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By Alec MacGillis, data analysis by Ken B. Morales, for ProPublica Marianna Mitchem grew up in the Denver suburbs, where she played high school soccer. One day in April 1999, her team faced off against a nearby rival, Columbine High. The next day, two teenagers went on a shooting rampage at Columbine, killing more than a dozen people. The massacre left an imprint on Mitchem.

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The company said it's worked up a moderation system that uses a blend of AI and human input to moderate both visual and written content.

Health secretary James Murray has said that he will become a data controller of all National Health Service records in England shared through the government’s planned single patient record (SPR). Murray, who is formally the secretary of state for health, told the House of Commons on 1 June that GP surgeries, NHS trusts and other care providers will continue to manage and take responsibility for their own records, but added: “Where that information is then shared through the single patient record, the Department of Health and the secretary of state will take on a role as data controller as well.” Asked by Labour MP Sarah Champion about the security of a system that could be accessible by a couple of million of health and social care workers, the health secretary said that the SPR “will be governed by the highest levels of security” including an audit trail of access and “the strongest available” cyber-security. The government announced the SPR in the King’s Speech on 14 May, giving MPs their first chance to challenge it as part of the second reading of the health bill. It will require all English NHS providers to share data on patients, with patients in England able to access their records through the NHS app (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own health and social care services). The government argues that the SPR will mean healthcare professionals will not have to ask patients to recount their medical histories when first meeting them, improving safety. Murray did not rule out Palantir, which manages the NHS’s federated data platform (FDP), working on the SPR when speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme earlier on 1 June, saying that this would be a commercial decision. However he told the Commons that the government is likely to lessen risks by offering a series of contracts for the SPR, rather than award a single deal such as Palantir’s £330 million FDP contract. He added that the government is reviewing the FDP contract in advance of a break clause in February 2027. This morning, the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has recommended that the government end Palantir’s FDP contract and develop a replacement in-house or with UK-owned and based suppliers. Doctors’ union the British Medical Association (BMA) said that there are existing ways for NHS organisations to access GP records and it was concerned over who will control these in future. “GPs have protected patients’ confidential records since the inception of the NHS in 1948 – a legal duty that they take incredibly seriously,” said Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair of the BMA’s GP committee England, in a statement. “However, we need clarity that this important GP oversight will not be taken away, otherwise it will raise serious questions about who is safeguarding patients' data.” The BMA is involved in a long-running series of strikes over the pay of resident doctors, also known as junior doctors, in hospitals. In comments on Monday’s Commons debate, medical record campaign group medConfidential said that the government was promising safeguards but these would only appear in secondary legislation that the House of Commons would not have the power to amend. It added that the Department of Health already makes it difficult for people to opt out of the existing summary care record service. Murray took over as health secretary from Wes Streeting, who stood down to criticise prime minister Keir Starmer on 14 May. He inherited Streeting’s health bill, which as well as establishing the SPR will abolish NHS England, the organization that currently runs the health service in England, and establish NHS Online, an optional England-wide service providing remote consultations for some conditions through the NHS app. ®

Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | Mamdani tackles housing crisis: ‘Block by block, we will build’…

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The UK’s competition regulator has imposed new rules for Google search, in a bid to help publishers prevent their work from appearing in AI Overview results as well as to get links to their work instated in AI results. The Competition and Markets Authority imposed a new conduct requirement for Google search, which it promises will provide effective tools to stop publishers' content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews. The requirements will put publishers, including news organizations badly hit by Google AI summaries, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google, the CMA said. The regulator also requires Google to properly attribute publisher content, using clear links in AI‑generated search results. Google is also set to allow publishers to opt out of their content being used to fine-tune AI models. In May, Google said it would embed its AI in search, offering users an AI summary of results that does not directly link to website sources. The CMA said it was monitoring how Google is implementing these changes and assessing their impact on businesses. The regulator said it would bring forward work on further measures to ensure a fair exchange of value between Google and publishers. Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the CMA, said the move was a world‑first requirement on Google’s search services in the UK and would support fair treatment and choice for businesses and consumers. “With features like AI Overviews rapidly reshaping online search, it is crucial that content publishers, including news organizations, have appropriate bargaining power over how their content is used. At the same time, these measures will help tens of millions of UK search users better understand and trust the information presented to them,” she said. She said the new rules were designed to respond to what Google is doing now and in the future. “We’ll also continue to use the unique flexibility of the UK regime to monitor and address future concerns as they arise and we will be announcing further action in relation to Google’s search business in the coming weeks,” she said. The new rules follow the CMA’s decision to designate Google with strategic market status (SMS) in general search services, allowing it to target Google’s search activities to ensure fair dealing, open choices or trust and transparency, so long as the rules are proportionate. ®

