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Santa Cruz County staff are proposing to cut a $170,000 contract with the Arts Council and reductions to a contract with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History to address a funding gap in the county’s parks department in a tough budget year.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When the United States took the pitch against Australia last week, millions of soccer fans tuned in. Anyone who hadn’t watched a match since the last World Cup might have noticed something new: players stopping midway through each half to drink some water. 

Introduced in the name of player safety, these mandatory three-minute breaks are a surprise controversy that has shoved climate change into the spotlight. Water-gate, blared a headline in The Independent, a UK newspaper. The chief sportswriter at the Daily Mail called the breaks a “momentum killer” and a “money-grabbing disgrace.”

“I think you have ⁠to look at it in every game separately…We’re inundated with commercials.”

Fans were equally outraged. Spectators at the match between England and Croatia booed when the referee blew the whistle, and comments poured in on Reddit. “I’m booing from home,” read one. Another said, “FIFA ruined the beautiful game.”

FIFA, the sport’s governing body and organizer of the tournament, declined to comment and referred Grist to its announcement of the policy in December. “The use of hydration breaks is part of a focused attempt to ensure the best possible conditions for players,” the statement read. 

Before this World Cup, cooling breaks only occurred when the wet bulb temperature—essentially a measure of air temperature and humidity combined—reached 32 degrees C, or about 90 F. Now the rule applies to all games, regardless of temperature, humidity, or other factors. It even applies to matches played indoors with air conditioning.

The move came after criticism of a tournament in the United States last summer, when the organization representing players, FIFPRO, said extreme heat should have canceled matches. “It has never been more important,” the organization said in a press release before the World Cup, “to give space to scientific knowledge and find mitigation strategies that protect the health and wellbeing of our players.”

There is no doubt that rest and water can help protect players in a world where extreme heat is becoming more common and increasingly dangerous. But many fans, and even athletes, think FIFA has gone too far. “If it’s really hot, obviously it will be good to put them in. But I think you have ⁠to look at it in every game separately, in my opinion,” said Virgil van Dijk, captain of the Netherlands’ squad. One Reddit user complained, “We’re inundated with commercials.”

“I don’t think the health of the players is their primary concern.”

That’s been a frequent complaint, and it has led to speculation that FIFA implemented the breaks to boost the number of ads that are shown. Broadcasters aren’t required to go to full-screen commercials during hydration breaks—Telemundo and the BBC, for instance, don’t. FIFA also dictates that ads must start 20 seconds into the pause and end 30 seconds before play resumes. But that still creates 2 minutes and 10 seconds of extra ad time available per half, which can be extremely lucrative. The Wall Street Journal reports that a 30-second spot during early games sells for roughly $200,000 and rises to around $750,000 when the US national team plays. 

“They’ve essentially divided the game into quarters,” John Kosner, a former ESPN executive, told the Journal, “and made enormously valuable breaks.”

About 67 minutes into the opening game of the World Cup, the referee signaled for a mandatory hydration break. The American broadcaster, Fox, cut to commercials. But they ran longer than the respite, so players were left stalling and many viewers missed the restart entirely. Fox said it didn’t see the referee signal the start of the break because it came during a replay. FIFA doesn’t plan to punish the network. But the incident did little to quell people’s fears about commercialization—in part because the temperature at kickoff was a relatively balmy 74 degrees F.

FIFA has required the breaks in all matches as an effort to be fair across a tournament that sees teams playing in 16 stadiums and three countries. That argument, though, has again done little to ease criticism. “That doesn’t ring true to me,” said Chris Taylor, the head coach of the Vermont Green FC’s men’s team, explaining that every soccer game has different stoppages and different lengths. 

The Green are a climate-focused organization, so the dangers of extreme heat are particularly front of mind. Taylor sees hydration breaks as critical when the conditions warrant them, which they have numerous times during his decades-long career as a player and coach. Still, he questions FIFA’s motives at this World Cup. 

“I don’t think the health of the players is their primary concern,” he said. “This World Cup has felt that every angle has been monetized.”

In an AI and digital world, analog instant film and retro-style cameras continue to remain popular, fueled by a mix of both nostalgia and novelty.

Watsonville police officers arrested a 22-year-old woman Friday after they say she posted a threatening comment on Instagram directed at the Pajaro Valley Unified School District board.

For years, some of Alaska’s most vulnerable children have faced harsh conditions for months at a time in locked psychiatric facilities. A new law aims to change that.

The legislation, HB 36, follows a 2023 Mother Jones investigation that found that the state’s Office of Children’s Services routinely placed foster kids at North Star Behavioral Health, Alaska’s only private psychiatric hospital for minors, when there were no available foster homes. Despite North Star’s troubling track record of assaults, escapes, and the routine use of seclusion and chemical restraints, foster children have been admitted to the facility hundreds of times in recent years. Some stayed for months after they were ready for discharge.

HB 36, which passed into law Monday and goes into effect in 90 days, will require a court to review a foster child’s placement at a psychiatric hospital within seven calendar days to determine if that child meets criteria for hospitalization. (Until the legislation passed, a preliminary injunction required a hearing within 30 days, but the hearings were sometimes delayed.)

“When this started showing up publicly, that made folks pay attention to it.”

Anchorage Democratic Rep. Andrew Gray, who first introduced the legislation in 2024, has said that the bill was inspired by Mother Jones’ reporting, as well as his own experience as a foster parent. Current and former foster youth rallied around the legislation, with dozens traveling to Juneau over the past three years to meet with lawmakers and testify about their experiences.

(Universal Health Services, the psychiatric hospital chain that owns North Star, did not respond to questions for this story but has said in the past that it adheres to policies intended to keep patients safe.)

“It was basically all-out chaos at the hospital,” says Amanda Metivier, who directs the nonprofit Facing Foster Care in Alaska. “When this started showing up publicly,” she said, “that made folks pay attention to it.”

But for Metivier and other foster care reform advocates, the legislative win was bittersweet. Last week, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed HB 52, another bill that aimed to protect vulnerable youth at psychiatric hospitals and had broad bipartisan support. It would have required the state’s health department to conduct unannounced inspections of psychiatric hospitals, including interviewing at least half of the hospital’s minor patients, and to provide annual reports to the legislature on the use of seclusions and restraints, among other things. Rep. Maxine Dibert, the Fairbanks Democrat who introduced the legislation, has said the bill was inspired in part by the prevalence of Native children in psychiatric facilities. 

“Everyone knows we’re going to be inspected, and we all get instructions on what we need to do to check boxes for the inspection—not to actually fix the problems.”

In a letter to the house speaker, Dunleavy explained that he vetoed the bill because “psychiatric hospitals are already subject to strict regulatory and accreditation standards, and this bill adds duplicative inspection, reporting, and notification requirements in statute.”

Legislators attempted to override the veto on Friday but were four votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Rep. Zack Fields, an Anchorage Democrat, noted that even some North Star employees supported HB 52. Currently, the health department conducts announced inspections at the facility; in his floor speech speech, Fields anonymously quoted a North Star employee, who said that “everyone knows we’re going to be inspected, and we all get instructions on what we need to do to check boxes for the inspection—not to actually fix the problems.”

Notably, North Star hired a lobbyist, Dianne Blumer, who was paid $41,000 in each of the past two legislative sessions to advocate on “issues related to mental health, workforce, background checks and State of Alaska budget.”

The institution of vulnerable youth in Alaska is a well-documented, long-standing problem. A landmark Department of Justice report in 2022 found that the state was violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by unnecessarily institutionalizing children far away from their families, often for months on end. Two years later, a state supreme court ruling concluded that children in state custody “are at substantial risk of being hospitalized for longer than they need, or when they do not need to be hospitalized at all.”

Development of GIMP has picked up speed in recent years, but now its first public release is back as a Flatpak, allowing the 1996 version to run on modern x86-64 Linux distros, even under Wayland, without the nightmare of finding and installing its 30-year-old dependencies. If you are just looking for a quick and lightweight image editor – especially if you want modern features such as edge detection or generative fill – this is not the package for you. It's mainly for the software archaeologists. For example, 0.54 did have basic "deep etching" capabilities, where you can isolate an element from its background, but you'd have to use destructive techniques – i.e. there were no fripperies like layers or layer masks, where you could preserve the badness in case you made a mistake. But at the time of release, it made a pretty good stab at replicating a lot of the features you'd have in the 1996-era Photoshop. GIMP 0.54 did include a clone stamp, though which at the time was the height of sophistication in photo retouching. Active development of what we've seen called the "GNU IMP" has resumed in recent years. In 2024, we reported that after 21 years, version 3 was close and then, in May last year, that GIMP 3.0 was out. The team has not slackened since. GIMP 3.2 came out in March 2026, and as we write, the most recent version is GIMP 3.2.4 from mid-April. What is interesting about the new Flatpak, though, is that this isn't the modern GIMP: this is the original public release of GIMP, brought back to life. The GIMP homepage has a section called A Brief (and Ancient) History of GIMP. This describes how this original version used the Motif toolkit: "It had a dependency on Motif for its GUI toolkit, which made efficient distribution to a lot of users impossible. This restriction also alienated a lot of would-be plug-in development." Back then, Motif was the default graphical programming toolkit for developing GUI apps on X11. One of the problems, though, was that Motif was not FOSS. It was not released under a recognized FOSS license until 2012, shortly after the Common Desktop Environment was open-sourced, as this vulture reported at the time, back when he still had a lot more hair on his cranium. The next GIMP release was version 0.60, and that had a very significant change: "Peter [Mattis, co-creator] got really fed up with Motif. So he decided to write his own. He called them gtk and gdk, for the Gimp Tool Kit, and the Gimp Drawing Kit. Peter tells us now that they never intended for it to become a general-purpose toolkit – they just wanted something to use with GIMP, and it 'seemed like a good idea at the time.'" The Motif-based GIMP looks a little strange and clunky by modern standards. It reminds us slightly of WordPerfect 8 for Linux, which we wrote about in 2022 – 24 years after a very young Register told readers it was coming. Even though Motif is FOSS now, we don't expect anyone will start using it again for new projects. However, running GIMP 0.54 today gives an interesting glimpse into an alternate Unix universe. Because Motif wasn't FOSS, the year after GIMP appeared, the founders of the GNOME desktop chose GTK instead, noting the issues with KDE's Qt: "The KDE project – in its current form – has about 89,000 lines of code, on the other hand, the source code for the Qt library has about 91,000 lines. Qt also forces the programmer to write his code in C++ or Python. GTK can be used in C, Scheme, Python, C++, Objective-C and Perl." GTK has been developed alongside GNOME ever since. It's now up to GTK 4, which GNOME would prefer you not to theme, although the Linux Mint project is trying to support that anyway. Others are expressing discontent with its limitations in other ways: we recently covered the announcement of a new fork of GTK 2. There are other alternatives. GTK 1 is still around. Robin Rowe, the developer of the TrapC type-safe dialect of C, also maintains CinePaint, and to do so, he also maintains a fork of GTK 1, which you can find on GitLab. Other old GUI toolkits are also adapting to the new world of HiDPI and Wayland. In 2024, we reported on Tcl/Tk 9, 12 years after the last point release, and the following month, on a new release of FLTK after 13 years. ®

It’s one of the Supreme Court’s most palpable fears: Somewhere, somehow, a government official might one day be held personally accountable in some way for their official conduct—or, more accurately, their misconduct. A new case at the court will likely be the latest demonstration of the court’s pro-impunity mindset.

