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Microsoft now lets customers apply existing SQL Server licenses toward SQL Server usage on AWS's managed relational database service (RDS). The move promises to give customers who decided to go with AWS an easier path to consuming their SQL Server systems as a service, rather than in virtual machines. In a blog post, Amazon explained that customers paying with Microsoft’s Software Assurance licensing program could only previously bring their SQL Server licenses to AWS on self-managed Amazon EC2 through the Redmond vendor’s License Mobility program. “If you wanted a fully managed database like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and you already had SQL Server licenses, you had to pay for licensing a second time through the License Included model,” RDS database engineer Srikanth Katakam said. Amazon's Bring Your Own Media (BYOM) for RDS for SQL Server lets customers use existing SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition licenses to cover both installation media and licensing on the managed service, with no additional fees. The process includes three steps, Amazon told The Register: customers submit a License Mobility Verification Form to Microsoft to confirm eligibility; they upload their SQL Server Release to Manufacturing media to Amazon S3; and in the Amazon RDS Console, users should select their SQL Server major version, point to the media file in S3, choose their minor version, and create the database. Customers can track their Microsoft SQL Server license usage with AWS License Manager. Microsoft has declined to comment on why it got involved in the deal. For Amazon, the self-interest is clear: it wants to get the data nearer to its AI tech. “Once that operational data is in the cloud, it sits alongside AWS AI and analytics services — so teams can build agentic AI applications that reason directly over their business data without complex data pipelines or infrastructure constraints,” AWS said in a statement. Microsoft has its own equivalent technology in Fabric, its data lake and analytics environment, which also offers a control console to manage databases. In the absence of any firm statement from Redmond, it seems reasonable to assume that SQL Server is no longer the strategic priority it once was for the Microsoft. It is inviting users to migrate to its database services, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric. Like AWS, users can also choose from a bunch of database services, including those running MySQL and PostgreSQL, which Microsoft has been increasingly vocal about SQL Server remains third in the DB-Engines ranking, although its popularity has been on the slide for more than five years, and it looks like it will be overtaken by PostgreSQL in the near future. However that may not be of great concern to Redmond’s accountants. As a database vendor, Microsoft is doing fine. As Adam Ronthal, vice president analyst at Gartner, pointed out: "Of the leading vendors in 2011 (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP), only Microsoft has grown their market share in the last 15 years.” ®

In the spring of 1989, demonstrators flooded Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to protest in favor of democracy in China. In the first days of June that year, the government responded with a violent crackdown, quickly securing the square. However, that victory was sidelined by one unforgettable image taken on June 5. A lone protestor walked out and stood in front of a column of tanks…

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Daily Kos staff had a team off-site this week, adjacent to Netroots Nation, and it was so lovely meeting some members of this community in person! Ed Tracey, cohenzee, brillig, BeninSC, mommyof3, and so many others — it’s so much fun to meet the faces behind the screen names (and if the staff has been less responsive than usual, it’s because we’ve been busy having these in-person discussions).

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The Australian data center operator plans to set up 5GW of capacity in India.

Those who helped families cope with child care, financial instability and mental health are being replaced with uniformed service members. By Marcus Baram for Capital & Main For the families of U.S. service members deployed overseas during conflicts, life can be very stressful, both financially and emotionally. More than 80% of military families report elevated stress from the Iran…

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Humanitarian organization World Food Programme (WFP) says one of its systems was breached, and around 600,000 Gazan households receiving aid had their details improperly accessed. Its announcement, made via Telegram on May 31, confirmed there was “a security incident” in the self-registration application used by Gazans to register for aid and applicants’ names, ID numbers, phone numbers, and location information were among the data types accessed. “We understand this may be concerning, and we want to assure you that protecting your data and privacy is our top priority,” the WFP said. “The program is treating this situation with the utmost seriousness and priority.” The organization said it temporarily suspended the registration platform to urgently apply the necessary security improvements. Its most recent update on the situation came on June 2, when it said the platform was still down, but added that aid recipients did not need to do anything, while their support would continue to be delivered uninterrupted. “The WFP wants to assure all those registered via the link that food assistance, cash assistance, nutritional supplementation, and all other WFP programs are continuing as usual,” it said. “If you are already registered on the Self-Registration Application (SRA), your registration remains valid. There is no need to update, delete, or re-register your information at this time.” WFP told The New Humanitarian, which first reported the story, that the attack was detected on May 14, and confirmed the scale to be in the region of 600,000 households. The news organization also claimed, citing a whistleblower’s account of matters, that an anonymous “independent expert” contacted WFP’s Palestine team, alerting it to vulnerabilities in the SRA two days before the organization detected the breach. The Register contacted WFP’s Rome headquarters for more details, but it did not immediately respond. WFP, which is a division of the UN and the largest welfare organization in the world, supports 1.6 million Palestinians every month who face a malnutrition crisis amid fierce conflict between the territory and neighboring Israel. This represents around 77 percent of the country’s population, and an estimated 80 percent of the population is unemployed, unable to earn the money required to pay for a nutritionally sound diet. WFP delivers wheat flour, high-energy biscuits, and fortified snacks to families, community kitchens, and bakeries in its effort to push back famine, as well as facilitating cash transfers. The organization is also helping individuals get back into paid work, maintains roads, and says that when conditions allow, it will stay in the region and help local people rebuild communities, markets, and other food systems. ®

