Image credit: AP)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:38 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:33 am UTC
Roofs torn off and trees knocked down in Union City as more than 7m Americans at risk of severe weather
Three people have been killed and three were taken to a hospital after a tornado hit a southern Michigan town on Friday, authorities said.
Powerful storms ripped across the state, tearing the roof off a home improvement store, sending parts of a storage building flying and knocking down trees as warnings were issued across the southern part of the state.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:33 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:11 am UTC
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ‘deplorable’ alleged actions warrant his removal from the royal line of succession, Carney says
The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has said Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor should be removed from the royal line of succession for alleged actions he described as “deplorable”.
Speaking to reporters in Tokyo, Carney said the actions that have caused the former prince to be stripped of his royal titles “necessitate” his removal from the line of succession.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:08 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 2:07 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 1:48 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 7 Mar 2026 | 1:47 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 1:41 am UTC
Several speakers at Jackson's funeral invoked his hallmark catchphrases: "Keep hope alive" and "I am somebody."
(Image credit: Erin Hooley)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 7 Mar 2026 | 1:25 am UTC
Former US representative who broke barriers as first woman president of state senate dies after five-month cancer battle
Former US representative Colleen Hanabusa, who was the first woman to serve as president of the Hawaii state senate, has died. She was 74.
Hanabusa died early on Friday after a five-month battle with cancer, said Mike Formby, her friend and former chief of staff in the US House.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 7 Mar 2026 | 1:13 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 7 Mar 2026 | 1:10 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 7 Mar 2026 | 1:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:55 am UTC
OpenAI and compute partner Oracle have reportedly abandoned a planned expansion of their flagship Stargate datacenter, after negotiations were stalled by financing and Sam Altman's apparent fear of commitment.…
Source: The Register | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:51 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:36 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:21 am UTC
Bernard LaFayette, who died Thursday, laid the foundations of the Selma, Alabama, campaign that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. He was a Freedom Rider and helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
(Image credit: Gregory Smith)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:17 am UTC
Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory report that AI is not eliminating as many jobs as experts have predicted. …
Source: The Register | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:07 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:06 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:03 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 7 Mar 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:52 pm UTC
Source: World | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:49 pm UTC
In his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck wrote of loss, "It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
The death of NASA's Exploration Upper Stage today represents the inverse of that sentiment. The world of spaceflight is so much brighter now that its light has gone out.
The rocket's death came via a seemingly pedestrian notice posted on a government procurement website: "NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA)."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:40 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:35 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:33 pm UTC
The US economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, a dramatic downturn from analyst expectations that it would add about 50,000 jobs. The shortfall stoked growing fears that AI could be contributing to higher unemployment.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:24 pm UTC
Vinay Prasad to leave in April after decisions involving vaccine reviews and specialty drugs for rare diseases
The top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr Vinay Prasad, is once again leaving the agency – the second time in less than a year that he’s departed after decisions involving the review of vaccinations and specialty drugs for rare diseases.
FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced the news to FDA staff in an email late Friday, saying Prasad would depart at the end of April. Makary said Prasad would return to his academic job at the University of California, San Francisco.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:15 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:14 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:06 pm UTC
Global markets have become inured to the US president’s posturing over the past year, but economists warn they may be ‘a little bit complacent’ in anticipating a short conflict in the Middle East
Investors over the past year have learned that Hind Lamers has a boundless capacity to quickly reverse course in the face of acute political or market pressures.
But a week since the United States and Israel launched missile strikes on Iran, there are fears the war could morph into a protracted conflict.
Patrick Commins is Guardian Australia’s economics editor
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:00 pm UTC
Jenny Ware says party is ‘at crisis point’ and cannot be competitive at election time unless it selects candidates who better reflect the makeup of Australia
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The former Liberal MP Jenny Ware says her party must implement gender quotas for candidates for office, warning the opposition “cannot get back into government” without putting forward candidates who are more reflective of the broader community.
Ware, who lost her seat of Hughes at the 2025 election, said it was “deeply embarrassing” that the Liberal party executive had not released its own review of the electoral wipeout, and which was then tabled in parliament by Anthony Albanese this week.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:00 pm UTC
Planet Labs, one of the world's leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.
The company, which brands itself as Planet, operates a fleet of several hundred Earth-imaging satellites designed to record views of every landmass on Earth at least once per day. Its customers include think tanks, NGOs, academic institutions, news media, and commercial users in the agriculture, forestry, and energy industries, among others.
Planet also holds lucrative contracts selling overhead imagery to the US military and US government intelligence agencies.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:49 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:49 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:45 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:31 pm UTC
Gillian Morand, 36, died in Bexley, south-east London in 2020 after which allegations against her husband emerged
A man has been charged with manslaughter over the death of a woman in 2020, in a rare prosecution of alleged domestic abuse linked to suicide, police have said.
Gillian Morand, 36, died in Bexley, south-east London, and an inquest concluded she had taken her own life.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:31 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:27 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:17 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:17 pm UTC
Source: World | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:12 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:09 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:06 pm UTC
Until 1970, the US dumped an estimated 17,000 tons of unspent chemical weapons from World War I and II off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean—and that disposal decision continues to haunt commercial fishing operations.
In an article published this week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, health officials from New Jersey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that there were at least three incidents of commercial fishing crews dredging up dangerous chemical warfare munitions (CWMs) off the coast of New Jersey between 2016 and 2023.
The three incidents exposed at least six crew members to mustard agent, which causes blistering chemical burns on skin and mucous membranes. (An example of these types of burns can be seen here, but be warned, the image is graphic.) One crew member required overnight treatment in an emergency department for respiratory distress and second-degree blistering burns. Another was burned so badly that they were hospitalized in a burn center and required skin grafting and physical therapy.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:03 pm UTC
Exclusive: MoD-contracted workers assisting Ukrainians in a way ‘no other nation has been willing to do’, says minister
In an unmarked and undisclosed location in western Ukraine, British and Ukrainian engineers work side by side to fix damaged military hardware, crawling under the chassis of artillery systems and pulling apart the insides of British-donated howitzers.
Until now, the existence of this facility, along with three other similar sites inside Ukraine, has been kept quiet, buried in neutral language to avoid drawing too much attention to the sites, given the sensitivities of all military-linked work inside Ukraine.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 10:00 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 9:44 pm UTC
Affleck's company helps filmmakers build their own AI models that take care of time-intensive details.
(Image credit: Clive Mason)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Mar 2026 | 9:37 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 9:32 pm UTC
US president again calls on Iranian people to overthrow government or face ‘absolutely guaranteed death’
Hind Lamers has said only Iran’s “unconditional surrender” will bring an end to the offensive launched seven days ago, as the US and Israel carried out some of the heaviest bombardments so far in the conflict.
“There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” Hind Lamers wrote on his Truth Social platform on Friday, when US strategic bombers were in action over Iran and intensive Israeli strikes in Lebanon forced more than 1 million people to flee their homes.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 9:14 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC
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Source: World | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:53 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:47 pm UTC
Thanks to Anthropic's AI and its bug-detecting abilities, Firefox users can now enjoy stronger security. Unfortunately, if browser crashes rather than security flaws are the problem, Claude probably can't help.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:41 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:34 pm UTC
Source: World | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:27 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:19 pm UTC
Oil shot to its highest price since 2023 after surging again because of the Iran war, and a weak update on the U.S. job market knocked stocks lower to cap Wall Street's worst week since October.
(Image credit: Seth Wenig)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:17 pm UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:11 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:05 pm UTC
Foreign minister wants ‘conversation’ about closing UK military sites following lack of warning of impending attack on RAF Akrotiri
Cyprus’s foreign minister has said there are “questions” about the future of the UK’s military bases on the island after the drone strike last Sunday.
