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When President Donald Trump appointed Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte as the new acting head of National Intelligence, critics were quick to ask what, exactly, a former residential homebuilder knew about international spycraft. The answer appears to be “nothing.” Pulte earned Trump’s favor after using his role at FHFA to launch multiple mortgage fraud investigations…

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The bill is expected to blanket ban companies and startups from selling people's precise location data across the state.

Duke Energy could receive $28.4 million in federal grants for upgrades, matched by $44 million in ratepayer funds. By Lisa Sorg for Inside Climate News Duke Energy could receive $28.4 million in taxpayer money to upgrade two coal-fired power units in Person County, North Carolina, where residents are already contending with the construction of new natural gas plants…

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The Python steering council has surprised onlookers by asking for the suspension of new development on the JIT (just in time) compiler project from the main branch of the Python code repository, pending creation and acceptance of a new PEP (Python enhancement proposal) for the project. Bug and security fixes for existing JIT code in main will continue to be accepted, but if no PEP is submitted and approved within six months, the JIT code will be removed from main. The announcement is unexpected because an improved JIT compiler is one of the key features of Python 3.15, for which features are frozen, and for which full release is expected in October. The release notes promise "8-9 percent geometric mean performance improvement" over the standard CPython interpreter on x86-64 Linux. That said, the JIT compiler is experimental and disabled by default; use requires setting PYTHON_JIT=1 as an environmental variable. The implication of the steering council statement is that the experimental JIT compiler should not have been merged into main, on the grounds that PEP 744, which relates to the JIT, is only informational and contains open questions. "We (the Steering Council) have not been as strict about following the process as a change of this complexity and reach deserves," states the post from council member Pablo Galindo Salgado. These open questions include future maintenance of the JIT, compatibility with existing CPython features and tooling, clear and measurable success metrics, and relationship to third-party JIT compilers. Key JIT contributor Mark Shannon said "stopping all development until a PEP is accepted puts us in an awkward position," because it puts pressure on the JIT team to produce a new PEP quickly, but doing so will not give the community time to discuss it. He said a new PEP was already planned for "later this year when the performance advantage would be larger." Shannon has asked for a grace period of "a month or two" to continue work. He said "a moratorium risks loss of momentum and losing the new contributors we have recently gained." Asked whether development could continue in a fork, Shannon said it was not easy due to the way optimizations are generated, leading to very large code differences that are hard to manage. The impact of the steering council’s JIT statement is that the future of the project is now in doubt, whereas before it looked likely to become part of CPython. Six months is not long for creating a PEP and having it agreed; and if in fact the JIT code is removed from the main branch the project is likely to lose momentum. Salgado said "the intent is not to call for competing proposals" but nevertheless raised the possibility of shifting towards "a JIT infrastructure that can support multiple implementation strategies," and implied the steering council would prefer an infrastructure that is not "highly coupled with a single strategy." The announcement appears to have come as a surprise to Shannon and others suggesting a lack of communication between the steering council and the JIT project team. Another steering council member, Donghee Na, said "the current experimental JIT project needs an official PEP" and "this would be a good time to review the different possible approaches." Fast-track approval of a new PEP will be hard to achieve alongside the lengthy likely discussion of different approaches. Both Galindo and steering council member Thomas Wouters said there is some flexibility around the six-month deadline. "We’re not unreasonable," said Wouters, "but we do want this to be taken seriously."®

As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same. Don’t forget to visit the Tom Tomorrow Merchandise Mall, and, if you’re so inclined, follow me on Bluesky! Related | Kennedy Center: 1; Trump’s ego: 0…

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Meta has asked a federal judge to hold Israeli spyware maker NSO Group in contempt of court after claiming it caught the surveillance vendor targeting WhatsApp users again despite a permanent injunction ordering it to stop. In a blog post on Monday, Meta said it had disrupted "NSO-linked social engineering attempts" after investigating reports from users. According to the company, the activity involved attempts to lure targets into clicking malicious links that redirected them to websites outside WhatsApp, as well as the creation of test accounts and groups on the messaging platform. "We successfully disrupted NSO-linked social engineering attempts after investigating user reports," Meta said. "They tried to trick people into clicking on malicious links to drive them to external websites outside of WhatsApp, similar to previously reported 1-click phishing campaigns linked to NSO." WhatsApp also published a handful of domains it linked to the campaign, including ikhwancast[.]com, ghazacast[.]com, and fr24cast[.]com, and said it was releasing indicators to help organizations identify related activity. The move marks the latest chapter in the long-running legal battle between Meta and the Israeli spyware maker. A US court found NSO liable in December 2024 for hacking WhatsApp users via its Pegasus spyware. In May 2025, a jury awarded Meta roughly $168 million in damages, but the judge later cut that to $4 million while issuing a permanent injunction barring NSO from targeting WhatsApp or its users. Meta, however, says NSO didn't get the memo. "Last year, WhatsApp made history by securing a landmark verdict and permanent injunction barring NSO Group ... from targeting WhatsApp and its users ever again," the company wrote. "Today, we're asking the court to hold them in contempt of that order." The company provided few technical details about the activity, such as when it occurred, how many users were targeted, whether any compromises were successful, or how it attributed the operation to NSO. Meta did not respond to The Register’s questions. However, the blog post adopts a hard line on the spyware industry than previous updates, repeatedly describing commercial spyware as a national security issue. "When a malicious company on the US government's Entity List continues to defy US courts, existing restrictions must remain firmly in place," WhatsApp wrote. "Easing them would undermine US national security and put American companies and billions of people worldwide who depend on secure communications at risk." If Meta's allegations are accurate, the episode suggests that a court loss is not enough to persuade a spyware vendor to leave a high-value target alone. ®

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

Sávio Bortolini Pimentel just missed getting on the roster to represent his national team, Brazil, at the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States.

At the time, he was a 20-year-old professional player with the Rio de Janeiro team Flamengo. He recalls other players telling him after the fact that the weather during some matches was just too hot. And the heat was “intense,” they said, during the final match at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, on a 90 degree day when Brazil prevailed over Italy.

Players in the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup in June and July face an even greater risk of unsafe temperatures than they did in 1994, the last time the World Cup was held in the United States, according to estimates from researchers at Imperial College London. Human-induced climate change has made these conditions significantly more likely in the 16 host cities in the US, Mexico, and Canada, according to the report. 

In extreme heat, “it becomes impossible to play with the same intensity.”

The report predicted that five games could take place in unsafe heat, up from three games in 1994. The report used a threshold for unsafe temperatures that may require postponements based on a wet bulb globe temperature of 83 F, which is recommended by FIFPRO, the international player’s union. Wet bulb globe temperatures are calculated based on a variety of factors including sun, humidity, and temperature, to show the stress on the human body. FIFA also uses wet bulb globe temperatures, but currently considers postponing matches only at levels exceeding 90. 

Chris Mullington, a consultant anesthetist at the Imperial College London who presented the report at a webinar, explained why soccer uses wet bulb temperatures to calculate if weather conditions are safe for players.

“A 30 C [86 F] day in dry, breezy conditions is very different from a 30 C [86 F] day with high humidity, strong sun, and little wind,” he said. “High humidity reduces the evaporation of sweat, limiting the body’s primary cooling mechanism.”

Sixty current and former professional soccer players from around the world recently issued an open letter urging FIFA to update its heat guidelines for events happening under dangerous heat before the World Cup. “It can make you feel light-headed, dizzy, experience fatigue, muscle cramps and worse. You can run less and it becomes impossible to play with the same intensity as with more average temperatures,” the players wrote.

The players also asked the league to do what it can to ease the climate change crisis by dropping fossil fuel sponsors and changing game schedules to reduce travel and the league’s fossil fuel footprint.

People walk past of the FIFA World Cup 2026 countdown clock at Paseo Alcalde in Guadalajara, Mexico on June 25, 2025Ulises Ruiz/AFP via Getty

Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at the Imperial College London and one of the authors of the report, said the increased risk for hotter temperatures shows climate change is having a real and measurable impact on the viability of holding World Cups during the northern hemisphere summer. The final match of the tournament, scheduled to be played on July 19 at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, has a 12.5 percent chance of exceeding the 79 mark, and 3 percent chance of reaching 83.

“That the World Cup Final itself—one of the biggest sporting occasions on the planet—faces a non-insignificant risk of being played in ‘cancellation-level’ heat should be a wake-up call for FIFA and fans, highlighting the urgent need to realize that there is no aspect of society not affected by climate change,” Otto said.

The 2022 World Cup, held in Qatar, was moved from summer to winter because of the threat of extreme heat. Last summer’s Club World Cup, held in 12 locations around the United States, served in many ways as a prelude for this year’s World Cup. In that tournament, no games were postponed due to heat even though temperatures soared above 90.

Training only goes so far. In the heat “it’s increasingly demanding. The pace is automatically reduced.” 

The Imperial College report shows nearly a quarter of all World Cup games are likely to be played in temperatures higher than 79 degrees and about 5 matches are expected to occur above 83—almost double the number from the 1994 World Cup.

