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Former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has taken a senior UK role at Palantir as the government considers whether to invoke a break clause in the US spy-tech company's controversial £330 million National Health Service (NHS) contract. The appointment is the latest high-profile example of Palantir recruiting from British politics and public service as it seeks to expand its government business. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp said in a statement: "This is just the latest chapter of Tom's 40-year fight for better public services. We are fortunate to have him guide us as we help the British government to deliver for the British public." Watson, who has advised Palantir since 2024, will become its UK senior vice president and work alongside Louis Mosley, executive vice president for the UK and Europe. In a statement shared on social media, Mosley said: "Tom will lead our work on what Palantir owes this country. That means answering the Prime Minister's challenge to companies holding public contracts: support British jobs, invest in skills, deliver in every postcode. It also means helping people prepare for what AI does to work and to the services they rely on." Mosley said Watson had been on leave from the House of Lords since March and would remain so while working for Palantir. He has also surrendered his parliamentary pass and the access that accompanies it. "Tom has joined Palantir to build things, not to open doors," he added. The assurances anticipate concerns about the revolving door between government and technology companies, particularly as Palantir's major public sector contracts face political scrutiny. In April, Zubir Ahmed MP, a junior minister at the Department of Health and Social Care, said the government could end Palantir's seven-year Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract when the break clause becomes available next spring. "My north star is always patient safety and quality, and of course value for money. If, at the point of the break clause, we evaluate and find that there are other providers that can do the job better, then of course that needs to be looked at and reflected upon," he said. However, replacing the platform provider at relatively short notice could prove difficult. The House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee said in July that the Department of Health and Social Care should begin preparing to replace the FDP before the contract reaches its break clause in February. Palantir began working with the NHS during the pandemic and received £60 million in contracts without competition, including work that later fed into the FDP. The NHS and Palantir maintain that the subsequent competition was open and fair, and say the resulting platform has delivered substantial value by linking data sources as the health service works through its elective care backlog. ®

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

Firefighters battling enormous wildfires in the United States say the federal government is failing them at a time when supercharged blazes have made their jobs exponentially more dangerous.

While the US continues to grapple with a critical shortage of federal firefighters—with especially large gaps in essential management positions—the Trump administration has increased pressure on firefighting forces to rapidly and aggressively contain the flames.

Nine firefighters who spoke to The Guardian under the condition of anonymity because they are barred from disclosing the information, as well as several retired firefighters, described how spread-thin crews are being pushed to their limits amid an unrelenting and extreme year of fire.

“Accidents have been through the roof,” one firefighter said, adding that widespread fatigue has set in after being on near-nonstop fire assignments since April. Another firefighter, who works as part of a specialized helicopter crew, said he’s had to opt out of assignments this year because they were too high-risk or ill-advised.

The job has always carried inherent risks, especially as the climate crisis continues to turn up the dial, creating blazes that are harder to battle. But this year has been a particularly dangerous one.

“Firefighting capacity is kind of like wages, and the fire environment is like inflation—it has not kept up.”

Wildfires are overrunning firefighters at the highest rate in two decades, according to data from the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, a federal agency. By mid-August there had already been 12 entrapments—exceptionally dangerous situations when flames roar into pre-established safety zones or block firefighter escape routes. That’s the highest number in 20 years, Reuters reported.

There have been 14 reported on-duty fatalities this year, including three firefighters who died battling Colorado’s Knowles fire. An additional member of their crew succumbed to his injuries weeks later and another was severely burned. The incident was the most deadly entrapment in 13 years.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist who began his career as a wildland firefighter with the US Forest Service (USFS), said he’s heard from safety officers that there has been a notable spike in burn injuries this year, a sign he attributes to “crews being pushed into aggressive direct attack in times when it is not effective.”

Ingalsbee is the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a nonprofit he cofounded in an effort to increase both safety and sustainability in firefighting, and he said he’s concerned that operations are heading in the wrong direction on both fronts.

“Climate change is half the explanation,” Ingalsbee said, for what he called “the perfect firestorm for a really bad season for firefighting.”

The Department of the Interior and the USFS did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian or answer questions on the comprehensive number of injuries reported so far this year.

But in a letter issued last week to the heads of the US Department of the Interior and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the USFS, five senators said personnel have had to work extended assignments, requests for crews went unfilled in communities across the west, and that the agencies are facing the depletion of their combined $6 billion suppression budget with weeks left to go before the highest fire risks subside.

The letter claimed “that teams have worked more fires than is safe, using temporary supervisory structures because fully qualified personnel are not available.”

Signed jointly by Sens. Michael Bennet, Alex Padilla, Ron Wyden, Adam Schiff, and John Hickenlooper, they added: “This is exceptionally concerning given the high wildland firefighter fatality rate this season.”

“We’re going to kill people trying to put out those last couple percent and we’re going to spend a lot of money doing it.”

Taskforce leaders, division supervisors and heavy equipment bosses are essential to run large firefighting operations, and require decades of experience. Losses in these on-the-ground leadership roles have become extremely difficult to replace. Meanwhile, firefighters said the federal government has failed to scale up staffing levels overall to meet the rising needs, pushing resources to the brink season after season.

“Firefighting capacity is kind of like wages, and the fire environment is like inflation—it has not kept up,” said one fire captain who works out of the Pacific north-west.

“We have had shortages for 20 years—and it’s only gotten worse,” said Bobbie Scopa, a retired fire chief who now serves as a vice-president for the firefighter advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. As the need for resources grew and limited numbers of leaders grew scarce, responsibilities were sometimes doubled up. “That sets everyone up for failure,” Scopa said. “It is not like we are trying to add bureaucracy—we are trying to keep people alive.”

The picture stands in stark contrast to the one painted by Tom Schultz, the USFS chief, who has repeatedly assured lawmakers and the public that the agency’s firefighting workforce is at full capacity.

“Our firefighting workforce is stronger than at any point in recent years,” Schultz said in testimony to a congressional subcommittee in July. “We are fully staffed and equipped to respond aggressively to every unplanned ignition.”

The Trump administration has pushed for more aggressive tactics, at times at the expense of firefighter safety, several firefighters said.

Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum both issued directives this year that prioritize direct attack, a strategy that can be more risky.

Officials have also mandated a return to fast and full suppression, shifting away from recent policies that took a softer approach to containing flames that could be beneficial to a landscape.

“Their roster is depleted and there doesn’t seem to be any strategic prioritization.”

Agency leaders have argued a more aggressive approach is necessary to ensure firefighters and communities are protected as conditions set the stage for more catastrophic fires. But critics, which include many fire ecologists and firefighter advocates, have raised concerns the approach will only perpetuate a cycle that contributed to the current crisis—leaving more vegetation on parched landscapes to burn in the future—and will more quickly exhaust limited resources.

Scientists, forest managers and other fire experts have advocated for allowing some fires to burn, especially those far from communities or in places that are difficult or dangerous for firefighters to reach.

Firefighters already stop 98 percent of fires before they spread. The administration wants to tighten that gap. “We’re going to kill people trying to put out those last couple percent and we’re going to spend a lot of money doing it,” Scopa said.

Meanwhile, the busy and destructive season has left little room for rest. Crews have spent months going from fire to fire. By mid-September, roughly 54,400 blazes have burned through more than 8.4 million acres, 149 percent of the 10-year average.

The US was classified at “preparedness level 5” (PL5)—the highest level, and one that indicates resources are fully deployed—for 48 consecutive days, close to double the 10-year average for days at the level per year.

Long seasons of sleep deprivation, smoke inhalation, exhaustion and malnutrition have a cumulative effect, said Ingalsbee. “It impacts your ability to think clearly and act decisively to keep you and your crew members safe.”

The level dropped to PL4 on 4 September and then to PL3 a few days later. But thousands of firefighters are still committed across the US. There may still be months left to go before the highest risks fully subside. “There are some crews near the breaking point,” Ingalsbee said. “Their roster is depleted and there doesn’t seem to be any strategic prioritization where they are sent.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Fox News suddenly finds itself in a very strange situation. A new Fox poll just landed that contains absolutely awful news for Trump and Republicans. And a number of very bad stories for Trump have broken of late.

That’s a big problem for a network that has the word “news” in its title, yet also can’t keep its audience if it tells the truth about Trump. So Fox has taken to largely ignoring a lot of these very big bad stories. And this has us wondering what’ll happen to the whole institutional superstructure that’s arisen around our homegrown MAGA fascist movement if Trump soon passes from the scene.

So we’re talking to our go-to person on Fox, Matt Gertz of Media Matters. Matt, thanks for coming on.

Matt Gertz: Good to be back.

Sargent: So things are going south for Trump on lots of fronts—Iran, the Supreme Court thwarting his plot to steal the election via vote by mail, racist GOP candidates outing themselves, and so forth. Fox has been quiet on a lot of these topics. You’ve coined this idea of “negative space” in Fox coverage. Tell us what that is.

Gertz: So I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking and writing about the stories that Fox News talks about, their particular obsessions, their tendency to puff up Donald Trump, their attacks on all of his enemies. But what I’ve been spending more time on lately is thinking about what I call the “negative space”—the stories that do not exist on Fox News, but are of a great deal of interest to people not only who don’t listen to Fox News, but who might be of interest if Fox were to level with their audience about what’s happening in the world. There’s been a series of these, in particular since the summer began, where there’s been an obvious interest in providing coverage, if this were in fact a news network, but Fox has been unable.

Sargent: You were pretty early on in noticing that Fox simply stopped talking about Iran, after functioning as really a twenty-four-seven propaganda outlet for the invasion. Walk us through what they’re doing on all these stories.

Gertz: Sure. Iran is a really clear case of this. Fox to a large extent helped get the country into this war in the first place. There was a great deal of very enthusiastic coverage from people like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin back in February, urging the president to go to war with Iran. There’s been reporting from behind the scenes that he was actually talking about some of these segments in the White House. We saw him use those segments on his social media platforms, trying to drive attention to them. I’ve talked for years about this feedback loop between Fox and Trump, and I think this was its most consequential test.

But a funny thing happened. The quick and easy war that all of these Fox stars were telling Donald Trump was on the table just didn’t materialize the way they expected it to. Somehow they were the only ones in American public life who were unaware that the counterattack for Iran is to close the Strait of Hormuz and shut down global trade in energy. And so when that happened, the network had a problem. And they just stopped talking about it altogether.

We tracked mentions of Iran on five of the most popular Fox News shows, the evening programs that the president watches that are so influential on the Republican Party. And we found that mentions of Iran fell 78 percent from June to August. They were down to, like, two mentions per episode, more or less. And this is just a huge decline across all the programs at the same time. They were suddenly no longer talking about an ongoing war that is currently sending the price of gasoline and diesel skyrocketing.