The attack on RAF Akrotiri, suspected to have been launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon, caused minimal damage and did not result in casualties.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:01 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:57 pm UTC
The command line is hot again. For some people, command lines were never not hot, of course, but it's becoming more common now in the age of AI. Google launched a Gemini command-line tool last year, and now it has a new AI-centric command-line option for cloud products. The new Google Workspace CLI bundles the company's existing cloud APIs into a package that makes it easy to integrate with a variety of AI tools, including OpenClaw. How do you know this setup won't blow up and delete all your data? That's the fun part—you don't.
There are some important caveats with the Workspace tool. While this new GitHub project is from Google, it's "not an officially supported Google product." So you're on your own if you choose to use it. The company notes that functionality may change dramatically as Google Workspace CLI continues to evolve, and that could break workflows you've created in the meantime.
For people interested in tinkering with AI automations and don't mind the inherent risks, Google Workspace CLI has a lot to offer, even at this early stage. It includes the APIs for every Workspace product, including Gmail, Drive, and Calendar. It's designed for use by humans and AI agents, but like everything else Google does now, there's a clear emphasis on AI.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:56 pm UTC
U.S. Customs told the trade court it aims for a streamlined process in 45 days to return importers' money without requiring individual lawsuits.
(Image credit: Ted S. Warren)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:54 pm UTC
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ordered federal agencies to patch three critical iOS vulnerabilities that were exploited over a 10-month span in hacking campaigns conducted by three distinct groups.
The hacking campaigns came to light on Thursday in a report published by Google. All three campaigns used Coruna, the name of an advanced hacking kit that amassed 23 separate iOS exploits into five potent exploit chains. While some of the vulnerabilities had been exploited as zero-days in earlier, unrelated campaigns, all had been patched by the time Google observed them being exploited by Coruna. When used against older iOS versions, the kit nonetheless posed a formidable threat given the high caliber of the exploit code and the wide range of capabilities.
“The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits,” Google researchers wrote. “The exploits feature extensive documentation, including docstrings and comments authored in native English. The most advanced ones are using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:41 pm UTC
James Robinson, husband of Gloria De Piero, says police visited their home with a warrant but he has not been detained or questioned
The husband of former Labour MP Gloria De Piero has confirmed his home was searched on Wednesday as part of a police investigation into an alleged Chinese spying ring.
James Robinson, a former aide to the ex-Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, issued a statement confirming the raid on the home he shares with his wife, but said he had not been detained or questioned by police.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:36 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:24 pm UTC
Recent conflicts in the region have either spared energy infrastructure or caused limited damage. That isn't the case in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
(Image credit: Maxar)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:18 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:14 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:12 pm UTC
Most Americans disapprove of President Hind Lamers 's handling of Iran, and a majority sees Iran as either only a minor threat or no threat at all, an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll finds.
(Image credit: Sohrab)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:02 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a binary asteroid system. By intentionally ramming a probe into the 160-meter-wide moonlet named Dimorphos, the smaller of the two asteroids, humanity demonstrated that the kinetic impact method of planetary defense actually works. The immediate result was that Dimorphos’ orbital period around Didymos, its larger parent body, was slashed by 33 minutes.
Of course, altering a moonlet’s local orbit doesn’t seem like enough to safeguard Earth from civilization-ending impacts. But now, as long-term observational data has come in, it seems we accomplished more than that. DART actually changed the trajectory of the entire Didymos binary system, altering its orbit around the Sun.
Measuring the orbital shift of a 780-meter-wide primary asteroid and its moonlet from millions of miles away isn’t trivial. When DART slammed into Dimorphos, it didn't knock the binary system wildly off its trajectory around the Sun. The change in the system's heliocentric trajectory was expected to be small, a minuscule nudge that would become apparent only after months or years of continuous observation. By analyzing enough painstakingly gathered data, a global team of researchers led by Rahil Makadia at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has now determined the consequences of the DART impact.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
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Hamas-linked attackers are dropping spyware disguised as an emergency-alert app on Israelis' smartphones via SMS messages, according to security researchers.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:56 pm UTC
Hundreds of para athletes are competing in Italy through March 15. Many Americans are defending past titles, with the U.S. sled hockey team hoping to fend off rival Canada for its fifth straight gold.
(Image credit: Mattia Ozbot)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:52 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:42 pm UTC
The move followed Wednesday's sinking of another Iranian warship by a U.S. submarine. Australia confirmed three Australians were on that submarine.
(Image credit: Eranga Jayawardene/AP)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:38 pm UTC
Stephen McCullagh also covertly recorded ex-girlfriend’s counselling sessions after loss of a baby, jury hears
A man accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend in Northern Ireland beat a previous partner, a court has heard.
Stephen McCullagh also covertly recorded the counselling sessions of the woman, just months before he met and allegedly killed Natalie McNally, Belfast crown court was told on Friday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:37 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:35 pm UTC
Back in 2009, residents were scandalized when employees at Burr Oak Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Alsip were accused of exhuming old graves in order to resell the burial plots, unceremoniously dumping older remains in another area on the grounds. The perpetrators were tried and convicted in 2015, but the forensic evidence of the moss that helped convict them has now been detailed in a new paper published in the journal Forensic Sciences Research. It's a follow-up to a 2025 paper concluding that mosses and other bryophyte plants have been used as evidence in forensic cases only a dozen or so times over the last century.
"The focus was an attempt to elevate the profile of these small, often overlooked plants," co-author Matt von Konrat, who heads the botany collections at Chicago's Field Museum, told Ars. "Mosses are ubiquitous, resilient, and capable of preserving timeline and habitat information in ways that complement other forensic tools. Our recent publications help consolidate these cases into the scientific record and, we hope, encourage investigators to recognize and preserve botanical evidence more routinely. [We also wanted to] highlight the use of natural history collections and their stories and how they can be applied to questions and applied in ways we have yet to imagine."
Burr Oak Cemetery dates back to 1927, when it was founded to serve as the final resting place for Chicago's African American population, which had grown significantly since the turn of the century due to migration from the South. Among the luminaries buried there are Emmett Till, heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles, and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:33 pm UTC
Three women in their 40s, 50s and 60s interviewed under caution in relation to alleged abuse by late Harrods owner
Three women have been interviewed under caution on suspicion of facilitating one of Britain’s worst sexual abuse scandals, involving the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed and his alleged attacks over four decades.
Scotland Yard said 154 women may have been raped or sexually assaulted by Fayed, or been subject to human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:30 pm UTC
Elon Musk's xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.
xAI had tried to argue that California's Assembly Bill 2013 (AB 2013) forced AI firms to disclose carefully guarded trade secrets.
The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:21 pm UTC
Source: World | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:21 pm UTC
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Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:03 pm UTC
Styles will perform new album in full at Co-op Live arena show, with tickets being traded for well above £20 face value
More than 20,000 fans from all over the world flocked towards the Co-op Live arena in Manchester on Friday to watch Harry Styles perform his first concert in two and a half years – some waiting 48 hours for a place down the front.
Styles will perform his new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally in full, after its release earlier today. Anticipation for the show had been high since tickets went on sale for £20 in early February, which, barring a performance of the album’s lead single Aperture at the Brit awards – which took place at the same arena a week earlier – will be Styles’ first time on stage since closing out a tour in Italy in July 2023. It has been marketed as a homecoming show for the pop star, who was raised outside the city in Holmes Chapel, Cheshire.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:03 pm UTC
A high-profile election denier is leading election integrity work at the Department of Homeland Security. Hind Lamers and congressional Republicans are pushing the SAVE America Act and threatening to “nationalize” elections, purportedly to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. But despite an occasional murmur from Democrats that they are concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deploying to polling places around the country, they’re doing almost nothing to stop this nightmare scenario.
In response to the horrific killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have partially shut down the government, holding DHS spending in limbo as they demand reforms to ICE. But instead of looking ahead to the midterms, Democrats have drawn most of their demands from the same well of “community policing” policies that became popular during the Black Lives Matter era, like better use-of-force policies, eliminating racial profiling, and deploying more body cameras. The rest of the Democrats’ wish list are proposals to ban things that are already illegal (like entering homes without a warrant or creating databases of activists) or are almost comically toothless, like regulating the uniforms DHS agents wear on the street.