The justices agreed on Monday to hear Nielsen v. Watanabe in the upcoming term, which starts next October. The case will give the court an opportunity to further narrow what are known as Bivens claims, which allow for people to sue federal officials for damages under increasingly narrow circumstances.

The plaintiff in the case, Ketei Watanabe, was a prisoner at a federal prison in Honolulu in 2021. During that time, he was “brutally assaulted” in a “gang-related fight,” according to his brief for the justices. After the fight, he told multiple prison officials, including nurse Francis Nielsen, that he had suffered significant injuries and was in a great deal of pain.

Nielsen and other officials declined to obtain specialist treatment for Watanabe or to transport him to a local hospital for treatment. Instead, his filings said, Nielsen gave him over-the-counter pain medication. “Several months after the attack, Watanabe finally received an x-ray: It showed that he had a fractured coccyx and that bone chips had migrated to surrounding soft tissue areas,” his brief explained to the court.

Even after this diagnosis, Watanabe alleged, Nielsen and other officials refused to provide him with outside medical treatment and he did not obtain proper medical care until his release from prison three years after the initial fight. The Supreme Court has previously held that prisons have a duty to provide medical care for prisoners under the Eighth Amendment. Accordingly, Watanabe sued the officials in federal court for their alleged mistreatment.

What happens when a government official violates your constitutional rights in some way? If they are a state or local official, like a police officer in a major city, you might file a Section 1983 lawsuit in federal court for damages. That Reconstruction-era law allows people to sue state and local officials in federal court in their personal capacity for violating a federal constitutional right. (More on this later.)

If a federal official violates your constitutional rights, on the other hand, there are very few ways to hold that official personally accountable. Congress has not enacted a Section 1983-style law for suing federal officials, though there have occasionally been proposals to do so. Nor do other congressionally enacted remedies, like the Federal Tort Claims Act, allow people to pursue damages against specific officials who violate their constitutional rights.

Watanabe instead relied upon an implied cause of action rather than an explicitly created one. This approach became more common after the 1971 case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Most people just call the case Bivens for short. In Bivens, federal agents searched the home of a New York man without a warrant and arrested him on drug-related charges. Bivens sued the agents in question in federal court for violating his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unconstitutional searches and seizures.

The narcotics agents argued that they could not be sued in their personal capacity because Congress had not created a cause of action to do so. The Supreme Court, led by Justice William Brennan, sided with Bivens. While Brennan acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment “does not in so many words provide for its enforcement by an award of money damages for the consequences of its violation,” he concluded that Bivens could rely upon an implied cause of action instead to vindicate his violated rights.

Between 1971 and 1980, the Supreme Court applied that reasoning to two other contexts: gender-discrimination lawsuits by congressional staff under the Fifth Amendment and, as relevant for Watanabe’s case, prisoner lawsuits over improper medical care by prison officials under the Eighth Amendment. The latter is grounded in the 1980 case Carlson v. Green. In Carlson, prison officials effectively killed an asthmatic prisoner by holding him in conditions over doctors’ protests, denying him treatment for an asthma attack for roughly eight hours, and then giving him substandard care until he died.

Since Carlson, the Supreme Court’s increasingly conservative majority has gone out of its way to clip the wings of Bivens claims. Justices ranging from Warren Burger to Neil Gorsuch have argued that, under the Constitution’s separation of powers, it is Congress’s responsibility to create causes of actions to vindicate constitutional rights, not the judiciary’s. To that end, they have effectively refused to extend Bivens to new contexts while also—for reasons known only to the justices—declining to overturn Bivens altogether.

In the 2017 case Ziglar v. Abbasi, for example, the justices imposed a new test on Bivens claims that required lower courts to consider whether they arose in a “new Bivens context,” which is highly disfavored, or if any “special factors” should deter courts from extending Bivens to that new context. In practice, this gives lower courts a variety of tools to block new Bivens claims and narrow the handful of existing grounds for them.

In Watanabe’s case, Nielsen and his co-defendants argued that the Bivens claim against them should be rejected under the Supreme Court’s recent tests. Watanabe’s experience is a far cry from the sustained and deliberate misconduct that led to Carlson’s death in the 1980 case that expanded Bivens to the Eighth Amendment context, they claimed. They claimed that Carlson was merely a “wrongful-death case” rather than an overarching cause of action for insufficient medical care. Alternative dispute-resolution mechanisms, the defendants argued, should also count as a “special factor” against expanding Bivens to this supposedly new circumstance.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals saw things differently. “Watanabe alleged official action to the same degree of specificity as that alleged in Carlson—‘acts and omissions’ that were deliberately indifferent to Watanabe’s serious medical condition,” a three-judge panel concluded. “Such alleged official actions include the refusal to transport Watanabe to an outside hospital and the failure to provide him competent medical attention.” Accordingly, they sided with Watanabe.

Nielsen and the other prison officials have good reason to think that the justices will now side with them. If there is one word that sums up the Roberts Court’s approach to power, it is “impunity.” Over the last few decades, the justices have used qualified immunity to greatly weaken Section 1983, the statutory analogue to Bivens for claims against state and local officials in federal court, despite an avalanche of criticism for the judge-made doctrine by academics, lower-court judges, and even a few members of the high court itself.

Taken together, the justices’ position is that Bivens is unacceptable because it is Congress’s responsibility, not the courts’, to create federal causes of action. When Congress does create those claims, however, the justices’ position is that the courts must sharply narrow them through judicially-created doctrines like qualified immunity. Judicial power can only make it harder, not easier, for people to hold accountable those officials who violate their constitutional rights.

Even beyond that specific context, the justices have consistently made it harder to hold government officials accountable over the last 20 years. They have repeatedly struck down criminal convictions of state and local officials under federal anti-bribery laws. They have closed the doors of the federal courts to those disempowered by racial and partisan gerrymandering. They even ruled two years ago that presidents can commit crimes without fear of prosecution, in part because the Supreme Court had previously held that presidents cannot face civil lawsuits either.

The overall effect of the Supreme Court’s rulings is a government where officials can often inflict incredible harms on people without any meaningful recourse—in the courts, at the ballot box, or through later prosecutions. Nielsen’s argument, stripped down to its barest essentials, is that prisoners under his care should only be able to invoke the Eighth Amendment against him if they die. I am skeptical that the Bill of Rights’s drafters went to the trouble of ratifying ten amendments for such paltry protections.

In Bivens, Justice Brennan quoted Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison to explain the fundamental reasoning of his decision. “The very essence of civil liberty,” he had written, “certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury.” The court may ultimately side with Watanabe. After all, they have maintained recently that Bivens and Carlson are still good law. But it is hard to not doubt that they will move further away from Marshall’s simple wisdom—and from the basic protections of the Constitution itself.

“It was Game of Thrones,” says George Osborne. The former Tory chancellor of the exchequer was talking about the fateful referendum 10 years ago, on June 23, 2016, on whether the United Kingdom should remain in or leave the European Union. Or rather, he was talking about one man in particular, and Osborne’s comparison was just right. For Boris Johnson, the referendum—in fact, all of politics, even all of life itself—was a game, although also an opportunity. The one thing it wasn’t to Johnson was a serious matter with grave implications for his country.

Just how grave we can now see. Every warning about the malign consequences of leaving the EU has been justified. This is not the place for detailed economic analysis with statistics and tables, but just to take one example, and a detached transatlantic view, a paper published last year by American academic economists, chiefly at Stanford, compares the U.K.’s performance since the referendum with those of similar countries and reckons that the U.K. economy is 8 percent smaller than it would have been had we remained inside the EU.                                       

Our particular problems are a grossly inflated financial sector that produces a disproportionate amount of tax revenue but is particularly vulnerable to a crisis such as that of 2008, along with a larger postindustrial economy characterized by low education, low skills, low investment, low wages, low growth, and low productivity. These wouldn’t have been cured merely by remaining in the EU, but they have been patently aggravated by leaving.

One obvious and undeniable consequence of the referendum has been political chaos. In the 40 years from 1976 to 2016, there were in all six British prime ministers. In the decade since the referendum, there have also been six. And soon there will be a seventh, with Sir Keir Starmer having thrown in the towel on Monday. He will presumably be replaced by Andy Burnham in a kind of coup. It’s yet another in a series of coups, a Labour premier kicked out as a succession of Conservative premiers— Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss—were before him. This latest change cannot be justified by any serious belief in Burnham, whose political résumé is far from stellar—a member of Parliament for 15 years (when he loyally and repeatedly voted for Tony Blair’s criminal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq); a minister for a few years; an unsuccessful candidate for the Labour leadership not once but twice; and then mayor of Greater Manchester, where his achievements were genuine but quite modest, such as improving the bus and railway services. His only real selling proposition is that he’s not Starmer.

And all of this stems from that fateful day 10 years ago. The referendum campaign remains one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. To be clear, I say that as a Remainer, but not just because of that. One might sometimes feel like the American pol years ago who said, after losing an election, “The people have spoken, God damn them,” but one can accept defeat after a fair fight. But the Brexit referendum was anything but fair. It was a squalid exercise in demagoguery or plain mendacity.

A riveting two-part BBC program, Brexit: A Very British Civil War, is the latest in the long line of brilliant documentaries produced by Norma Percy, an American adornment of British broadcasting. Her oeuvre includes important additions to our knowledge of the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia and conflicts in the Middle East, but my favorite may be the Watergate series, made 20 years after Richard Nixon’s resignation, which is not least a comic masterpiece, as all the old burglars and bunglers revisit, and try to explain away, their malfeasance.