Under severe heat and dehydration, athletes’ heart rates rise, their muscles fatigue faster and they sweat more. “Your body is trying to prevent the rapid rate of rise of your body temperature; it’s just a protective mechanism,” said Douglas Casa, chief executive officer of the Korey Stringer Institute, a nonprofit based at the University of Connecticut that works to educate and prevent heat illness and sudden death in athletes and laborers.

Under extreme conditions, around 104 degrees, Casa said the body enters into the volitional exhaustion phase, the point during exercise where you voluntarily stop because you feel unable to continue doing the same movements. 

“The game turns into a different game, it’s more ‘mentality.’ The one that commits less mistakes is the one that ends up winning.”

Sávio said players now are likely more resilient to the heat. “There are athletes that are more used to the cold than to the heat—that’s normal,” he said. “But today’s athletes are much more prepared, and even more so than in 1994, due to the evolution of preparation techniques, equipment, and products.”

But training only goes so far. Sávio, who won bronze with the Brazilian team during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and is now retired from soccer, said athletes feel the heat on the pitch much more dramatically. 

“If we’re looking at 35 degrees C [95 F], like what happened in 1994 when we even heard of matches played at 40 degrees C [104 F], then yes, it’s increasingly demanding,” he said. “The pace is automatically reduced.” 

But there are alternatives, even if FIFA does not choose to postpone eligible matches. Casa urged FIFA to make aggressive cooling strategies available at all stadium locker rooms. He also recommended extending hydration breaks from the mandated three minutes to six, as the heat could influence the athletes’ recovery from one game to the next.

“Do you realize people could easily be 103 or 104 degrees when they come in at halftime?” Casa said. “My point is, if you have 15 minutes and you get in quickly at the stoppage, you could have 10 or 11 minutes of aggressive cooling: rotating freezing cold wet towels over your whole body, going into a cold plunge, anything like that.”

Casa said he is not against playing games in the heat, but high temperatures and dehydration at the World Cup can lead to lower-quality soccer games. 

“Why not give the fans who just spent a fortune on these tickets the best quality game that they could possibly watch with these elite soccer players?” he asked.

Kevin Muneton Ramirez, a 27-year-old American-Colombian dual citizen, is excited to watch the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo play in what is expected to be his last World Cup. He bought tickets for the June 27 match in Miami between Portugal and Colombia, and he expects his home country’s team to win the game.

Muneton Ramirez said, as a fan, he does not really mind games when the players get exhausted at the end. “The game turns into a different game, it’s more ‘mentality,’” he said. “The one that commits less mistakes is the one that ends up winning.”

For fans, Casa said FIFA should at least include free water-filling stations inside stadiums. Fans could fall ill as a result of overwhelming heat and dehydration, even if they’re not moving too much.

According to FIFA’s recently updated stadium code of conduct, fans, “for the avoidance of doubt,” are no longer allowed to bring in an empty bottle that can be refilled at a water fountain or dispenser.

Muneton Ramirez does not usually go to stadiums to watch soccer.

“But if I have the opportunity to go to a World Cup … at least once in my lifetime, I’d go to any game,” he said.

For my upcoming book, United States of Oligarchy, I spent the last few years reporting on the activities of a small group of billionaires who have amassed increasing sway over US politics and policy. Chief among them, of course, is Elon Musk, who used a small fraction of his enormous wealth to put Donald Trump back in the White House—a political investment that has paid off in spades. But another player milking his proximity to Trump for personal gain is the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who, as I show in this Mother Jones excerpt, has parlayed his official role as America’s top diplomat into massive personal wealth. Kushner’s gilded, hapless journey to billionaire-dom, much like the explosion of oligarchic wealth in America, didn’t begin recently, but stretches all the way back to the 1980s. Behold some highlights.

1981: Jared Kushner is born in Livingston, New Jersey.

1990s: Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu visits the Kushners’ New Jersey home, reportedly sleeping in Jared’s bedroom and shooting hoops with him in their driveway.

1999: Kushner, no academic standout, enters Harvard. He was accepted after his father, Charles, pledged $2.5 million—to be paid after Jared’s matriculation.

2005: Charles Kushner gets two years in prison after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, illegal campaign donations, and witness tampering—he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, a tryst he secretly filmed and sent to his sister.

2006: Kushner buys the New York Observer for $10 million—money he says he earned doing real estate deals during college. He reportedly goes on to order “hit jobs” against family foes.

2007: Kushner Companies buys 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion—nearly all borrowed—the most ever paid for an NYC office tower.

Owner Jared Kushner attends the New York Observer and IFC Films premiere of Factotum in New York in August 2006.Peter Kramer/Getty

2008: Mortgage meltdown: Kushner sells a 49 percent stake in the building’s retail space for $525 million.

2009: Kushner marries Ivanka Trump in “lavish” ceremony—complete with Regis Philbin crooning—at a Trump golf club.

2010: 666 Fifth Avenue is appraised at $820 million—less than half what the Kushners paid.

2011: Occupancy at 666 Fifth Avenue plummets; in a refinance bid, Kushner Companies sells off a nearly 50 percent stake in its office space.

2011–2013: Kushner’s family donates to multiple foundations that support West Bank settlements.

2015: Kushner negotiates with Qatari Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani (HBJ), former head of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, seeking his personal $500 million investment in 666 Fifth Avenue.

2016: Kushner helps run his father-in-law’s presidential campaign. After Trump is elected, UAE leader Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan cancels a meeting with President Barack Obama to meet with Kushner instead; Russian official Kirill Dmitriev sets out to make Kushner a Kremlin asset.

January 2017: Trump sworn in; Kushner becomes a senior White House adviser but retains the vast majority of his interest in Kushner Companies; he also forms a back-channel personal relationship with Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), including trips to Riyadh and private texting sessions.

President Donald Trump is joined by congressional leaders and family, including Kushner, as he signs his Cabinet nominations in the President’s Room of the Senate on January 20, 2017.J. Scott Applewhite/DPA/Zuma

March 2017: 666 Fifth Avenue refinancing scuttled amid concerns over Kushner’s conflicts of interest; HBJ pulls out.

April 2017: Charles Kushner lobbies Qatari government to invest in 666 Fifth Avenue. No dice.

May 2017: Kushner discusses a blockade of Qatar, designed to weaken Iran, with Saudi and Emirati officials.

They Went to JaredHow Donald Trump’s son-in-law used his position to hop in bed with autocrats—and sell out America.

June 2017: Qatar blockade brings Gulf to the brink of war. According to Kushner biographer Vicky Ward, Qataris interpret the move as Kushner saying, “If you don’t pay my father, the Americans are going to sanction an invasion of your country.”

August 2017: 666 Fifth Avenue still flailing. Vanity Fair asks, “Is Jared Kushner the World’s Worst Real-Estate Investor?”

February 2018: The Washington Post reveals that multiple countries have discussed manipulating Kushner via financial entanglements.

Kushner Companies’ albatross, the highly leveraged building at 666 Fifth Avenue that left the family scrambling to cover its massive loan paymentsDrew Angerer/Getty

March 2018: MBS bragged to UAE leader that he has Kushner “in his pocket,” the Intercept reports.

April 2018: Trump meets with Qatari emir in Oval Office. New Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declares that Qatar blockade must end.

May 2018: Kushners are finalizing a deal with a Qatar-backed company to bail out 666 Fifth Avenue; Trump overrides his own intelligence officials to grant Kushner a top-secret security clearance.

October 2018: MBS’s agents brutally murder Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

2020: Trump puts Kushner in charge of solving the Middle East. Abraham Accords ease tensions between Israel and Gulf States but offer nothing for Palestinians, a deal Hamas vows to undermine.

December 2020: Trump pardons Charles Kushner.

January 21, 2021: As President Joe Biden takes over, Kushner launches Affinity Partners, a private equity firm that goes on to secure billions in investments from Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar.

Kushner and Saudi officials look on during an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in March 2018.Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty

February 2022: Biden administration sanctions Russia’s Dmitriev.

August 2022: The New York Times savages Breaking History, Kushner’s “soulless” new memoir: “Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.”

October 7, 2023: Hamas attacks Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. Israel launches a retaliation campaign that will reduce Gaza to rubble, kill at least 72,500 Gazans, and injure 172,000 more.

February 2024: Kushner insists he won’t play a role in the second Trump administration; he also says Israel should consider permanently relocating Palestinians, in part because “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.”

March 2024: Affinity announces a plan to develop a hyperluxury resort in a protected wilderness area in Albania considered the “jewel” of the Adriatic.

November 2024: Trump, elected to a second term, says he’ll make Charles Kushner America’s ambassador to France.

January 2025: Affinity becomes the top shareholder of Phoenix Financial, reportedly linked to Israeli settlements.

Charles Kushner, whom Trump pardoned and later appointed ambassador to France, presents the program for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence at Villa Masséna in Nice, France, in May 2026.Boizet E/Abaca/Zuma

September 2025: UN commission finds Israel guilty of genocide in Gaza; Forbes proclaims Kushner a billionaire; Kushner brokers a $55 billion purchase, with Saudi Arabia, of video game giant Electronic Arts. (MBS loves video games.)