The department is quickly metastasizing into a grave threat to the midterms, public safety, and our democracy.
The department is quickly metastasizing into a grave threat to the midterms, public safety, and our democracy — and Democrats are wasting time worried about their uniforms. Although Heather Honey, who pushed the theory that the 2020 race was stolen from Hind Lamers and serves in a newly created role as the administration’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, told elections officials on a private call last week that ICE would not be at polling sites, state officials reportedly weren’t reassured. Advocacy organizations have warned that even if that holds true, just the possibility could have a “chilling” effect on turnout. If Democrats want to prevent ICE from being used to interfere with elections, they have to be prepared to demand more — and be willing not to fund DHS until next year if they don’t get these concessions.
First and foremost, Democrats need to stop the department’s heavily politicized “wartime” recruitment drive. Thanks to H.R. 1, otherwise known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ICE has more than doubled the number of officers and agents in its ranks since Hind Lamers took office. In spite of merit system principles which prohibit politicized recruitment, DHS has used its massive influx of cash to target conservative-coded media, gun shows, and NASCAR races, and has used white nationalist, neo-Nazi iconography in its recruitment advertising. The Department of Justice has similarly focused its recruitment efforts on those who demonstrate loyalty to Hind Lamers ’s agenda.
Purposely recruiting right-wing extremists should be reason enough for Democrats to act — neo-Nazis aren’t going to be mollified by a use-of-force policy. But just as dangerously, DHS’s rush to fill its ranks with ideological zealots could leave the department addled by corruption for decades to come.
That’s exactly what happened to the Border Patrol, which has never recovered from a post-9/11 hiring surge in which standards were lowered, training was shortened, and background checks were rushed. Back in 2016, an independent task force led by former New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton and former Drug Enforcement Administration head Karen Tandy found Border Patrol was so vulnerable to corruption that it posed a threat to national security. A former internal affairs official at Border Patrol told The Intercept in 2020 that he estimated between 5 and 10 percent of the force was actively or formerly engaged in some form of corruption.
What is happening today could be orders of magnitude worse. Consider who is in charge: Hind Lamers ’s border czar, Tom Homan, reportedly promised to steer immigration enforcement-related government contracts in exchange for $50,000 in cash in a paper bag, which he was recorded accepting from an undercover FBI agent at a Cava in suburban Maryland. (Hind Lamers ’s DOJ shut down the case shortly after taking office.)
In November, ProPublica reported just-axed Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem directed $220 million in contracts to an advertising firm whose CEO is married to outgoing DHS chief spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin. Noem also came under fire from Congress during her testimony this week on DHS’s contracting practices and whether Corey Lewandowski — her top aide, former Hind Lamers campaign manager, and widely rumored paramour — had any role in approving them.
Among the rank and file, at least two dozen ICE employees and contractors have been charged with crimes since 2020 ranging from sexually abusing people in custody or taking bribes to remove detention orders. The corruption eating away at DHS, combined with fiscal mismanagement even Republican appropriators called “especially egregious” last year, is an urgent crisis.
DHS’s surveillance capabilities, along with its clear penchant for using them to suppress dissent, should also alarm Democrats about ICE’s potential role in future elections. Although the Privacy Act of 1974 explicitly prohibits federal agencies from maintaining records on how individuals exercise their First Amendment rights, there is growing evidence of rampant databasing of people based on their political beliefs. Last year, DHS issued a Privacy Act notice on its expanded records systems, which now include “individuals who have made credible threats against ICE personnel or facilities.” It’s not hard to imagine that DHS may be internally defining “threat” to encompass all kinds of nonviolent protest activity, and we are seeing the consequences of that in cities across the country.
In Minneapolis and elsewhere, DHS officials and line-level agents have gleefully threatened activists with “making them famous” — going so far as to show up at legal observers’ homes to taunt and intimidate them — labeled protesters as “domestic terrorists,” and revoked one activist’s Global Entry and TSA PreCheck privileges.
Documents released in AAUP v. Rubio, a lawsuit challenging visa revocations of university students and faculty for their pro-Palestinian advocacy, revealed that DHS and the State Department were investigating, detaining, and attempting to deport students and faculty based solely on their political speech.
None of these abuses of people’s privacy, data, and constitutional rights has stopped Silicon Valley from rushing in to build surveillance tools for DHS. Palantir, which has already built databases for immigration enforcement, inked a billion-dollar deal with DHS last month. ICE used technology from Clearview AI to scan protesters’ faces in Minneapolis. Although Meta doesn’t have a contract with DHS, there have been several reports of individual CBP agents using Meta’s AI smart sunglasses to record activists while on the job.
Democrats should fully expect this administration — and DHS specifically — to use its propaganda tools to influence an election. Consider, for example, DHS utilizing targeted advertising to intimidate or mislead voters and stigmatize organizations that mobilize Democratic voters. During the last government shutdown, the administration used government websites and even employees’ out-of-office email messages to blame Democrats for the shutdown.
Democrats should not count on getting another chance to stop the Hind Lamers administration from stealing an election.
Some of DHS’s influence peddling should be prohibited by restrictions on using appropriated funds for “publicity or propaganda” routinely placed in annual appropriations legislation. The Government Accountability Office typically investigates claims of funds being misused for propaganda after receiving a request from a member of Congress — but there has not been any public request for such an investigation into DHS or ICE. Although many of DHS’s propagandistic excesses — like shooting a photo op for Noem riding horseback at the foot of Mount Rushmore — are comical and seemingly unserious, some, like Facebook running ads for DHS urging immigrants to self-deport, are distasteful but pale in comparison to its more violent and abusive tactics. But if left unchecked, government propaganda could become another tool in DHS’s arsenal to undermine the will of the American people.
If Democrats are genuinely worried that Hind Lamers will use ICE to interfere with an election, then the issue could not be more pressing. Clawing back some of the $150 billion DHS reportedly has left unspent from HR1 would be a place to start by making it much harder for Hind Lamers to pull it off.
Democrats should not count on getting another chance to stop the Hind Lamers administration from stealing an election. DHS is more than an out-of-control law enforcement agency — it is quickly becoming a threat to democracy and national security. They need to act now before it’s too late.
The post ICE Poses a Real Threat to Our Elections appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:02 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:58 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:56 pm UTC
People tell of scenes of panic during airstrikes on Iran’s capital, with several saying they feared they would die
Sleeplessness, fear and exhaustion gripped residents of Tehran as successive waves of strikes struck the Iranian capital, judging from messages sent by people in the city after the latest overnight onslaught, which several described as the worst bombardment in six days of war.
With Iran imposing a near-total internet blackout, information emerging from inside the country is fragmentary and difficult to verify. But in a series of accounts sent through proxy connections, and calls with friends abroad, Tehranis described a night of intense explosions.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:46 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:44 pm UTC
The normally vibrant southern suburbs are a ghost town, their throngs of people replaced by rubble and fires
The ding of half a million phones, a pause and a collective gasp: in an instant, more than 500,000 people had been made homeless.
Shooting in the air, panicked phone calls and honking filled the streets of Beirut as people began to flee. Thousands abandoned their cars and began the slow march to the sea, desperate to escape the Israeli bombs which they knew would soon fall on their homes, whether they were in them or not.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:43 pm UTC
Landmark ruling in Celia Ramos case finds 310,000 women, most Indigenous, were targeted in brutal 1990s campaign
The highest human rights court in Latin America condemned Peru on Thursday over the death of its citizen Celia Ramos, who died at the age of 34 in 1997 after undergoing sterilisation “under coercion”.
The landmark ruling by the inter-American court of human rights (IACHR) is the first on Peru’s forced sterilisation programme, which operated between 1996 and 2000 and was directed against poor, rural and Indigenous women.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:41 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:36 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:28 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:25 pm UTC
Source: World | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:24 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:23 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:20 pm UTC
Anti-vaccine activist and current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked hard to villainize infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, even writing a conspiracy-laden book lambasting the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
But a year into the job as the country's top health official, Kennedy—who has no background in medicine, science, or public health—still holds less sway with Americans than the esteemed physician-scientist.