On a recent Wednesday at 11 p.m., Arianne Betancourt’s phone rang. It was her father, Justo Betancourt, who had spent much of the last six months at the notorious Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention facility in Florida. ICE had just transferred him to Krome, a different facility in Miami, and with little warning, he was being released in the middle of the night. Still in her pajamas, Arianne asked a friend to take her. “I was too nervous to drive myself,” she told me a few days later.

Their reunion at Krome included no hugs or warm greetings. Once 55-year-old Betancourt got in the car, guards ordered them to leave immediately. Under the fluorescent lights of a nearby gas station, the father and daughter finally embraced for the first time. Arianne noticed “the toll that that place took on my dad.” He had lost about 50 pounds. His wrists and ankles were bruised from the shackles he wore during his detention, and his speech seemed slurred.

“Welcome home to Justo Betancourt, whose Daughter, Arianne, fought very hard to free her father from Alligator Alcatraz. Enjoy your Freedom together!!!”

They headed to his son’s house in Miami, where the family gathered and stayed up most of the night. Betancourt drank Cuban coffee for the first time since his arrest and saw his 15-month-old granddaughter, who could now walk, toddling around the living room.

By the weekend, Arianne noticed her father’s speech had worsened. She drove him to a nearby emergency room, where he was admitted, and doctors confirmed he had suffered a stroke while in detention. Justo, who is diabetic, had not received the proper amount of insulin he needed at Alligator Alcatraz, Arianne told me, and he will need speech and physical therapy to recover. His medical condition, however, is only part of the effects of his ordeal. “What Mr. Betancourt has experienced shows that folks who are caught up in this cruel deportation machine are suffering, and that their suffering doesn’t end upon release,” said Miriam Haskell, a senior attorney with the Community Justice Project, a legal nonprofit in Miami. She represented Betancourt pro bono and filed the Habeas Corpus petition that resulted in his release. “People have endured great hardships, and getting out doesn’t solve all of the problems.”

An unexpected expression of support for Betancourt’s release came from President Donald Trump, whose draconian immigration policies were responsible for his incarceration in the first place. On a Sunday night Truth Social post, the president wrote, without any apparent irony: “Welcome home to Justo Betancourt, whose Daughter, Arianne, fought very hard to free her father from Alligator Alcatraz. Enjoy your Freedom together!!!”

Arianne Betancourt at a Sunday vigil in front of Alligator Alcatraz.Jose Mejia/Owl Media Justo Betancourt at a Sunday vigil in front of Alligator Alcatraz.Jose Mejia/Owl Media

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration erected the makeshift detention camp in the Everglades last summer when the Department of Homeland Security needed more beds to house immigrants pending their deportations. Over the last year, the center has come under fire for its living conditions, its environmental impact on the Everglades, and its location on sacred tribal land. Nearly 22,000 people have been detained there despite reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, and lackluster food. The venture has also been costly, requiring more than $1 million a day to run the facility. 

Recently, reports circulated that Alligator Alcatraz will be closing soon. Federal and state officials haven’t announced any official plans. Still, signs of an imminent closure are emerging. Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Orlando, learned during a visit to the center on May 27 that only 655 people remained there, half the population reported earlier this year. Contractors were also told that operations would be winding down in early June, the New York Times reported. 

“There’s a lot of uncertainty and lack of information and transparency here,” said Carmen Iguina Gonzalez, Deputy Director for Immigration Detention at the ACLU. “That makes a lot of people nervous because they have no certainty as to what is going to happen to them.”