Sargent: I want to dwell a little bit on what Fox News means to Trump. So early on, when Fox is egging Trump on, Trump starts the invasion, Fox covers it glowingly. They’re pumping all this imagery of things going boom, boom, and making Trump look very strong—pumping this right into his veins, right? He’s watching Fox News from the White House and he’s seeing his war get praised on Fox. He’s seeing things blow up, he’s seeing his power kind of sprawled across the world.

And then all of a sudden, when the thing starts going south for Trump in exactly the way that everybody said it would, they suddenly go quiet? Like, what does he think when he sees that? Does he notice it?

Gertz: I’m not sure that he notices the negative space in the same way. And I think that’s really key to Fox’s operation here. They know that if they do coverage that is negative about the administration, he will notice that. He will become irate about that, in fact.

Sargent: On these other stories, you’re finding the same thing, correct? So on this racist candidate that everybody’s been talking about—

Gertz: And we have to specify which racist candidate, I think.

Sargent: This is—OK, you do that.

Gertz: So this is Bo French, who is the candidate for Texas Railroad Commission. And he over the weekend published a social media post. It’s a picture of students celebrating a Texas Longhorns touchdown. They’re hugging each other, they’re very happy. Many of them are not white. And Bo French’s response to this is: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

The problem is that there are brown people attending the University of Texas. And he feels that it is necessary to say this. Even in Texas, this is not acceptable.

To be slightly fair about this, the George W. Bush strain of the GOP in Texas itself was certainly trying to bring Mexican Americans and South Asian Americans into the Republican Party. And so this sort of absolutely naked bigotry was enough for Karl Rove to say, “the GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches, and not only in Texas...it’s raw, uncut bigotry.” And he sort of goes on to say that this is a huge problem for the Republican Party and they need to fight it.

This is a message that is important for the Fox News audience to hear, right? Like, there is a fight within the Republican Party about what it means to be a conservative. It is now being articulated by someone who not only has sterling credentials in Republican politics, but who has worked for Fox News for 18 years now as their, like, top political analyst. He wrote this in The Wall Street Journal, which is another publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, like Fox News. And this got covered on CNN, it got covered on MS Now. It was not mentioned, this Karl Rove column, on Fox News, where he works. And in fact, Bo French has not been mentioned this entire week. It is the sort of story that is just not part of their discussion, because they don’t have a way to frame this to make it actually about how Democrats are bad.

Sargent: So Matt, it seems like Fox is in meltdown kind of across the board, in the sense that they’re just going quiet on a number of fronts. Can you just briefly sum that up?

Gertz: Yeah. I mean, I think Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding being partially paid for by a Russian oligarch is a story that they’re not talking about at all. I think in general, the rise in gas prices and diesel prices in particular—they spent one minute covering the rise in diesel prices over a recent seven-day period. You know, there is no interest from people at the network in covering some of these various health crises that have popped up, the measles, the cyclospora situation. These just kind of recede into the background at Fox.

Sargent: So this Fox poll lands this week, and it’s just terrible for Trump. Some numbers: nearly two-thirds, 63 percent of voters, say the Trump administration’s made the economy worse. Trump’s approval on inflation, an abysmal 24 percent. Dems leading by seven in the generic ballot matchup, 51 to 44. Dem enthusiasm off the charts, with 64 percent of Dems extremely interested in the elections to 53 percent of Republicans, and Dems holding these lopsided leads among those who are certain to vote.

Matt, I think that a lot of Dems and liberals aren’t really aware that the Fox poll is actually a very good survey. And for them to find this means they’re probably right. Your thoughts on all that?

Gertz: Yeah, I mean, it’s such a good survey that Trump repeatedly over the years has said that Fox should fire its pollsters, has even suggested that they should be investigated for some sort of election subversion [for] manufacturing fake numbers—the same way he claims that all other pollsters manufacture fake numbers. So he puts them in the same category.

And so I think what we end up seeing is a very interesting dance that breaks out on Fox News when one of these polls hits. They try to find some numbers that they can talk about while not annoying or sending Trump into a full rage. And so, you know, the coverage that kind of happens over the day, I think, really illustrates this concept of negative space.

So here’s an example. I went through all the coverage, and you know, I can’t be absolutely sure, but I’m fairly confident that they did not mention Trump’s job approval number—the, like, normal headline number that under most circumstances is the one that journalists put focus on the most. I don’t think they mentioned his job approval number since this poll dropped.

Sargent: Yes. And Matt, you mean on the network, right?

Gertz: Yeah, on the network. I don’t think they mentioned it on air. Maybe they did once or twice and I missed it, but, like, it’s certainly not the focus of their coverage at all.

Instead, much of the coverage is around how people are responding to the Trump economy. And these are also bad numbers, obviously, for the Trump administration. But those they can finesse a little bit more, largely by doing the thing that is always a good sign that you know that you’re losing, which is arguing with the public about what they should feel.

I keep seeing over the course of the day people saying—as Stephen Moore did on Fox and Friends this morning—it’s crazy for people to think that Democrats are better on inflation, but they do. What that’s saying is, we at Fox have failed to make an argument that is sticking with most of the public. Most people disagree with what you at home are hearing day in and day out on this network. And so I think, again, this is a signal that they are floundering. They’re running out of arguments that they think they can make, and they’re running out of time before the election.

Sargent: Well, Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who does the Fox poll with a Democrat, said this: “Time is running out for the administration and its supporters to convince voters that things are improving.” So I guess he agrees with you.

On your point about how it’s very hard for Fox figures to say that Democrats are doing well or doing better than Republicans on issues, I want to flag some other data. Like, as you mentioned, Dems are leading the GOP on inflation. It’s actually 55 to 40, 15 points. On foreign policy, it’s Dems 53 to 43. The parties are even tied on immigration, which is just stunning.

Matt, that’s got to be really, really hard for Fox figures to process. Their entire existence is devoted to kind of running propaganda about Democrats. Can you talk about that role that they play, and how they process something like this, which shows that voters are just looking at the Democratic Party and seeing mainstream Democrats, not crazy socialists? What’s going on there?

Gertz: Yeah. What Fox has been trying to do—their play since the summer has been to point to individual cases where Democratic socialists have won Democratic primaries, mainly in deep blue congressional districts, say that they are socialists, socialism is basically the same as communism, all Democrats are now responsible for the communism. And if Democrats win back the House and the Senate, then you will probably be murdered in your home and all of your possessions will be taken away—I’m exaggerating slightly, but that’s pretty close to your basic Sean Hannity gloss on this election.

Now, an interesting number that came out in this Fox poll, and one that they’ve been talking about quite a bit today, is that they asked respondents, does the way capitalism works in the U.S. give people like you a fair shot? And the numbers were yes, 39 percent, no, 57 percent.

Sargent: Ooh boy, that’s going to be tough for them.

Gertz: It is. And they’ve been trying to grapple with this over the course of the day. And what I keep seeing people say is, like, the public doesn’t understand, and what they think is capitalism that is bad is actually socialism that is bad—that it is the government spending that has caused the inflation. They’re saying that capitalism isn’t responsible for the affordability problem, that it’s socialism that’s responsible. And if you don’t like what’s happening, it’s because you’re against socialism, not capitalism. Again, this is an arguing with the public that I think suggests that they just do not have a way to grasp how unpopular Donald Trump has become, and how unpopular the Republican Party and everything that touches him has become.

Sargent: I think you can actually see this tension when you listen to someone like Fox’s Brit Hume talk about this poll. Let’s listen—here he’s talking about Trump’s impact on the economy:

Bret Hume: Fully 63 percent say it’s made it worse, and that is 11 percentage points higher than the number of people who thought that last year. That is not a number that the president can be very content with. And if you look at what people are saying about what is a major problem for their family—62 percent said grocery prices, 61 percent said gasoline prices. Those are both things that are up. This business with prices is just killing this administration and the president’s party.

Matt, that’s a very senior Fox person really lowering the hammer on Trump. He does sugarcoat it with a bunch of praise for Trump, but it’s still pretty blunt talk coming from Fox. Is something changing over there? Like, it seems like there’s real tension inside Fox about how to handle Trump’s collapse.

Gertz: Well, Brit Hume is someone who has been with the network for decades and decades. He was the host of Special Report before Bret Baier took it over. He’s been their sort of senior correspondent ever since Baier became the anchor of that program. And so he has more leeway than basically anyone else does at the network to say whatever he wants. He doesn’t have his own show, so he doesn’t have ratings of his own to worry about.

And so as someone who wants the Republican Party to succeed, he can level with the audience in a way that basically no one else is. I think his comment that the business with prices is just killing this administration and the president’s party is blunter than anyone else has been on the network about that problem.

Sargent: I think you can see in all this a little glimpse of the future. I think if Dems win this election decisively, we’re not really prepared for just how shrunken and shriveled and brought low a figure Trump is going to start to look like. I also think Trump might see a lot of the institutional support from MAGA, even in places like Fox, start to move away from him pretty decisively.

I think Fox recognizes that Donald Trump is this sort of binding figure for MAGA and Republicanism that really is sort of a once-in-a-generation figure. Maybe George Bush sort of played that role for a while. Ronald Reagan certainly did. Trump is not exactly like them. He’s sort of more overtly fascist, I guess. But he is this kind of cult-like unifying figure that comes along only once every few decades for these people. And I think the Fox people really recognized his unique power in that way. When that power really starts to ebb, what happens at an institution like Fox News? Who do they start gravitating toward? What do they do?

Gertz: I think it’s a scramble. I think it’s going to be a huge mess over there, between people who want to move on from Trump, people who are Trump loyalists who refuse to. I think we’re going to see a split between people who are supportive of JD Vance, between people who want Marco Rubio to be the Republican nominee. We’re seeing that now on Fox and Friends in particular, where they really do not like JD Vance and really do like Rubio, and clearly want him to create a real primary. And so how all that shakes out, I don’t know. It’s going to be messy. But I think who ends up on top is really hard to predict.

Sargent: Yeah. And all this cognitive dissonance we’re seeing right now, I think, is really a preview of that extreme chaos—which hopefully we will see, because that will mean Democrats won the elections. Matt Gertz, really great to talk to you, as always. Thanks for coming on.

Gertz: Always a pleasure.