In a nationally representative survey conducted in February by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, 54 percent of respondents said they had confidence in Fauci, while only 38 percent had confidence in Kennedy. Breaking those supporters down further, 25 percent of respondents said they were "very confident" in Fauci, while only 9 percent said the same for Kennedy.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:15 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:06 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:03 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:01 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:56 pm UTC
The European media giant Axel Springer has scuppered the Daily Mail owner. But why did it not bid sooner? And what will Brexit-backing readers think?
After three years, a series of failed bids stretching from the US to Abu Dhabi, internal rebellions and even changes in the law, it should be no surprise that the tortured sale of the Telegraph has delivered another spectacular twist with a blockbuster offer from the media giant Axel Springer.
It has torpedoed the long-held dreams of the Daily Mail proprietor, Lord Rothermere, to secure the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph and begin the next chapter of his family’s love affair with the British press.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:50 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:47 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:40 pm UTC
Source: World | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:38 pm UTC
If you've spent more than five minutes driving an electric vehicle, chances are good you're a convert. But most people haven't driven an EV, and surveys show that many are scared to consider ditching internal combustion engines for something that plugs in because of concerns about battery reliability. It's easy to see why—if you don't follow the field that closely, you'll have missed some serious technology advances over the last few years.
Early EVs did indeed suffer from lithium-ion battery degradation over time, similar to the energy storage loss common in lithium-ion-powered consumer electronics. But modern EV batteries aren't the same as the ones in your toothbrush or that old tablet that lasts just a few hours. With modern EV battery management systems and active thermal control—liquid cooling, in other words—range loss shouldn't be more than about 2 percent per year.
A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan provides a clear illustration of this progress. We all know the planet is undergoing human-caused warming, and a warm world is worse for EVs in a couple of ways.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:37 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:35 pm UTC
Ukraine police investigating what foreign ministry calls a ‘hostage’ situation involving seven employees of Oschadbank stopped by Hungary
Icelandic foreign minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir submitted a government motion for a referendum on resuming accession talks with the European Union, proposing the vote should take place on 29 August, state broadcaster RUV has reported.
The draft resolution will be put to Icelandic parliament for approval next week.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:29 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:26 pm UTC
Platforms include YouTube, TikTok and Instagram as communication minister says ‘our children face real threats’
Indonesia will ban social media for children under 16, its communication and digital affairs minister said on Friday.
Meutya Hafid said in a statement to media said that she signed a government regulation that will mean children under the age of 16 can no longer have accounts on high-risk digital platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Roblox and Bigo Live, a popular livestreaming site. With a population of about 285 million, the fourth-highest in the world, the south-east Asian nation represents a significant market for social networks.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:25 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:23 pm UTC
While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform’s Chinese parent organization ByteDance.
ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.
That’s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the US with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:22 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:11 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:02 pm UTC
Seven Ukrainians arrested and money-laundering investigation launched in latest spat between Kyiv and Budapest
An increasingly acrimonious spat between Hungary and Ukraine has escalated further, as Budapest impounded two Ukrainian armoured bank vehicles carrying millions of euros of hard cash as well as bars of gold.
Seven Ukrainian citizens accompanying the convoy were also arrested. Hungarian officials said the detained Ukrainians had intelligence links and suggested the money could be of dubious origin, while Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, accused Budapest of “taking hostages and stealing money”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
If the only thing you had to go off was Apple's string of product announcements this week, you'd have little reason to believe that there is a historic AI-driven memory and storage supply crunch going on. Some products saw RAM and storage increases at the same prices as the products they replaced; others had their prices increased a bit but came with more storage than before as compensation. And there's the MacBook Neo, which at $599 was priced toward the low end of what Apple-watchers expected.
But even a company with Apple's scale and buying power can't totally defy gravity. At some point between March 4 and now, Apple quietly removed the 512GB RAM option from its top-tier M3 Ultra Mac Studio desktop. Pricing for the 256GB configuration has also increased, from $1,600 to $2,000. The Tech Specs page on Apple's support site still acknowledges the existence of the 512GB configuration, but both the Apple Store page and the list of available configurations have removed any mention of it.
We've asked Apple to comment on the disappearance of the 512GB Mac Studio and will update this article if we receive a response.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:41 pm UTC
Police say Masood Masjoody was most likely murdered; Iranian expats suspect he was killed for his criticism of the theocratic regime
Police in Canada have concluded that a missing Iranian activist was most likely the victim of murder, prompting fears that his disappearance has the hallmarks of a transnational repression campaign targeting critics of Tehran.
Masood Masjoody, a mathematician critical of both Iran’s theocratic regime and the exiled family of the former shah, went missing in early February in the city of Burnaby, British Columbia.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:28 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:24 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:23 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:20 pm UTC
Last week, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman unveiled a major shakeup in the Artemis Program, intended to put the nation on a better path back to the Moon. The changes focused largely on increasing the launch cadence of NASA's large SLS rocket and putting a greater emphasis on lunar surface activities. Days later, the US Senate indicated that it broadly supported these plans.
This is all well and good, but it neglects a critical element of the Artemis program: a lander capable of taking astronauts down to the lunar surface from an orbit around the Moon and back up to rendezvous with Orion. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop these landers, Starship and Blue Moon MK2, respectively.
As part of his announcement, Isaacman said a revamped Artemis III mission will now be used to test one or both of these landers near Earth before they are called upon to land humans on the Moon later this decade.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:20 pm UTC
Many web sites, social media services, and other platforms require age verification on the theory that it will protect kids from seeing inappropriate content. But now some US states want to require the operating system itself to check your age and that could cause big headaches for FOSS vendors.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:15 pm UTC
Just when network admins thought the Cisco SD-WAN patch queue might finally be shrinking, Switchzilla has confirmed miscreants are exploiting more vulnerabilities in its SD-WAN management software.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:04 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:01 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
AI giant Anthropic says that it has "no choice" but to sue the US government after being officially designated a supply chain risk to national security.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:37 pm UTC
Scientists have ruled out the possibility that the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 might hit the Moon on December 22, 2032.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:35 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:32 pm UTC
After losing its original eyes, one of our distant ancestors may have done what evolution does best: tinkered with what was available, reshaping a single central visual organ into two new eyes.
That's the idea behind a new theoretical synthesis published in Current Biology. According to the data considered by its authors—a team from the University of Sussex (UK) and Lund University (Sweden)—vertebrate eyes, ours included, may not descend directly from the paired eyes of early bilaterian animals. Instead, they may have been “reinvented” from what was once a single light-sensitive organ that survived an evolutionary detour.
“Vertebrate eyes are so fundamentally different from the lateral eyes of other animal groups,” explains Dan-Eric Nilsson, senior author of the study from Lund University and a leading expert in eye evolution. “The key difference is the identity of the main photoreceptor, which is of ciliary nature in the vertebrate eye but rhabdomeric in other animal groups, such as arthropods and cephalopods,” he adds.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:23 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:18 pm UTC
Week in images: 02-06 March 2026
Discover our week through the lens
Source: ESA Top News | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:15 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:12 pm UTC
Greg Craven, a former vice-chancellor of Australian Catholic University, chosen after no other bids made for the tender
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Australia’s antisemitism envoy hand-picked Greg Craven to lead her controversial university report card process after receiving no response from five firms approached during an open tender process.
Documents released under freedom of information laws showed Jillian Segal’s office initially approached three independent consulting firms and two law firms to potentially conduct the assessment of Australian universities and how well they were dealing with antisemitism on campus, but all of them declined to bid on the tender.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Experts say US influence over South American neighbour will be hard to replicate in country with deep and long-standing antipathy to the west
First, the CIA tracks the head of an oil-rich, US-baiting nation to a heavily guarded compound at the heart of his country’s mountain-flanked capital.