Last week, I asked the Florida Division of Emergency Management, the state agency that manages Alligator Alcatraz, when the facility was closing and how many people were currently being detained. A spokesperson referred me to DeSantis’s May 13 remarks during a press conference, in which the governor said that the responsibility for sending immigrants to Alligator Alcatraz rested with DHS. “I have not gotten any official word that they’re not going to be sending illegal aliens there,” DeSantis continued. When I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for more information, a spokesperson replied in an email, “Daily operations at Alligator Alcatraz continue as usual.”

a Sunday vigil in front of Alligator Alcatraz.Jose Mejia/Owl Media

I wrote about Arianne and her father back in March, when I first learned about his story. Justo Betancourt came to the US from Cuba more than 35 years ago, and had an order of removal following his release from prison in 2020 after serving time for drug-related charges. Betancourt reported to his check-ins with immigration and was issued a work permit, court filings state. He was arrested in Miami during a routine immigration check-in appointment in October and was taken to Alligator Alcatraz. In January, he was transferred to a Texas detention center and then forced to present himself for deportation to Mexican authorities at the border. But due to his health problems, including diabetes, Mexican officials turned him away. ICE transferred him back to Alligator Alcatraz, court filings state.

Since her father was detained, Arianne has become a firebrand within the immigrant rights movement. As I wrote in March:

Before her father’s arrest, Betancourt, a 33-year-old Miami native, spent her days guiding tourists through the city’s most iconic sites like Little Havana and South Beach. Now, she is holding a microphone and a bright orange sign that reads, “Give Justo Betancourt the right to due process.” She peered across the crowd of about 100. When she came to the weekly vigil for the first time, Betancourt told them she was “absolutely broken.” She then added, “Week after week, I’ve come here, and I’ve felt stronger. I feel love, I feel empathy, compassion from absolute strangers.”

Her activism began at the weekend vigils held outside the detention camp’s gates. She protested in Minneapolis and Chicago and shared her family’s story with local and national news outlets. In March, she attended then US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s testimony at a Senate oversight hearing. Her advocacy led to a career change; she quit her job as a Miami tour guide and was hired as an organizer for the Workers Circle, a Jewish social-justice organization that has taken the lead in coordinating the Alligator Alcatraz gatherings. Most recently, she contributed to the launch of a new pro bono legal program for Alligator Alcatraz detainees. 

I spoke to Justo for the first time this week. He was out of the hospital and living with Arianne. Despite his slurred speech, he sounded upbeat. While thrilled to be with his family, he is worried about the friends he left behind. He described the frozen bologna and cheese sandwiches eaten during 15-minute meal breaks, the mosquito and spider infestations that left detainees covered in bites, and the anxiety of waiting hours to make one phone call to Arianne and his two other children. He witnessed fights break out, and people trying to take their lives. “We were 32 people in one cage,” he recalled. 

For months, he said, he went without insulin. He spent much of his time at the medical unit shackled to a bed and escorted to the restroom by guards. “Alligator Alcatraz has scarred me like nothing else in my life. It broke me mentally and emotionally,” he added. “Some people may say I’m exaggerating…but I lived through those moments.”

On Sunday, Justo joined Arianne at the vigil outside Alligator Alcatraz, where week after week, she showed up to advocate for him. They held hands and faced the detention camp that had separated them for more than six months. 

“Nobody deserves what’s happened to them and what’s continuing to happen inside of Alligator Alcatraz,” Arianne said. “And if the government and DeSantis can be proud of having an operation like that, then I should be proud of all of my efforts to get it shut down.”

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

Six states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its decision to cancel a major offshore wind lease off the coast of New York.

In March, federal officials announced they would pay nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to French energy firm TotalEnergies in exchange for the company killing plans to erect two offshore windfarms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies agreed to terminate the projects and pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States, while investing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and gas projects.

The deal was unlawful, says the lawsuit, led by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. “The Trump administration is once again trying to kill clean energy projects and destroy good-paying jobs for New Yorkers,” she said in a statement to the Guardian.

The administration’s agreement with TotalEnergies came after federal judges repeatedly struck down the president’s executive orders and stop-work directives which aimed to halt offshore wind development, ruling them unlawful and arbitrary.

“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” said James. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”

In the lawsuit, James and the attorneys general of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont assert that the deal violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which restricts the Interior department’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases. It also breaches the Judgment Fund Act—which regulates appropriations used to pay court judgments, awards, and compromise settlements—they said, among other allegations.