KPMG UK is laying off staff from the Tech and Data areas of its Advisory division and offering severance terms that one affected employee described as "insulting and disgraceful." The job cuts, affecting about 4 percent of the Advisory staff, were announced internally in July. Affected workers in the AI, Cyber, SAP, and Testing teams are scheduled to leave the consulting business next month. Insiders have now shared with The Register details of the payments offered to those set to depart. The proposed redundancy package, subject to consultation and the employee signing a settlement agreement, combines statutory redundancy pay with several enhancements. The document helpfully advises staff to divide their annual salary by 52 to calculate their weekly pay. The number of weeks to which each employee is entitled depends on their age during each full year of service: half a week's pay for each year worked while under 22, one week's pay for each year worked from age 22 to 40, and 1.5 weeks' pay for each year worked from age 41. "If you turned 41 while working at KPMG, the higher rate of 1.5 weeks' pay only applies to the full year of service completed after you turned 41," KPMG's missive states. "Redundancy pay is calculated based on the individual's number of years' service (up to a maximum of 20 years' service). If you've been at KPMG for more than 20 years, your most recent 20 years of service are considered when determining the number of weeks' pay you will be entitled to." KPMG's enhancements remove the statutory weekly pay cap of £751 and count partial years of service exceeding six months. Regardless of their length of service, staff are guaranteed either £1,250 plus statutory redundancy pay or eight weeks' pay inclusive of statutory redundancy pay, whichever is higher. The agreement also provides pay in lieu of notice, including employer pension contributions and, where applicable, a car allowance, according to the document. The document explaining the package includes an illustration of three employees alongside examples of the terms they could receive. Two of the illustrated employees appear delighted. The reaction among actual employees was less cheerful. One affected worker suspected that "protecting the profit pot for the equity partners is what is driving this re-org mostly." KPMG's UK partners received an average of £880,000 in the year to September 2025. "The payout scale is insulting and disgraceful," one affected employee told The Register. A KPMG spokesperson said: "As our market evolves, we are adapting where we are focusing and how we are set up to make sure we have the right skills in place to best serve our clients. To respond to these market dynamics combined with low levels of attrition, we are proposing reductions in some of our advisory client-facing teams and will support our colleagues throughout this process." The latest cuts come six months after KPMG eliminated 600 roles across its UK organization, including around 120 in Advisory. "The firm's consulting business has been under pressure for some time as market demand has remained subdued," said Duncan Aitchison, an analyst at TechMarketView, who estimated that the practice's revenue fell 9 percent between fiscal 2024 and 2025. "KPMG is not the only Big Four firm taking action to reshape its consulting business. In April 2026, PwC UK unveiled plans to bring together two of its three advisory businesses as part of a global effort to respond to the disruptions to the consulting industry caused by AI." ®

The Santa Cruz County housing market held no surprises in August, with buyers and sellers remaining quite active as summer winds down. However, on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve hiked short-term interest rates by a quarter-percent — a move that many experts and markets predicted ahead of time. While that won’t raise mortgage rates in and of itself, the bond market has started to rise above the 5% mark, which can concern prospective buyers.

“It does put pressure on mortgages because that’s what mortgages are tied to, the long-term rates,” said Monterey Bay Mortgage advisor Scott Goodrich, who explained that the move is likely to affect everything from credit cards and auto loans to home equity lines of credit. “That affects people, and it’s just another borrowing cost that people will have to incur,” he said.

A few days ago, Mike Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch and chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, posted a racist diatribe on X offering to pay for “bitching minorities” to move to another country. He also offered to cover their living expenses if they renounced their citizenship and left, which he said that they would need thanks to “that nappy-ass head of hair.”

Dear Bitching Minorities:

Here’s my proposal for your reparations:

One-way tickets anywhere.

6 months of living expenses.

Renounce your U.S. citizenship.

Never come back.

Good luck.

You’ll need it.

(Especially with that nappy-ass head of hair.) https://t.co/JN5Y75maOF

— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) September 6, 2026

His rant made me think of a different group of people in the United States, one that would happily take that offer if it meant permanent residency in a country not actively desiring their eradication.

The Trump administration and those in its orbit have made it clear that transgender people need to be eradicated for America to be great again. Trump has effectively promised to eliminate transgender people given the chance. He said on Fox News that if Republicans do not retain control of the House and Senate in the midterms, “transgender will never end.” The implication of course is that if Republicans do retain control, it will end.

Elon Musk has similarly vowed to destroy the community, as vengeance for his estranged transgender daughter, Vivian. “The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus,” he said. “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that, and we’re making some progress.”

Project 2025 explicitly called for making it illegal to be transgender, or to even discuss being transgender, the First Amendment be damned. In the project’s executive summary, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for the Trump administration declared: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … has no claim to First Amendment protection.… Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

To that end, the Trump administration has pursued a host of policies targeting transgender people as a group. These policies have direct parallels to Nazi Germany’s targeting of Jews, homosexuals, and people with disabilities between 1933 and 1938. For example, transgender people have been banned from the military, banned from access to government health care, banned from public facilities, and banned from all sports, right down to chess tournaments. Similarly, the Supreme Court found that while “gender expression” might be a protected characteristic, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not, meaning that the government can target transgender people for direct discrimination on the flimsiest of excuses.

More recently, the Trump and MAHA-dominated National Institutes of Health published a non–peer reviewed “study” attempting to prove that support for transgender people leads to political violence and terrorism. This follows the September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which named “radical gender ideology” as a domestic terrorism threat indicator. And just to add to the danger, Republican House members Nancy Mace and Ronny Jackson have called for all transgender people to be rounded up and forcibly institutionalized.

These calls to label transgender people as violently mentally ill  terrorists is part of a coordinated misinformation campaign, one that has been picked up and amplified by the most prominent “independent” voices in media, such as Joe Rogan, who called transgender people “fucking perverts” and (falsely) accused them of being responsible for most school shootings.

All of this animus is focused on a group of people in grave danger of being targeted and potentially confined by the federal government. This is why the Williams Institute at UCLA found that, given the opportunity in December 2024, 45 percent of transgender people in the United States would leave the country if they could. Almost two years later, with the situation deteriorating even more, it seems likely that this number is significantly higher today. It doesn’t help that Democrats are increasingly willing to sell out their transgender constituents to the people who want to eradicate them in the name of political expediency.

However, the barriers to immigration are formidable. Most countries that have legal protections for transgender people are clamping down on immigration, as xenophobia sweeps the West and buoys fascist movements globally. Similarly, most countries legally define the United States as a “safe” country for LGBT people and therefore are rejecting attempts by transgender Americans to claim asylum. In short: Transgender Americans perceive the danger, even while the rest of the world is too busy dealing with all the other irrational and disruptive things Trump and the GOP are doing to understand the peril that trans people are in.

Here’s an idea: Canada would like to end the trade war with the U.S. without having to effectively hand over sovereignty to Trump. Canada also has a desperate need for skilled young workers, particularly those in medical professions, transport, and to serve in the military.

At the same time, the Trump administration is attempting to separate thousands of qualified transgender members of the military and giving them discharge codes that guarantee they will never be able to work in the defense industry again.

The logic is simple: The United States wants transgender people to go away and would encourage them to emigrate. Canada wants to end the tariff wars, and its ability to take transgender people off the hands of the U.S. government may be a potential bargaining chip. Transgender people can read the writing on the wall: If they don’t flee, something very, very bad is likely to happen to them if the GOP holds onto power.

There is a historical precedent to this concept. During the early years of the Third Reich, the Nazi government actively encouraged to Jews to emigrate. It worked with Jewish organizations to liquidate Jewish assets and transfer the proceeds to them in Palestine as part of the Haavara Agreement. Similarly, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, when 30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned, they were released on the condition of signing an agreement to emigrate and surrender their property (effectively guaranteeing they would never return).

This sounds horrible, but it is worth remembering that the people who emigrated had a much higher survival rate than those who did not. Roughly 85 percent of the 300,000 Jews who emigrated survived the war. Of the 200,000 who remained behind, approximately 75 percent to 80 percent perished. This is the math that many members of the transgender community are doing now.

However, there are significant issues that would need to be overcome for this concept to be viable. Despite being a lawyer, Davis ignores that you cannot renounce your citizenship if it would leave you stateless. There’s also the issue of whether the Canadian government would trust the U.S. not to renege on any agreement or stiff them on the bill of paying for the living expenses of the people it exiles. Additionally, there is considerable Canadian opposition to increasing immigration of “those people,” which transgender individuals certainly qualify as, even if they do come from a country that’s culturally similar.

As someone who has become a permanent resident of Canada, I can attest to how long and slow the process of naturalization can be. Even for someone with a Canadian spouse and an easy path to permanent residency and citizenzhip, it is a long, drawn-out, and arduous process. Any sort of agreements to help usher transgender people out of the U.S. would face significant administrative, legal, and diplomatic hurdles. But at the same time, all of the stakeholders here have something that the others want, be it skills, an end to the trade war, or a Reich free of Untermenschen.

I have been told many times that it is far nobler to stay and fight than to retreat to relative safety. This argument only makes sense if one believes that there is no real risk of the U.S. government deciding to round up and intern transgender people under the auspices of national security or public health. However, we can clearly see the Trump administration laying the groundwork to do either or both. If our perception of the situation is accurate, then asking trans people to stay and fight makes as much sense as urging German Jews to stay and fight before World War II. Those who fled were able to do far more  damage to fascism in service of the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Canada.

For other transgender people, the idea of spending the rest of their lives going from marginally protected to actively persecuted every four years is unpleasant at best. The courts are setting precedents that allow this targeting, and legal protections via some sort of Equality Act that makes it through a Senate filibuster is unimaginable. People should not have to live in constant fear of their own countrymen electing the next fascist government, which may or may not decide to enact some sort of final solution.

Certainly, there may be great value in staying and fighting if either Republican restraint or the courts would ultimately prevent the right from achieving its goal of “eradicating transgenderism.” But right now, the polling says that probably fewer than half of all transgender people believe that the U.S. is, or will be, a safe place to live anytime soon.

For Native people in the Golden State, it’s going to be an autumn of mixed messages from the governor’s mansion. This month, Gavin Newsom will decide whether a bill confers California’s 109 Native nations with a government-to-government seat at the table on water policy, the same month it’s anticipated he’ll sign data center legislation—a pair of bills named S.B. 886 and S.B. 887—that gives them no seat at all.

The Karuk Tribe, one of the water bill’s (also known as A.B. 2218) co-sponsors, has actively pushed Newsom to sign it specifically because of the difference it was built to make: The bill “would statutorily require state agencies to both recognize and address water-related inequities caused by state-sanctioned acts of termination, removal, and assimilation, and to consult with tribes when contemplating water-related decisions, regardless of whether environmental review is otherwise required,” said Kenneth Brink, the tribe’s vice chairman.

But the enhanced standing that tribes are set to receive with the passage of A.B. 2218 is set to be eroded by the forthcoming data center bills. Honor the Earth’s data center tracker has mapped at least 106 proposed or operational data centers on or near Native land—exposure reaching a meaningful slice of the country’s 575 federally recognized tribes. California’s tribal consultation gap is a preview of what other tribes can expect elsewhere, and Newsom’s handling of it is being watched by Native voters nationally, not just in-state. Native voters are a significant bloc in swing states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.

Some tribes aren’t waiting to find out how this plays out. The Cherokee Nation, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Seminole Nation have already banned hyperscale data centers outright, using their own sovereign authority rather than a tribal consultation process that assumes a seat at someone else’s table.