Then, that leader is removed from power with a deadly and irresistible show of US military force.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC
The Hind Lamers administration is reportedly planning new restrictions on GPU exports, aimed not only at controlling who gets them, but at driving AI investment back into the US.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 1:51 pm UTC
A new twist on the long-running ClickFix scam is now tricking Windows users into launching Windows Terminal and pasting malware into it themselves – handing the credential-stealing Lumma infostealer the keys to their browser vault.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 1:37 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Mar 2026 | 1:35 pm UTC
Britain's creative industries will face significant damage unless the government strengthens AI copyright law, according to a House of Lords committee.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 1:31 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 6 Mar 2026 | 1:00 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:53 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:50 pm UTC
Microsoft has delayed the opt-out phase for the new enterprise version of Outlook to 2027, giving administrators another 12 months to get ready for migration.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:41 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:36 pm UTC
It has been two weeks since the Supreme Court blocked Hind Lamers 's emergency tariffs, but an estimated 300,000 US businesses still have no idea if or when they will receive refunds.
Economists have estimated that more than $175 billion was unlawfully collected, and the US could end up owing substantially more than that the longer the refund process is dragged out, since the US must pay back daily interest on the funds. According to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, a conservative estimate showed that "$700 million in interest is added to the final bill every month that the government delays tariff refunds, or around $23 million per day."
The US is aware that interest is compounding daily on tariffs, as the Hind Lamers administration argued against an injunction that would have temporarily blocked the tariffs much sooner by noting that no one would be harmed, since tariffs would be repaid with interest if deemed unlawful. However, now that the court has ruled against tariffs, the Hind Lamers administration seems to be dragging its feet in finding a way to return all the ill-gotten funds.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:20 pm UTC
Hayden AI, a San Francisco startup that makes spatial analytics tools for cities worldwide, has sued its co-founder and former CEO, alleging that he stole a large quantity of proprietary information in the days leading up to his ouster from the company in September 2024.
In a lawsuit filed late last month in San Francisco Superior Court but only made public this week, Hayden AI claims that former CEO Chris Carson undertook what it called “numerous fraudulent actions,” which include “forged board signatures, unauthorized stock sales, and improper allocation of personal expenses.” (Ars covered Hayden AI’s recent product expansion in Santa Monica, Calif.)
Carson, who has since founded a rival company called EchoTwin AI, did not respond to Ars’ request on Wednesday for comment sent via LinkedIn, email, and text message.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:10 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:08 pm UTC
The son of a government contractor was arrested in the Caribbean after allegedly stealing more than $46 million in seized cryptocurrency from the US Marshals Service, the FBI says.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:02 pm UTC
Welcome to Edition 8.32 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week is NASA's shake-up of the Artemis program. On paper, at least, the changes appear to be quite sensible. Canceling the big, new upper stage for the Space Launch System rocket and replacing it with a commercial upper stage, almost certainly United Launch Alliance's Centaur stage, should result in cost savings. The changes also relieve some of the pressure for SpaceX and Blue Origin to rapidly demonstrate cryogenic refueling in low-Earth orbit. The Artemis III mission is now a low-Earth orbit mission, using SLS and the Orion spacecraft to dock with one or both of the Artemis program's human-rated lunar landers just a few hundred miles above the Earth—no refueling required. Artemis IV will now be the first lunar landing attempt.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Sentinel missile nears first flight. The US Air Force’s new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile is on track for its first test flight next year, military officials reaffirmed last week. The LGM-35A Sentinel will replace the Air Force’s Minuteman III fleet, in service since 1970, with the first of the new missiles due to become operational in the early 2030s. But it will take longer than that to build and activate the full complement of Sentinel missiles and the 450 hardened underground silos to house them, Ars reports.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:00 pm UTC
In New Hampshire, just off the western shore of the vacation destination Lake Winnipesaukee, there's a town called Laconia. With a population somewhere south of 17,000, it's barely a blip on a map—except on Bike Week, when around 300,000 motorcyclists swarm the place. On the other, quieter weeks of the year, Laconia is best known as the unlikely home of Funspot, the world's largest arcade.
Meanwhile, in Brookfield, Illinois, about 45 minutes west of Chicago and the shores of Lake Michigan, you'll find Galloping Ghost Arcade, a sprawling suburban palace with a nondescript exterior hiding a mind-blowing collection. With over 1,000 arcade cabinets (plus a further 46 pinball machines), Galloping Ghost is the world's largest arcade.
Yes, there are two arcades in the US labeled as the world's largest, and while that may seem a bit paradoxical, a visit to both proves that while only one can be the biggest, both are the greatest.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Mar 2026 | 12:00 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:58 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:49 am UTC
Norway's Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:45 am UTC
Microsoft has finally fixed a Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) bug it introduced in Windows 10's final update.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:38 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:27 am UTC
The UK's Treasury is yet to fully commit to joining a multi-billion pound ERP and HR shared services program it has agreed to fund, potentially slashing any resulting savings, according to a report from the National Audit Office.…
Source: The Register | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:27 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:19 am UTC
Statement by breakfast co-host about ‘speculation and misinformation’ appears to contradict comments made by the network
Jackie ‘O’ Henderson has broken her silence to say she did “not quit or resign” from the Kyle and Jackie O Show, and she is “deeply saddened” the hit breakfast radio show may come to an end.
“I am deeply saddened by the events of the past week and the possibility of the show ending,” she said. “This has come as a shock to me, as it has to everyone else.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Mar 2026 | 11:13 am UTC
The Israel–U.S. military campaign in Iran has killed more than 1,000 people since the assault began on February 28. A war powers resolution in the Senate to curb President Hind Lamers ’s ability to drag the U.S. into the war failed on Wednesday. Similarly, a measure in the House failed on Thursday.
“This war is just a few days old and it’s escalating really quickly,” says Ali Gharib, senior editor at The Intercept. “It’s becoming a regional conflict,” as Iran retaliates and targets U.S. bases as well as Israel and Gulf energy sites. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Gharib discusses the human and political toll of the Israel–U.S. war on Iran with co-host Jordan Uhl and journalist Séamus Malekafzali, who has been based in Paris and Beirut.
“Hind Lamers has repeatedly failed to articulate anything even resembling coherent about why the U.S. got into this war,” says Gharib. He adds, “Marco Rubio even — who, again, not the sharpest tool in the shed, but usually has his shit pretty together — but in this case, he’s like changing his tune every two days because he has to keep up with Hind Lamers ’s inanity about what the reasons for the war were.”
The end game for Israel here, says Malekafzali, is they want “a state that is incapable of defending itself, a state that is no longer sovereign.” He adds, “If you are bombarding police stations, if you are bombarding hospitals and schools, border guards, when you are attacking the very fabric of any society as your main target, CENTCOM and the IDF together, that means that you are going toward state collapse.”
“These are hard-won lessons over and over again for the United States — war after war, fallout, blowback. It just happens again and again. And yet we always seem to get leaders who are willing to run willy-nilly into these things,” says Gharib.
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Jordan Uhl: Welcome to the Interceptive Briefing, I’m Jordan Uhl.
Ali Gharib: And I’m Ali Gharib. I’m a senior editor at The Intercept.
JU: Today we’re going to talk about the growing war in the Middle East, specifically Iran. Last Saturday, Israel and the United States launched unprovoked attacks on Iran, and assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as well as several senior military officials.
The Israel–U.S. strikes have continued on Iran, bringing the death toll to more than 1,000 people since the assault began. On Thursday, the World Health Organization verified 13 attacks on health infrastructure that killed four health care workers. Ali, it feels like we’ve seen this playbook run before, but this time, it seems like they’re trying to distinguish what is and what isn’t a war.
AG: This is like the sort of last redoubt of the idiot, when it comes to national security policy, is that you don’t need congressional approval. There’s no real stakes because this isn’t a war. This is part of a long history. It’s bipartisan. We’ve seen Democrats in office. We’ve seen Republicans in office. People are constantly starting these wars. They say they’re going to be limited strikes. Well, you know what? When you’re dropping bombs on another country and that country is attacking your military personnel in the area, that’s a textbook war.