The plaintiffs are asking a court to strike down agreement, halt the lease cancellation and prevent Donald Trump officials from taking further steps to implement the deal.

In March, Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, hailed the deal as “another win for President Trump’s commitment to affordable and reliable energy for all Americans.” Burgum added that offshore wind is “expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent” and had been forced on US taxpayers.

Green groups defended the worth of offshore wind. Sam Salustro, a senior vice-president of pro-offshore wind group Oceantic Network, said: “Paying to remove affordable, homegrown energy out of the equation leaves American consumers struggling to pay their electricity bills.”

Updated: UK banks are set to receive access to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber after being excluded from Anthropic’s latest expansion of Project Glasswing. Project Glasswing, and access to the Mythos Preview model, is geared toward ensuring critical infrastructure providers are prepared to handle the threat posed by advanced AI models, once they inevitably make their way into the public domain, and therefore the hands of attackers. However, amid a fourfold expansion of Glasswing’s partners, only JPMorganChase was named among the financial institutions to receive access to Mythos Preview, despite financial services falling under the critical infrastructure umbrella. In light of the news, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, and Nationwide will be among the banks to receive access to GPT-5.5 Cyber, the BBC reported, while NatWest and Santander have already been playing with it as part of separate agreements. OpenAI offered nine UK banks access to its Mythos-rival model in total, after they were snubbed from Glasswing. It is not clear if this number also includes the Bank of England, whose governor, Andrew Bailey, has been outspoken about its exclusion from Glasswing. Bailey told Bloomberg TV last week that despite pushing for access so the UK’s financial system is protected, Anthropic has not handed over the keys to Mythos Preview. Liam Salsi, director of architecture at Talion, told The Register he suspects the decision to exclude UK banks was political. Bailey had also previously alluded to suspicions that Anthropic had not yet granted access to Mythos Preview due to processes at play related to the US administration. “The US government wants to control who has access to the platform and this is largely because it will limit the chances of it falling into the wrong hands,” said Salsi. “However, limiting access will ultimately leave some banks more exposed to cyber threats and could impact their vulnerability management, leaving larger windows of opportunities for attackers. “It's hopeful these gaps won't exist for too long because of competition among Advanced AI platforms. GPT-5.5 was issued only a few weeks after Mythos, and it's safe to assume more advanced AI platforms will surface soon, closing gaps and delivering more of these systems to a larger pool of critical organizations.” He added that it could also introduce a single point of failure in the global banking sector if every institution were using the same product. Anthropic has not commented publicly on its approach regarding which financial institutions receive Mythos access, although it's not just financiers who are pondering the company’s decision-making. It transpired this week that the EU’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, will receive access to Mythos Preview, while the US equivalent, CISA, is yet to be selected. Glasswing goes big In other news, Anthropic said on Tuesday it is looking to induct many more organizations into its Project Glasswing initiative, taking the total number of members from around 50 to 200. The additional 150 or so organizations hail from 15 different countries and will join the old guard, comprised of security shops and other tech giants, government agencies, and open-source maintainers. It has not named these organizations officially, although reports suggest that South Korea is among the 15 countries, and its science ministry, Samsung, SK Hynix, and SK Telecom are among the new inductees. Project Glasswing is something of a private members’ club – a carefully selected cohort of organizations with early access to Anthropic’s most advanced Mythos Preview model, the one the company claims will fundamentally alter the cybersecurity landscape. The cynics among us may see such claims as an extension of Anthropic’s marketing playbook, which some believe involves stoking excitement about a product through fear. When the AI biz announced Mythos in April, it did so by dubbing it too dangerous to unleash on the public. It was billed as an expert bug hunter and zero-day specialist, capable of finding vulnerabilities in code far more efficiently than humans. The oft-touted nugget from launch was the 27-year-old OpenBSD bug Mythos found during initial testing, but there were many more zero-days and other critical vulnerabilities – novel ones – Anthropic said its model was able to unearth. Those who have tinkered with Mythos Preview already report mixed results. Cloudflare CISO Grant Bourzikas wrote in May that the model represented “a real step forward,” and was able to find a series of low-severity bugs and chain them into working exploits. Others, such as cURL’s Daniel Stenberg, called Mythos Preview “an amazingly successful marketing stunt,” after it found just one vulnerability in the data transfer software. Likewise, security expert Kevin Beaumont said the model “is not great,” and “it’s marketing, essentially.” He said Mythos Preview was good at finding bugs in vibe-coded applications, but aside from that, it was not discovering much beyond what the models of yesteryear were capable of. Regarding the new intake of Glasswing partners, Anthropic but said each would have to pass its own security requirements before being granted access to Mythos Preview. It also said the new organizations brought into the fold all managed critical infrastructure services, and a successful attack on their systems could be “catastrophic.” “For most partners, we estimate that a major attack could affect more than 100 million people, with important ramifications for both global and national security,” the company said on Tuesday. “This expansion is the next step toward our long-term goals: for AI to make all software more secure, and for us to help the industry adjust to how AI could change many of the core assumptions of cybersecurity.” The big when? As for when the Mythos model will be made available to the wider public, Anthropic has kept that largely under wraps, but don’t expect it to be anytime soon. In its latest Glasswing announcement, the company said the safeguards required to prevent abuse are not yet available. “We’re working as quickly as we can to safely release Mythos-level capabilities in general access,” it stated. “To do so, we’ll need highly robust safeguards that prevent the model’s cyber capabilities from being misused – safeguards that we (and, to our knowledge, all other AI developers) have yet to develop. “Because cybersecurity has both helpful and destructive uses, making safeguards that are both strong and precise enough is a major challenge.” Anthropic may face some tough decisions in the next year, however, as by its own reckoning other AI companies will produce Mythos-level capabilities within their own models inside 6-12 months. Confusingly, it also said on Friday that it would be releasing Mythos-class models to all customers in the coming weeks. Anthropic said it will expand Glasswing further before Mythos is more widely launched, bringing in more critical infrastructure orgs, open-source maintainers, and safety testers. “We intend for future expansions to cover organizations in the US and overseas, just as this one does. We also intend to scale up our Cyber Verification Program, which would grant Mythos-class capabilities to many more organizations for specific cyberdefense tasks.” ® Updated to add at 1420 UTC: An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to us that retired Brit politico and newspaper editor George Osborne – who has been OpenAI’s Head of OpenAI for Countries since the end of 2025, has "written to the CEOs / CISOs" at several UK financial institutions including HSBC, Natwest, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, and others "to extend access to our latest defensive cyber capabilities." Global financial infrastructure provider Swift is also included. They added: "In total, we are extending access to nine leading financial institutions, which includes Santander Group and Natwest Group that already have access to GPT-5.5-Cyber as part of our existing relationships."