There is a certain similarity in the Brexit program, even if there’s nothing at all funny about the consequences. It all came about because of the internal politics of the Conservative Party. Once upon a time it was the Tories who were the Europhiles. One Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan, made the first attempt to join what was then the European Economic Community, or Common Market, in 1963, before he was blackballed by Charles de Gaulle. Another, Edward Heath, did join in 1973. And as is often forgotten, it was one more Tory, Margaret Thatcher (yes!), who ratified the Single European Act in 1986 establishing the single market.

After her fall, a group of Tory M.P.s began a guerrilla campaign against further European integration, and they harried John Major during his troubled prime ministership from 1990 to 1997. When David Cameron became Conservative leader of the opposition in 2005, he told his party to “stop banging on about Europe,” but his words went quite unheeded. Every poll showed, over many years, that “Europe” was one of the least important questions for most British voters, although immigration, which was sometimes connected to the EU, mattered much more. And yet for the same gang of Tory M.P.s, the EU was the one subject that dominated their lives, and they were relentless in pursuing it.

Following the 2010 election, in which the Tories won a plurality of parliamentary seats but not an outright majority, Cameron and Nick Clegg, leader of the ardently Europhile Liberal Democrats, formed what someone called the Brokeback Mountain coalition. But then, as another observer pointed out, that movie does not end happily, and so it proved.

As his next move, or misstep, Cameron tried to quiet those colleagues who were still banging on by promising a referendum on continued British membership. But he made the promise hoping that he wouldn’t have to keep it. If the coalition held after the next election, he could plead the Lib Dems’ support as a way out. In 2015, to general surprise, the Tories won an outright majority, and Cameron was impaled on his promise.

Even then, having called a referendum he didn’t want, Cameron still expected to win it—and he wasn’t alone. He tried to gain concessions from the EU, but the other European leaders, while not wanting the U.K. to depart, had almost had enough of endless British plaints and special concessions. In particular, German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to budge from the sacred principle of free movement of people within the EU. It was unfortunate, not to say disastrous, that this coincided with the bloody strife in Syria and the consequent huge flood of refugees trying to escape from that country and get into Europe.

All Cameron could do was fall back on saying that to leave would still be economically damaging for the country. Although plainly true, and amply justified by events since, that quite missed the point. “It’s the economy, stupid” must be one of the stupidest political slogans ever coined, but it underlay the Remain campaign’s great mistake. Dry economic arguments simply didn’t cut it.

Although I would never say that we Remainers were “the best” and that Leavers were “the worst,” the rest of Yeats’s line applies all too aptly: Remainers lacked all conviction while the Leavers were filled with passionate intensity. More than that, we Remainers forgot what Raymond Aron, the great French politicologue, said toward the end of his long life: It is a denial of the entire experience of the twentieth century to suppose that people will reject their passions in favor of their interests. 

And then there are the individual roles played 10 years ago. Whatever one thinks of Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-European United Kingdom Independence Party at the time, or his gruesome sidekicks who made us shudder again as we saw them on the recent BBC show, they had always opposed British membership of the EU, so they can’t be accused of cynical calculation. And they were fighting wholeheartedly to win the referendum.

Not so some others. Important parts were played by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, the two most prominent Tories who deserted Cameron and campaigned for Leave. Both of them had been journalists before they entered Parliament as Conservatives. In 2004, Gove wrote an essay in the Spectator, where he is now editor, on what being a Conservative meant to him, which included the enjoyable line, “Rudi Giuliani is a conservative, and a hero to conservatives like me.”

Ten years ago, Gove wrote another long and supposedly weighty essay making the case against membership of the EU, while Johnson wrote not one but two columns, one making the case for Leave and the other for Remain. He claims this was to clear his mind before coming to his decision, which really means that he was weighing up which suited his personal ambitions better. The very idea of “a principled belief held by Boris Johnson” is what logicians call a closed category, like “a square circle.”

Above all, what the BBC program confirmed was what many of us suspected at the time—that both Tories supported Leave while expecting to lose, but hoping that the campaign would strengthen their own positions within the Conservative Party. That was made clear by Johnson’s and Gove’s respective former wives, Marina Wheeler and Sarah Vine. The latter has already told us, as a supposedly amusing story, that on the morrow of the referendum, she said to her then spouse, “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” (a cinematic allusion: vide Michael Caine in The Italian Job).

And all this is what Osborne, the chancellor who was a leading Remainer, meant by Game of Thrones. It was all a struggle for advantage and position, quite unrelated to any serious consideration of the national interest, and when they won the referendum they didn’t know what to do next. 

Ten years on, and everyone is unhappy. Any election or referendum is potentially fraught and divisive, but that was peculiarly true of June 23, 2016, which divided the country in the harshest ways, between young and old, educated and “the poorly educated” whom Donald Trump says he loves. If the vote had been confined to citizens over 60, or those who had left school without qualifications, Leave would have won with a much larger majority; if to those under 30 or to university graduates, then it would have been an easy victory for Remain.

By what ought to be a contradiction—but then whenever has political life followed a logical course?—those who gave us Brexit with its lamentable consequences and ought to be execrated have surged ahead. That specifically means Reform UK, the latest iteration in a line of Europhobic parties led by Nigel Farage, which was recently polling around 25 percent, while the possibility of Farage becoming prime minister was seriously discussed. But the special election in Makerfield that sent Andy Burham back into Parliament saw the Reform vote collapse, and that bubble might have burst at last.

Even now the winners of the referendum are as baffled as the losers. A frankly risible ad in the right-wing Daily Telegraph has just announced a “Big Debate” to be held in London on June 29, with a panel of well-known Brexiteers, Daniel Hannan, Allister Heath, and Allison Pearson, on the question “How to Make Brexit a Success”—after 10 years! This is in itself an acknowledgment that it has been a failure so far, which is what most people now think, however they voted then. For some years past, a consistent and substantial majority in polls say that they regret Brexit, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Maybe we shall see the same panel discussing how to make Brexit a success in another 10 years’ time. Until then, amid economic decay and violent rioting in the streets, I keep thinking of the words “Referendums are the device of dictators and demagogues.” Who said that? Why, it was Margaret Thatcher, 50 years ago, and she never spoke a truer word.

Working-class Americans are worried that AI will eliminate jobs, including their own, and they want the government to step in with a massive retraining program for affected workers—funded in part by a tax on large corporations that replace workers with AI.

That’s one of several key takeaways from a new poll commissioned by Working Families Power, an organizing, advocacy, and research group that partners with the Working Families Party. The survey, released exclusively to The New Republic, also shows that people are suspicious of data centers, particularly their impact on energy costs, and they support temporary limits or even moratoriums on new centers. That isn’t so surprising given the protests against data centers around the country, but it’s yet another reminder of the huge opportunity for the Democrats in the rising populist rage against Big Tech.

So far, they’re largely missing it.

Working Families Power partnered with the Justice Research Fund to contact 2,511 working-class registered voters, oversampling in swing districts. To identify those voters, they used a rigorous definition of working-class that includes family income, education level, type of work, homeownership status, and whether someone has financial security to fall back on if they lose their job. It’s a far more exacting definition of working-class than simply sorting out voters without a college education, as many surveys and analyses do, and one that identifies voters who are suffering most from the affordability crisis.

The poll shows that 73 percent are “concerned” that AI will lead to job losses in the United States, while 62 percent worry it could “affect their own job, household income, or jobs of people close to them”; 58 percent think it will hurt working-class families overall. Among the jobs that a majority said AI would hurt are truck drivers; retail and service workers; office and administrative workers; and writers, designers, and other creative workers.

Huge majorities, 80 percent and more, want government support for retraining and education programs for those who lose jobs due to AI. They want regulations requiring corporations to give notice before replacing jobs with AI, and to be taxed to contribute to these programs. They also want to share in any benefits from AI through increased pay, shorter workweeks, and stronger benefits. Seventy-three percent agreed with this statement: “AI should work for working people, not just make billionaires richer while everyone else worries about losing their job.”

“What we’re seeing from results like this is that AI might be the biggest political realignment issue of our lifetime,” said Ravi Mangla, a spokesperson for Working Families Power and the Working Families Party. “It’s rare that you see numbers where there is 70, 80 percent agreement in a polarized country like this, and for the vast majority of people to agree that the government needs to step in and do something about AI job loss, that AI companies need to be paying for infrastructure and energy costs, and that there needs to be mass retraining, as well as benefits for workers who are laid off because of AI. That’s a level of agreement across politics that we don’t really see on anything.”

Mangla said Working Families Power doesn’t see enough candidates and officials addressing these widely held concerns. “[They] are not taking what is a political layup,” he said. “Neither party, right now, is rising to the occasion.”

Voters’ concerns extend to data centers. They’re worried that their growth would lead to increased utility costs, and 60 percent want a pause on construction to study their impacts. At the moment, only Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have released a comprehensive plan to address these concerns. The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s New Affordability Agenda also addresses issues like AI-driven surveillance pricing, and its chair, Texas Representative Greg Casar, supports taxing AI companies to pay for a jobs program. But the anger at Big Tech over AI is more expansive, and largely untapped on the campaign trail.

Professor Alondra Nelson, the founder and director of the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, said these results confirm what many in her field have been arguing for a long time. “The costs of AI transformation should not be passed on to the public while profits flow exclusively to shareholders and executives. That’s not innovation—that’s extraction,” she said in an email.

Nelson said we need transparency first, because we’re still not sure how AI is affecting business and hiring practices. She said she’s encouraged by new tax policy ideas from the Center for Shared AI Prosperity, which include new taxes on wealthy people whose fortunes derive substantially from AI industries and requiring more contributions from AI firms to help affected workers.

The federal government is not pursuing such protections, and in fact the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress have tried to block states from regulating AI at all. “State legislatures are moving faster than Congress on some of these questions,” Nelson said. “That experimentation matters—which is precisely why we should resist any federal preemption of state-level AI regulation. Ultimately, though, we need federal standards establishing a floor of protection for working families, regardless of zip code.”

That’s especially true because the potential benefits of AI remain unclear, as tech evangelists simultaneously promise unimaginable abundance and warn of potential doom. “Even the tech CEOs and AI CEOs can’t tell you what’s going to happen,” Mangla said. “They will say this might destroy civilization or humanity. They’ll say outright that this will cause massive job loss. They are actually conceding to the massive risks and potential faults of this technology, and yet they’re resistant to commonsense policies that will actually protect people and that will allow people to continue to live their lives and earn a decent wage.”