“California’s laws will create a national model,” says Thad Kousser, a UC San Diego political science professor. That means whatever gap exists in the state’s approach to tribal consultation won’t stay contained to California.

If you want a close-up view of how that structural gap in tribal consultation actually works on the ground, California’s wranglings serve as a prime example. A data center headed for a city goes through a public permitting process with built-in entry points—hearings, comments periods, a mayor’s office to lobby. A project destined for land near a reservation has no equivalent forcing function: Consultation happens government to government, tribe by tribe, and only when a company or agency initiates it—ex post. “By the time that Tribes and the public know what’s going on, these companies have already put way too much money into it,” says Jessie Barrington, an attorney whose firm works on tribal consultation law. “The consultation is just an afterthought. It’s just to check a box.”

Barrington poses a question that is simpler than anything in the data center bills’ actual text: What’s the downside of working with tribes from day one—ex ante? As it stands, by the time tribes even catch wind of a project, it’s already a fait accompli.

In 2025 in San Benito, California Attorney General Rob Bonta intervened in a lawsuit that challenged a massive 108,425-square-foot development approved without tribal consultation. The chosen site sits within Juristac, a tribal cultural landscape meaningful to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. Bonta actually argued that the county’s environmental review violated the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, along with the tribal consultation requirement mandated by law. No data center in the state has faced that fight yet, but every one of the state’s dozens of pending projects sits one skipped consultation away from that very same legal exposure.

It’s not that the state has no framework for this. California has, de jure, a tribal consultation framework; tribes experience it as an afterthought when a project triggers environmental review. 

This year’s water bill arrives alongside the broader reckoning set in motion by Newsom’s 2019 California Truth and Healing Council, or CTHC. But it appears to do something the environmental-review trigger doesn’t: It builds government-to-government consultation directly in its own text.

To his credit, that Newsom created the CTHC paved the way for a number of meaningful land returns with outsize positive impacts on the environment. In 2024, Newsom returned 2,800 acres to the Shasta Indian Nation, rehabilitating 300 miles of salmon habitat. The following year, he conferred on the Tule River Indian Tribe control over 17,000 acres of their ancestral territory and reintroduced tule elk. There are also pending land returns to the Washoe Tribe and Esselen Tribe.

But the pending data center legislation cuts against this established trend. Today, tribes receive no mention in State Senator Steve Padilla’s own account of what these bills do. He describes them as protecting ratepayers and communities from an industry he says shouldn’t get “zero regulation.” But nowhere in that framing, or the bills themselves, do the words “Native American,” “Indigenous,” or “government-to-government” appear. That’s notable given his own district: Padilla represents Imperial County, home to the Fort Yuma Quechan and Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, where a proposed one million-square-foot data center on former farmland is now tied up in litigation over exactly the kind of issue that environmental review consultation is supposed to strengthen.

It’s also one of the two California sites that a Next10–Santa Clara University study flagged as having the most acute overlap of water scarcity and social vulnerability from data center development. The county draws from the already-strained Colorado River, the identical water source at the center of decades of tribal water rights disputes in the region. The industry Padilla is trying to regulate is already generating the very fights for which his bills fail to account.

Neither bill closes the actual gap. S.B. 887 does actually close a real loophole: It bars data centers from using categorical exemptions to skip environmental review altogether, which should mean more projects, not fewer, run through the CEQA process that can trigger tribal consultation under A.B. 52. But A.B. 52 is only invoked if a tribe finds out about a project and requests review, project by project, tribe by tribe. Neither of the data center bills really builds anything like what the water bill accomplishes, which establishes a standing government-to-government consultation requirement, written into the statute itself, that isn’t contingent upon catching a filing in time. That the data center legislation closes a loophole is laudable; that it leaves the basic architecture of consultation exactly as passive as it’s always been is not.

S.B. 886, meanwhile, would force data centers over 25 megawatts to cover the full cost they put on utility customers, including a share of the fees that fund wildfire mitigation and environmental programs, a tacit admission that the industry’s power demands carry real fire risk on a grid with a documented history of igniting some of the state’s deadliest wildfires. But nowhere in that legislation is that risk connected to Native nations, whose traditional fire stewardship practices California has spent years, and other legislation, trying to reincorporate. 

Why talk with tribes so late in the process? Doing so doesn’t just hurt Native communities and worsen environmental outcomes; it corrodes already fragile public trust in data centers in a state that already leans pro-environment and, to a lesser extent, pro–Native sovereignty. According to a July 2026 Public Policy Institute of California poll, 73 percent of Californians oppose data center construction in their own communities, rendering data centers about as popular in the state Newsom governs as ICE or the ongoing immigration crackdown. 

Addressing tribal consultation almost entirely after the fact doesn’t merely reflect a moral failing; it’s a real financial risk to companies, as well. Bad-faith assumptions about what consultation will produce tend to be a more expensive bet: Companies that skip the chance to broker a détente early are gambling on one being forced on them later, in court, on worse terms.  

A seat at the table isn’t a courtesy. Standing Rock showed the country what happens when Natives don’t receive their due. And while Native voters may not be tracking a California data center bill today, a governor who may want their trust in a potential presidential run in 2028 is building his California record in front of the same movement—moratoriums in Oklahoma, organizing in Arizona and Nevada, land defense everywhere data centers touch tribal ground—that’s already treating this fight as a national concern. That’s friction a presidential campaign can’t outrun forever. If Newsom ignores 109 tribes by leaving tribal consultation out of this bill that otherwise protects ratepayers, along the way to pursuing his well-known presidential ambitions, he may end up hoist with his own petard. 

If you watched the first week of college football last weekend, you saw a well-funded campaign to pass the Protect College Sports Act, or PCSA. College GameDay, ESPN’s flagship pregame show, hosted Texas Senator Ted Cruz to build support for the legislation. He was largely booed throughout his appearance. Cruz was interviewed by former Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee, who echoed the bill’s supporters by saying that college sports were in “absolute chaos,” suggesting that Congress needed to act.

Perhaps the most visible proponent of the bill is Nick Saban, who was the head football coach at the University of Alabama for most of this century. He now works as an analyst on ESPN. Saban has testified before Congress to support the bill and filmed a $10 million ad campaign with Deion Sanders, the Hall of Fame NFL player who now coaches at the University of Colorado.

“The Protect College Sports Act ends the NIL chaos in college athletics by protecting our student-athletes and teams and safeguarding women’s sports and Olympic programs,” he tells viewers in one version of the ad. “Join the winning team today and help protect this American tradition.”

What Saban declined to mention is that the bill would “protect college sports” from the athletes who play them. The PCSA is a life raft for the NCAA, its conferences, and its schools after illegally suppressing college athletes’ earning potential for decades. College athletes were finally able to pursue fair-market compensation for their services over the last few years thanks to a series of major court rulings. Now the NCAA and its allies are trying to turn back the clock to keep as much of the money that college athletes generate as possible.

The bill, like any major legislation in Congress, is the product of a thousand smaller compromises between different factions of lawmakers. There are more than a few things in the PSCA that would appeal to many college sports fans. A variety of restrictions on coaching hires and recruitment would likely appeal to those alienateed by last year’s Lane Kiffen-to-LSU extravaganza, though the bill does not cap compensation for coaches or administrators. Every good thing in the PSCA is a sweetener designed to make its real purpose easier to swallow.

The PSCA’s centerpiece is a harsh earnings cap for all college athletes. At minimum, those athletes could collectively receive only 22 percent of the revenue derived from their performances through their schools and conferences. There are a variety of conditions that could raise that cap for individual schools to accommodate women’s sports and Olympic events, but not by much and not for everyone. This would effectively entrench a recent court settlement—more on that later—into federal law for ten years unless Congress reauthorizes it. The NFL, NHL, and NBA distribute between 45 and 50 percent of their revenue to players by comparison.

The bill also sharply limits athletes’ ability to switch schools by only allowing it to happen once without penalty. Future transfers would cost athletes a year of eligibility, which would be capped at five years, outside of a few narrow exceptions—if their school eliminates a sport, for example, or a head coach is fired or hired elsewhere. To further reduce athletes’ bargaining power, the PSCA would impose a strict recruiting window of between two to five weeks. This would constrain athletes’ ability to shop around for the best deal, so to speak, after proving themselves.

In addition to all of this, the NCAA and its components would receive two long-sought objectives. One is preemption of state laws. By legislating on these issues, Congress would be explicitly barring state legislatures from passing their own laws to regulate compensation and other key issues for college athletes. Second, and even more importantly, the PSCA gives the NCAA immunity from federal antitrust laws when it enforces rules on compensation, transfers, broadcast rights, and more among member schools and conferences. Federal antitrust laws have been a powerful tool for college athletes to keep at least some of the wealth that they generate for themselves. With the PSCA, Congress would slam that door shut.

Arrayed against the bill are labor and civil-rights groups that have strongly criticized the PSCA for what it changes and what it preserves. In a letter to lawmakers last month, the AFL-CIO warned that the proposed law would be a major step backward for college athletes’ rights. “The bill empowers the NCAA to unilaterally set rules for athletes, shielded from antitrust liability, with no suggestion that the rules ever be collectively bargained with athletes at the table,” the labor organization argued.

The NAACP also criticized the bill and urged lawmakers to vote against it, arguing that it would be harmful to Black students who make up a majority of players on the most lucrative college sports. “You have coaches that have been doing this for decades now, and unfortunately, the players did not have the same rights,” Derrick Johnson, the organization’s president, said in an interview on ESPN earlier this week. “Now that players have rights, they’re saying it’s unstable. I watched college football this weekend. Every stand of every game I watched was full. People were excited. The game is as rich as it has ever been. TV revenue is up.”

The bill’s greatest compromise is an explicit neutrality on whether college athletes are employees or non-employees. “This title is neutral on, and does nothing to alter, employee or non-employee status for student athletes,” the bill’s proposed text reads. Federal laws can be vague or silent on certain matters, but I’m struggling to think of another example where Congress explicitly declined to reach a decision like this in black-letter law.

“What this bill does at its core is to protect a system of exploitation,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said earlier this week at an event with the PCSA’s opponents. “This bill protects the billions of dollars that coaches and sports industry executives are making over the suppression of compensation for some of the most highly valued athletes in the world. This bill seeks to give an unprecedented antitrust exemption to an industry that is violating the law every single day.”

Not every college team or sport is profitable, but college sports as a whole is a multi-billion dollar industry. ESPN, for example, paid $5.64 billion for a twelve-year deal to broadcast the College Football Playoffs in 2012 when they were first introduced. Two years ago, the network signed an extension with the NCAA and its components to broadcast the games through 2031 for $7.8 billion. This is just the playoffs, with the Big 10 and the SEC also reaching multi-billion agreements with the major broadcast networks for regular-season games. And it’s not just college football: Networks now pay $1 billion a year to air the annual men’s basketball March Madness tournament. Some of those networks’ parent companies have lobbied, both officially and unofficially, on the bill’s behalf in recent weeks.