Partner Content ZTE successfully co-organized the graduation of the 2026 Engineering Capacity Building Program (Information & Communication Engineering) in Shenzhen. Under the theme "Wisdom Leading Communication Frontiers, Empowering Engineering Practice", the program was hosted by the Chinese Society of Engineers, organized by the China Institute of Communications, and co-organized by the Guangdong Institute of Communications and ZTE. The initiative brought together over 60 ICT engineers from more than 20 countries, including Indonesia, Uzbekistan, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Colombia, Peru and China. Through a diverse range of activities, including reports, technical exchanges, and interactive workshops, the program explored global digital and intelligent engineering practices to enhance the professional capacities of domestic and international engineers. During the organizational and technical reporting sessions, experts from the Secretariat of the Chinese Society of Engineers (CSE) , the China Institute of Communications, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and ZTE shared insights on innovative practices in engineering capacity building, ICT frontiers, and the evolution of global project management, sparking active interactions among attendees. Magendaran Kaliaperumal, an engineer from Indonesia, shared his profound experience: "Participating in our country's network integration project, I have truly felt the transformative power of cutting-edge digital and intelligent technologies. From digital project management to the precise optimization of resource scheduling, these technologies have significantly enhanced delivery efficiency and quality." Speaking on the transition of digitalization and greening, Prof. Gong Ke, Chairman of the ECBAP (Engineering Capacity Building for Africa Programme) of WFEO (World Federation of Engineering Organizations) in Africa, emphasized: "Engineering is a key force in achieving sustainable development goals for society." This exchange of ideas laid a solid theoretical foundation for subsequent practical sessions and inspired a sense of responsibility among engineers to collectively drive innovative industry development. During the site visits, the engineers toured ZTE's headquarter, experiencing immersive digital and intelligent engineering practices. At the museum, exhibition halls, and smart production lines, participants witnessed the technological leap from 5G to 6G, as well as the deep integration of lean production and intelligent manufacturing. An Algerian engineer expressed his excitement: "We just commercialized 5G last year, and today, seeing the forward-looking breakthroughs of 5G-A and 6G in Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) and intelligent economic foundations makes me highly optimistic about the future." The engineers also visited SenseTime to learn about its leading Artificial Intelligence Data Centers (AIDCs) , exploring innovative applications in urban governance, environmental monitoring, and smart healthcare. An Ethiopian engineer remarked: "This program has redefined my perception. The deep integration of cutting-edge technology with real-world scenarios truly demonstrates the potential of technology to drive high-quality social development." In the workshop sessions, engineers gained hands-on experience with ZTE's enterprise-level AI agent, Co-Claw, and collaborated to develop various models based on real business scenarios. At Shenzhen Polytechnic University, they studied new energy vehicle and drone application technologies, personally operating and debugging industrial-grade drones with independent intellectual property rights. At the closing ceremony, Hu Lihua, Vice President of ZTE, delivered a speech, stating: "ZTE will, as always, open its technological platforms to empower the growth of engineers, working together to build a global engineering community featuring collaborative technology research, shared achievements, and win-win industry growth." Participants enthusiastically shared their experiences and insights. "This program not only showed us the potential of cutting-edge technologies but also sparked new thinking on how to enhance our capabilities and adapt to future technological trends," they noted. A representative from Peru stated they would bring these "genes of innovation" back home to foster further international cooperation. The engineers agreed that open collaboration and mutual recognition of professional capacities are crucial to achieving sustainable development in engineering technology and global digital inclusion. The China Institute of Communications will continue to leverage its platform advantages to gather high-quality industry resources, actively promote international mutual recognition of engineers, and enhance the professional and international standards of engineers in the ICT and digital technology fields, thereby supporting enterprises in their global expansion. As a co-organizer of the event, ZTE will leverage its deep expertise in information and communication engineering to continue partnering with all sectors. ZTE remains committed to nurturing global "digital craftsmen" with international vision, digital literacy, and innovative capabilities, contributing to bridging the global digital divide and achieving sustainable development. Contributed by ZTE.