A lot of the potential solutions, such as regulating companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, taxing them more, and providing a safety net for workers, are traditional progressive asks. But Mangla said the polled voters don’t see these as partisan solutions—just necessary ones. Working-class Americans don’t want to halt AI innovation, as the the poll shows, but they don’t want it to come solely at their expense.

The majority of Britons still believe Big Tech should be contributing more to the public purse, new research suggests. Polling by the Fair Tax Foundation, shared with The Register, finds that 67 percent of respondents believe the UK should ensure large technology companies such as Meta, Google, Apple, and Amazon pay more in Digital Services Tax (DST) to increase their overall tax contribution. The same proportion of Brits said the government should aim to become a world leader in regulating cryptocurrencies and other digital assets to help prevent tax avoidance and evasion. The findings arrive as the future of the UK's Digital Services Tax continues to attract scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic. Introduced in 2020, the levy was designed to extract more money from online giants that generate substantial revenues from UK users while often reporting profits elsewhere. Last year alone, the tax raised around £800 million for the Treasury. Not everyone has been thrilled by the arrangement. President Donald Trump threatened in April to impose a "big tariff" on British imports if the government refused to drop the Digital Services Tax, arguing it unfairly targets US tech giants. The British public, however, appear less concerned, and the polling suggests support extends well beyond the digital tax itself. Three-quarters of respondents said they would prefer to work for a company that can demonstrate it pays its fair share of tax, while 74 percent said they would rather spend money with such a business. More than seven in ten backed requiring fair tax practices from companies bidding for public sector contracts, while 82 percent supported similar requirements for firms receiving government bailout funds. The research forms part of the Fair Tax Foundation's annual survey of public attitudes toward corporate tax conduct, released during Fair Tax Week. Paul Monaghan, chief executive of the organization, said the findings showed that tax fairness remains one of the public's biggest concerns regarding corporate behavior and argued that politicians have a clear mandate to push for greater transparency. "The UK public care about many issues, but 'tax justice' is consistently at the top of their concerns when it comes to corporate conduct," he said. "The days of large multinationals such as Amazon refusing to disclose what their income, profit, and corporate taxes are in the UK need to end. As does the almost complete absence of tax transparency we see from the vast majority of micro-enterprises – which is helping to fuel fraud across the country." That may prove easier said than done. Governments have spent years trying to agree on an international framework for taxing multinational corporations, with varying degrees of success and enthusiasm. Until then, the UK's stopgap solution appears to retain something increasingly rare in modern politics: broad public support. For all the complaints from Big Tech and the US government, most Britons seem perfectly content for HMRC to keep rattling the collection tin outside Silicon Valley's front door. ®

Editor’s note: A Lookout View is the opinion of our Community Voices opinion section, written by Community Voices Editor Jody K. Biehl and Lookout founder Ken Doctor. Our goal is to connect the dots we see in the news and offer a bigger-picture view — all intended to see Santa Cruz County meet the challenges of the day and to shine a light on issues we believe must be on the public agenda. These views are distinct and independent from the work of our newsroom and its reporting.

There is something profoundly wrong happening on Coral Street in Santa Cruz.

Coral Street has been a city problem for years. But the unsanitary conditions have worsened since April 1, when nonprofit Housing Matters stopped offering day services, including public toilets and showers used by 50 to 100 (possibly more) unhoused people regularly. 

When bathrooms disappear, people still need bathrooms.

Residents and service providers who work around Coral Street and the Tannery describe increasing odors of urine and feces. Every Thursday, city sanitation crews and police officers now move through the area to clean up conditions that everyone knew would follow the loss of basic facilities.

Staff at the Homeless Persons Health Project, which operates a clinic near Coral Street, have warned that the consequences extend far beyond inconvenience. Lack of sanitation drives infections, worsens chronic conditions and increases the risk of communicable disease. One case of giardia has already surfaced. If a more contagious gastrointestinal illness like shigella spreads through the unhoused population, it will not stay contained there.

Public health is exactly that: public.

To be fair, the City of Santa Cruz did respond, although many city leaders point out that providing services is a county responsibility. The city installed four portable restrooms and handwashing stations at three locations: two at Depot Park, one at the downtown library and one at parking Lot 32 in Midtown on Soquel Avenue. 

The efforts deserve recognition. But they do not solve the problem.

The people most affected by the closure remain concentrated around Coral Street, while the replacement facilities sit 1 to 4 miles away. 

A mile or two might not sound like much to people who have transportation, stability or housing. But if you have to carry everything you own, are dealing with illness or disability or addiction or simply trying to survive day to day, it is a great distance. “It might as well be in San Francisco,” one service provider told Lookout. 

People do not walk miles every time they need a bathroom. The question is not whether toilets exist somewhere in Santa Cruz. The question is whether they exist where people actually need them.

Right now, they do not.

And there are still no showers.

City and county officials insist they are “working on it” and have identified possible locations on the outskirts of downtown. Again, we applaud these efforts. We just believe they should have happened faster.  

The contrast to the COVID-19 response is hard to miss. During the pandemic, local governments moved quickly to install handwashing stations and sanitation facilities on Coral Street because they understood that disease prevention protects everyone. Today, many of those same agencies are tolerating the disappearance of sanitation infrastructure without a comparable sense of urgency.

County Public Health Officer Lisa Hernandez has told us she is not part of these ongoing discussions. Why not? Where is the Health Services Agency? Where is the county’s health equity officer? Where are the elected officials who routinely speak about dignity, compassion and public health when discussing homelessness?

The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors has acknowledged the problem. Its primary response has been that it cannot dictate Housing Matters’ decisions.

That is true.

But county leaders can still act. They can identify locations. They can put real funding on the table, despite a budget deficit. They can work with the city instead of waiting for a solution to materialize. Some of that collaboration happens in monthly meetings, but the public does not see results. And the whole process is just too slow.

The public deserves to know what is happening and how much it would cost to provide permanent restroom and shower facilities. 

Yes, Housing Matters’ decision, announced in October 2025, came as a surprise to many. Its reasoning makes sense: As it shifts its focus toward permanent supportive housing, it no longer wants to serve those working to change their lives and those still living on the streets. But could it not have participated in a better workaround?  

The City of Santa Cruz spends roughly $11 million annually on homelessness-related programs and services. Can it direct some of that to bathrooms?

Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker told Lookout that the portable toilets and handwashing units cost about $8,000 per month to operate ($96,000 per year), funded through the city’s general fund, while city officials pursue a longer-term solution. Mayor Fred Keeley said he is open to adding toilets and showers to the budget, but that other services would need to be cut. 

That is a good start – and the public should be aware of those trade-offs.

Let’s be clear: The problem does not affect only unhoused people.

Businesses, residents, healthcare providers, sanitation workers — everyone who shares public space absorbs the impact when basic sanitation disappears.

Community groups have stepped up to help. Temple Beth El and the Belonging Collaborative have raised $2,000 for hygiene support. Service providers are trying to organize mobile showers.

Their efforts matter.

But access to bathrooms and showers should not depend on community volunteers.

It is a fundamental public health responsibility.

The city believes it responded. Technically, it has. But if people still cannot realistically reach the replacement facilities, then the problem has not been solved. 

Mail services, another offering Housing Matters ended on April 1, also remain largely unreplaced. The county’s Human Services Department has started holding government-related mail for one year, as it is required to do by law. But beyond that, people without housing cannot get mail unless they can afford a post office box. 

That makes something as basic as maintaining a mailing address a privilege — a dividing line between people who can stay connected to jobs, benefits and services and those who cannot.

Bathrooms. Showers. A mailing address.

None of these are complicated services. Yet almost three months after Housing Matters ended them, local officials still do not have adequate replacements in place.

The city and county can continue debating responsibility. Or they can recognize what should be obvious: When basic services disappear, the consequences do not stay confined to Coral Street.

The public deserves a clear plan, a timeline and a commitment to move faster. Local leaders knew this problem was coming. Now they need to solve it.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post A Lookout View: Coral Street toilet shortage a stark contrast to local pandemic response – why doesn’t public health matter more? appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump is growing angrier over the strange saga involving his plan to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is beset with an algae problem and with peeling paint. In a series of posts, he’s raged at a journalist for reporting on it, fulminated that vandalism is the real problem, and hailed a series of arrests that have now taken place there, which are really bizarre and raise lots of unanswered questions.

This whole sorry tale is taking on much broader significance than you might expect. It’s displaying many of the pathologies of this whole presidency and this broader moment in America—from the megalomania to the incompetence, to the corruption, to the sheer tinpot banana republic vibe that’s settled on our nation’s capital. Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, has a good new piece digging into the subtext of this saga, so we’re working through all of it with him today. Mike, good to have you back on.

Michael Tomasky: Nice to be with you, Greg. Thanks.

Sargent: So before we get to the discussion of the arrests, can you quickly sum up one point for us? You argue in your piece that the Reflecting Pool saga is a real presidential scandal. I wondered if you could just recap the story up until the arrests—how we kind of went from having the Reflecting Pool as we’ve always known it to having one full of algae and peeling paint.

Tomasky: Sure. Well, I gather that it did need work, drainage work, and that part of it is legitimate. And something was done under Obama that did cost a lot more, $35 million, and it didn’t fix the problem the way it was supposed to. So that may be part of Trump’s motivation. But his real motivation is his vanity and getting something, putting his stamp on Washington in advance of the America 250 celebrations, but just in general, for time immemorial.

So he puts his name on the Kennedy Center, he puts his name on the Institute for Peace, and of course tearing down the East Wing and putting up that ballroom without any permits, without any of the normal processes that are supposed to come into play when you do something like that to a landmark historic building. And the arch in front of the Arlington Cemetery.

So here we are. I don’t know why it had to be blue. Nobody really understands quite why it had to be blue. These people did a swimming pool for him in Virginia that was blue and he liked it, so it suddenly needed to be blue. It’s been green for a century. And now it’s become this disaster with the no-bid contracts and the massive cost overrun. He started out talking about $1.7, $1.8 million. It’s now nudging up against $15 million.

And he said it was going to take a week and now—where is it?—six weeks, two months, and it’s going to go on and on.

Sargent: And where did the algae come from? Can you just kind of take us up to the present? And I feel like that’s such a richly symbolic thing. He’s the “Drain the Swamp” president. He was talking about making this thing crystal clear, right? Making the water crystal clear, transparent, as it were. And he’s utterly failed at that.