Until recently, none of that money went to college athletes. The NCAA long championed the idea that its student-athletes should not be paid or compensated to preserve amateurism in college sports. NCAA rules allowed it to punish players, coaches, and schools who offered any sort of financial benefits to players beyond a limited number of scholarships. To that end, the association also opposed any efforts to classify players as employees, to allow them to unionize, or to accept any brand-endorsement deals from third parties.

Major American sports leagues are generally structured as cartels, where member teams work together to set costs and restrict worker employment and compensation. Federal antitrust law does not look kindly upon this sort of arrangement. If businesses in most other industries colluded to raise prices for consumers, depress employees’ wages, or prevent workers from changing jobs, they would be engaging in illegal anti-competitive practices that could open them up to major legal consequences.

Every major American sports league has two features that prevent this: a collective-bargaining agreement with athletes that maintains labor peace, and an antitrust exemption that shields the league from litigation over anticompetitive practices. Major League Baseball has a judicially created exemption to antitrust laws thanks to a 1924 Supreme Court ruling. Other major leagues have partial exemptions to antitrust laws by act of Congress.

The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, for example, allows the NFL and its teams to collectively negotiate broadcast-rights packages with the networks. In exchange for this exemption, the law also prohibits the NFL from broadcasting games on Friday and Saturday for most of the season to preserve interest in high school and college football on those respective days.

To secure congressional approval of the AFL-NFL merger in 1966, the NFL also agreed to create expansion teams in certain markets favored by key lawmakers. Two key members of congressional leadership at the time, Representative Hale Boggs and Senator Russell Long, pressured then-Commissioner Pete Rozelle to promise an expansion team in their state by threatening to kill the antitrust exemption bill required for the merger. Rozelle agreed to their terms, and the New Orleans Saints began operations that same year.

Congress, when it wants to do so, can use the promise of antitrust immunity to extract meaningful changes and reforms from sports leagues. This time, the NCAA is hoping to get everything it wants without giving up anything it wouldn’t be losing anyway. It is implacably opposed to recognizing college athletes as workers, fearing that they would be obligated to the provide them with the basic workplace rights that every American receives, and it does not have a statutory or judicial exemption to federal antitrust laws, despite its past occasional claims to the contrary.

As a result, the NCAA faced a wave of federal lawsuits over player compensation over the past decade. The first and most momentous ruling came in NCAA v. O’Bannon in 2014 when Judge Claudia Wilken, a federal judge in California, ruled that the association’s rules forbidding athletes from profiting from “name, image, and likeness” deals, or NIL deals, violated federal antitrust law. After O’Bannon, other groups of college athletes filed a lawsuit to challenge the NCAA’s restrictions on education-related compensation.

Those cases were also consolidated under Wilken, who partially ruled in favor of the athletes. In 2021, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld her injunction against the NCAA over its restrictions. The case, NCAA v. Alston, went about as badly as it could have gone for the association. Justices from across the ideological spectrum excoriated its antitrust claims. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, raising concerns about “exploiting” college athletes, warned in a concurring opinion that other NCAA rules might face a similar fate.

Finally, in NCAA v. House, the association reached a settlement with former and then-current athletes to end multiple antitrust lawsuits, which Wilken approved last year. Among the settlement’s terms was a $2.8 billion compensation fund for back payments for college athletes. It also allowed schools to pay their athletes directly for the first time, with a starting cap of around $20.5 million for each school. (Athletes had already won the right in court to accept NIL payments from third parties, including school boosters.) That cap is scheduled to last for a decade with periodic increases after each school year. The settlement forms the starting point for the PSCA, though Congress has gone well beyond it to unfairly constrain college athletes’ earning and bargaining power.

Perhaps the most galling aspect of the PSCA lobbying blitz is the face of it. Nick Saban is undoubtedly the best college football head coach of the past quarter century. He was also handsomely compensated for it. The University of Alabama paid him between $3.5 and $11 million each year between 2007 and 2023. Saban was paid a fair-market value for his labor, and he was able to leverage his success into greater earnings along the way. The players he led and coached had no such opportunities while playing for him.

Even as the NCAA fought to prevent college athletes at Alabama and other schools from pursuing NIL deals, Saban was able to pursue them himself. He signed an endorsement deal with insurance giant Aflac in August 2019 that made him one of the faces of its complex advertising strategy. Had one of his players signed that same deal that year, they would have lost their eligibility to participate in NCAA sports.

Fortunately, this legislation might be one victory that even Saban can’t achieve. The good news is that the PSCA might not become law in the 119th Congress. While the Senate is on course to pass its version of the bill later this month, the House adjourned on Wednesday until after the November midterm elections. Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision left a host of other major legislative issues on ice until the lame-duck session this winter. If the clock runs out on the PSCA, college sports and the athletes who play them will be better off for it.

Queasiness at the county fair? Was it The Zipper? The Tilt-a-Whirl? The fried Twinkies?

Well, at one spot at the Santa Cruz County Fair this week, some unsettled stomachs were at the California Highway Patrol booth, where the agency’s virtual-reality goggles had folks walking sideways and feeling a bit off-kilter.

The British Army is buying more than 1,000 small drones for battlefield surveillance and training under contracts worth £16 million ($21 million). The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says the new portfolio of "spy" drones will give soldiers better battlefield intelligence and protection. The MoD is procuring the drones through three UK-based small and medium-sized companies, although some of the technology comes from overseas. Two models are intended for surveillance, while the third will prepare soldiers to use similar systems on operations. Most of the order consists of 670 Skydio X10 quadcopters. Each weighs about 2.49 kg (5.5 lb), can reach 45 mph, and has a flight time of up to 40 minutes. Surrey-based Marlborough Communications Limited is supplying the drones to the MoD, although their manufacturer, Skydio, is based in California. Evolve Dynamics, based in Hampshire, England, is providing 245 FOXE-NATO drones for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance roles. The company describes the FOXE-NATO as a pouch-deployable quadcopter weighing less than 250 g (0.55 lb), designed for rapid deployment and ease of use. "This contract marks an important step in strengthening the Army's sovereign UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) capability. Our ambition is to see small, reliable uncrewed systems become standard equipment at the lowest tactical level, rather than a limited or specialist resource," Evolve Dynamics CEO Tom Redman said in a statement. The remaining 110 units are SONORA drones supplied through a partnership between Exeter-based Brigantes Consulting and Paris-headquartered Harmattan AI. Designed for training, the SONORA can be deployed in less than a minute and weighs under 1.8 kg (4 lb). The UK National Armaments Director Group handled the procurement, which forms part of Project Rapstone, an Army program intended to move new technology from industry to the front line within 24 months. The purchase follows a £400 million ($534 million) deal announced in July to replace the Army's troublesome Watchkeeper fleet with Tekever AR5 drones. The fixed-wing AR5 is much larger than the quadcopters and can carry a 50 kg (110 lb) payload while remaining airborne for up to 20 hours. "Our soldiers deserve the best technology, and that's what we're delivering," said the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard MP. "From small drones giving troops eyes on the enemy, to the AR5 offering commanders better intelligence over the battlefield, we're transforming the Army's ability to see, understand and act first." ®

Fox News is having profound trouble coping with the spate of terrible stories hitting Donald Trump. Lately the network has mostly avoided discussion of the Iran debacle. Fox largely ignored the report of a Russian oligarch funding Don Jr.’s wedding. It didn’t appear to cover Karl Rove’s highly newsworthy warning about racism in the GOP. Meanwhile, a new Fox poll just delivered crushing news to Trump and the GOP: It finds that 63% say Trump made the economy worse; Democrats substantially leading the GOP on most major issues and in the generic ballot; Democrats benefiting from a big enthusiasm edge; and much more. Fox often downplays its own polling when it’s bad for Trump, but this time, it seems to be breaking through into the coverage. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters details on this episode, Fox is really in crisis mode amid Trump’s mounting failures and cratering public standing. Gertz takes us inside how Fox deals with bad news for Trump, details how Trump-MAGA propaganda functions, and anticipates what’s coming on the right if a big midterm loss badly diminishes him. Listen to this episode here.

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

The tough-on-crime initiative California voters passed two years ago wasn’t supposed to be a draconian return to mass incarceration. Instead, it promised to help people get better by diverting drug offenders into addiction treatment instead of prison. 

To see if Proposition 36 was making good on that promise, CalMatters analyzed data from the 15 counties that have filed the most cases  under the new law.

CalMatters found that people the measure was supposed to help appear to be falling through the cracks in large numbers. In some counties, a small fraction of those arrested for drugs under the law’s new “treatment-mandated felony” are actually getting treatment through Prop 36. Even fewer are graduating their programs and having their charges dropped. 

CalMatters found that counties are implementing the new law, which also increased penalties for certain shoplifting cases, in wildly different ways. The amount of time defendants must stay in treatment to have their drug charges dropped varies from three months to two years. Some counties, such as San Francisco, basically ignored the law altogether, making hardly any Prop 36 drug arrests.

Many counties that are making arrests are having a hard time fulfilling Prop 36’s promise of treatment for everyone. The ballot measure was passed with no funding for addiction programs, and though lawmakers later appropriated some, it wasn’t nearly as much as stakeholders said they needed. That strained a treatment system already struggling with a lack of beds and outpatient slots. 

Before they got it onto the ballot, proponents of Prop 36 called it the “Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act,” highlighting their promise that it would address California’s homelessness crisis. But that promise has run up against the state’s limited housing supply, meaning the program’s many homeless participants sometimes have to try and get sober without a long-term roof over their head. Some counties have no money for case managers that could help keep people on track with their recovery. 

“The statute basically said, ‘We will fix everything for you,’ right? ‘We’ll come up with a mental health plan, we’ll come up with a drug addiction plan, we’ll come up with a work plan and we’ll come up a housing plan,’” said Tracie Olson, chief public defender of the Yolo County Public Defender’s Office. “And none of that happened.” 

The most recent statewide data shows that of the 18,666 felony drug cases charged under Prop 36 last year in counties that reported treatment data, 17% involved defendants who opted for treatment, and just 57 cases were dismissed after the defendant graduated. 

In Orange County, which had the most potential Prop 36 treatment cases of any county we analyzed, 1,311 people were referred to Prop 36 on drug charges as of February 2026, but only 314 agreed to treatment. Of those, fewer than half were actively receiving treatment, while just 15 graduated. 

Information on how Prop 36 works is spotty, and the state has yet to release comprehensive, detailed data on treatment and outcomes. In addition to requesting data from 15 counties, CalMatters interviewed more than two dozen people who have experience with the program. The level of data counties provided varied. Los Angeles County doesn’t track how many people are referred to and accept treatment under Prop 36, and Stanislaus County doesn’t track treatment data. 