October 2025: Kushner and Trump special envoy (and business partner) Steve Witkoff announce Gaza “ceasefire.” Israel continues to occupy most of Gaza.

November 2025: Kushner and Witkoff propose a unilateral peace plan that cedes territory to Russia, bars Ukraine from NATO membership, and caps Ukraine’s military capacity. It was “drafted solely by Dmitriev,” according to the Insider.

January 2026: Trump appoints Kushner and Witkoff to the executive board of his new Board of Peace, which bills itself as a “peace-building body” focused on (but not limited to) Gaza. Among its founding members: Qatar, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.

Kushner (right) listens as US special envoy Steve Witkoff (second from left) addresses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (second from right) in Jerusalem in October 2025.Chen Junqing/Xinhua/Zuma

February 2026: Trump names Kushner his new “envoy for peace.” Kushner and Witkoff lead Iran negotiations, despite limited experience and Kushner’s business ties to Iran’s foes. Negotiations fail. New York Times op-ed: “The Trump team is running [foreign policy] like a Trump subsidiary.”

March 2026: US and Israel attack Iran, which closes the Strait of Hormuz; Affinity’s assets top $6 billion as Kushner solicits more funds from Iran’s adversaries. “Technically, I have not joined the administration,” he insists, adding that he’s just a “volunteer.”

April 2026: Trump announces a potential bailout of UAE, now struggling as a result of Kushner’s diplomatic failures. As the war drags on and fuel prices soar, Democrats launch an investigation “amid mounting reports that Mr. Kushner is wielding diplomatic powers in the Middle East while soliciting billions of dollars in capital from foreign powers whose interests diverge sharply from those of the American people.”

The pitch deck from a new investment fund called Affinity Partners was one of the most laughable presentations the potential investors had ever seen. Consisting of 20 black-and-white slides, the PowerPoint resembled something an undergraduate would have put together. It verged on satire—drenched in corporate pabulum, it touted “accelerating transformation through connectivity” and “aligned economic interests” that could “create previously unrealized value.” Specifics were minimal at best, but the opportunities—whatever they were—were apparently endless. The would-be investors “said they’d never seen such a joke of a deck,” one source told the Intercept.

Despite its startling amateurishness, the gist of the pitch, proffered in 2021, was clear enough. Affinity sought to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from both American investors and the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom, eager to diversify its economy and launder its image as a repressive kleptostate, had already bankrolled professional golf, tennis, and soccer leagues; commercial real estate and luxury properties; video games and celebrity influencers; PR agencies and consultancy firms—even corporate giants like Boeing, Citigroup, and Disney. And much of that investment flowed to Westerners willing to overlook Saudi human rights abuses.

The Affinity pitch, though, was so vapid, so vacuous, so devoid of content that even Saudi officials blanched. A due diligence report conducted on behalf of the kingdom found Affinity’s operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” But there was one element that would get its pitch over the finish line: Taking up two full slides at the end of the presentation was a 1,200-word biography of Affinity’s founder, Jared Kushner.

This article was adapted from Casey Michel’s forthcoming book, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally With Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.Mother Jones illustration; photo by Versha Sharma

By this time, Kushner was out of the White House, where he’d served as a top adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump. The disgraced former president was back in Florida, licking his wounds after losing to Joe Biden, railing about election fraud as he plotted his return to power. Kushner took a different tack. Instead of, say, spending more time with his young children or turning back to the New York real estate scene that had chewed him up and spit him out, he would try something new—something that didn’t require too much talent and hinged almost entirely on his proximity to power and wealth. He would be a private equity fund manager. And Affinity—which he launched the day after Biden was sworn in—would be Kushner’s vehicle to greater riches than he’d ever known before.

But again, this was 2021. The world viewed Trump as little more than a twice-impeached former president who’d attempted a coup to remain in power. Kushner was tainted by association with his father-in-law, whose circle of contacts was increasingly worthless. Moreover, doing business with Kushner came with all sorts of hazards—not least the potential blowback from a Biden administration watching out for any foreign governments partnering with the Trump family.

The Saudi officials tasked with screening investments had their answer. Affinity’s lack of clarity or strategy, the absence of other major investors, the “inexperience” of its managers, and “public relations risks,” as their report put it, all pointed to an unequivocal no. They would not back Affinity. They would not fund Kushner.

But only one vote mattered. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—architect of the grisly assassination of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, lord of the Saudi kleptocracy, a leader opposed to extending women or minorities or gay people anything resembling equal rights—would have the final say. And as MBS saw it, Affinity wasn’t just some panhandling, fly-by-night investment group looking for a handout. It was a fund overseen by a fellow princeling whom the Saudi dictator had already befriended.

MBS also knew that if America’s political tides were to turn, Kushner could prove an indispensable asset. So he overruled his experts. Kushner and Affinity would have their funding—$2 billion to start, with potentially much more down the road. And MBS would again have an American partner he could steer in whichever way he wanted.

The Saudi investment proved fruitful. Despite Kushner’s insistence during the 2024 campaign that he would have little involvement in a second Trump term, he is once more at the center of almost every major geopolitical event. In the occupied Palestinian territories, he’s point man for what should supposedly emerge from the rubble—a “New Gaza” that promises to restore jobs, prosperity, and peace. He was dispatched to Moscow with special envoy Steve Witkoff to seek a diplomatic solution to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. In January, he and Witkoff were appointed executive board members of Trump’s new Board of Peace, itself a breathtaking attempt to monetize foreign relations. The following month, Trump named Kushner his “special envoy for peace,” shortly before dispatching him and Witkoff to lead the administration’s disastrous negotiations with Iran. To each of these assignments, Kushner has brought a mind-boggling array of ethical conflicts. His financial entanglements span the globe, touching on the diplomatic hotspots where he is supposed to be negotiating on America’s behalf. He has made an art of cashing in on his foreign relationships, which, for those partners, are also paying off as never before.

It’s worth pausing to reflect on just how unprecedented this entire play has been. True, Kushner is hardly the first family member to profit from their presidential connections. Billy Carter moonlighted as a lobbyist for Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and hawked “Billy Beer” to make a buck off his brother’s presidency. Hunter Biden’s attempts to cash in on the family name—via crooked networks out of Ukraine and Romania and the sale of overpriced artwork—helped derail his father’s presidency.

But in scale and audacity, what Kushner has attempted—and achieved—is on another level entirely. He asked foreign regimes to trust him with billions of dollars even though he’d never managed an investment fund. One former Republican official, as the New York Times noted in April 2024, “could recall no precedent for a government official leaving office and starting an investment firm that would immediately receive billions of dollars from foreign governments with which the official had been working while serving in government.” And that was before Trump placed Kushner—who had zero diplomatic or foreign affairs expertise until his father-in-law rose to power—at the center of every international crisis, elevating him to the role, arguably, of the nation’s leading diplomat. 

Even Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who led the charge against Hunter Biden, was taken aback: Kushner’s Saudi funding arrangements, he said, “crossed the line of ethics,” and when a consultant close to Kushner called and asked him to tone down his criticism, Comer said he instructed the intermediary “to tell Kushner to fuck off.”

Kushner was denied top-secret clearance until Trump overruled intelligence officials. “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him,” said a former White House official.

Of course, it wasn’t just Saudi Arabia that saw Kushner as a pliable source of influence. The United Arab Emirates, whose own despot had cultivated Kushner years before, began tossing money at Affinity Partners around the same time. So did the Qatari regime, which slipped back into America’s good graces as it was helping bail out Kushner’s family company. To date, firms linked to the UAE and Qatar have invested at least $1.5 billion in Kushner’s fund. With more modest infusions from smaller investors, nearly all foreign, Affinity’s asset pool grew and grew, topping $6 billion and generating more than $100 million in management fees for Kushner and his partners. (Affinity’s fee structure, the Saudi investment officials wrote in their analysis, seemed “excessive.”)

If the investments themselves weren’t enough of an ethical hornet’s nest, the contracts Affinity signed give the regimes troubling leverage over Kushner. They allow investors to pull out after a five-year window, which means Saudi Arabia and Qatar have the power to implode Affinity in the middle of Trump’s second term, decimating Kushner’s standing—a financial sword of Damocles that, by extension, dangles over the federal government.

Playing Both SidesA brief history of Jared Kushner profiting from his proximity to power.

This situation was entirely foreseeable, and yet Kushner’s foreign dealings were largely ignored by Democratic lawmakers until Biden was headed for the door. There were no formal investigations or high-level hearings into his doings, even after Trump announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Democrats appeared reluctant, with Hunter Biden under investigation, to draw attention to the issue of family members profiting off a presidency. Kushner, after all, seemed unlikely to have a future in US politics. Ignore him and he’d go away. The Trump era was over—right?

One of the few Democrats to raise the alarm was Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, then-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who attempted to pierce Affinity’s veil of secrecy once it became clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee. In June 2024 and again that September, he wrote to the company seeking information. Affinity resisted, withholding key financial details and refusing to fully reveal its foreign investors. Wyden’s request rested on two unknowns: how much Kushner profited personally from his foreign dealings and what he was doing, precisely, for those clients. Kushner “has some experience in real estate, but no experience running hedge funds and private equity,” a source familiar with the back-and-forth told me. If anything, his affairs gave the appearance of a simple playbook: selling access, influence, and even policy.