Now, I don’t know to what degree that’s his fault. Nature’s a complex thing, in fairness to Donald Trump. But it just seems perfectly symbolic in a way that it’s now filled with this infestation.

Tomasky: Totally symbolic. And am I a marine horticulturalist? No, I am not. But I know this much just from reading about this. Until those Obama renovations, the source of the water for the Reflecting Pool, which is 18 inches deep around the edges and as deep as 30 inches in the middle, was Washington, D.C.’s drinking water supply. Then it changed, so that the source of water was the tidal basin.

The tidal basin is the smallish body of water—it’s about the size of a lake, for people who don’t know Washington—and it’s where the Jefferson Memorial sits and where the cherry blossom trees surround it. So the water comes from the tidal basin. So there’s algae. There’s algae in water that comes from nature. Go figure.

Sargent: OK, so Trump is getting angrier about the situation. In the last few days, he’s tweeted about the arrests we’ve seen at the Reflecting Pool. As of Saturday night, we’ve seen five people arrested and charged with vandalism. A number of others issued citations, according to the reporting.

But what’s going on here is really murky, as it were. One of those detained is saying he reached into the pool to feel a piece of the liner that had become detached from the pool bottom. Another person was detained after taking a piece of paint out of the water.

Mike, these don’t seem like Antifa vandals to me. Do we know anything more than this? And what does your gut tell you about what’s really going on with these arrests?

Tomasky: In the case of the first gentleman, that’s a guy named David Hearn. I wrote about his saga in my piece today. And this got quite a lot of coverage over the weekend. He was out on a bike ride. He’s a former U.S. Olympic athlete—a canoeist, a canoe racer. And he was out on a long bike ride. I saw it described variously as 50 miles, 64 miles.

I ride my bike sometimes on Saturdays too. Fifteen is a good Saturday for me, a really good Saturday. So this guy—and he’s 67 years old—so he’s in some kind of shape. And he was an Olympic athlete. I doubt he’s stealing pieces.

He said this piece of the rubberized liner was partially detached and he reached into the Reflecting Pool just to see how it felt. And the next thing he knew, he said, he was in handcuffs.

He also had the misfortune of this right-wing journalist named Emily Miller, who’s gone back and forth between One America News and The Washington Times and local Fox over the years, happened to be there, I guess, and videotaped him and maybe showed it to park police or something like that. I don’t know. It’s all, as you say, very opaque.

And why these people are being arrested—it’s just not clear yet. As far as I know, talking on Monday afternoon, the park police and the Department of the Interior haven’t commented on these arrests.

Sargent: Amazing. And CBS reports that one of the people arrested was the same individual who Trump accused in one of his tweets of using a knife to carve a 250-foot gash into the facade. Mike, 250 feet is nearly the length of a football field. And the choice of the 250 number sure sounds suspiciously like an echo of the 250th anniversary that this Reflecting Pool is supposed to be a part of. So it sort of seems like maybe that number was rattling around in Trump’s head or something.

Now, again, maybe someone did do this. I can’t seem to find evidence of it. But does it seem likely to you that someone would try to carve something that long into the facade—like a 250-foot-long line?

Tomasky: No, it doesn’t seem likely, but you never know. I could believe that there are people who aren’t fans of Trump out there who might vandalize this thing because it’s become such a symbol to him. I can believe that. But if that’s true, tell us. Show us the evidence. Give us the names and tell us what they did.

I don’t support people damaging federal government property, especially historic landmarks like that. I’m sure you don’t either. I’m sure nobody listening to us does. If somebody did that, arrest them, charge them, prosecute them, sic Jeanine Pirro on them. But show us the evidence first.

And so when Trump tweets over the weekend about vandals, I’m sorry—the man has been known to make things up from time to time. And so we’re going to regard that skeptically until there’s evidence.

Sargent: So Trump is getting angrier about the situation in a series of tweets. On Friday, he tweeted that, “Lightweight ABC reporter Jonathan Karl was seen sticking his hand into the pool and trying to rip the rubber off of the surface.” Jonathan Karl had merely been reporting on this whole fiasco.

Trump also raged that the “radical left lunatics, most likely Dumocrats who have spent their lives trying to ruin this country”—he basically said they were more or less responsible for this thing in some sense.

And then on Saturday, he tweeted that “disgraceful vandalism” has marred the project, calling this an affront to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, while characterizing his handling of the whole thing as impeccably perfect.

One more tweet—on Monday, he said the only project of his that’s been vandalized is the Reflecting Pool. And then he talked about a “300 foot long gash” carved by vandals. So it’s apparently gotten 50 feet longer.

Mike, Trump really seems to be spiraling downwards with this stuff. What do you make of it?

Tomasky: He really is. And it’s just such a perfect Trumpy obsession. It’s a minor thing that to him is a very major thing because it’s about his self-image, his self-regard, his monstrous yet very fragile ego. All these things that he puts on display before us, the American people, constantly every day—about how he’s going to destroy a civilization, about how ICE is doing a magnificent job, about how all his enemies belong in jail, about the personal vendettas that he’s pursuing through the office of the presidency, which are totally inappropriate and completely impeachable offenses.

All of these things are just about his ego, again, which is huge, as we all know. But what’s important here is the fragility of it. And that’s why he gets so defensive. And that’s how a gash grows from 250 feet to 300 feet. The Reflecting Pool, I believe, is about 600 feet long. So if he ever posts that it was a 700-foot gash, then we’ll know that couldn’t possibly happen—unless maybe the person went up and back. This is just his psychodrama that is bananas.

It’s the same thing at work when we watch those Cabinet meetings and they go around the Cabinet table and they all have to offer praise of him, each more effusive than the last, each saying, no, you deserve two Nobel Prizes. No, three Nobel Prizes. Four Nobel Prizes and two Pulitzers, sir.

It’s just a preposterous situation to be in in a democratic country. And this is the point I’d like to make. This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships. It’s not supposed to happen in a democratic country, in a democratic republic. We’re not supposed to have this kind of a leader who is so fragile and breakable.

We’re supposed to have processes that are democratic, that give people input into what’s going to happen with the eastern side of the White House, that give people input into the renaming of a venerated cultural institution that’s been here in the nation’s capital for 60 years.

The people are supposed to have input into these things. And they’re supposed to go through processes. And yes, experts, the much-reviled experts, are supposed to be able to weigh in on this stuff.

But Trump, of course, knows better than everybody. And that’s just not a small-d democratic impulse or way to go about doing things.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think your piece got at that really well, the larger importance of this whole thing. And I just want to flag for people—what was really telling to me was the way Trump talked about the project. I forget at which event it was, but he was essentially talking about the contractors on the project in almost precisely the same tone and with the same posture that he would about one of his own real estate projects.

And I think that’s the essence of this, which is that Donald Trump doesn’t get on some very basic level that this stuff is not his. This is not an imperial capital. It is the capital of a republic. And as a result, he doesn’t own this stuff. He is a steward of it, a temporary steward. And as you say, there are processes. But in a way, this whole story shows somebody trying to dispense with that larger idea.

Tomasky: Right. He wants to be the czar. That’s probably the best historical analogy that we can come up with. I went to St. Petersburg once in June. And it was like 50 degrees there anyway. And I walked around the Hermitage, which of course is beautiful and magnificent, the art and all that stuff. But I also walked around that place thinking—I asked my tour guide, I said, how many people lived here? And she said, six. The czar and his family.

And it was as gilt-edged in gold as the Oval Office now is. But that’s how Trump thinks of himself. And that’s what he wants to be. He wants to be a czar. And that’s what all these things that he’s trying to do to Washington prove. And it’s really very, very distasteful.

And by the way, I only mentioned this very quickly and you just alluded to it, but we should spend a little bit more time dwelling on the no-bid aspect of these contracts. That’s sewer corruption. That’s just basic corruption 101. You can’t do that. You can’t let out no-bid contracts.

One of them was, ironically, to a place called Greenwater, which is really funny. That’s the Gafaro guy from Ohio. Then the other one was the swimming pool people from Virginia who did the pool at his golf club in Virginia. But these were both no-bid contracts.

And one of the two, I think the first one—David Fahrenthold of The New York Times reported, he’s so good at this sort of thing—is charging a 20 percent profit margin into their contract when the normal profit margins on this kind of work for the federal government are six to 12 percent. But they just padded it, and the guy’s a donor of Trump’s, a donor and a neighbor in Palm Beach, and he just padded it up to 20 percent and got the contract without any competitive bidding.

That alone is an impeachable offense right there. Boom. There’s just no question about it. I don’t know, what are they going to—if the Democrats take the House, what are they going to impeach him on? I mean, there’s 46 possibilities.

Sargent: Right. And your piece really made the point very well that if this were just an ordinary moment, that would be a huge scandal. But since we’re in this really extraordinary moment, it isn’t.

I want to close on this thought, which kind of pulls all this together, I hope. One of the consistent things in the reporting here has been that many people are just stopping by the Reflecting Pool to look at the algae and the peeling paint, to almost marvel at the spectacle of it. And you did that too, right? You stopped by and marveled at the spectacle of it.

And I think for a lot of people, what they’re actually marveling at is what Trump has done to our country—how all this didn’t have to happen, how it’s all just rooted in megalomania and incompetence and corruption and derangement.

I strongly suspect that this story, the Reflecting Pool, just like the ballroom, has immense symbolic importance to ordinary people in a way that we still haven’t gotten our heads around. And I just wanted you to talk a little bit about that.

Tomasky: The day I rode my bike down there, I took a couple photographs of it just for my own amusement. I posted one on Facebook and I said, well, this looks pretty green to me—something kind of offhanded.

I post political-ish things on my Facebook feed from time to time. And it’s interesting because it’s not my New Republic readership. This is old high school friends, many of whom are MAGA, many of whom have politics basically like mine. So it’s a mix and I get to see a mix.

Usually when I post a political kind of thing on Facebook, 50 people either give it a like or have some kind of comment. Seventy, 80 people. This one—the last time I looked—870 responses.

Sargent: I really do think it has that sort of importance for people. It really represents this presidency and what’s happening to this country under this presidency, don’t you think?

Tomasky: Yeah, it really does. And it’s just such an emotionally potent symbol for people. Most people have been to Washington when they were in eighth grade, or later they brought their families here. And you’re sitting there right in the shadow of the beautiful, tasteful, grand but not opulent or self-regarding memorial to our greatest president—and I mean Lincoln. The Washington Monument is up the way, but it’s a little farther away.