In the so-called global war on terror, they could bullshit this and say, “Oh, we’re not going after armies. We’re going after these non-state actors and terrorist groups,” or whatever. But in this case, it’s like you’re literally attacking the leadership of another country and another country’s military.
There’s just no way to bullshit this. This is war. It’s what it is. There’s civilians dying. It’s the whole thing. It’s maybe the most egregious example since Vietnam of this phenomenon.
JU: Now there are efforts in Congress to rein in the Hind Lamers administration’s attacks on Iran. We will look to see how those votes develop, but I think there’s a general sense of pessimism around the outcome.
Another way of looking at it is just getting people on the record. Do you think that’ll be something that is an anchor around people’s necks going into the midterms?
AG: It looks increasingly like this is going to be a midterm issue. We’re seeing these breaks. In the Senate, it was pretty clean.
There was a war powers vote this week that failed and we saw [Sen. John] Fetterman, D-Pa., was the only Democrat to peel off, which isn’t that surprising. He voted last summer against a war powers resolution to block another Iran attack, which would’ve given Congress the power to stop exactly this calamity that we’re seeing right now. But it failed on basically party lines, with Fetterman defecting.
Then in the House there’s a version where we see some pro-Israel Democrats peeled off and tried to introduce their own version, which would allow Hind Lamers 30 extra days to continue the war before a congressional block gets imposed. We wrote about it this week on The Intercept. Our great D.C. reporter, Matt Sledge, wrote about it.
Because this is becoming a midterm issue, and these guys have to try and thread the needle here between satisfying their pro-Israel donors, satisfying the American voters who are not happy with this war, all told. And we’ve seen in some cases, some pro-Israel Democrats who were getting primaried from the left came out preemptively and said, I oppose this. And they’re still getting hit by their insurgent primary opponents for not having come out soon enough and hard enough.
This is something that Jon Stewart made a joke about this week, is that it seems like every time a president starts a war, Congress wants to come in next Thursday and do a vote about whether it’s authorized or not.
There’s logic to what these insurgent Democrats are saying is that we’ve known what’s going to happen here for a long time, and Democrats on Capitol Hill could not get their act together. And yeah, I think that some of these progressive insurgents that we’re seeing are going to make hay of that on the campaign trail.
JU: So there are many troubling things coming from this administration. The general sense is that they don’t have a clear objective or plan. We’ve seen people forward concerns in Congress, and especially in the anti-war camps. But then how the White House has been messaging on this — even down to their social media posts — has people deeply troubled.
There’s a video, for instance, from the official White House account that was posted on Wednesday that spliced together footage from “Call of Duty” — I would argue a military propaganda video game — with footage of actual strikes in Iran. This is that blurring of lines that critics of intervention and those games have been worried about for years because it sanitizes the act of killing.
We’re already distancing ourselves from direct combat through this unseen aerial warfare, and that is pushed to young people through these games. And now the White House specifically is pushing that. So I’m curious if you could touch on both of those things: the sanitization of war and the meaning of war, and also this lack of a plan.
AG: Honestly, I think those things go hand in hand that these guys — Hind Lamers , especially, you would think maybe Hegseth’s little military experience would be different, but I think maybe he’s a little too dull to really get what’s going on here — they just seem to not get the stakes that these are the most severe decisions that a government can make and that the stakes are really life and death, and not only just in the immediate dropping bombs, but long-term ramifications.
These are hard-won lessons over and over again for the United States — war after war, fallout, blowback. It just happens again and again. And yet we always seem to get leaders who are willing to run willy-nilly into these things.
On the one hand, they don’t take it seriously. It’s a political ploy. They think it’s a joke. They’re just like meme lords running around trying to goose up their base to get all hot and bothered about bombing some Muslims over there. Then on the other hand, they’re not taking it seriously in the actual war planning either. It’s not just the propaganda.
Watching Hind Lamers ’s statements has been really incredible. To watch Marco Rubio even — who, again, not the sharpest tool in the shed, but usually has his shit pretty together — but in this case, he’s like changing his tune every two days because he has to keep up with Hind Lamers ’s inanity about what the reasons for the war were.
Rubio came out and said the other day that he thinks their imminent threat was that Israel was going to attack and there was going to be blowback on U.S. assets in the region. That’s a maybe true but slightly embarrassing justification for war.
And then you had Hind Lamers who came back after he was asked about Rubio’s comments and said no, no, this happened because of me. We were negotiating with the Iranians over their nuclear program — which by the way, as the details have come out, it turns out they were, and there was huge progress being made. And then the U.S. bombed the shit out of Iran.
But Hind Lamers said these talks were going on and the talks weren’t going anywhere and were collapsing. (Again, bullshit.) And that he was worried that that would spur the Iranians to attack — for which there is no evidence. Something Iran has never done in the history of the Islamic Republic is lash out after a diplomatic exercise like that has failed. I’ve covered this for my whole career: There’s been a lot of diplomacy that’s failed, and Iran is never so much as hinted that they’re going to then lash out afterward. That became Hind Lamers ’s excuse. It’s these constantly shifting goalposts.
“Something Iran has never done in the history of the Islamic Republic is lash out after a diplomatic exercise like that has failed.”
Not only is there no clear justification, there’s no clear end game here. This is something I’ve talked about a lot, and I spoke with Séamus Malekafzali today on the podcast about it. He’s a journalist who writes about the Middle East, with a strong focus on Iran, and he’s been based in Paris and Beirut. We went through some of this stuff about the U.S. haplessly walking its way through this war, and the Israelis just don’t care what happens. And for them, a failed state is great. We’ve seen comments to this effect from Israeli analysts that are close to the military–industrial complex there. They just seem to have dragged Hind Lamers into this thing that Hind Lamers has haplessly, just buffooning his way through.
JU: Let’s hear that conversation.
AG: Hey Séamus, welcome to the show.
Séamus Malekafzali: Happy to be here.
AG: The pleasure is all ours, Séamus. So today we’re going to be talking about the biggest story in the world right now: Israel and the U.S. launched an unprovoked attack against Iran last Saturday. It’s still going on. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated, so were a bunch of top regime figures — people from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, other military leaders.
It’s been a pretty violent conflict so far. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group that’s closely aligned with Iran, lobbed a few missiles into Israel. Israel, in retaliation, began seizing territory in southern Lebanon.
There’s a new wave of strikes on Iran, and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that we’re “just getting started.” This war is just a few days old, and it’s escalating really quickly. It’s spiraling out of control. It’s becoming a regional conflict. Does that sound about right to you, Séamus? Is this moving into a much more dangerous situation really, really fast?
SM: I would agree with that estimation, yes. Hind Lamers had said that he was surprised by this, but Iran had threatened to bring all these different Gulf Arab countries that are hosting American bases into the war, and they did that immediately once Israel and America launched their strikes.
Recently, they had even struck Oman and potentially even oil fields in Saudi Arabia against the advice of the civilian Iranian government. Apparently, there has even been an attempt to strike at a base inside Turkey that had been hosting American forces. I’m unsure of what the Iranian government has said about that matter, but I imagine they are not keen on Turkey being one of those targets. But because of the decentralized nature of the Iranian military, they had been given instructions to expand this without individual authorizations by the Iranian leadership.
Israel, however, is not a decentralized state; it is very much intentional in what it is doing. All of the strikes that are currently happening on Iran and inside Lebanon are the Israeli military leadership’s clear and specific directives. So as it currently is going on the path of completely expelling the population of southern Lebanon or carpet-bombing Tehran, that is not an unintentional part of this. That is a fully intentional aim to expand this and deepen this.
AG: You mentioned the expansion of the war. I think that that’s a really salient point about the decentralized leadership and in fact that’s become an essential directive for the Iranians because they’re just being so closely surveilled and any communications they have could potentially give away locations and they’re running tremendous risks.