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | How does Trump just keep losing? Let us count the ways.

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COMPUTEX 2026 Gigabyte showed off a high density server platform at Computex this week that crams 40 low-power compute nodes into a pizza box. Amid a sea of nearly identical MGX and NVL blades, the R1C7-KOA-AS1 was one of the more unusual systems on this year’s show floor. Rather than using Intel or AMD's datacenter class Xeon or Epyc, the machine is powered by dozens of notebook processors. Specifically, Gigabyte has opted for Intel's Core Ultra 7 258V. Launched in mid 2024, each chip is equipped with four Lion Cove P-cores and four Skymont E-cores clocked at up to 4.8 GHz and 3.7 GHz respectively. Each processor is paired with 32 GB of LPDDR5x 8,533 MT/s memory, Arc 140V graphics with eight Xe cores, and a 48 TOPS NPU. These chips are mounted on a thin motherboard roughly the size of an index card. Each node is equipped with a pair of PCIe 5.0 m.2 drives, which probably provide redundant storage. Eight of these nodes slot into one of the chassis’ five carriers for a total of 40 systems, 320 cores (160 P / 160 E), and 1.28 TB of high-speed memory. Networking and power come in the form of two 100 Gbps QSFP28 LAN Ports, and a pair of 3200 watt 80-plus Titanium power supplies. We're told the system is well suited to running micro services workloads like Kubernetes, but we suspect many will be attracted to it as a bare metal alternative to VDI, for something like Microsoft 365 cloud PCs or casual cloud game streaming. The Intel 258V's on board graphics means customers wouldn't need to worry about vGPU licensing costs. Each node would have its own dedicated graphics acceleration. Gigabyte currently lists the system as "To be released" on its website. We've asked for comment on timing and will let you know if we hear anything back. ®

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

Is Frito-Lay categorically refusing to buy potatoes grown on farmland that has hosted solar installations? No, the company says. 

That hasn’t stopped lawmakers in Michigan and Pennsylvania from spreading the false claim about one of the biggest purchasers of potatoes in the country.

In January, Michigan Republican state Rep. Cam Cavitt posted a 51-second clip to Facebook labeled ​“Solar Farm SECRET.” In the segment, he claimed that farmers in his district couldn’t grow potatoes on land where solar developments were sited.

“Frito [Frito-Lay] did the same with the potato growers up by us,” fellow Michigan Republican Rep. Dave Prestin told Cavitt in the clip. ​“Any field that had solar panels installed on it will never be allowed to grow potatoes for human consumption due to the leaching.”

More than 1 million people viewed that video. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Cris Dush shared it and said he wanted ​“cash bond guaranteeing restoration” of the soil after a solar development was removed. ​“When Frito Lay refuses to accept potatoes from farms that had solar arrays we should all sit up and take notice!” he wrote.

“Raising these claims about solar could prevent farmers from diversifying their income stream and adding a really stable source of income.”

PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, told Canary Media that the company ​“has not issued blanket guidance to growers that fields with solar installations will not be accepted.”

Nor is there any published evidence that solar farms have a negative impact on potato farming, according to experts consulted for this story. On the contrary, there is agrivoltaics research showing that potatoes—and many other crops—can benefit from growing alongside shade-making solar panels.

Nevertheless, this false claim about solar is gaining some traction. Like other forms of misinformation about renewables, it helps fuel local pushback to proposed energy installations.

The claim comes amid a broader wave of opposition to building solar arrays on farmland.

As energy developers look to build more solar installations to meet climate goals and fast-rising electricity demand in the U.S., more and more projects are being proposed on flat and sunny land that could otherwise grow crops. The impact these projects may have on the land is often exaggerated by opponents—including Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers—who claim solar will destroy prime farmland.

American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving agricultural land, found that by 2040, 7 million acres of agricultural land could be used for solar installations. That’s less than 1 percent of the farmland across the Lower 48 states.