After months of lawsuits, injunctions, plugin disputes, and public sparring between Automattic and WP Engine, WordPress is showing its first sustained market share decline in years. As first reported by Search Engine Journal, new data from web technology tracker W3Techs puts WordPress at 41.9 percent of all websites, down from 43.2 percent six months earlier and extending a losing streak that stretches back into 2025. The numbers are hardly catastrophic for software that still powers more than two-fifths of the web, but they represent a notable shift for a platform whose market share had remained stable for years. For years, the W3Techs charts were about as exciting as watching paint dry. WordPress sat at roughly 43 percent of the web and rarely moved very far in either direction. Last year, the line started bending downward, and by January 2026, it had slipped to 43.0 percent from 43.6 percent a year earlier. By the end of May, it was sitting at 41.9 percent. Not everyone is heading south. Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, and Webflow all posted small gains in the W3Techs data, while Duda sat exactly where it was a year ago. The obvious question is why. Some observers point to increasingly capable competitors, while others have noted a more recent development: WordPress's prolonged, high-profile conflict with hosting provider WP Engine. The decline in market share began shortly after Automattic chief executive Matt Mullenweg launched a campaign against WP Engine that escalated into lawsuits, injunctions, contributor disputes, plugin controversies, and a steady stream of public recriminations. The W3Techs data shows correlation, not causation. There is currently no evidence that website owners are abandoning WordPress specifically because of the WP Engine dispute. Plenty of other factors could be at play, including growing competition from hosted platforms and newer web frameworks. The WP Engine dispute may ultimately prove unrelated. But either way, Automattic now has a problem it did not have a couple of years ago: the numbers are no longer moving in its favor. ®

It’s impossible to overstate rapper Tupac Shakur’s influence on music and culture in the 1990s. One of the era’s bestselling musical artists, Tupac helped define West Coast hip-hop through vulnerable, introspective lyrics and Black power politics. His death in 1996 at just 25 years old sparked conspiracy theories for decades and left his fans wondering what might’ve been.