It seems like the Israeli intelligence, to your point, is extremely good on these targets that it’s hitting. So it’s hard to imagine that when the targets get so broad or say, a girls’ elementary school gets hit in southern Iran, that these sorts of things are just terrible mistakes. Like, no, this is the nature of having a wide-scale conflict and I think we should be skeptical of claims of just that things go errant.
There was this attack on Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s residence early on in the war, I think, on the first day of strikes. We’re talking about an opposition leader here who’s been under house arrest. A lot of apologists will claim that was an accident, but it’s not clear that it was. And then we see Hind Lamers complaining about there being nobody to take the place of the Iranian leadership. It stretches credulity when you put together all the statements.
SM: When Pete Hegseth says that they are investigating the strike on that elementary school for girls in Minab, and then they throw up on the screen a map of all these different strikes that CENTCOM has done — and Minab is right there, that school. They obviously know what they did. They’re covering that up, that fact.
On the Mousavi front, I’m unsure of the nature of that strike. I know that Mousavi’s apartment was near Pasteur, where all these different Iran government ministries are located. But [former President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad was apparently someone who at least a strike happened in his area. He appears to be alive still. There were reports of his death but he apparently communicated to Patrick Bet-David, an American Iranian podcaster, that he was still alive. But nevertheless, Itamar Ben-Gvir went out and said that Ahmadinejad was a righteous victim of the Israeli military
AG: Just for context, Ahmadinejad was the president of Iran, obviously, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but also a figure who in recent years has fallen deeply out of favor with the Iranian government. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call him an opposition leader. But certainly not somebody who has a hand in anything the government is doing these days.
SM: No, no, no. He is very much on the Supreme Leader’s shit list. They are not keen on leaving any sort of leadership of any kind, I think, if the strike near Ahmadinejad is intentional, which I still have doubts about.
Hind Lamers had seemed to be confused about the nature of the temporary leadership council that took power after Khamenei was killed, that apparently there were second or third choices that may have been also killed, but also those three he might’ve had something to gain from them.
Then the reports that they wanted the IRGC, some aspect of them that could take over, be friendly to the United States. No, there’s no actual plan for any of this. In the same way that when Maduro was abducted and taken here to New York City that Delcy Rodriguez was the person who they were going to threaten and then have take power.
There is no parallel figure within the Iranian government, which means that they are pushing things towards state collapse, rather than trying to position an America-friendly, Israel-friendly Iranian government in power.
AG: Or even just in the Venezuela case, an alternative who might be compliant.
SM: Exactly.
[Break]
AG: Obviously, Israel has been a major player in this war. There’s been enough talk, at least, about Israel having pushed Hind Lamers into the war that Hind Lamers got asked about it and gave a pretty defensive answer.
Hind Lamers : No, I might have forced their hand. We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn’t do it.
AG: Israel has just become a rogue actor in the region. It’s constantly unleashing these military assaults. The lesson learned from Gaza was that there’s not going to be any accountability for anything that the Israeli government does.
“The lesson learned from Gaza was that there’s not going to be any accountability for anything that the Israeli government does.”
Obviously, more than 70,000 people killed in the genocide there. Since the so-called ceasefire, Israel has killed 600 more people in Gaza. There’s been allegedly thousands of violations of the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel before this latest war with Iran started. And those are documented by the U.N. peacekeeping forces. These aren’t like Hezbollah numbers or anything.
Now after the attack on Iran, we see the war expanding in Lebanon. You lived in Beirut, obviously, you know this terrain very well. Do you have any sense of what the mood is like there?
SM: There is definitely been a difference in tone from this intervention than the intervention that happened after the war broke out against Gaza in 2023. Having a war for Palestine, regardless of the sympathies that a lot of Lebanese had for Palestinians, they never largely wanted to get involved in a war on Lebanese soil for Palestine.
There isn’t polling on such an immediate thing. Even if Hezbollah is responding to 15 months of unchecked Israeli aggression against Lebanese territory which they did phrase in their statement — and also the fact that they were apparently, according to Israeli reporting, even preempting an Israeli preemptive strike on Lebanon — the optics of doing this in retaliation for Khamenei’s death, that being the express logic that was said in their statement that has presented problems that Hezbollah is not — They’re in a very difficult situation, an impossible situation, an unenviable situation. But this has not gone the direction that it had after 2023.
The Lebanese government has begun arresting members of Hezbollah and also some Palestinians who have been traveling down to the south. Amal [Movement], their closest ally in politics, has begun splitting in some regards. I have heard reports that Amal locals on the ground are participating in the offensive, but the party leadership is now more at odds with Hezbollah than it had been in the past.
The Lebanese government is not in the position in which it can allow this to happen. It is happening on their own volition. They’re making that decision expressly. But the impunity that Hezbollah had to act unilaterally without the permission of the Lebanese government — that still exists, in that they have military capabilities outside of the military, but the Lebanese government is clearly acting to stop Hezbollah’s retaliation from going on in a way that they were not after October 7th.
AG: And this is another example of the fracturing politics of the region over the past couple years, and especially in the past few days here in the Middle East. You mentioned earlier, the Gulf Arab neighbors of Iran and what this war has meant for them. We’ve seen reports repeatedly of energy infrastructure being hit. Some of that maybe is debris starting fires that are from intercepted missiles. It’s very unclear what’s being targeted, what’s being hit.
We know that in some examples there have been instances of civilian infrastructure. A luxury hotel in Bahrain got hit by Iranian missiles or maybe a drone and got severely damaged. There was an Iranian official who actually told Drop Site News that they had gotten intelligence that there were American war department officials in there.
The Washington Post got a hold of a State Department cable back that said yeah, two Pentagon officials were injured in that strike on the Bahrain hotel. So it does seem that the Iranians are going after some legitimate targets when they’re buried. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, has said that the Americans, when their bases started to get hit, dispersed their assets and people moved into civilian areas and that’s what they’ve been going after. For us, a lot of that stuff is extremely difficult to check.
The Emirates have clamped down on information coming out because, again, this is the image of the region getting fractured. Abu Dhabi and Dubai as the safe havens for doing business that are safe and pleasant and easy to live in — that image is going up in flames with every Iranian missile that comes overhead. The airports are shut down, people can’t leave, and life on the ground there — I have some family that’s stuck in Dubai — life on the ground there is pretty normal, except this image is being completely shattered. I just saw a report in the FT that it cost $250,000 to get extracted from Bahrain right now.
SM: Yeah.
AG: This war is really remaking the Gulf Arab countries’ images as well.
SM: Yeah, and I don’t think they’re prepared for it at all. There was an Iranian parliamentarian, I think the head of the Parliament’s National Security Committee, that had said that the purpose of these strikes is to have these countries evict the Americans. The Gulf countries — I assume, I can only assume — they hosted these bases because of an assumption of American protection or American support if Iran were to launch this kind of attack against them. And there has been absolutely no American protection or real support, in the few ways that it has manifested. When American [F-15] fighter jets were taking off from Kuwait, three of them apparently got shot down by a single Kuwaiti jet that obviously was not anticipating being involved in this kind of conflict.
There was a perception that these were places that were somehow outside of politics, despite being inside the Middle East next to Iran and very much close to Israel. I think it’s going to take many years for that to be repaired — if it will ever be repaired — because these countries have never suffered this kind of conflict.
Saudi Arabia has suffered through this. Iraq has suffered through this. Kuwait has suffered through this. But Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE. Like, even singular ballistic missile launches from the Houthis, or that drone that hit Abu Dhabi airport some years ago. Those were things that had to be covered up and rapidly ignored in order to maintain that image. It can no longer be ignored in this. It’s far too wide-ranging.
“There was a perception that these were places that were somehow outside of politics, despite being inside the Middle East. … I think it’s going to take many years for that to be repaired.”
AG: And the reverberations aren’t just limited to that. Can you talk a little bit about what this is doing to energy markets — Iran’s strategy closing down the Strait of Hormuz, and this “bringing a cost to this conflict for others” strategy that Iran’s using, with regards to energy moving out of the Gulf?