In October 2024, with less than two weeks left until the election, Wyden and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland accusing Kushner of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and asking Garland to name a special counsel to investigate. “The scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner coupled with the national security implications of his apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder are unprecedented and demand action from DOJ,” they wrote.

Soon after, Garland was on the way out, Trump was incoming, and the Republicans were poised to run Congress. There would be no special counsel, just a vastly more lucrative fundraising landscape for Affinity Partners.

Kushner’s deep ties to foreign despots are a remarkable breach of ethical norms. But they also are of a piece with his personal and professional histories—and perhaps especially his attitude. Kushner, much like his father-in-law, behaves as though rules and restrictions don’t necessarily apply to him and as though private-sector dealmaking somehow suits him for high-stakes international diplomacy. “A lot of the people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats,” he conceded late last year. “It’s just different being ‘deal guys’—just a different sport.”

Hints of this pay-to-play worldview—this notion that there’s a deal to be cut wherever one looks, ethics be damned—were first evident decades ago, when Kushner was a high schooler in New Jersey. Despite reportedly being a “less than stellar” student, he was accepted at Harvard—a move preceded by the pledge of a $2.5 million donation to the college from Charles Kushner, Jared’s father. For good measure, the payment was structured to begin only “after Jared matriculated,” journalist Andrea Bernstein wrote in her 2020 book, American Oligarchs.

In March 2005, less than two years after Jared graduated from Harvard, Charles was sentenced to 24 months in prison (and served 14) after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering—he had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, filmed their tryst, and sent the tape to his sister. (Trump would pardon Charles in December 2020 and appointed him ambassador to France four years later.) But the younger Kushner continued his unqualified ascent.

Charles Kushner (second from left), his wife, and his lawyers make their way through the media scrum outside the federal district courthouse in Newark, New Jersey, on August 18, 2004.Chris Hondros/Getty

At age 25, he purchased a majority stake in the New York Observer, once a staple of the city’s media and real estate landscapes, for $10 million—his own money, he claimed, from real estate deals he’d closed during college. He evinced little interest in good reportage or journalistic ethics. To the contrary, multiple editors later asserted that Kushner ordered the paper to run “hit jobs” on people he felt had wronged him or his family. “I came to believe that Kushner wanted the Observer to succeed not because he believed in what it was, but because he needed it as a bullhorn for his own business interests,” former editor Kyle Pope remembered. The paper, already losing money, failed to thrive on Kushner’s watch. By the mid-2010s, less than a decade into his ownership, the “once-proud” Observer was a “Potemkin village” of a publication, limping along with clickbaity articles and little impact.

On September 16, 2025, a UN commission declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. That same day, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire.

The Observer was hardly Kushner’s biggest financial fiasco. That honor belongs to a high-rise building at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Constructed in 1957, the 39-story, glass-and-steel office tower had been a Midtown staple for decades, with tenants ranging from Citigroup to Warner Brothers and Xerox. It would become an albatross around the Kushners’ neck. In 2007, their commercial real estate firm, Kushner Companies, with Jared at the helm, purchased the tower for nearly $2 billion—a staggering markup from its $518 million sale price seven years prior. The family invested $50 million and borrowed $1.75 billion to cover the remainder­—a remarkable risk at the best of times, which these were not.

A few months later, the subprime mortgage crisis sent the global economy into a freefall. Jared’s acquisition became, as the New York Times put it, a “classic example of reckless underwriting.” Vacancy rates spiked as interest on the family’s 10-figure debt accumulated. To cover costs, Jared sold off nearly half of the family’s stake in the building’s retail space and subsequently had to restructure the loan. Even as Trump ran for president in 2016, the family was still scrambling for funding. (“Is Jared Kushner the World’s Worst Real-­Estate Investor?” asked Vanity Fair.)

There was a moment just before the election when Kushner, who was helping run his father-in-law’s campaign, thought he’d found a lifeline. Together with Charles Kushner, he solicited a personal investment from former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who also had previously overseen Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

The sheikh, who goes by HBJ, agreed to put up $500 million to help refinance 666 Fifth Avenue if the family could raise the rest elsewhere. Negotiations bled into 2017, as Kushner, by then a White House official and diplomat, was charged with brokering Middle East peace. But after a controversy arose in relation to other potential investors, HBJ pulled out, leaving the Kushners again on the hook for their spiraling debt payments. At that point, the Intercept reported, Charles went directly to Qatar’s finance minister seeking an investment from the nation’s sovereign wealth fund. He failed to land a deal.

President Donald Trump, with Kushner in attendance, meets with Saudi Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office in March 2017.Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty

A regional blockade of Qatar began two months later, in June 2017. The Saudis, Emiratis, and other Middle East regimes severed ties with Doha as part of broader jockeying for regional supremacy between Gulf rivals—all US partners. The scent of invasion hung in the air. It was a tinderbox primed to explode.

Remarkably, rather than act as a neutral arbiter, the Trump administration immediately threw its weight behind the Saudis and Emiratis—and Kushner, according to investigative journalist Vicky Ward, “greenlit” the entire operation. “The Saudis would not have risked moving forward without permission from somebody,” an aide to then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told her. “That person must have been Jared.”

While there’s no direct evidence linking the blockade to Kushner’s investments, his family’s financial entanglements raise legitimate questions about his motivations. He had already “reamed the Qatari ruling family for not doing the deal” on 666 Fifth Avenue, Ward wrote on social media. Would the Qataris view the administration’s support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, she added, “as Kushner saying, ‘If you don’t pay my father, the Americans are going to sanction an invasion of your country’”?

Put another way: Lovely country you have there. Shame if something bad were to happen to it.

The blockade persisted for years, as did the ever-present threat of invasion. But the Trump administration began changing its tune in April 2018 after an intensive Qatari lobbying campaign culminated in the first of several Oval Office meetings between Trump and the emir. The following month, the New York Times reported that Charles Kushner was in “advanced talks” about 666 Fifth Avenue with a company partly owned by Qatar. Jared then flew to Doha, where he met with the emir to discuss “increasing cooperation.” Early that August, Kushner Companies inked a deal with the Qatar-backed company, eliminating what the Times called “the family’s biggest financial headache.” Trump’s new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, pushed for a resolution in the meantime, and just before Trump left office, the Saudis and Qataris reached a deal to end the blockade.

Everyone involved denied that the deal had any relation to Kushner’s White House role, but the timing was intriguing. Either way, it was a remarkable turnabout for the family—and a complete dissolution of the traditional separation of public and private interests.

Kushner Companies struggled to service the massive debt the Kushners took on when they purchased an office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.Drew Angerer/Getty

The Qatar affair set the tone for Kushner’s second stint as a public official. He’d struck up a friendship with MBS during Trump’s first term, engaging in text­ing sessions and jetting off to Riyadh for unannounced talks. The Saudi regime “cultivated the relationship with Mr. Kushner,” whom it saw as someone with “scant knowledge about” the Middle East and, specifically, “ignorance of Saudi Arabia,” the New York Times wrote. At one point, MBS reportedly bragged he had Kushner “in his pocket.”

It was difficult to conclude otherwise. US intelligence officials grew increasingly alarmed by Kushner’s private communications with MBS even as the prince sought retribution against regime critics like Khashoggi. “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him,” said a former White House official. The concerns reached such a breaking point that Kushner’s application for a top-secret security clearance was initially rejected over fears “about potential foreign influence,” NBC reported. But Trump overruled his intelligence officials, granting Kushner access to America’s most closely held secrets.  

As MBS tucked Kushner further into his pocket, other regimes tried to replicate the Saudi success. One year into Trump’s first term, US intelligence analysts reported that officials from a range of foreign countries had “privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner,” the Washington Post noted, “by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties, and lack of foreign policy experience.” They’d hit on the same conclusion as MBS: Kushner was tractable, and perhaps the best vector for influencing Trump.

“I was very surprised that the United States would send two negotiators who clearly had done almost no research into Iran’s negotiating history or even the basic facts surrounding the nuclear program.”

One of those countries was Israel. For years, Kushner and his family had supported Israeli imperialism in the Palestinian territories, helping bankroll the settler organizations stealing Palestinian lands in the West Bank. Kushner also had a decades-long personal relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Their ties stretched back to the 1990s, when Charles Kushner supported Netanyahu’s political rise and invited “Bibi” to their sprawling home in New Jersey. Young Jared even gave up his bedroom to Netanyahu and, according to Andrea Bernstein’s book, played basketball with him in the driveway. That familiarity has paid dividends for Netanyahu and Israel. With Kushner ensconced in the White House, the Israelis had their Trump whisperer. (He would broker the Abraham Accords, which brought Israel closer to the Gulf states but sidestepped the Palestinians. Al Jazeera and others cited Arab–Israeli normalization as a key factor in Hamas’ brutal October 7 attacks and the retaliatory razing of Gaza.)