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By his own admission, sports writer Jeff Pearlman is not the rapper’s likeliest biographer. Pearlman typically profiles athletes like Barry Bonds or Brett Favre. But as he waited for what he called “the big, fat biography” of Tupac, his impatience and long-standing fascination with the rapper got the best of him. So he set out to write it himself.

“Tupac Shakur…was profoundly smart and in many ways incredibly enlightened, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t have his 12th Academy Award now,” Pearlman tells More To The Story host Al Letson, adding that both Tupac’s music and movies still resonate because they were a compelling combination of hip-hop and Black Panther.

On this week’s episode, Pearlman talks about his book Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur; discusses how Tupac’s Black Panther mother, Afeni Shakur, shaped her son; and examines the nuance and mystery surrounding Tupac’s life and death almost 30 years later.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Fusion startup Xcimer fired up the world's largest privately owned laser.

MPs have told the government to cut its ties with Palantir, and end the US spy-tech firm's controversial involvement in the National Health Service's Federated Data Platform. Warning against vendor lock-in across government, the House of Common science and technology committee said it was most concerned about Palantir, which had secured central roles in health and defense systems. “Palantir should not have a such a significant role in the UK public sector… it is far from the only company capable of providing the data analysis ‘middleware’ required by public bodies,” the report from the Science Innovation and Technology Committee said. The report notes concerns about Palantir’s origins as a company getting a foothold in government with security, immigration services, and defense contracts. It also describes the political musings of co-founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp. However, it added: “Our view that Palantir’s increasing presence across the public sector represents an unacceptable point of weakness is not ideologically motivated or driven by concerns about the quality of their products. The government should retain the ability to pick and choose individual suppliers and safeguard against the risk of vendor lock-in and debilitating dependencies, particularly in areas of critical national importance such as healthcare and national security infrastructure.” Palantir won the £330 million Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract in November 2023 after a procurement process, which NHS England, the soon-to-be-defunct health quango, maintained was open and fair. The award followed £60 million in Covid-era NHS contracts awarded without competition. The committee recommended that the government use the February 2027 break clause in the FDP contract and either “develop an in-house replacement or seek an alternative developed by UK-owned and UK-based providers that are more compatible with UK values, and do not pursue either technical or contractual dependencies.” The Science Innovation and Technology Committee said dependency on a small number of suppliers, locked into repeated government contracts, was one of the factors holding up delivery of the broader vision for digital government. The others included over-reliance on legacy systems, the problem of digital sovereignty and over-hype by senior politicians and industry figures. Dame Chi Onwurah MP, Committee chair, said: “We welcome the government’s intentions to make the UK a ‘truly digital state,’ but it’s not clear how this will be delivered. Without a detailed and measurable plan, it risks falling short – but there’s still time to put this right. “A critical part of this transformation should include reducing the UK’s dependence on a small number of big US tech companies like Palantir. Vendor lock-in isn’t inevitable, and the current position leaves us seriously exposed. The UK can and should be aiming for technology sovereignty in critical parts of our public sector and supporting domestic alternatives through smarter procurement,” she said. The committee said the government needed to get its approach right before embarking on ambitious projects such as the digital ID scheme, expected to roll out by the end of the current Parliament. Without modernized digital infrastructure, digital ID will struggle to succeed, and to keep citizens’ data secure. “Only once the foundations of the UK’s digital infrastructure are secure, and public trust has been gained, should the government proceed with its planned digital ID. The success or failure of this project will be a defining test of its wider digital transformation ambitions," Onwurah said. ®