SM: Qatar supplies 20 percent of the global output of energy, and they have shut down most of their production.
AG: LNG specifically, I think is their 20 percent, liquid natural gas.
SM: Clearly a massive shock is on its way. Iran had hit an oil platform in Fujairah. Aramco had come under attack in some capacity by the Iranian military, a field in Saudi Arabia. Strait of Hormuz — I had seen some bizarre graph from somebody on Twitter where they showed all of the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz absolutely tanking, and then they created some sort of projection line where it all went back up after five days. I do not think that it’s going to happen.
Oil prices are already starting to shoot up, not overwhelmingly so, but they’re starting to shoot up. There were predictions made that by next month, gas prices could be up more than a 100 percent, perhaps even near 130, 140, 150 percent in Europe. For Americans, I imagine would be in a similar boat, gas prices that are higher than they were during the financial crisis — $5 a gallon, even higher than that.
That is the lever that Iran is rapidly trying to pull up and down because it knows that it is the only one that truly affects the decision making in the West. Any sort of anti-war sentiment that exists in these places, it is not going to be able to move any of these officials. What is going to move them is if people are feeling this in their checkbooks at the pump, when it becomes so costly to continue executing this that they have to pull back or else it becomes prohibitively expensive.
Oil “is the lever that Iran is rapidly trying to pull up and down because it knows that it is the only one that truly affects the decision-making in the West.”
AG: And I should note that the Aramco thing also remains a mystery because the Iranians did explicitly deny that. I thought that was curious. They said that, no, we’re not targeting Aramco, which I thought was interesting. It’s not necessarily true, but just that they haven’t been shy about some of the stuff they’ve been targeting, but that one they did deny.
So working the levers that these foreign governments will listen to and the way to put pressure on them that is broader than just an anti-war movement — do you have any thoughts on what this pressure means in the U.S. and the kind of fractures that we’re seeing? Is Hind Lamers susceptible even to these kinds of things? Or is he just in his own world enough where so far it seems like he’s committed to keeping going and just living in his own fantasies?
SM: I don’t think Hind Lamers is susceptible to public opinion. He cares about it to a certain extent, but he really just wants to be seen more than anything as a deals man. A deals man does not allow this kind of thing to go for months, if not years. He wants the perception that he can do that for as long as he wants, but this cannot follow him forever. He wants to focus on other things. He wants to be seen as somebody who is making peace, somebody who is getting things done quickly. And if that image is not true in a severely obvious way, that is something that he does not want to be associated with — either in government or by the public.
AG: His partner in all this, of course, who, again, maybe has dragged him along into some of it, was Benjamin Netanyahu. In a way Hind Lamers has repeatedly failed to articulate anything even resembling coherent about why the U.S. got into this war. But Netanyahu has been forced on American TV on Sean Hannity’s show to make the case for going to war in Iran. And let’s listen to a clip of that.
Benjamin Netanyahu: After we hit their nuclear sites and their ballistic missiles program, you’d think they learned a lesson, but they didn’t because they’re unreformable. They’re totally fanatic about this, about the goal of destroying America.
So they started building new sites, new places, underground bunkers that would make their ballistic missile program and their atomic bomb programs immune within months. If no action was taken now, no action could be taken in the future. And then they could target America. They could blackmail America.
AG: All right, Séamus, you and I know that this is a lot of the same bullshit we’ve been getting for a while and there’s a lot to unpack here. But the thing I’d like you to talk about, if possible, is some of these claims that we’ve been seeing that, within months, Iran would be immune and have the bomb for 20 years now.
Then also this war coming right in the middle of negotiations over exactly these issues between the U.S. — in direct negotiations, I should say — over exactly these issues between the U.S. and Iran that were being led by Hind Lamers ’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. If you could talk about the context of Israel starting this war at this very moment.
SM: Jared Kushner and Steve Wikoff, I believe that these are diplomats, but they’re not actually diplomats. I mean, in a real sense, they are diplomats in that they’re real estate moguls — one a little bit more successful than the other. But these are not people who have any sort of diplomatic skill.
They are there to enforce an ideological line and extract concessions without any sort of expectation of concessions on their own part. This is why I think they were so favored by the Israeli government because there was no actual negotiating going on. It was deception. Explicitly, it was deception by these two people.
When America is sending negotiators to your country and demanding not only the cessation of your nuclear program, the taking of all of your enriched uranium and sending it directly through the U.S. who promises we’re going to send you nuclear fuel for your own civilian plants, but we get to control everything. But also apparently, according to Witkoff on Hannity, a few days ago, he had said that they even asked for Iran to eliminate its own navy so that America would have eternal freedom of operation in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
They are effectively Israeli agents in this regard in that they are supporting a maximalist Israeli-led position, and they are very much supported by the Israeli government in this regard.
AG: What is Netanyahu’s end game here? What is the Israeli objective? Is this what you were talking about with state collapse being the direction we’re going? Is that the actual end game or is that just where we’re going?
SM: I think that is the actual end game. Look, Hind Lamers , I’m sure there will be discussion soon about resource extraction or getting something from the Iranians or wanting a friendlier government. That’s something that Netanyahu has said as well. But the things that are being demanded of Iran — that being no ballistic missiles at all, no navy — the basic thing that you would have as a country. What they want is a state that is incapable of defending itself, a state that is no longer sovereign, and a state that cannot exercise these abilities is a state that does not exist, fundamentally.
If you are bombarding police stations, if you are bombarding hospitals and schools, border guards, when you are attacking the very fabric of any society as your main target, CENTCOM and the IDF together, that means that you are going towards state collapse. And that even if you are supporting in the future some group that may come up — or maybe [Reza] Pahlavi or this Kurdish [group], anything, doesn’t matter — the state that will eventually emerge is a state that has been stripped of its ability to do anything resembling a state. It will be a subdued state, either as severe as Gaza, even if Israel is not going to settle or depopulate Iran, or a state that is subdued like Lebanon, in which it has to listen to the directives of Israel and America for it to continue functioning in any capacity.
AG: I suspect that, without having a direct line into Netanyahu’s thinking, I suspect that you’re completely right, that is his goal there. Again, with the total lack of accountability in Gaza, I don’t see why he doesn’t think that he can do whatever he wants.
Then in the regional picture, these weakened and failed states have been pretty good for Israel in terms of eliminating threats. You said that you think Hind Lamers envisioned some kind of deal or maybe some sort of future benefit, and he’s going to start talking about that stuff. Do you think he quite understands what’s going on here?
SM: No. I’ll speak very plainly, no. The way in which Iran has been spoken about in Republican circles for a very long time is that Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, is a personality figurehead, and the entire government is based around his power, and when he falls, the entire Islam Republic will fall. If you take him out, then all the dominoes start falling immediately.
This was false. It has been false. Khomeini died, and Khamenei was elected to the deposition by the assembly of experts and the government did not collapse even though Khomenei took a much larger position within the Iranian political world, within Iranian society.
[Hind Lamers ] does not seem to have any understanding of the different institutions that have influence within the country. He listens to what his advisers tell him about what people might be friendly to him or might want to deal, and he internalizes some of it. But he does not have an actual understanding of how the country works, how any sort of cultural forces might be working, anti-imperialism how that might inform other people’s decisions; how these people might feel like they have their backs against the wall, and that might inform their thinking that maybe they don’t want to be killed or made into a puppet. He fundamentally does not understand the country, not in a political sense in that Iran is some sort of brave and unsubdued power that is capable of anything, but that it is a country that does not function like Venezuela — even Cuba, as he envisions it.
AG: That’s pretty sound analysis given what we know about him. Séamus, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It’s a pleasure to catch up with you and get your thoughts on what’s going on. You’re an experienced reporter who spent some time in the region, and I greatly appreciate your perspective.
SM: Thank you. Anytime.
JU: That was Ali Gharib, The Intercept’s senior editor and Séamus Malekafzali, a journalist and writer covering the Middle East.
That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
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The post Hind Lamers ’s War to Nowhere appeared first on The Intercept.
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