Such misinformation could threaten not only solar developments but also farmers’ livelihoods. Farmers can earn tens of thousands of dollars by leasing land to solar developers, providing a financial lifeline in a precarious agricultural market. Potato farmers in particular could have a hard time leasing under ​“this sort of speculated risk,” according to Scott Laeser, senior working lands adviser for the Rural Climate Partnership, a nonprofit connecting rural and renewable development.

“Raising these claims about solar could prevent farmers from diversifying their income stream and adding a really stable source of income to their operation, which I suspect most farmers would be pretty happy to add in the volatile moment that we’re in,” he said.

The speculation about solar’s impact on potatoes began a year ago with a statement from the agricultural trade group Potato Growers of Michigan. While the organization recognized the role of renewable energy in Michigan’s future, it didn’t want solar on farmland and cited concerns about food safety.

“When solar panels and systems are eventually removed, small fragments of plastic and metal may remain in the soil,” the statement read. ​“For crops like potatoes, which grow underground, this poses a unique and serious risk. Tuber vegetables can readily engulf foreign objects, creating contamination hazards that impact not just growers, but also processors and consumers.”

But there’s no evidence to suggest that this actually happens, experts say.

Steven Loheide, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is located in one of the three biggest potato-growing states and researches the interaction of solar projects and farmland. Loheide had not heard of the concern from Michigan potato growers.

Nor had Alan Knapp, a plant ecologist at Colorado State University, who added that he did not know of any scientific study finding that solar panels installed aboveground could impact potato crops grown belowground. Knapp noted that there’s a list of worries about what happens underneath solar panels—like toxins leaching into the soil or metal and silica shards impacting crops—and most are unfounded.

“I’ve never heard of any sort of toxicity issues or any concerns about the quality of the crop being consumed by humans being impacted by the installation of solar panels above,” Knapp said.

Rumors have spread anyway.

In August 2025, a public comment from a farmer opposing a project in Kentucky called Wood Duck Solar quoted the Potato Growers of Michigan statement. Potential contamination from the 100-megawatt solar field threatened food safety, the farmer wrote. That project was ultimately approved.

In March 2026, Dennis Iott, the chair of the Potato Growers of Michigan, along with Kelly Turner, executive director of the Michigan Potato Growers Commission, another trade group, repeated the claims at a Michigan House Agriculture Committee hearing.

“There’s a huge opportunity to get both agricultural benefits and energy production off a single plot of land.”

Solar threatens potato growers because the vegetables require a lot of land that farmers often lease in rotational years, but solar groups are buying up that land, Turner said.

“You cannot blame them for signing the solar contracts,” Turner said of the farmers. ​“The problem is, though, that it takes that land out of production, and now it starts to hurt economies of scale because there’s no more land near the grower to be able to create enough land to have those rotations.”

Potatoes are also ground crops, and could form around foreign objects in the ground, Turner purported, including whatever might be left behind after a solar system is dismantled.

But Iott, speaking after Turner at the hearing, admitted, ​“The food safety issue hasn’t been seen yet, because we haven’t taken those solar fields out. But it will be a problem for anything that grows in the soil.”

Iott and Turner did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

At some point, the general speculation raised by industry lobbyists morphed into specific falsehoods about Frito-Lay, and caught the ear of the lawmakers from Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Neither Cavitt nor Prestin responded to multiple requests for comment.

Lynsey Mukomel, communications director for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said she and her colleagues were not aware of any statements made by Frito-Lay or any other company asking Michigan farmers not to grow potatoes on land with solar installations.

And, of course, PepsiCo itself said it had issued no such directives.

The furthest PepsiCo says it has gone is to provide growers with its carefully worded perspective on endorsing solar outside of ​“prime agricultural lands,” but only when growers have asked them directly, a company spokesperson said.

While the firm says it values solar energy as part of its corporate decarbonization goals, it endorses solar and other renewable installations outside of prime agricultural lands ​“in order to avoid potential impacts to crop yields, quality and the creation of other unintended consequences,” a spokesperson for PepsiCo said in an email.

Although there is no evidence that solar panels damage potato farmland, there is mounting proof that siting solar and crops on the same land can be beneficial.

A four-year study in Italy published earlier this year showed that agrivoltaic systems, which combine farming with photovoltaic electricity generation, could potentially support potato crops.

Solar panels can help retain groundwater as rain runs off the sloped panels which then provide shade that blocks the sunlight and helps retain moisture, Loheide said. He has also studied solar’s impact on native pollinator habitats.