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who was one of Prop 36’s most prominent Democratic supporters, said the policy itself isn’t to blame for people failing to receive treatment. Instead, he faults the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who opposed the ballot measure, for refusing to provide meaningful funding or policy leadership.

“People are waiting and dying on the streets for lack of a proper treatment system,” Mahan said. “The fundamental problem remains, which is that the state has refused to take ownership of building a robust treatment system that is going to serve the needs of people.”

Ian Kemmer, director of behavioral health services in Orange County, wishes the program was treating more people. But he says the fact that it’s helping anyone is a win. As of February, no one in his Prop 36 treatment program had sought addiction services from the county in the past.

“I think that these are folks that we would not have gotten into treatment any other way,” he said. 

How Prop 36 works

Prop 36, backed by district attorneys and sheriffs, pledged “a new era of mass treatment for those who need it the most.” Newsom tried to keep it off the ballot, referring to the initiative as an “unfunded mandate” that would take California back to the War on Drugs. It partially reversed a 2014 ballot measure that turned certain nonviolent felonies into misdemeanors in an effort to reduce incarceration after the prison population exploded thanks to tough-on-crime policies dating back to the 1980s. 

At far left, Sacramento Sheriff Jim Cooper speaks at the “Yes on 36” Election Night watch party in downtown Sacramento on Nov. 5, 2024. Credit: Fred Greaves for CalMatters

Now, prosecutors can charge people convicted of various third-time drug offenses with a felony, while also giving them the option of substance use or mental health treatment in lieu of up to three years in jail or prison. If a person chooses treatment, they are required to plead guilty or no contest to the felony charge. If they complete treatment to the court’s satisfaction, their charges are dropped. 

Courts typically refer those cases to their county behavioral health department, which then assesses the defendant to see if the person is eligible and what type of treatment they need. Then the court orders them into a residential or out-patient treatment program. A judge can order drug treatment, mental health treatment and job training, and also require the defendant to meet any other stipulations related to a “successful outcome” that the court finds appropriate.

When Californians voted on Prop 36, the proposal specified that alongside drug and mental health treatment, defendants would be offered shelter, job training and other services “designed to break the cycle of addiction and homelessness.” 

Falling through the cracks

When people accept treatment through Prop 36, sometimes they start the program and then fall off, which could happen because they don’t show up to their court hearings or meet other program requirements. As of February, 63 people in Orange County’s Prop 36 program were considered not “active” and had warrants out for their arrest. 

Other defendants who could be eligible for Prop 36 instead are referred for treatment to another county or program, and therefore don’t show up in the dataset CalMatters obtained.

Public defenders, district attorneys and behavioral health experts say even when treatment is available, the support needed for somebody to succeed is lacking. 

Those pains are being felt in San Diego County, where District Attorney Summer Stephan called the lack of case management support for Prop 36 defendants a “missing piece.” 

Even so, her office touts its success with Prop 36 and multiple politicians hold up San Diego as an example of what’s possible when a county commits to the new law. As of February, 71% of San Diego County defendants who pled guilty to a Prop 36 drug felony allowed their case to be started on the path toward mandated treatment, according to Stephan’s office. Most of the rest were assigned to treatment through probation, and fewer than 5% were sentenced to jail or prison.

“I believe that it’s still a work in progress,” Stephan said. “But in the first year, I think we’ve demonstrated that Proposition 36 has made a big difference.”

But that data captures only part of the picture – it doesn’t show what happens later, after a defendant is referred to the county for evaluation and treatment. As of December, fewer than a third of the people referred had agreed to treatment and even fewer were actually being treated, according to the county’s department of behavioral health services. Two people had graduated.

While the stated goal of Prop 36 is to get people into treatment, not prison, some people still end up behind bars. Between January 2025 and July 2026, there were 568 admissions to California prisons on Prop 36 drug charges, according to an analysis by the University of California’s California Policy Lab and the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code. The average sentence was 28 months. 

Prop 36 will likely increase the prison population by roughly 1,550 people once it has been fully implemented, according to the state department of finance. About 90,000 people are incarcerated in state prisons today. 

Old cases can prompt Prop 36 charge

After getting arrested last year on a Prop 36 drug charge in Orange County, Nicco Pierstorff’s overwhelming response was anger. The 40-year-old had already overcome his methamphetamine addiction and pulled himself out of homelessness. But after police found drugs in a backpack in the backseat of his car — a backpack Pierstorff said belonged to an acquaintance, not him — he wound up facing the choice of jail or mandatory treatment.

But after graduating Prop 36 in April and having his charge dropped, Pierstorff now views his time in the program as a blessing. The counseling he received gave him a new perspective on his past drug abuse and tools he can use the next time he finds himself in a risky situation.

“At first I thought it would be a waste of time because I was already sober,” he said. “But being in Prop 36 really did help me a lot because it recognized my past trauma and the reasons why I do the things that I do.”

During the six months he spent in the program, Pierstorff got drug tested twice a week, and once a week attended both a group counseling session and a one-on-one meeting with his clinician. He went to court twice a month for the first few months, and then once a month.

Nicco Pierstorff in Santa Ana. Credit: Stella Kalinina for CalMatters

Before that arrest, Pierstorff’s last arrest had been nearly 10 years ago. Back then, he’d been homeless and using methamphetamines, and had racked up various drug-related arrests. But he hadn’t used drugs — or been arrested — since 2018, he said. Instead, he’d gotten a maintenance job, found an apartment in Buena Park and turned his life around.

But that didn’t matter under Prop 36, which does not specify a statute of limitations on prior convictions. That means any two prior drug convictions, no matter how old, can qualify someone for a felony drug charge. Although some district attorneys have implemented a “washout period” — a period of time that washes out prior convictions so they cannot count against someone facing new charges — many have not. Public defenders who spoke with CalMatters have reported seeing Prop 36 felony charges based on priors that date back as far as the 1980s. 

“It’s a very archaic approach when the priors are old,” said Contra Costa County Chief Public Defender Ellen McDonnell. “If you haven’t engaged in that same context for 15 to 20 years, that’s not who the voters were intending.” 

Greg Totten, chief executive officer of the California’s District Attorneys Association, said he would have likely implemented a washout period, but every district attorney has to reflect the values of their constituents.

Very different treatment requirements

Prop 36 does not specify how long someone needs to remain in treatment before their charges are dropped. Program length varies widely — from three months in Ventura County to two years in San Luis Obispo County. The length of time someone is forced to remain in the program can have a significant impact on their lives.

Andre Nintcheff, a chief deputy public defender of the Ventura County Public Defender’s Office, said it’s not tenable for people to put their lives on hold as they complete a 12- or 18-month course of treatment.

“We want to make it palatable,” he said. “We want to invite people into treatment.”

In Sonoma County, treatment is required for at least one year. Aaron Kasper, who lives in Santa Rosa, was arrested on his birthday in March 2024 for allegedly possessing fentanyl. He pled guilty and took the treatment path, but said he felt like he signed a bad deal because nobody told him how long it would actually take to complete it.

After spending six months in jail, he finished a three-month residential treatment program. He thought his charges would be dropped as soon as he finished. But for the remainder of his year-long court-required time participating in Prop 36, he was subjected to random drug testing and required to attend regular court appearances, outpatient treatment twice a week, and five self-help meetings a week. 

“I tried to make the best of a horrible situation,” he said.

But all of those obligations affected his ability to work. Since Kasper entered a plea deal, he knew it would be futile to apply for jobs with a felony conviction on his record. He lived off savings he received through a lawsuit settlement over the 2017 Tubbs fire and postponed his job search until two weeks before his year was up.  

After staying sober for more than a year, Kasper in July was one of two people in Sonoma County to graduate from treatment and have his charges dropped. According to the Sonoma County Department of Health Services, as of February 2026, 77 people were referred for an evaluation — 31 of whom agreed to treatment.

Lack of resources for treatment

When Prop 36 supporters were campaigning, they promised to provide not only addiction treatment for people arrested on drug charges, but also shelter and mental health help – a trio of supports that ideally would help someone get off the street and turn their life around.

But access to all these resources remains an obstacle — a worry opponents brought up back in 2024 when the measure was on the ballot.

Prop 36 is sending more people into Orange County’s residential drug treatment, which has fewer than 300 beds, Kemmer said. Before Prop 36, patients generally waited up to a week for a bed. As of February, patients were waiting an average of two to three weeks, and sometimes as long as six weeks, Kemmer said. 

Kemmer said the county places people in sober living homes while they wait for a residential bed — they aren’t stuck in jail. 

But those sober homes don’t provide the treatment patients need. And it’s well-known in the addiction field that if someone says they want treatment, it’s crucial to act immediately – otherwise people are likely to get lured back into using.

It’s a similar story in Santa Clara County.

“We are simply out of treatment in my county,” said Santa Clara County Judge Stephen Manley, who handles drug and mental health cases. “So whether you’re Prop 36 or probation or mental health diversion or misdemeanor diversion, you have to wait a long time to get into treatment. And that’s one of the big challenges with this proposition.”

Gustavo Meza, who was mandated to treatment under Proposition 36, leaves the courthouse after presenting a progress report to a judge at the San Mateo County Superior Court Southern Branch in Redwood City on June 18, 2026. Credit: Manuel Orbegozo for CalMatters

A lack of housing also has been a challenge, as many of the people referred into Prop 36 are homeless. In Santa Clara County, 61% of the people referred for evaluations were homeless. In Orange County, 62% of all completed evaluations were for homeless defendants. In Tulare County, homeless defendants accounted for roughly 30% of its 120 evaluations.

Most counties CalMatters asked don’t track how many people moved into housing while in the program. 

“That’s one of the huge problems with Prop 36 in my view, is we don’t have housing,” said Santa Clara County drug court Judge Manley. “You put people back on the streets and they will continue to use drugs.”

In addition to housing, experts say mental health services can be critical to helping someone get sober, as co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders are common. Last year, about two-fifths of the 42.7 million adult Americans who had a substance use disorder also had a mental illness, according to the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. 

Prop 36 requires courts to order a substance abuse and mental health evaluation of each defendant charged with a Prop 36 drug felony. The court then orders a treatment program that may include mental health care, but doesn’t have to.

Whether and to what extent mental health treatment is being provided varies county by county. While some counties said mental health treatment may be included in their addiction programs, most weren’t tracking how many defendants received any type of mental health services. Those that were, reported that the vast majority of Prop 36 defendants in treatment were receiving addiction services, while just a handful were receiving mental health treatment. 

Santa Clara County was the one outlier, with 13 defendants in mental health treatment and three in addiction treatment (including two receiving both services). The county uses a “whole-person approach” to treatment, because many people need and request both mental health and addiction support, the county’s behavioral health department said.