Russia had a similar epiphany. Once Trump was sworn in, Kushner became a Kremlin target second only to Trump himself. President Vladimir Putin, federal documents show, tasked businessman Kirill Dmitriev with courting top White House officials, and Dmitriev took a particular interest in Kushner. Now head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund, Dmitriev—who was personally sanctioned by the US in 2022, along with the fund itself—controls a massive trove of Kremlin assets. He also studied at Stanford and Harvard and once worked at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. “It was with Kushner that Dmitriev established the closest and most trusting relationship,” the Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta noted. And that relationship would flourish again during Trump’s second term, as Kushner’s foreign ties came full circle.

Alex Fine

Kushner’s assertion that he would play no role in a second administration crumbled as soon as Trump returned to power, and foreign regimes were quick to recapitalize on his proximity to the throne.

Dmitriev is now steeped in negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine on Russia’s terms, with his old pal Kushner representing the United States. The Kremlin is dangling potential deals for US invest­ors that are reportedly worth trillions of dollars, if only America would lift its sanctions and welcome Russia back in from the cold. Kushner, meanwhile, has proved willing to peddle pro-Kremlin talking points time and again. In late 2025, he and special envoy Witkoff—whose family and the Trumps co-founded World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm in which a top UAE official would later purchase a 49 percent stake—publicized a “peace plan” for Ukraine. But its provisions, from capping Ukraine’s military to forcing Kyiv to cede territory that Russia hadn’t even conquered, were conspicuously pro-Moscow.

A Kremlin-friendly push by a US president with a mysterious Putin affinity might be unsurprising, but the details are galling. As investigative journalism site the Insider revealed, Kushner’s peace plan was in no way original. “Many of its most controversial conditions were contained” in a months-old Kremlin document the outlet had obtained. The plan was “at its core a recycled Russian document,” the Insider wrote, with “specific language that appeared almost exactly word-for-word in an earlier text—one drafted solely by Dmitriev.”

Israel also redoubled its relations with Kushner, whom Trump reappointed, with Witkoff, as a key interlocutor for the administration’s Palestinian efforts. Left unacknowledged was the fact that Affinity Partners had secured financial deals in Israel and was therefore in a position to profit from the ongoing theft of Palestinian lands. In 2025, the Israelis approved Affinity’s purchase of nearly 10 percent of an insurance and financing behemoth called Phoenix Financial Ltd., making Kushner’s fund the largest shareholder. Phoenix is a bulwark for Israeli expansion in the Palestinian territories and Syria, enabling more building, construction, and imperialism.

All of this has fattened Kushner’s wallet, and by extension Ivanka Trump’s. And yet the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are no closer to a conclusion. On September 16, 2025, a UN commission officially declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.

That same day, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire.

“Can you imagine, like, a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars?”

While still juggling Ukraine and Gaza, Kushner added Iran to his remit. If his Israeli investments made him a bad choice to broker peace with the Palestinians, the billions Affinity has received from Iran’s geopolitical rivals make his involvement in those negotiations just as shocking. His glaring conflicts of interest, combined with his lack of the knowledge and experience to lead such dicey negotiations, have resulted in what may be the greatest strategic failure of Trump’s presidency. Those conflicts perhaps might be easier to overlook were Kushner a nuclear policy whiz or an Iran expert. Instead, life-and-death decisions, and the fate of world affairs, have been left to a naive oligarch who seems to believe his ascent to ­billionaire-dom qualifies him to thread this difficult diplomatic needle.

The Guardian reported in March that Kushner claimed he and Witkoff both have “a pretty deep understanding of the issues that matter” in the Iran negotiations. But if Kushner has any nuclear know-how or useful knowledge of Iranian history and policy, it wasn’t evident during the failed negotiations that preceded the attacks Israel and the Trump administration unleashed in February without consulting Congress or America’s other allies. “I was very surprised that the United States would send two negotiators who clearly had done almost no research into Iran’s negotiating history or even the basic facts surrounding the nuclear program,” Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told me. “You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to negotiate an effective nuclear agreement, but you should be surrounded by nuclear experts.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (seated in front of the flags) is flanked by US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Kushner at a meeting in Jerusalem on October 9, 2025.Chen Junqing/Xinhua/Zuma

Kushner and Witkoff, by all appearances, misunderstood Iran’s recent diplomatic history with the United States, not least the nuclear deal struck under President Barack Obama, which Trump scuttled during his first term. For instance, when Iranian negotiators turned down Kushner’s offer of free nuclear fuel in return for ending the regime’s nuclear fuel enrichment, Kushner apparently took it as a sign that Iran would never abandon its bomb-building efforts. He can be heard complaining, in an early March recording obtained by Mother Jones, that Tehran was not taking the US position seriously and was responding simply with “games and tricks and denials.”

“Iran’s response should not have been a surprise,” said Davenport, whose organization has laid out perhaps the most thorough criticism of the US–Iran communication breakdown. “Iran had been burned in the past on fuel supplies, and it views uranium enrichment, the production of fuel, as not only a source of pride, but also as a sovereign right.” She added: “Witkoff and Kushner fundamentally misread the Iranian position and jumped to conclusions about Iranian intentions that just aren’t supported by the evidence.”

Yet despite the US contingent’s technical ignorance and general obtuseness, the Iran­ians appeared willing to keep talking. The Omani foreign minister, who was helping mediate, cited “substantial progress” between Washington and Tehran. And British mediators saw “no compelling evidence” of any imminent nuclear threat from Iran. That, too, appears to have been the conclusion of Trump’s White House predecessors. But Kushner, parroting Netanyahu’s rhetoric, claimed the Iranians “basically could have been days or weeks away from a weapon if they would have put the effort into it, and they had all the capability to accomplish that.”

That’s the conclusion he took to Trump, resulting in a war that has destabilized the region, alienated US allies, and bled Americans’ wallets. “All the reporting suggests that a strong deal was on offer had there been the patience and expertise from the US negotiating team—and it appears Mr. Kushner was not interested in that level of patience, and investing the time and effort needed for intensive negotiations on nuclear policy,” Jonathan Guyer, program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, told me. 

Kushner was, however, interested in soliciting new investments. The New York Times reported in March that, even as US bombs rained down on Tehran, he was meeting with foreign regimes, including the Saudis, to raise additional billions for Affinity. “Other Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that invested earlier in Affinity, including those in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, are also expected to be asked for more,” the Times noted.

And how could they say no?

Back in DC, now that Kushner has his official title of special peace envoy, the law requires that he produce a financial disclosure. He hasn’t, but a Republican-­controlled Congress doesn’t seem inclined to haul him in for a grilling. That could change if the Democrats retake either chamber in the midterms. “Can you imagine, like, a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars?” Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, looking very much like a 2028 presidential candidate, asked a crowd of supporters in a clip posted on TikTok in mid-April. “No!” a man yells. “But he’s a Trump!” Ossoff adds perkily. “A royal. A princeling!”

This past spring, Raskin, along with Wyden and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-­Calif.), announced separate committee investigations into Kushner’s conflicts of interest. “Kushner makes up for his flaws as an investor by being a wildly corrupt appendage of his father-in-law’s wildly corrupt administration,” Wyden said in a press release. “The guy is literally on the payroll of the Saudi government and trying to take even more of their money while simultaneously hijacking US foreign policy with his shadow State Department.”

Kushner, whose companies did not respond to questions for this story, may not be directly responsible for the Iran war—the thousands of deaths, billions in damages, shortages of fuel and fertilizer and key metals, economic disruption, and, by some estimates, expenditure of nearly $50 billion in US military resources. That was Trump’s call. But Kushner’s leading role in the bungled negotiations makes him complicit in what, by most accounts, has been a costly and humiliating defeat for the administration—and for the nation, whose alliances and global standing may never recover.

In many ways, the Iran mess is a fitting capstone to Kushner’s career to date. Rather than a seasoned diplomat with a deep understanding of Middle East policy and history, a person of integrity with no financial stake in the outcome, we got a feckless wheeler-dealer—and a global quagmire. For Kushner, none of this appears to matter. He and his partners are traveling the world, gleefully raking in cash as they cultivate relationships with sordid regimes and kleptocratic leaders in the interest of making a buck. The world burns and Jared Kushner gets richer.

It seems he was right when he said it’s just different being a “deal guy.” Never mind what that means for the rest of us.