Microsoft has released Aspire 13.4, with the key feature being general availability of the TypeScript AppHost, as well as new integrations for Go, Bun, Blazor and WebAssembly. The company currently describes Aspire as a "code-first orchestration and observability layer for distributed applications" which makes it sound like some kind of service, but it is not. Developers use the Aspire CLI (command line interface) to model, develop and debug distributed applications, originally just for .NET, but now for a variety of languages, with TypeScript now first-class so that even the core Aspire file, called the AppHost, can be written in the language. Aspire can also deploy applications, though it is not a service that runs in production. Instead, developers add targets to an Aspire project to enable commands including publish, which builds the artifacts to be deployed, and deploy, which deploys the artifacts to the configured target, such as Azure container apps, Azure app service or Kubernetes. Other targets include Docker Compose, AWS services, and others via third-party integrations. The AppHost in the .NET variant is a C# project and for TypeScript, a code file called apphost.mts which imports an Aspire module. The AppHost configures and assembles the distributed application. For example, by running aspire add postgres the AppHost gains the ability to add PostgreSQL support with a few lines of code, including options to add a container image to run the database engine, creating a database, adding a web-based admin dashboard, mounting a data volume outside the container, adding health checks and telemetry for the database server to the Aspire dashboard, and injecting connection properties as environment variables to selected projects. The Aspire dashboard is a development feature that consumes OpenTelemetry data to monitor the health of a running application and show data such as memory usage. It is not primarily intended for use in production but can be run standalone or even used in environments which do not otherwise use Aspire, available in a Docker image. Aspire 13.4 adds critical features for Kubernetes deployment, including support for cert-manager, Gateway API, manifest resources and external Helm charts. There are also enhanced resource commands, which execute commands exposed by resources in a running AppHost, and new AppHost APIs for Go and Bun, so that applications using these can be added. Python, Java and Rust were already supported. A new aspire-skills bundle is provided for AI agents. The full list of new features is here. Aspire was first released in 2024 but its roots go back further, to an experimental tool called Project Tye that appeared in May 2020. It is a bold effort to simplify and improve the developer experience for distributed applications, though held back from wider adoption by its .NET and Azure flavor, which Microsoft is now attempting to broaden. Another issue is that articulating what Aspire is has proved difficult, leading to questions like, why not use Aspire in production? "You don’t run Aspire in production. You develop your app with it locally and then deploy to the platform you want," said James Newton-King, a principal software engineer at Microsoft working on the project. Distinguished engineer David Fowler acknowledged the communicating exactly what the project is has been difficult and added that "lots of the impressions about what Aspire is and how it worked is outdated because it’s changed so much." ®

I Cantori di Carmel performs Carmina Burana at the UCSC Quarry Amphitheater, where redwoods, stars and natural acoustics meet Orff’s thunderous music.

Robbie Fitzsimmons takes readers behind the scenes of Queerlantis, an immersive Santa Cruz Pride celebration of drag, music, art and queer resilience.

Santa Cruz VegFest returns with vegan food, music, comedy, family activities, vendors and a message of compassion for animals, people and the planet.

Santa Cruz Pride 2026 honors Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin, Dinah Phillips and Gail Groves, linking this year’s Grand Marshals to a landmark 2008 same-sex marriage.

This week in local business, Jessica M. Pasko has the latest on a proposed mixed-use development in downtown Santa Cruz, a seismic development for South County apple growers and names, numbers and dates to know.

Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber arrived at the government center bright and early at 6 a.m. Tuesday to begin receiving, counting and processing ballots. And she and her team of volunteers and other full-time staff expected to work well into the evening, making for a marathon Election Day.

Webber trained the six new volunteers on-site to receive and sort the ballots by hand. The volunteers are given a stipend for their time. 

“You’re going to take everything out of your box and get it onto the table. And then once it’s empty, you’re going to push it off to the side and start separating everything inside your box,” she explained to them.

There are three different types of ballots: vote-by-mail, in-person ballots and electronic ballots, which are printed to be sorted. Electronic and handwritten in-person votes get sorted into piles after they are received, and all mail-in votes are sent to another room in the government building. 

Kachina Addison, who has worked three elections as an extra helper, spent the day picking up and unlocking the drop boxes for votes by mail, as well as processing these ballots. She said there have to be at least two people wearing official badges that designate them as ballot retrievers when drop boxes get brought up, due to California protocol.

According to Webber, everyone who votes in person checks in and signs the voter’s oath, which means there are fewer steps involved to count an in-person vote than a mail-in one. Once staff receive and sort a mail-in ballot, they have to flatten it, make sure all of the excess tabs are torn off, and ensure the voter used blue or black ink pen and that there are no pen smudges along the ballot card ID that could disrupt the ballot sorting system. 

“We want to make sure that people know how secure our whole system is, and it really is,” Addison said, “There’s always accountability.”

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