Yeah, to our greatest president and to a very humble man, and to a man who probably, if he could come back, would say, you built that for me? Why? Donald Trump will want something three times that size. As indeed the arch—it’s not quite three times, but the Lincoln Memorial is about 130 feet high at its peak and this arch is twice that.

So yeah, this is really important. And it’s why—and to conclude on a point that you often make in your writing and podcasting—this is why Democrats shouldn’t just let this one slide and just talk about affordability or whatever. No, you can walk and chew gum, Democrats. Talk about this stuff. People care.

Sargent: People really care about it. And just to underscore the point one last time, I really wonder whether this sort of thing—the tearing down of the East Wing of the White House, the piles of rubble that are on everybody’s phones all across the country, the kind of viral nature of this imagery, the viral nature of the imagery of the algae in the Reflecting Pool—I do wonder whether people are sort of in some deep sense reconsidering republican, small-r republican governance and saying to themselves, that thing was pretty cool that we’ve lost.

Do you think that’s maybe going on? Do you think that’s what’s happening?

Tomasky: I hope so. I don’t know, but I hope so. Twenty-five percent of the country is always going to support him no matter what, maybe 30, maybe a little more. But I’d like to think that the people whose politics aren’t like yours and mine, but people who aren’t terribly political, have enough of a civic impulse running through them that this bothers them. And that even if they can’t quite exactly articulate to themselves why, they know something about this isn’t right—this isn’t how stuff’s supposed to go down in the United States of America. I think they do. Enough of them anyway.

Sargent: Really well said, Michael Tomasky. It was a pleasure having you on. Folks, if you want to read what Mike wrote about this—and you should—the piece is up at NewRepublic.com. It’s called “Vandalism at the Reflecting Pool? Yes, It Was Committed by Donald Trump.” Well said, Mike. Thanks for coming on.

Tomasky: Enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Siting datacenters either on the water or underwater is an idea that just won't sink, and there is increasing interest in it, despite the obvious fact that water and IT equipment are a potentially disastrous combination. The attraction of having a data facility in or on the water is that it offers virtually limitless natural cooling, which is an increasingly vital consideration for operators deploying hot-running systems filled with GPUs for AI processing. But set against that are potential issues with access for maintenance, in the case of underwater facilities, and gaining access to enough power to keep all that IT infrastructure chugging along. The most recent announcement is that an underwater facility off the coast of China has now commenced operations, powered by a nearby offshore wind farm. First disclosed last October, this project by Beijing-based Highlander Digital Technology has a capacity of 24 megawatts, about half the average size of a US datacenter, but is designed to run on more than 95 percent green electricity. It is expected to serve clients such as China Telecom and a state-owned AI computing company, and is said to be part of a push by the Chinese government for operators to lower their carbon footprint. But long before China got in on the act, there was Microsoft and its Project Natick. This involved a prototype lowered into the water off the coast of California in August 2015 to test out the concept, before Phase II of the trial saw a larger unit tested out near Scotland in 2018. When this latter unit, fitted with 12 racks containing 864 servers, was hauled up from the seabed in 2020, Microsoft reported that the systems in it had experienced a failure rate one-eighth that of a land-based control cluster. Yet despite declaring the experiment a success, Microsoft chose not to proceed any further with submerged server farms, and the company never fully explained why. It seems likely that the issues around accessing the IT kit for maintenance or upgrades, not to mention supplying power to an underwater enclosure, all add up to make land-based facilities just more convenient. Despite this, some companies, such as Subsea Cloud, have persevered with the idea. However, another approach that seems to be gaining more traction is the floating datacenter, typically on a barge tethered close to shore or even on board a ship. Google toyed with the concept back in 2013 after patenting a design for a floating facility back in 2008, but changed its mind, reportedly after finding the time and cost of meeting federal maritime safety regulations too burdensome. Another US company, Nautilus Data Technologies, made bit barges a reality with one facility in Marseille, France, and another in Stockton, California, before shifting to focus on the EcoCore line of AI infrastructure. However, the Stockton facility is still operational, according to Nautilus, offering 6.5 MW of IT load capacity. In Japan, shipping biz Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) started exploring the possibility of fitting out a ship as a floating data hall last year. This year, the company signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Hitachi for the development of such a facility from a second-hand vessel, with a view to commence operations in 2027. When first floated, MOL said it expected to use a 120-meter ship to support an IT capacity of 20 to 73 MW, but the plans with Hitachi could involve a larger vessel. The ship's onboard systems, including air conditioning, water intake, and power generation, would be used to service the IT infrastructure. Korean behemoth Samsung is also looking to get in on this action, signing an MoU with Greece-based shipowner Capital Clean Energy Carriers and Lloyd's Register earlier this month to build floating server farms from scratch using existing shipbuilding methods. Samsung said that such facilities can have advantages over existing datacenters because they can address land scarcity, lower cooling costs, and reduce carbon emissions. But perhaps the wildest floating bit barn concept comes from Panthalassa, a startup based in Portland, Oregon, which is developing wave-powered floating structures designed to operate in the deep ocean. The firm, backed by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, has designed the units to operate autonomously, connected to the outside world via SpaceX's Starlink satellite network, according to reports. But as New Scientist magazine points out, saltwater and wave action are very effective at causing trouble for machinery, and Panthalassa didn't respond to its questions about what happens when something goes wrong in the middle of the ocean, or about relying on a satellite link to get data in and out. Other floating datacenter projects aim to sidestep the permitting hurdles and power constraints faced by land-based facilities, but it seems that scale is likely to be the enemy of such waterborne projects. The hyperscaler mob is looking to build massive multi-gigawatt facilities such as Meta's planned Hyperion facility, and stuffing servers onto barges or ships is unlikely to match facilities of this size or their economies of scale. Where they will find a home is in places such as Singapore, which is severely land-constrained. Earlier this year, two firms even proposed floating hydrogen power plants to serve shore-based datacenters. ®

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At first glance, the preschool classroom in Paso Robles looks like any other: young students sing “Wheels on the Bus,” listen to stories and learn colors and shapes through play. 

But unlike most preschool classrooms, children with disabilities in this Marie Bauer Early Education Center classroom are learning alongside their peers who do not require special education services. This is unusual in California, where only 1 in 3 students with disabilities receive their preschool education in a classroom with their peers, according to an EdSource analysis of 2024-25 federal education data.

Parents, educators and researchers say this inclusive model improves outcomes for students with disabilities and reduces the need for more intensive — and costly — special education services in older grades.

“Kids with special needs, who have an IEP, need to be in programs with other, typically developing kids,” said Diana Makowetski, a special education teacher at Marie Bauer Early Education Center, referring to the individualized education program. “They need good language models. They need good social models.”

Supporters of inclusive early education argue that it can address one of the fastest-growing costs facing school districts: rising numbers of students who qualify for special education. In the upcoming state budget, school districts could see as much as a 43% bump in special education over the past year to address rising costs.

This new funding could be a golden opportunity not just to cover rising special education costs but to stop them from ballooning, according to Anjanette Pelletier, a special education finance expert and director of management consulting for School Services of California, Inc. In a recent report, she called for districts to invest in inclusive preschool settings, “one of the strongest opportunities for both educational and fiscal return.”

“Early education is not cheap,” said Heather Wahlberg, director of early childhood education at Paso Robles Joint Unified School District. 

But Wahlberg said that the district’s investment in early education has paid dividends. The number of students placed in special day classes with high staffing requirements has been cut in half, and 12% of students no longer require special education services in kindergarten at all.

Why don’t more districts offer inclusive preschools?

Researchers say that preschool is a great time for inclusion, because any gaps between students with disabilities and those without them is at its narrowest point. But the youngest children with disabilities are largely educated separately from their peers — in different classrooms, with different teachers — and sometimes even with different recess and lunch schedules.

That approach runs counter to the spirit of inclusion, which is enshrined in federal and state laws requiring students with disabilities to be educated in the least restrictive environment possible alongside their peers. The stakes are high in these early years.

“Once a child is not included, they’re almost never included after that,” said Karin Garver, an early childhood education policy specialist at the National Institute for Early Education Research. “So if we’re putting children in self-contained settings as preschoolers, we’ve kind of determined their fate as school children beyond that.”

Only 33% of California preschoolers with disabilities learn alongside their peers, compared with 45% nationally, according to federal data.

Moving to an inclusive model takes time, coordination and up-front investment, Pelletier said. 

Teachers and staff need professional development. Districts might need to modify classrooms and playgrounds to make them accessible for students with disabilities. Funding an inclusive preschool classroom requires districts to navigate a patchwork system of funds that could have complex staffing and licensing requirements, such as the California State Preschool Program.

Preschool funding isn’t like K-12 funding. This patchwork system means that where a child attends preschool, in practice, often depends on how much income their family earns or whether they have a disability — even within the same district.

“We, as a district, used to have a state preschool, a [general education] preschool, and our special [education] preschools all operating in separate silos,” said Wahlberg. “We finally came together as a district and said, ‘Those are all future Bearcats” — the mascot of the Paso Robles High School — “being educated in separate buildings by separate departments and by separate teachers.’”

Rather than maintaining separate programs, Paso Robles Joint Unified chose to bring all students together in inclusive classrooms. Depending on the child, Marie Bauer Early Education Center might receive state preschool funding, district funds for special education students or parent tuition payments.

The California Early Childhood Special Education Network is tasked by the California Department of Education with assisting school districts working to make the transition to inclusive classrooms. The state also provides grants for planning and implementation. 

“That really helped begin the conversation and alleviate some of that startup fears that many districts have about the funding,” said Wahlberg. “Having a grant like that and having that conversation happening at the state level was really supportive and powerful.”

Pelletier argues that the state should go even further. If inclusive early education can reduce the need for more intensive and costly services later, she said, districts should be required to invest more of their special education money in these early years.

Diana Makowetski, a special education teacher at Marie Bauer Early Education Center, helps students struggling with their speech skills. Credit: Emma Gallegos / EdSource ‘Leaps and bounds’

For families, the benefits of inclusive early education are often visible long before students reach kindergarten. 

Michelle Robinson said her 4-year-old grandson, Everest — “like the mountain, but he’s little” — was born prematurely and experienced delays in speech and motor development. He began attending Marie Bauer Early Education Center two years ago. Robinson said it’s made a world of difference.