Britain's much-heralded scheme to attract top scientific talent has managed to attract a total of 18 takers, the government has admitted. The Global Talent visa program was launched last summer following announcements from the EU and France that they intended to tempt scientists unhappy with their lot in Trump's America and elsewhere. But while the EU was putting up €500 million ($575 million) in funding for foreign eggheads, the UK could only stump up a dedicated pot of £54 million ($72 million) to lure boffins to Britain. According to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), UK research organizations have managed to attract ten leading international researchers in the latest wave, who are expected to drive breakthroughs in clean energy, life sciences, and other advanced technologies. This is on top of eight researchers previously announced by the agency. Nevertheless, DSIT today declared a key milestone for the scheme, with all 12 of the Global Talent Fund research organizations taking part having successfully recruited international candidates. This demonstrates strong delivery against initial program objectives, it claimed. DSIT highlighted two scientists that have left the US for Great Britain: Professor Bryony DuPont is joining the University of Strathclyde in Scotland from Oregon State University to work on the use of AI to improve energy systems and make them more resilient to the changing environment. The second is Dr Ivana Bukvin, who is joining the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, from Stanford University. She is researching proteins to advance understanding of aging and neurodegeneration in diseases such as Huntington's. UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), which oversees the scheme, says it is expanding its Global Talent visa fast-track route to cover all of the Association for Innovation, Research and Technology Organisation members (including IBM). Doing so means it will cover about 100 R&D-intensive businesses across key high-growth sectors, including advanced manufacturing and digital technologies. "It's no coincidence that the world's top researchers, driving groundbreaking innovations in AI, life sciences, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy, are choosing to come to the UK to advance their work," stated Lord Vallance, Minister for Science, Innovation, Research and Nuclear. The government says the Global Talent Fund is also strengthening UK research capability thanks to early investment in infrastructure and lab equipment. Some organizations are already deploying funding into specialist facilities and start‑up resources to support incoming talent, it claims. ®

Uber customers in the UK can now join an interest list to increase their chances of being matched with a Wayve robotaxi.

UK insurer Aviva is receiving tens of thousands of reports from scammers looking to profit from claims embellished using artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Aviva and its wider brand portfolio received an estimated 18,400 plus fraudulent claims in 2025, backed by doctored evidence includeding AI-generated car accident scenes, fake official documents, and fabricated images exaggerating damage. If approved, the sum of these claims would have amounted to £233 million ($310.3 million) across the year, or roughly £638,000 ($850,000) per day. The majority of claims cooked up using AI were related to motor insurance. The insurer says policyholders handed in supporting documents for claims such as inflated costs incurred for vehicle repairs and exaggerated reports of damage. Some claims were fraudulently made to appear more severe, whereas others were entirely fabricated. It marks a shift away from the older fraud model where policy-holders staged incidents such as a crash IRL in the hope of securing a payout. In total, Aviva said the value of scam claims made against motor insurance policies jumped 39 percent, with fraudsters increasingly seeking higher-value payouts. Similar trends were witnessed in liability insurance. While the number of cases remained broadly stable, the value of fraudulent claims rose 32 percent in 2025, with claimants exaggerating loss of earnings, rehab costs, and injury claims. “Professional enablers” – rogue white-collar workers, such as lawyers and medical professionals – are lending their support to the claims, says Aviva. These individuals are also playing a role in the increased value of travel insurance and medical claims for policy-holders. Aviva is countering the rise of AI-enabled fraudulent claims with… AI. It uses a concoction of its own tools and “advanced analytics,” all with human oversight, to help identify suspicious claims faster. Pete Ward, head of claims counter fraud at Aviva, said: “Fraud isn’t a victimless crime – it drives up the cost of insurance for everyone. We have a duty to ensure our customers don’t foot the bill for other people’s dishonesty, and we work tirelessly to root out fraud and stop it wherever we find it. “We’re seeing fraud become more sophisticated, from exaggerated claims to the use of AI-generated documents, and we’re continuing to invest in the tools and expertise needed to identify and stop it. “By detecting and preventing these claims, we’re helping protect honest customers from the cost of fraud.” ®

The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission on Thursday will consider awarding a contract for construction management services for Segment 12 of the Coastal Rail Trail. Meanwhile, the county’s annual road work is underway, with Mid-County projects set to wrap up this week.

The UK government is about to unleash an AI-powered CV writer on jobseekers in the hope that the technology taking jobs can also help people to find them. Prime minister Keir Starmer used London Tech Week to announce a three-month trial of an "AI Work Assistant" that officials say will put "a job centre in your pocket," offering around-the-clock help with CV writing, applications, job searches, and career advice. The service is already live online, though the government would like users to keep a few things in mind before handing the keyboard to a large language model: check whether the employer allows AI-assisted applications, make sure the generated content is accurate, and perhaps most challenging of all, rewrite it so it still sounds like you. The government, in effect, is encouraging job seekers to use AI while reminding them not to make it obvious. The service appears to be the latest step in Whitehall's growing enthusiasm for AI-powered public services. Earlier this year, the government confirmed it was working with Anthropic on a chatbot for job seekers, and more recently it launched "GOV.UK Chat," a generative AI assistant bolted into the GOV.UK app that it is boldly pitching as the "most comprehensive government-built chat tool in the world." Whitehall's latest experiment arrives as young workers face the toughest jobs market in years. Official figures show youth unemployment has climbed to 16.2 percent, the highest level in more than a decade, while business groups have repeatedly warned that rising employment costs are making firms more cautious about hiring. "No one doubts the huge potential of tech to change lives," Starmer is expected to say. "But we have to decide who that change is for. This government's choice is clear: the tech revolution must work for everyone, not just a privileged few. We're backing British businesses to lead the way, driving growth and investment that turns into more jobs and stronger communities." He added that ministers were using technology to "bring opportunity to every corner of the country" by helping people into work, boosting skills, and tackling inequality. Alongside the AI assistant, ministers announced AI and technology training for up to 400,000 pupils in disadvantaged schools and a new AI bootcamp program for young people at risk of falling out of education, employment, or training. The announcement comes as ministers are simultaneously grappling with growing concern about AI's impact on the labor market. A recent survey found that almost one in five Britons believe widespread AI-driven layoffs could trigger civil unrest, while more than half expect the technology to reduce the number of available jobs. Those concerns are unlikely to disappear any time soon. The same technology companies building AI systems to automate workplace tasks are increasingly pitching those tools as replacements for at least some human work, particularly the administrative and entry-level roles that traditionally provide a route into employment. Whether employers are eager to receive applications drafted by the same technology they are increasingly deploying to screen candidates remains to be seen. The labor market may yet become an arms race between applicants using AI and recruiters using AI to filter out applicants using AI. Somewhere in the middle, a human being is presumably still expected to get hired. ®

At Glenwood Fire Center, Cal Fire hand crews prepare for the next wildfire season in Santa Cruz County.