Alfredo Caballero, who has been in Prop 36 in San Mateo County for more than a year, said he has severe posttraumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. But while he received treatment for his methamphetamine addiction and is now sober, he says he wasn’t offered any mental health care through Prop 36.

“As far as mental health help there, I don’t see it,” Caballero said.

Potential fixes to Prop 36 problems

Some politicians and local leaders have been pushing for more money to help close the gaps in services Prop 36 participants can access. Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, is part of a group that called for $400 million in this year’s state budget for addiction treatment. 

“The path is right and the voters voted for it,” Blakespear said, “and it’s our mandate to do more to fund it.”

But the budget, which was enacted in June, allocated just $50 million for pretrial services, behavioral health services and court workloads, according to the department of finance. It was another blow to lawmakers who last year requested $650 million for Prop 36 implementation, but according to the finance department received $100 million. 

The Board of Community and State Corrections, which oversees California jails, distributed some funding for Prop 36.  Since September 2025, nine grantees have been awarded roughly $72 million to include or create substance abuse and mental health treatment for Prop 36 participants. 

Totten of California’s District Attorneys Association said district attorneys, probation departments and behavioral health departments are trying to put everyone in treatment who needs it.

“We’re somewhat challenged by the lack of funding, but I think the law is working as it was intended — with the exception of the availability of treatment resources at the local level,” he said.

Gustavo Meza, who was mandated to treatment under Proposition 36, stands outside the San Mateo County Superior Court Southern Branch in Redwood City on June 18, 2026.
Credit: Manuel Orbegozo for CalMatters

Despite the road blocks that have impeded the rollout of Prop 36, Gustavo Meza believes he would have died if he hadn’t been arrested last year on a Prop 36 drug charge in San Mateo County. He’d already overdosed several times at that point, including once just days before the arrest. A friend had to revive him with Narcan.

Back then, Meza was homeless and his life was spiraling – his use of alcohol, methamphetamines, heroin and other substances had derailed his ambitions to become a commercial truck driver and gotten him evicted from his Foster City apartment.

Last year’s arrest was the catalyst that inspired him to turn his life around, but Meza did most of the work himself. After his June 2025 arrest, it was another 10 months before the court processed his case and enrolled him Prop 36. By then, Meza had already found an addiction treatment program on his own, had been enrolled for eight months, and was sober. 

His life is much different now. Meza is working at a restaurant and Goodwill, going to group counseling, getting drug tested and taking classes in anger management and job skills. He wants to become a drug counselor and reconnect with his estranged 11-year-old daughter. 

“I’m sober, clear minded, not doing the stuff I used to be doing,” he said. “I just want to start nice and slow. I just want to establish communication with her.” 

This story was reported with support from the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.

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The president of the Royal Society has slammed the government’s decision to move science policy from the department also covering technology to the business department. In changes announced after Andy Burnham became UK Prime Minister in July, the government abolished the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – created by former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – and split its responsibilities among other ministries. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCSM) became Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) while the Science in DSIT went to the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST). Jonathan Reynolds was named Secretary of State for the department. Kanishka Narayan has been given a Cabinet-attending role of Minister for Artificial Intelligence, working jointly in the Cabinet Office and BIST. Chris McDonald, Minister of State for Science, Innovation and Investment is work jointly across BIST and the Department for Health and Social Care with no Cabinet role. Speaking to MPs this week, Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the prestigious Royal Society, said moving science to the business department was a mistake… “actually quite a big mistake”. Nurse, whose main research was in genetics, argued that science cuts across business, health, defense, transport, energy, and the environment. “The future of our country depends on what science can put into all that we do. Giving it just to business — there are ways through that — is restricting just what it can do, and that is a mistake. I would have put science and AI together, because AI is in fact science. I don't know why that is so neglected all the time. AI isn't just large language models and rushing after big databases. It is also about promoting creativity in science and actually generating appropriate technologies.” Nurse said experience with other government activities thrown in with business did not bode well for science. There have previously been a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and a Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. “When you talk to the civil servants, they see the big thing about their department, which is business. So every time I had to speak to them, it was always about application to particular business objectives. They couldn't get off that. Now that is something for the Secretary of State to deal with, but that is a problem. It's not just leadership. It's also what comes underneath. And the Secretary of State has nine policy areas, of which only one is to do with science,” Nurse told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. Also speaking to the Committee, Alicia Greated, executive director for the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said that while there was a government connection between science and health, there was none with the Department for Education, which is responsible for universities and higher education. “That connection is extremely important. Our members are asking for stability, whether it's in funding, strategy or policy. We need to be thinking more long term. A lot of the objectives of the current departmental priorities are going to be quite short term.” Greated also said she feared a “deprioritization” of basic research. “It's not just R&D; it's the skills, it's the infrastructure, it's the ideas that feed into our whole innovation pipeline.” In a letter to the Committee, ministers from the Cabinet Office, BIST and the DCMS said: “The Prime Minister has made a number of changes to the Machinery of Government to rewire the state to deliver a stronger, more strategic center which acts as the engine room for driving economic growth across the whole country. "These changes include transforming how the Government is structured to approach science, innovation, and technology. This reflects that the UK stands at a critical juncture where unprecedented global changes demand that we secure our position as a world leader in AI, science and technology. In this context, we cannot see science and technology as an isolated issue, limited to one department.” ®

ON CALL Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Eddy," the one-person IT department for an assisted living company. "I have had quite a bit of trouble creating a stable Wi-Fi network," he admitted to On Call. "The space is crowded with multiple networks because seemingly every other resident has their own router blasting Wi-Fi throughout the building," he explained. After extensive troubleshooting, he managed to establish a stable connection everywhere except one hallway at the back of the building. "I was starting to question my sanity and competence as seemingly nothing would create a stable signal," Eddy told On Call. "After beating my head on the issue for an unreasonably long time, I decided to take a break and troubleshoot another issue that a user was having: Their monitors would cut out randomly, more so if someone quickly closed the office door." Eddy examined the desk, where a stand held a pair of monitors, whose power and video cables all snaked downwards through the same hole in the desk's surface. "When the stand moved, it was also crimping the power cords," Eddy observed. "Jiggle the desk or slam the door and the monitors would cut out briefly." He drilled a new hole for the stand to sit in and replaced the power cables. That fixed the monitors – and, unexpectedly, restored the Wi-Fi around the desk. "As near as I can tell, the power cables were crimped just enough that they started to transmit and interfere with the Wi-Fi," Eddy told On Call. However, Eddy's other Wi-Fi dead zone remained. He signed off his email to The Register: "Now I am going to be haunting the back hallway with a software-defined radio dongle and waving around a Yagi antenna like a demented wizard to see if I can find the second source of interference." Have you fixed one problem and found it also fixed another? If so, help us fix the problem of the On Call mailbag being a little sparse by clicking here to send us your story! ®

If AI does end up killing us all, or just compounds our daily havoc, the insurance industry would rather not pay the bill. "AI-related harms are already emerging, including incorrect or misleading outputs, deepfakes, privacy violations, intellectual property disputes, fraud, product defects, and discriminatory decisions," observes the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research think tank, in a newly issued report. "These harms create demand for insurance but do not fit neatly within existing insurance lines." Companies want to protect themselves from the financial liability of deploying unreliable, mendacious, amoral AI agents, but insurance companies have become wary about taking on that risk. And if AI ends up being uninsurable, the AI industry will have to moderate its ambitions and sales targets while corporate customers delay AI projects to fulfill their fiduciary obligations. RAND says its report was motivated by the mismatch between rapid enterprise adoption of AI and the fragmented market for insuring or not insuring AI usage, particularly in the US. Apocalyptic scenarios aside, the report says that companies are already grappling with AI-related incidents and related litigation while insurers, regulators, brokers, and policyholders puzzle over risks, coverage, and rules. Insurer W. R. Berkley has already introduced exclusions in its D&O (directors and officers), E&O (errors and omissions), and Fiduciary Liability insurance products to exclude coverage for "any actual or alleged use, deployment, or development of Artificial Intelligence." During the company's Q4 2025 earnings call, CEO W. Robert Berkley highlighted the need for underwriters to understand "the impact that [new technologies like AI are] having on our insureds, what it means for risk, and our ability to fully understand that risk so we can control it, select it, and price for it." The RAND report observes that some insurance carriers are excluding AI-related harms, noting that in January 2026, Verisk/ISO – whose standardized forms appear in more than 80 percent of US property and casualty policies – introduced optional language carriers can adopt to exclude bodily injury, property damage, and other harms arising from generative AI. Not all insurers are deciding not to cover AI harms. As RAND points out, coverage gaps are being filled by new and existing companies that believe they have a handle on the risk calculations. To illustrate those risks, the report points to the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database (AIIDB) which lists tral-world harm or near-harm caused by generative AI. At the time of writing, the AIIDB lists 713 incidents drawn from more than 6,000 reports and covers AI use beyond chatbots. Among these generative AI events, the categorical breakdown includes: misinformation and manipulation (586), deepfakes and synthetic media (346), deepfake enabled misinformation (333), hallucination and factual error (215), harmful content (92), agentic and autonomous failure (84), privacy and data leak (58), bias and discrimination (47), copyright and IP (20), other and unclassified (14), and wrongful AI attribution (7). The total of those events exceeds 713 because some incidents span multiple categories. Then there are the 250 or so US lawsuits related to AI, largely related to copyright and IP, but also touching on privacy/surveillance, fraud and deception, negligence and product liability, discrimination and civil rights, and contracts/trade secrets. And after that, the report touches on the dozens of laws in various US states covering AI intimate images, AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM), automated decision making, AI in political ads, and related rules that could trip up businesses deploying AI. In light of all these potential problems, one might assume this AI thing is dead in the water. But no. Businesses keep deploying AI, despite potential uncertainty about whether corporate insurance policies protect them. To address the gaps in the market, RAND argues that policy researchers and brokers, carriers, and reinsurers need to develop a common taxonomy to track AI incidents and claims. And the think tank wants to see state regulators push for an AI Coverage Notice so everyone is clear on what's covered and what isn't. RAND expects AI insurance coverage will move beyond being a specialty product. The report argues that the risks just need to be understood and priced accordingly. But that will take time. The AI industry may get the pause it has been asking for as insurers puzzle over how to price the end of humanity. ®