“I have just seen this little guy grow by leaps and bounds,” she said. “Because it’s been such a positive experience, he’s super excited next year to go into TK.”

Her older grandson likely would have benefited from this program, Robinson said. But because of pandemic disruptions and a lack of awareness about available services, he never attended preschool. 

“When he got to kindergarten, it was a challenge for him,” she said. 

That’s become a common story, according to Wahlberg. Kindergarten teachers in Paso Robles Joint Unified have told her they can often tell which students attended the preschool. They are better at regulating themselves and have better language, social skills and fine motor skills.

The most common challenge in young children is delayed speech and language development. Speech-language pathologist Ashley Tsudama said children might struggle with communication because of developmental delays or autism. Children who were isolated during the pandemic or who spend a lot of time on screens also have limited opportunities to develop language skills.

Paso Robles Joint Unified is beginning to see signs of that impact. According to Wahlberg, behavioral issues among students who attended preschool have declined. For 2022-23, 14 preschool students were placed in either transitional kindergarten or kindergarten special day classes — a number that dropped to six for the upcoming school year. These classes are costly because they require heavier staffing than general education classrooms: one teacher plus aides for every 10 students.

When children struggle to communicate or regulate their emotions, those challenges can spill into the classroom and become more serious as academic expectations grow.

“We always say when we’re building our students’ ability to maintain regulation during disappointment and frustration, we’re building future mathematicians and problem solvers and readers,” Wahlberg said.

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Donald Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool is a major fiasco, and it’s getting him angrier. In Truth Social posts, he raged at a journalist for covering the story. He fulminated that vandals had cut at 250-foot gash in the facade (which is entirely unverified). He hailed multiple arrests at the scene. He even angrily threatened 10 years in jail. Yet these arrests are only growing more questionable. One man detained is a 67-year-old former Olympian who said he just wanted to examine the peeling coating. Another person detained said she was merely pulling a piece of paint out of the water. These explanations, plus the tenuousness of Trump’s claims of vandalism, suggest a darker turn in the story. We talked to New Republic editor Michael Tomasky about his good piece on this whole mess. We discuss why Trump doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt on the arrests, why this story has deeper resonance for many ordinary people, and what it captures about Trump’s effort to destroy republican governance and turn Washington into an imperial capital, with himself in the role of “czar.” (After we recorded, Trump kept on raging.) Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

Across California, every incarcerated individual taking a college course now has a tool those of us on the outside take for granted: a laptop. 

In the past three years, the prison system spent $23.2 million to distribute 30,000 laptops to all incarcerated students. Almost half of those went to the 13,000 inmates enrolled in community college, who are increasingly doing their coursework online. 

The growth of online learning marks a shift away from correspondence courses, where inmates receive assignments in physical packets, fill them out and mail them back to colleges, with limited feedback. While some community colleges still offer those types of courses, the laptops are starting to replace the packets.

Meanwhile, students and faculty alike debate whether online courses are as effective as in-person courses. Some teachers say online options reduce disruptions when students have to miss class due to court hearings or prison lockdowns. Some students say they prefer in-person courses because they can build invaluable connections. In either mode of learning, inmates say using laptops helps them prepare for life on the outside.

“The more we understand about today’s world, the better we’ll be equipped to get out into the workforce as things continue to change,” incarcerated student Richard Moye said in an interview. “We don’t want to get left behind. … Tech literacy is of the utmost importance behind prison walls.”

Online courses could increase enrollment 

In 2024, the state Legislative Analyst’s Office recommended improving the California Community Colleges’ prison education program, called Rising Scholars. The Legislature’s spending and policy adviser recommended addressing limited classroom space by offering more online courses. The office also suggested Rising Scholars prioritize enrollment for students still pursuing their first degrees, to allow for greater student access. 

Today, 104 of the 116 community colleges in the state partner with prisons to provide courses and degree programs. According to data tracked by the community colleges, over 21,000 courses took place in prisons during fall 2025. Twenty colleges offer courses in person, with a faculty member commuting to the prison to teach the course. The rest teach courses either online or, with diminishing frequency, via mail correspondence, according to the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.

The true number of online versus mail correspondence courses taken by incarcerated community college students is unknown. While community colleges have the option to track courses using the data labels “correspondence” or “text one-way,” there is no consistency as far as which ones they use, according to the Chancellor’s Office. 

In-person classes can be difficult to get into because of enrollment caps and limited classroom space. The average in-person course generally ranges from 18 to 40 students. Many colleges enroll students on a first-come, first-served basis, enabling people on their second or third degree to “crowd out” those on their first degree, according to Orlando Sanchez Zavala, a policy analyst for the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The Project Rebound study room at Cal State Northridge. Credit: ules Hotz for CalMatters

Sanchez Zavala said prioritizing enrollment for people pursuing their first degree would have the most impact on lowering recidivism rates. 

Leaving prison with a degree can make parolees eligible for a wider range of jobs, and more prepared to enter the workforce, reducing their likelihood of reoffending. According to the prison system’s recidivism report, during the 2018-19 fiscal year, those who earned an associate’s degree while incarcerated had a 8.5% conviction rate in the three years after getting out, compared to a 41.9% conviction rate for all individuals released that same year.

Sanchez Zavala also suggested utilizing correspondence and online classes to open more courses with lower enrollment caps, allowing more incarcerated people to access community college.

Incarcerated students face multiple barriers

For in-person courses, a major challenge is finding classroom space in prisons. Though prisons have classrooms, they are also used for other programming and group meetings. Sometimes, classes take place in gyms or dining areas. 

Joseph Bruno Martinez, 40, said he struggled to get into classes when he was incarcerated at high-security facilities, where institution-wide lockdowns sometimes interrupted learning. 

Formerly incarcerated student Garret Eiferman, 56, said he found that prison correctional officers were not always amenable to helping incarcerated students complete degrees. He had to build relationships with officers so he could use the classrooms past 7 p.m., and, at times, even convince officers to allow his classmates to leave their buildings to attend class.

Graduate student Garret Eiferman on campus at Cal State Northridge. Credit: Jules Hotz for CalMatters

He cited other obstacles to his instruction as well, including out-of-date textbooks with the hard covers ripped off for safety reasons, little to no feedback on his correspondence coursework, and challenges balancing work and other prison programs with classes. 

Though he didn’t take any online-only courses when he was in prison, Eiferman said he can see the benefits for students as they grapple with the obstacles he went through trying to take in-person courses. 

Online courses improve tech literacy 

The new laptops offer much to the inmates: education, enrichment, and — for those who will go free one day — future employment.

For Moye, online education is important for technology literacy. Moye, 44, has been incarcerated for 16 years and takes courses online and in person through Solano Community College at California Medical Facility in Vacaville. 

Moye said a lack of emphasis on tech literacy in prisons is a “disservice to this community” as jobs on the outside require applicants to be skilled at using computers and other tech. Online learning is closing this gap for incarcerated people. 

Students and teachers told CalMatters they now complete much of their coursework and grading through the online learning site Canvas, which is used across the state’s higher education systems for assigning and submitting work, as well as messaging between students and instructors. 

Isela Ocegueda is the vice president of instruction at Coastline College and teaches an online English course to incarcerated students. She says using Canvas streamlines an incarcerated student’s transition from school on the inside to school on the outside. At her college, 80% of instruction is online.

Until 2023, Coastline College provided courses in prisons through mail-in correspondence. The college calls its new online format “Canvas-supported correspondence.” 

Ocegueda says the online format allows instructors to offer more creative assignments and thorough feedback. Her first assignment to her English class last semester was a journal entry, in which she asked students to introduce themselves and tell her how she can help them throughout the class. 

The class final is a research paper, on which Ocegueda can give instant feedback and edits to students who can turn in multiple drafts, which was nearly impossible through snail-mail correspondence.

“Imagine just trying to receive essays in the mail and then make your corrections and then send them back,” Ocegueda said. “That was really hard to do in the mail version of correspondence. … Canvas-supported correspondence allows more for that writing process to actually happen.”

Obstacles to online instruction

While major improvements to Wi-Fi connectivity and research materials for inmate coursework have been made, there are still obstacles. Wi-Fi access varies from prison to prison, and it can often take up to a week for students to get reading materials approved by prison librarians for them to access.

Students at Pelican Bay State Prison in Del Norte County and California Institution for Women in San Bernardino County say they can’t access Canvas in their cells due to a lack of Wi-Fi, while students at Folsom State Prison and San Quentin Rehabilitation Center say they are able to complete coursework from their cells, where the Wi-Fi is strong. According to a state prison system spokesperson, inmates have Wi-Fi access in the housing units at all but four state prisons. All prisons have Wi-Fi in education areas and classrooms, though signal strength may vary, according to the spokesperson.

Some students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in prisons reported to CalMatters last year ongoing challenges with Wi-Fi and limited access to research materials, with some wishing they could do a simple Google search for information.

Solano College English professor Ben Brookeshire’s main teaching challenge is delay in students accessing what he calls the “information space.” Some documents his students might need to explore on digital research libraries require approval from prison librarians. 

In-person courses boost engagement

Eiferman, now a Cal State Northridge graduate student, did most of his in-prison coursework via correspondence courses from Palo Verde and Coastline colleges from 2009 to 2019. Eiferman holds an associate in arts, an associate in science and a business certificate from his time incarcerated. He was also pursuing a U.S. history degree when he paroled in 2020. 

“​​The bulk of my interaction with professors during the degree completion was very minimal. It’s distance learning, so that means it’s all done with an envelope and a stamp, and feedback was never a thing,” Eiferman said. “It was extremely challenging to transfer out here to the university, thinking that I knew stuff that I didn’t or stuff that I knew that needed to be retaught and relearned correctly.”

Garret Eiferman, a graduate student, uses one of the computers inside the Project Rebound study room at Cal State Northridge. Credit: Jules Hotz for CalMatters

Eiferman took his first in-person course through Bakersfield College at Golden State Community Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in the southern San Joaquin Valley. It was a math class, a subject he had always struggled with, but Eiferman said he had “aha moments” and was even able to help teach his fellow students. He said he took people “under his wings” to conduct “spirit building” and encourage them to stay in class.

Moye said in-person classes allow students to more clearly understand teachers’ expectations. They also offer group interaction, peer support, tutoring and collaboration on class assignments.  