INTERVIEW Gregory Kurtzer, CentOS's founder, tells the story of how the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone was born of a small group of rebuild hackers and Linux fans who were angry that Red Hat Enterprise Linux had replaced Red Hat Linux and convinced they could do better. Back in 2003, Linux fans were ticked off at Red Hat because they were replacing the end-user-friendly Red Hat Linux with the business-oriented Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a smart move for Red Hat, but users were pissed when then Red Hat CEO, Matthew Szulik, said that for home users, Windows was probably "the right product line." Yeah. That went over about as well as you'd expect. In the meantime, Gregory Kurtzer had no plans to start building a Linux distribution, he says. He came out of biochemistry and genomics, where compute‑hungry (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) (BLAST) jobs were chewing through early SGI systems. One day, his business partner suggested they try Linux. "He said there was this thing called Linux, he wanted to try, and I thought he was mispronouncing Unix," Kurtzer tells The Register. They drove to Fry's, "bought a ton of hardware," and discovered that a free operating system downloaded off the internet could run serious scientific workloads. It wasn't the price that blew his mind, says Kurtzer. What hooked him was realizing that "many, many thousands of people [were] collaboratively working all over the world on a common software project… actually creating something of massive amounts of value." He became "enamored with open source in general, but Linux as a platform," and started looking for ways to contribute. When he landed at the Department of Energy's Berkeley lab, the environment was standardized on Red Hat. He says he missed Debian's ecosystem and apt so much that he began asking why there was "no community around the Red Hat type ecosystem or the RPM-based ecosystem." The answer he kept hearing was that Red Hat owned that space. His answer was Caos [Community Assembled Operating System]. The idea was "to be basically a Debian-like alternative for RPM-based distributions of Linux." Caos used Red Hat as a base. "Glibc came out of Red Hat, for example, right, but we used the upstream kernel and then extended it with a community‑driven package universe." He formalized the effort as the Caos Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non‑profit. Caos might have stayed a small Linux distro like so many others, but when Red Hat ended the classic Red Hat Linux line in favor of RHEL, it picked up steam. Kurtzer recalls that the community had grown up on free Red Hat Linux CDs, and the move landed badly: "Linux is a community project, it's freely available, and it should remain freely available, so a lot of people didn't like that notion at the time." By then, there was already a Red Hat "rebuild" mailing list where multiple groups were experimenting with re‑compiling Red Hat's source packages into community distributions.uKurtzer tell is: "VA Linux was doing this, along with an HPC company called Atipa, which is where early CentOS developer Rocky McGaugh worked… and there were a few others." Rocky, later immortalized in the name Rocky Linux, was part of that loose coalition, maintaining his own rebuilds. The list also included John Morris, who'd create White Box Enterprise Linux, and David Parsley, who would launch Tao Linux. The first RHEL clone to break out wasn't CentOS; John Morris's White Box Enterprise Linux, not CAOS or CentOS, was first. "He released White Box Enterprise Linux, and Slashdot went crazy for it," Kurtzer remembered. Sudden success became a burden. Morris "got way more visibility and attention and responsibility than… he was ready to take on" and didn't want to "take on the weight of the world in terms of infrastructure." The Caos folks, by contrast, already had build and mirror infrastructure: "we already have our own builders, we already have our own infrastructure… we were already ingesting packages from… Red Hat Linux [and] Red Hat Enterprise Linux." "So a couple members of the Caos team said, well, we're already kind of doing a lot of this… It's like, well, this actually makes sense, because we can then leverage those same binaries… and let's start this project, and so CentOS kind of came out of everything that was happening at the time." Then the Red Hat clones were more collaborative than competitive: "We were generally all very collaborative… we were all kind of on the same IRC list, so when any of us had a bug on rebuilding a package or issue, we all kind of worked together." Where Caos had an edge was scale. "We actually had a number of people already associated with it. We already had a critical mass… so it was not that big of a lift for us to properly support this," Kurtzer says. Parsley ultimately "ran Tao Linux… for quite a while before finally retiring the project, and then telling his users basically to go… over to CentOS," complete with a "nice transition plan." White Box and Tao quietly funneled users and expectations into the emerging CentOS brand. Even the version numbers reflect CentOS's pragmatic roots. "CentOS 3 was developed almost completely by Rocky," Kurtzer adds. "We started CentOS version 3 before version 2, and there was never a 1, right, because… There was never a version 1 of RHEL either." CentOS 3 arrived on stage on March 19, 2004. The community went where the demand was. "We identified that the first and most pressing need was around version 3, so Rocky started with version 3. That focus, combined with Caos's infrastructure and the consolidation of smaller rebuilds, turned CentOS into the RHEL clone that stuck." For its early life, CentOS lived under the Caos Foundation umbrella. By the CentOS 4 timeframe, in 2005, the projects split. Kurtzer says, "At about the release of… CentOS four… the CentOS project left the Caos Foundation, and it moved on… and we kind of ended up going different directions." He ceded control. "I was no longer the project lead of CentOS at that point, so it was taken over by a guy named Lance Davis," he tells The Reg. Caos continued until around 2007–2008, including a "Node Server Appliance" variant focused on "lightweight high-performance computing systems," but the market was voting with its feet. "Most people wanted the compatibility… that one-to-one compatibility… was incredibly important," he says. CentOS became the canonical RHEL clone; Caos faded into history. How CentOS simply had to exist From the outside, CentOS often gets cast as Red Hat's free rival. Kurtzer sees it differently. Red Hat's subscription model, he contends, practically required something like CentOS to exist. "This choice in the business model has made it very difficult for organizations, and so this is the whole reason why… There was even a need for CentOS," he says. Kurtzer explains that enterprises evolved a two‑tier pattern. "Organizations started running a bisected environment where they ran CentOS on the majority of it, and then they ran Red Hat on a sliver of it, where they needed the most support, where they needed validation, where they needed to know that it's going to work." Without CentOS, he bluntly says: "I believe that most organizations probably would have gone to a Debian and Ubuntu model because nobody's going to pay for support… across their whole environment for a free product." Running Debian or Ubuntu everywhere and RHEL on a small slice doesn't work well, he argues, because "it's an incompatible operating system, so the tooling would be different depending on what side of the infrastructure that they're looking at." With CentOS, they could "run the free product where they can and then only pay for the support where they need to." His conclusion: "I actually truly believe CentOS was very helpful to RHEL overall, given the choice of that particular business model." Asked when CentOS stopped being a niche rebuild and became a default choice, Kurtzer points to a supercomputing conference in Phoenix in the mid-2000s. "I remember being at a supercomputing conference… and I was talking with a vendor… and I remember somebody came up next to me and interrupted the conversation to ask the vendor: 'Why don't they support CentOS?'" It was a turning point. "This is the first time I actually even heard somebody outside of my circle of people actually now start demanding CentOS… and it was somebody I didn't know, and I'm just kind of like, 'wow, that was kind of cool.'" Around the same time, Kurtzer says he and early collaborators met IBM executives there to pitch Caos and CentOS. "Interestingly enough, there was no interest at the time. Another metric of success was seeing technology appear on resumes and in job descriptions. By the mid‑2000s, CentOS was on its way to being more popular than RHEL." By the early 2010s, CentOS was everywhere, but still maintained by a small, unpaid team. When Red Hat moved to sponsor the project in 2014, some read it as a hostile capture. Kurtzer didn't. "The CentOS team was fairly small at this point… and the developers were basically doing heroic feats for the entire community, and not being paid for it." Some things never change in open source, do they? Kurtzer says he thought the deal was fair. "They're giving up their home lives and whatnot… and there were companies out there that were doing very well, basing their infrastructure on it, but also making a ton of money on that, so I thought that this was a really fair option for them to now get hired by Red Hat… and now get paid, and now be… not having to give up their home life." Vendors began calling to ask if CentOS was going away and whether he'd recreate it. "I even had two people from fairly large companies at fairly high rankings… basically say, 'Greg, do you want to recreate CentOS?' And I said, 'no… let's give Red Hat… the benefit of the doubt… and see what happens,'" he recalls. For years, he thinks, Red Hat did "a phenomenal job": release latency improved, documentation and community interaction got better. That's why the CentOS 8/CentOS Stream pivot in 2021 hit so hard. Kurtzer thinks that Red Hat's messaging "was just a complete cluster… nobody, including the people at Red Hat, really knew what they were saying." The community's "general consensus at the time was that CentOS is end of life, and there's this new thing that's replacing it, which is some rolling beta." The blog post announcing the change "got more press… and more comments than any other blog that Red Hat has ever posted… mostly people in the community yelling at Red Hat," and "it was… nasty." By then, Kurtzer was running CIQ, a young high-performance computing (HPC) company building a computing platform on CentOS. They had already asked themselves what would happen if "something happens to CentOS." Their answer was to be ready to help rebuild a RHEL‑compatible distro if needed. Within two hours of the CentOS blog going live, as comments piled up, Kurtzer says, he replied publicly: "Hi everybody, I'm… original founder of CentOS. I'm going to go… recreate CentOS, and I'm hanging out over in this Slack over here… and if anybody wants to join me, I'll be hanging over there, kind of thinking about how to do this." The response was immediate. "Within four to six weeks, we had over 10,000 people join… it took off," he says. The free tier of Slack couldn't cope, "that 10,000 message limit goes in a matter of hours," but it was enough to bootstrap a new community. Teams coalesced around release engineering, testing, development, branding, web work, and even merchandise. "We had T‑shirts, swags, and memorabilia that you can get before we had any code," he laughs. Early shirts read "Rocky Linux" with "early supporter" in brackets underneath. Rocky Linux wasn't the only successor; AlmaLinux and others joined the field, and the usual distro tribalism followed. Kurtzer compares it to sports rivalries: "We just do it around our Linux distribution choices," he says. But he insists the diversity is healthy. "If something happens to Alma, Rocky's here; if something happens to Rocky, Alma is there; if something happens to both of us, Oracle is there; and we have all of these other options to guarantee the stability in the ecosystem." That may be CentOS's real legacy. It proved that a community could rebuild an enterprise OS from source and sustain it long enough for enterprises to standardize on it, and that doing so could actually reinforce, not undermine, the commercial platform it tracked. The clones that followed, from Scientific Linux to Rocky and Alma, are part of the same lineage that began when a few people on a rebuild mailing list decided that Red Hat's sources shouldn't just sit on a server; they should become a truly community Linux again. ®

In a letter to the editor, a nurse expresses her worry about Watsonville Community Hospital’s future amid a dire financial situation.

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David Boyer is stuck in a waiting game. For more than 18 months, silence from the National Institutes of Health on a crucial grant decision has thrown his research developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease into uncertain territory.

His application received a favorable impact score, the main metric used for NIH funding decisions, so the postdoctoral scholar at UCLA figured he would hear good news by spring of 2025. Instead, he has heard nothing.

Without the funding, he has less to spend on his experiments, which require thousands of dollars worth of materials, including advanced microscopes. In a worst-case scenario, it’s possible he could lose his job if the grant doesn’t come through. 

“It’s really up in the air whether I would be able to continue getting funded,” said Boyer, who is part of UCLA’s Eisenberg Lab. 

Boyer is not alone. Federal funding for scientific research, from agencies such as NIH and the National Science Foundation, has been upended under the Trump administration, with fewer grants being awarded and some existing grants being canceled altogether. Even researchers with stable funding worry that their grants could get suspended or will not be renewed. 

But now, Boyer and other researchers at California universities have some hope that they could get a reprieve — from California voters. 

The University of California is pushing to get a $12 billion state bond on the November ballot that would fund scientific research projects at California universities, research institutes and private companies. In addition to UC and California State University campuses, private universities such as Stanford and the University of Southern California would also be eligible for the bond money.

For the bond to appear on the ballot, the state Legislature first needs to approve Senate Bill 895. The bill’s sponsors include UC and UAW 4811, the union representing 48,000 academic workers at UC, including thousands of researchers.