Amazon Web Services does a lot of things right, but the cloud giant’s user console is arguably not one of them. Which may be why it’s just created an easier alternative for new users. In a Wednesday post, Senior Solutions Architect Micah Walter said that when AWS launched its earliest storage, compute, and queuing services, “anyone with an idea could start building.” Over the years, AWS added more services, and more options, making its console and overall UI quite complex. “That combination of global reach, breadth, and depth remains essential for those customers,” Walter wrote, “but if you are at the start of a new idea, every configuration option is effort standing in the way of shipping your dream product fast.” “We’ve heard from builders that they do not want to spend their first hours configuring an AWS environment,” he added. The cloud giant’s response is a new “getting started experience” aimed at “builders who are working at the pace of AI.” The Register understands that AWS has been working on this for almost a year, after realizing new users find its existing console intimidating. Walter said the new UI allows users to establish an AWS account with credentials from Google, GitHub, and Apple. When new users sign up, AWS will automatically create a project. “Instead of having to complete configuration tasks before you can work on your project, you start with sensible defaults and simple administration,” Walter wrote. Once logged in, users “get a prompt to paste into your coding agent that configures it to work with your new AWS environment. From there, your agent can deploy resources, run workloads, and iterate on your application following best practices for working with AWS.” The cloud colossus will apply what Walter described as “sensible defaults” to resources, and those who sign up with the tool can also apply a spending limit starting from $20 a month. AWS will “suggest a spend limit based on your usage, and you can accept that recommendation or set a custom amount if you are planning to further scale your usage,” Walter wrote. Users will also get warnings if they approach their spending ceiling, and AWS will pause a project rather than let it exceed a user’ budget. AWS has always tried to win new users and startups with free services and onboarding assistance. The Register cannot recall a moment when the cloud giant created an entirely new user experience to woo them, or all-but admitted that its current console is an impediment to adoption. ®

Think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has warned that Venezuela is poised to adopt Chinese AI systems to enhance surveillance systems that already rely on Middle Kingdom tech, and called for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to do something about it. ASPI outlined the Venezuelan situation in a recent report [PDF], titled Warning signals: Venezuela and the risk of Chinese AI-enabled digital authoritarianism. The document explains that Venezuela’s government built a surveillance state a decade ago, largely using technology from Chinese companies. In 2025, according to the report claims, then Venezuelan vice-president Delcy Rodríguez led an effort that culminated in “an agreement to adopt Chinese-built AI systems … to use Chinese AI to enhance existing state-sponsored surveillance.” One of the companies involved in that agreement is iFlytek, which the US banned in 2019 for its role in helping Beijing to repress the Uyghur Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang region. The USA effectively took over Venezuela in January 2026 and installed Rodríguez as the nation’s leader. ASPI can find no signs she’s changed course on her plan to adopt more Chinese surveillance tech. “Venezuela will become one of the first countries outside China to import China’s new generation of LLM-based AI systems for surveillance and control, and the most advanced adopter in the Western Hemisphere,” the report claims. And while ASPI’s analysts don’t think Venezuela’s government can recreate “China’s full-stack surveillance apparatus.” They do worry that “Chinese or other AI tools could strengthen a domestically directed apparatus already used to manage dissent, restrict information and preserve political power.” That arguably leaves Venezuelans no better off than they were before the US decided to replace former president Nicholas Maduro. And it leaves the USA effectively running a nation that relies on Chinese surveillance tech to maintain power, even as Washington seeks a greater role in Venezuelan affairs. ASPI called on US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who effectively acts as viceroy of Venezuela, to dismantle the surveillance apparatus and enact political change. The think tank’s analysts believe doing so would signal that democracies are willing to combat China’s attempts to export its surveillance tech, and dismantle it when possible in the name of civil liberty. “Beijing for its part recognizes this opening, and the risk it poses to Chinese companies and China’s political influence there,” the report states. “China’s leaders appear to understand that assets and investments of its national champions are at risk in Venezuela. Beijing’s approach seems to be, in part, strengthening oversight of state-owned assets abroad to assist in risk protection and management.” The report does not address whether greater adoption of Chinese surveillance by Venezuela increases the risks the USA faces as it seeks to control the South American country. ®

Meteorologists are predicting a wet El Niño winter this year, with above-normal ocean temperatures potentially bringing heavy rain and flooding.

“We are in a very strong El Niño index right now where we are seeing above-normal temperatures along the coast,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Anamaria Navarrete.

Robert Lund, a statistical climatologist at UC Santa Cruz, told KSBW that “we are probably looking at the strongest El Niño in our recorded lifetime.”

Navarrete said the warming conditions can contribute to elevated sea levels.

“With warmer waters, swells from distant hurricanes in combination with possible winter atmospheric rivers, we could face major consequences,” she said. “This could also bring on astronomical tide activities, major beach erosion and damage to area harbors. We can’t say for sure, but it is something we are keeping an eye on.”

Navarrete added that National Weather Service forecasters are projecting above-average precipitation, with a chance of wetter-than-normal conditions.

She advised the public to stay aware of changing weather conditions, especially during severe weather, by visiting weather.gov/bayarea.

People in low-lying areas should remain  especially aware, Navarrete added. 

The public can also get valuable alerts and information by signing up to CRUZ AWARE at CruzAware.org.

The Pajaro Valley High girls flag football team was confidently aiming to close out this week with a couple of short-term goals in mind: keep their perfect record intact and push further ahead in the league standings.

But, the Grizzlies were served a sliver of humble pie following a 26-12 defeat to King City High in Pacific Coast Athletic League Mission Division action Wednesday afternoon.

“I got to give it to them, they were tough,” PV head coach Cesar Rojas said. “Really, really good team.”

With the loss, PV dropped to a 4-1 overall record. They are now tied with King City and Watsonville with a 2-1 record in Mission Division play.

The Grizzlies were coming off a pair of victories against Watsonville and Alvarez high schools on Monday and Tuesday, respectively, giving them all the confidence required to take on the Mustangs.

“I think we got too confident after beating the cross-town rivals,” said Rojas about the win over Watsonville, which defeated King City on Sept. 8. “King City came, put up a show. They did their thing.”

PV junior Denise Magallon was visibly upset after Wednesday’s game, mostly because she felt they didn’t play to their full potential like they usually do.

“I thought that we had it,” Magallon said. “But I guess we got in our heads too much. I don’t understand why, but we got in our heads too much, and that kind of messes up real bad.”

Magallon gave credit to King City for the way they took care of business, but she thinks a lack of communication and execution played a big part in their first loss of the season. 

“They were doing really good passes in the middle, and once again, I think we messed up on that because we’ve had conversations about focusing on the middle,” Magallon said. “We struggled with that a few games ago, and we thought we had it again, but I guess not.”

The Grizzlies began the 2026 fall campaign with a four-game win streak. However, Rojas echoed his star player by saying they continue to fail to communicate with each other, and it showed during Wednesday’s game. 

It began in the first quarter with a pair of interceptions thrown by junior quarterback Aaliyah Suarez. One of those turnovers resulted in a touchdown for King City.

PV’s defense also allowed a touchdown just before going into halftime, allowing the Mustangs to push ahead at 19-6 at the break.

Some players looked confused and Rojas attempted to calm them down, yet at times it almost seemed impossible for him.

“They need to understand our formations,” Rojas said. “They need to understand our style of play, and it’s important to work with them. That’s gonna build our program in the long run.”

With youth comes inexperience. Still, Rojas is confident this particular group will learn from their mistakes after a tough loss.

The Grizzlies have key returning players in seniors Jezlynn Calderon, Perla Rivera and Analia Vazquez, along with juniors Nadia Renteria, Xitlali Pozos and Elizabeth Zamora.

Magallon said having a good core of players coming back from last year is great because they have a familiarity. But it’s also great to have new players coming in and helping out in any way possible.  

“I think we just gotta work on them more and help them out to help us out,” Magallon said. 

The underclassmen include sophomores Sofia Arenas and Khloe Cisneros, along with five new freshmen: Maya Cigala, Damaris Cortez, Aryana Gonzalez, Amarely Magdeleno and Mariyah Vazquez.

“We are a small roster, but I think it’s full of potential,” Rojas said.

The season is still young. Rojas emphasized, though, that he needs to include more team bonding, which he admits they haven’t done much of this year.

PV’s third-year head coach believes doing out-of-school activities that includes the parents and guardians is what keeps teams together.

“I think we gotta get back to it,” Rojas said. “Take the girls to the beach, they love going to the beach. I think we were working way too hard in our practices.”

In 2025, they were in a similar situation after losing to Pacific Collegiate School and North Monterey County High early in the campaign.

The Grizzlies turned it around by winning the final 10 games of the regular season en route to the program’s first-ever PCAL Mission Division title.

They intend to defend the Mission Division crown as King City, Watsonville, PCS, Soledad High and North Salinas High look to dethrone them.

“We still have a big chance,” Rojas said. “It’s there for everybody.”

Next up, Pajaro Valley (4-1, 2-1) plays at Soledad (4-2, 1-1) in Mission Division play Sept. 22 at 5:45pm.

#tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item1 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PAJ2638-PV-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-1-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item2 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PAJ2638-PV-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-2-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item3 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PAJ2638-PV-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-3-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item4 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PAJ2638-PV-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-4-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item5 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PAJ2638-PV-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-5-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item6 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PAJ2638-PV-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-6-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item7 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/KCR2639-KC-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-1-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item8 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/KCR2639-KC-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-2-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item9 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/KCR2639-KC-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-3-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #tdi_1 .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item10 { background: url(https://pajaronian.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/KCR2639-KC-girls-flag-football-update-WEB-4-80x60.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } 1 of 10 Pajaro Valley High junior quarterback Aaliyah Suarez has been under center for the Grizzly girls flag football team this fall campaign. (Juan Reyes/The Pajaronian) Pajaro Valley High junior Denise Magallon is one of several key returning players for the Grizzly girls flag football team this fall campaign. (Juan Reyes/The Pajaronian) Pajaro Valley High girls flag football head coach Cesar Rojas enters his third season with the progam. (Juan Reyes/The Pajaronian) Pajaro Valley High senior Perla Rivera, No. 10, is a speedy defensive rusher for the Grizzly girls flag football team this fall campaign. (Juan Reyes/The Pajaronian) Pajaro Valley High junior quarterback Aaliyah Suarez, right, checks in with assistant head coach Jordan Ruiz during a game against King City High on Sept. 15. (Juan Reyes/The Pajaronian) Pajaro Valley High senior Analia Vazquez is one of several key returning players for the Grizzly girls flag football team this fall campaign. (Juan Reyes/The Pajaronian) King City High junior Marali Ortiz, right, and teammate senior Shyrah McDonald both reach for the ball at an attempt to make the interception during a girls flag football game against Pajaro Valley High on Sept. 15. (Juan Reyes/King City Rustler) King City High senior Katia Slama tosses the ball during a girls flag football game against Pajaro Valley High on Sept. 15. (Juan Reyes/King City Rustler) King City High sophomore Alondra Herrejon sprints past the defense during a girls flag football game against Pajaro Valley High on Sept. 15. (Juan Reyes/King City Rustler) King City High senior Shyrah McDonald hauls in a catch during a girls flag football game against Pajaro Valley High on Sept. 15. (Juan Reyes/King City Rustler)

Geothermal startup Mazama is drilling three miles underground to tap superhot rock, with one well capable of generating 15 MW of electricity 24/7.