Data tracked by the community college system indicates a 77% success rate for internet-based and correspondence instruction, and an 85% success rate for in-person instruction, for incarcerated students in spring 2025. “Success” means the student earned a C or higher, or a “pass” in non-letter graded courses. Incarcerated students have a success rate 10% higher than community college students overall in in-person courses.

“I’m a fan of in-person learning,” Moye said. “That’s my favorite style of learning, because to me, it resembles most what’s going on in society. If we’re trying to prepare incarcerated men and women for society, we have to have it look as much like society as possible.”

Brookeshire said he has seen his peers debate the merits of online versus in-person courses in the prisons. He said he knows online courses are inevitable, but he strictly teaches in person because it’s the best way for him to connect with students. 

“I’m very passionate,” Brookshire said. “I really believe there’s magic in a classroom, and I really believe that face-to-face instruction is irreplaceable.”  

Joe Garcia contributed to this story.

Ella Carter-Klauschie is a contributor with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

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BORK!BORK!BORK! Are you a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty person? Some distressed digital signage on the island of São Miguel in Portugal's Azores is running on empty, judging by today's entry into the files of signage silage. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader, a Coca-Cola display has clearly had too much of the carbonated beverage and urgently needs to free up some space, a feeling many an over-caffeinated techie will be familiar with after chugging one Diet Coke too many. It's tricky to work out what operating system is running behind the scenes. Running Windows with 200 MB or so of disk space is only for the brave (or foolhardy), but we suspect this might be Ubuntu Unity warning onlookers that the volume is fit to burst. While there is an option to ignore the message (assuming the viewer can find somewhere to plug in a mouse or keyboard), doing so might be the computing equivalent of dropping some Mentos into a bottle of Coke and standing well back. While a good old-fashioned poster would never show an error message, thus obscuring whatever message Coca-Cola is trying to convey via the medium of a bottle top, Ubuntu isn't a bad choice for digital signage. Assuming it is indeed the operating system running behind the scenes, security maintenance could continue well past the display's lifetime, and there are plenty of tools to deploy, provision, and manage the hardware. All of which makes the pop-up a little incongruous. Somewhere, a distant dashboard is flashing red to indicate the signage storage is not what it might be. But on a well-managed system, surely the customer would never be aware of any issues. Kiosks and digital signs are about keeping their internals well tucked away from prying eyes after all. Except here. A volume is getting dangerously full. The same effect can be created by pouring a sachet of Pop Rocks/Space Dust* into one's mouth and chugging a glass of Coke. The result could be your very own storage error. Possibly through your nostrils. ® *Also known as popping candy.

The leaders of intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes nations – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the USA and the UK – have together issued strongly worded advice calling for leaders to nail cybersecurity basics or fall victim to ruinous AI-powered attacks. “The rapid pace of frontier AI development means cyber risk assumptions can become outdated in months, not years,” the advice warns, and calls for organizations to take rapid action to ensure their defenses remain potent. “While AI will help us improve cyber defence over time, it also accelerates the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyber threats,” the advice adds. “Frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years, it is months.” After all that scary stuff, the spook bosses offer some antidote: “Cyber resilience is integral to advancing business continuity, market confidence, and long-term value.” And how might one achieve that resilience? The Five Eyes have four suggestions: Understand and assess risk, readiness and accountability Prioritize foundational cyber security practices and controls Empower cyber leaders with authority and resources Stay actively engaged as threats and guidance evolve “Cyber risk can no longer be treated as a purely technical issue,” the advice points out. “This is a core business risk and leadership responsibility,” because breaches are inevitable and “Breaches will occur. Preparedness helps you contain them quickly and prevent escalation into major operational and financial crises.” The intelligence chiefs therefore want organizations to test their cyber resilience rigs. “It is not enough to have controls,” they write. “Leaders must be confident those controls will perform during a real incident. This requires reassessing long-standing trade-offs and using AI deliberately to strengthen defence – not just improve efficiency.” That last sentence is a rare moment of optimism in the advice and precedes a section in which the intelligence bosses observe “Organizations that integrate AI tools into their security operations can detect vulnerabilities earlier, improve software quality, monitor unusual behaviour, and respond faster to incidents – reducing both the cost and impact of incidents.” Readers of The Register might find this advice a little quaint given that infosec vendors have for years blathered on about the need for boards and bosses to take cyber seriously. It’s also been a couple of years since it became apparent that generative and agentic AI can fuel new and unusually potent cyber-attacks. Interest in that idea spiked in the eleven weeks since Anthropic revealed the existence of its powerful flaw-finding Mythos model and hid it behind a regwall lest criminals use it to swiftly slice holes in important software. The Five Eyes bosses address their advice to “leaders” – presumably bosses of substantial organizations – who may not have watched the Mythos mess unfurl while they worried about a global energy crisis kicking holes in their supply chains. The good news is that the spy bosses don’t think leaders need to learn a lot to cope with the advent of AI, as their advice suggests five practical actions they rate as “not new,” but “now urgent to reduce not only technical risk, but also operational, financial and reputational exposure.” For the record, those actions are: 1. Reduce your attack surface: Limit unnecessary system access and external connectivity. Challenge whether systems need to be exposed at all and isolate those that do not. 2. Accelerate patching processes: AI is shortening the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation. Delays in patching increase risk, especially for operational systems with long update cycles. Prioritize security updates accordingly to manage risks. 3. Address legacy systems: Unsupported systems are easy targets. They are not just technical debt, they are strategic liabilities. 4. Review and strengthen identity and access controls: Limit who can access critical systems. Enforce strong authentication and regularly review permissions. 5. Prepare for incidents before they happen: Test response plans, train and prepare teams, and assume breaches will occur. Focus on fast containment and recovery. Take us, and this, to your leaders, dear readers. ®

Buyers in the world’s two most populous nations, India and China, bought just 13.1 million PCs in the first quarter of 2026, according to analyst firm Omdia. The firm’s analysts last week declared that Indian buyers acquired 4.4 million PCs – 3.5 million of them laptops – during Q1. That figure represented 32 percent year-over-year growth. “Brands and channels front-loaded their inventory, to secure pricing ahead of anticipated increases,” the firm wrote. “This triggered a 43 percent surge in the consumer market as buyers moved to purchase high-performance PCs at older price points, a trend amplified by intense online retail promotions.” On Monday, Omdia published Q1 PC sales data for China and found total shipments of 8.9 million – a two-percent year-over-year decline. Senior analyst Emma Xu blamed the slump on the end of government subsidies that Beijing used to keep consumer spending buoyant. Whatever the reason for the drop in shipments, it meant that the two nations – combined population 2.9 billion, or 36 percent of global population – bought 13.1 million PCs in the quarter, or 20 percent of the 68.44 million PCs Omdia says shipped worldwide in Q1. Omdia forecasts China will experience a 14 percent PC shipment slump in 2026, while Indian shipments will dip by 5.3 percent across the year. The firm believes rising component costs will push PC prices beyond the reach of local purchasers. Samsung signs up for OpenAI everywhere Samsung has gone all-in on OpenAI, adopting the upstart’s ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex tools for all employees in its Korean home and all Device eXperience (DX) employees worldwide. “Samsung Electronics plans to use ChatGPT and Codex for technical and non-technical work, across a broad range of functions, including software development, marketing, product development, and manufacturing, to enhance employee productivity and problem-solving capabilities,” according to a Monday announcement from OpenAI, which describes the deal as “one of our largest to date.” Samsung Electronics employs over 100,000 people in South Korea. OpenAI’s announcement points out that the company already collaborates with Samsung on memory chips. “With Samsung Electronics’ adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise, the relationship between the two companies is expanding beyond AI infrastructure to encompass workforce transformation and company-wide AI adoption,” the upstart enthused. Jio heading for spaaaaace, and an IPO Indian mega-telco Jio is contemplating its own constellation of broadband satellites. “Jio is evaluating the development of a sovereign Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation for India,” chairman and managing director Mukesh D. Ambani wrote in a statement [PDF] made at its annual general meeting. “We are also partnering with the leading global constellation providers by leasing satellite capacity, so that we can accelerate service availability while building our own long-term sovereign capability,” he said. “To anchor this ambition, Jio is also building its own ground station infrastructure in India. These ground stations will support our partner constellations, as well as our own future satellites, creating an end-to-end satellite broadband ecosystem from space to ground.” The telco, which in a decade has become India’s largest by winning over half a billion subscribers, also revealed its intention to conduct an initial public offering. Locally developed AI is also on the company’s agenda. “Unlike global AI platforms that build in English and translate later, Jio is building AI natively in Indian languages,” Ambani said. “Be it a Marathi farmer or a Tamil student, both will get an AI that thinks and replies in their language.” Vietnam decides to create ten of its own Big Tech companies The government of Vietnam last week announced its intention to foster development of ten tech companies, each with revenue of $1 billion, by the year 2030. Vietnam knows exactly what it wants these so-called “large-scale domestic strategic tech enterprises” to do, including deploying half a dozen new high-speed international submarine fiber-optic cables and rolling out 5G networks to 99 percent of the country's population. Others get to “develop and improve digital platforms and shared databases that meet the needs of ministries, agencies, and localities to provide nationwide services, serving as a critical digital infrastructure for socio-economic development.” All that work will require “at least five large-scale data centers that meet international and green standards, contributing to positioning Vietnam as a regional data hub.” China’s digital currency finds 26 friends Chinese authorities last week announced that 26 financial institutions have signed up to transact in the Digital Yuan, the Middle Kingdom’s central bank digital currency. Per a state media report, “Standard Chartered China, as well as multiple Chinese-funded banks' branches in Thailand, Singapore, Laos and Qatar” have agreed to use the digital currency for cross-border transactions. As the report points out, existing cross-border payment schemes can involve several intermediaries and take days. The institutions that signed up to use the Digital Yuan will apparently need only hours to settle things up. China promotes its digital currency as a more efficient way to handle international payments than US-dollar-centric schemes like SWIFT. Signing 26 institutions therefore signals China continues to seek its own place in the international payments system. More scandal at Australia's WiseTech Things just keep getting weirder at Australian logistics tech company WiseTech Global, which saw its CEO Richard White depart amid claims of improper behavior and later investigated share trading that White conducted during a blackout period. This week’s escalation saw Australian media allege that White had become the subject of a human trafficking investigation related to a former employee who needed a visa to remain in Australia. That allegation saw WiseTech issue a stock exchange filing [PDF] in which White unequivocally denied any involvement with human trafficking and WiseTech point out this is a matter for White to deal with in his capacity as a private citizen. ®

A running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.