The bill was approved last week by the Senate and now heads to the Assembly. It must be passed and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom by June 25 to make the ballot.

State Sen. Scott Wiener speaking in 2024. Credit: Fred Greaves for CalMatters

“As the federal government cuts and destroys scientific funding, as it creates long-term instability and uncertainty, as science has now become a political football in this country, let’s make sure that California retains and expands our leadership in scientific research,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said on the Senate floor just before the May 27 vote. Wiener is one of the authors of the bill. 

If passed and approved by voters, the measure would create the California Foundation for Science and Health Research, which would award the grants using “an open, competitive, scientific peer review process,” according to the bill.

The bond would not be a cure-all for research funding if federal spending continues to dwindle. UC alone gets nearly $6 billion annually in federal support for research. 

“There is nobody else who can substitute for research funding on the scale the federal government supplies,” said Simon Atkinson, vice chancellor for research at UC Davis.

Still, Atkinson and other proponents of the bond agree that it would benefit researchers in California not to rely so much on the federal government, especially under the Trump administration, which proposed a $5 billion cut to NIH for 2027. Last week, The New York Times reported that NSF had slowed funding to Harvard and other institutions targeted by the White House, though the impact on California campuses is unclear.

Having another potential funding source would be welcome news to Ximena Anleu Gil, a plant biologist at UC Davis who researches how to breed more plants in environmentally friendly ways.

There is one year remaining on the grant that funds Gil’s position in UC Davis’ Meyers Lab. The prospect of not having the funding renewed is stressful for Gil, who is the main provider for her family, which includes her partner and 7-month-old daughter. 

“I’m very scared of what could happen. If I’m laid off, we’re screwed,” Gil said. “But having another source of potential funding, that would already feel like a big relief.”

If voters approve the bond, the legislation requires that priority be given to replacing funding slashed by the federal government. 

In California, 782 grants have been terminated by the federal government since January 2025, according to the website Grant Witness, a project tracking terminations under the Trump administration. 

Most of those grants have been restored under court orders, but dozens remain canceled, including one at UC San Francisco’s Center for AIDS Research that paid for training for undergraduate students. 

Under that grant, students from nearby Hispanic-Serving Institutions, including San Francisco State University, would spend the summer at UCSF doing HIV research. At the end of the summer, the center would hold a symposium where undergraduates present their findings.

The idea was to expose those students to the field and get them interested in HIV research, said Monica Gandhi, director of the center. 

“There are fewer and fewer people going into infectious disease research at a time when infectious diseases are all over,” Gandhi said. “It really just got them excited, and we thought it would help grow our biomedical research workforce in a really important topic.”

If California’s bond goes through, Gandhi said she expects the center would immediately apply for a grant to restart that program. 

Federal funding remains intact for the rest of the AIDS research center, which organizes all HIV research across UCSF. But it’s not clear how long that will be the case. Gandhi said the center is waiting for a formal notice from NIH to apply for a grant renewal, which she said normally would have come by now. 

“There are all these little ways they are making it harder to get funding,” she said. “Having a California-based initiative that isn’t political and will have the grants be judged on their scientific merit would be amazing. And I think it will go a long way.”

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OPINION In the time zone of the keynote, it's dystopia o'clock. These days, it always is. The fervent CEO prophet strolls around an empty stage, backlit by a giant altar of light on which they display their magic and impart visions of a future that address none of our fears, choosing instead to add to them. The format has as little variation as a church service, the whoops and cheers of the faithful as predictable as psalms. There are no industry awards for keynotes, even the most brazen hype machines can't go that far. Perhaps there should be. Taiwan's Computex had a great selection. Nvidia's Jensen Huang pushed RTX Spark, a repackaging of existing technologies — another keynote staple — as the next PC platform. It'll make local AI ubiquitous, freeing users from reliance on giant minds elsewhere. Or it would, if those giant minds weren't using all the memory you'll need. Pricey thing, privacy. Another, even more delightful dollop of digital darkness came from Qualcomm's Vogon Captain Cristiano Amon. His vision is of omniscient agents constantly monitoring everything you do on every device, combined with the sort of wireless traffic analysis via 5G that outperforms anything GCHQ and the NSA managed in the cold war. "Resistance is futile," he actually said. Which is curiously comforting. It replicates both Sun Microsystem's 1984 "The network is the computer" and the more notorious quote from Sun's then-CEO, Scott McNealy, in 1999 that: "You have zero privacy. Get over it." He, too, actually said it. Sun was defunct ten years later, and we still have privacy worth fighting for. Just. But the They Actually Said It Award in a keynote didn't come from Ol' Taipei, but rather the streets of that upstart city San Francisco. Here, the keynote for Microsoft Build 2026 was in the CEO-as-Ringmaster format, an option if your company does more than a couple of things. Here Satya Nadella, sadly lacking top hat, tails and a spangly waistcoat, wheeled on act after act culled from underlings blinking uncertainly in the LED lights. Yes, there were plenty of moments where things nobody wanted were presented as inevitable miracles. Shrunken models that might actually run in affordable memory because "sorry-not-sorry about the datacenters." Autopilot, an omniscient, omnipresent trickster god of an agent, that watches everything you do and wilfully inserts itself into your reality. A synthetic demo of agents wandering critical power plants gathering vulnerability data and integrating it into corporate IT. Why on Earth would you want a human doing that, anyway? It's all very exciting, and pffft, security is too trivial to mention. Only — OMG — they did mention it. It came late, after the "We've put grep and Homebrew in Windows' fans service." Imagine shipping your OS with a CLI package manager, eh, Apple? Then, at last, agent security took the stage. In fact, there was a live demo of OpenClaw trying desperately to delete all the files on a desktop and failing. "Six months ago, that totally would have worked," they joshed. The reason Microsoft can finally admit that agents are dangerous AF is because it has rediscovered what an operating system actually is and actually does. The thwarted OpenClaw was sandboxed in a Windows MXC container with very detailed permissions about what agents could access, who they could talk to, and so on. If this sounds familiar, it's because MXC marks Microsoft's discovery that agents need an ID that has to operate under rules and needs to be managed. In other words, once you realize that agents are just another kind of user, all the user and process focused protection of a modern OS can be brought to bear. It was sitting there all the time in the OS, because that's what we've had to evolve to keep things safe. Fancy that, eh? None of this is much good as it stands for Qualcomm's unique cyberpunk dreams. Getting access to all of your services wherever you are, on your own terms, is obvious and as old as silicon. The keynote actinic fever dream videos always show such access to be effortless — the Microsoft keynote had Project Solara showing just that — but the MXCification of OpenClaw is anything but. It's a belated admission that trust and control are prerequisites of agent acceptance, and that currently you can only grok that if you know about menu diving through right-click granular system-level settings. The alternative at the moment is the slightly abstracted model for mobile apps, where the user has to tell the OS to grant or deny permissions as requested by the software. Just hitting accept every time is common, dangerous in apps, and devastating with agents. If the industry is serious about agentic AI, let alone multi-platform auto-porting agents, it needs to create and adopt common interfaces that monitor, manage, and protect wherever agents touch the users, user ID and user data. As Microsoft has now actually said, this is what OSes are designed to do. It doesn't fit precisely into the shimmering nightmare future, but it does into one that's moderately shiny and not entirely unwholesome. That's a difficult proposition to work into a 2027 season keynote but what if it was? That would really be worth an award. ®

WHO, ME? Is showing up for work every Monday a mistake? While you ponder that question, dive into a new installment of Who, Me? – The Register's weekly column that shares readers' stories of escaping their errors. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Evan," who wrote to us from the side of a pool while his kids had a swimming lesson! "I work in test automation as a consultant and for one client I had to record test evidence as video," he explained, adding that the client's test management tool stored the vids. The resulting files weren't individually large, but by the time Evan had recorded 600 of them, managing all those files was starting to get a bit cumbersome. "Removing them manually was far too slow and wasn't feasible," he wrote. So he wrote a script to clean things up all at once. "Obviously this data was important, and I'm not reckless," Evan wrote. He therefore carefully debugged the script using breakpoints. "I stepped through every line, I checked all values, and I could see everything was right. Then I let the code try to delete the one file I was watching." The script deleted that file. And everything else in the container that the test tool used to store videos and plenty of other data. Did we mention this happened in the middle of a project, meaning Evan's action was profoundly unwelcome? Evan reckoned he was probably at fault, but decided not to confess to his client and instead informed them about the data loss and logged a support ticket. The client therefore assumed this incident was an accident and was cool about it. After a week of back-and-forth with support, Evan got good news. His client's support team was able to restore the data from a backup and could not find a reason for the incident. And then came even better news. "They took all ownership of the fault," Evan admitted. "They were very apologetic and said one of their SaaS scripts had gone haywire and deleted the content." Evan therefore escaped blame and carried on consulting – and is clearly doing well enough to pay for multiple kids to have swimming lessons! Have you successfully escaped blame for an error? If so, click here to send an email to Who, Me? It would be a mistake not to share your story so we can present it to your fellow readers. ®