“There’s a huge opportunity to get both agricultural benefits and energy production off a single plot of land,” said Loheide, who was not part of the Italian study.

Despite the evidence, speculation that strikes a nerve has a way of circulating anyway. After all, concerns that offshore wind hurts whales, a claim that lacks any evidence, have turned out to be one of the biggest vectors of attack on the beleaguered energy source.

Speculation about potatoes and solar may never rise to quite that level. But it doesn’t seem likely to fade away, either. Late last month, a post on X from a prominent anti-solar account repeated the falsehood that customers won’t buy potatoes grown on land that once hosted solar. It racked up nearly 10,000 shares and 20,000 likes.

The AI gold rush is proving good for Raspberry Pi's bottom line, but it's also forcing the low-cost computer maker to borrow money to keep enough memory chips in stock. In a trading update published on Friday, Raspberry Pi said it expects full-year earnings to come in significantly ahead of market expectations after a stronger-than-expected first half driven by healthy demand, higher average selling prices, and the benefit of lower-cost memory inventory purchased earlier. Raspberry Pi expects first-half profits of at least $38 million from shipments of more than 4 million units, putting it close to the roughly $42 million analysts had forecast for the entire year. Investors piled in after the update, pushing Raspberry Pi shares up nearly 20 percent and more than tripling the Cambridge-based firm’s value since January. The most interesting detail, however, was tucked away beneath the headline numbers. Raspberry Pi warned that pricing and availability of DRAM and non-volatile memory remain challenging, a familiar complaint across the industry as AI infrastructure builders continue vacuuming up components. To ensure it meets production targets, the company said it intends to make strategic purchases of memory inventory and will "appropriately utilize" its debt facilities throughout the year. Not so long ago, Raspberry Pi's biggest supply-chain challenge was making enough boards for eager tinkerers and classrooms. The firm increasingly looks less like a hobbyist hardware vendor and more like a company navigating the same semiconductor supply chain headaches as much larger technology firms. Earlier this year it raised prices on some products as memory costs climbed, while executives have repeatedly pointed to component availability as a key business risk. At least Raspberry Pi has a problem that many hardware vendors would happily take. Customers are still buying enough boards to keep the memory buyers busy. Still, Raspberry Pi said first-half profitability benefited from lower-cost DRAM inventory acquired before memory prices moved higher. As that stock is consumed, margins are expected to moderate during the second half of the year. Still, management seems willing to sacrifice some profitability to secure supply. It turns out the AI boom affects more than datacenter operators. Even Raspberry Pi is now playing the DRAM market. ®

Gail Groves and Dinah Phillips, the first same-sex couple to be married in Santa Cruz County in June 2008, will lead this year’s Pride festivities alongside Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, who officiated their wedding. In being named for this honor, they bring attention to the importance of LGBTQ+ love being normalized and validated.

Watsonville High School senior Chris Delgado has transformed childhood trauma into success, earning a statewide courage award and a scholarship as he prepares to attend college. He’s sharing his story in hopes of encouraging other young people to speak up and persevere through adversity.

A new court filing has revealed the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions accepted a bid from Capita to run its new Oracle-based HR and finance system at £272 million less than its own cost modelling. In March, the UK outsourcing company won the contract for running shared services for £370 million over ten years. The central government department had earlier produced a "Should Cost Model" — designed to protect against a bias towards low bids — which provided a total price of £642 million, according to court papers. Capita’s bid was 42 percent less than the “should-cost” estimate. Since January, the deal to run HR and finance systems for four UK government departments has been the subject of a legal claim from rival bidder Sopra Steria, which alleges Capita's bid was "abnormally low" and based on staffing "significantly below the current levels." Capita has already told The Register it took part in a robust procurement process and stands ready to work with the DWP to ensure a smooth transition of service and value for money. A DWP spokesperson has previously told us: "We have signed a contract with Capita to deliver the Business Process Service and are committed to ensuring a smooth transition. Our priority is continuity of service and value for money for the public." Through its subsidiary SSCL, Sopra Steria has been running back-office shared services for the DWP, the Ministry of Justice, the Cabinet Office and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, based on Oracle eBusiness Suite 12.2.6, since 2013. In 2024, the DWP led the procurement for a new Oracle-based SaaS system and awarded the deal to IBM and Big Red for £711 million ($950 million), with the Home Office set to join the shared service at a later date. Capita’s 10-year deal to run the Business Process Services (BPS) for the group of Whitehall departments — known as the Synergy cluster — is part of the government's shared services strategy it says will offer £4 billion in benefits. In its defense against the claim, the DWP alleged that Sopra Steria was in breach of an “Ethical Wall Agreement” by basing its case on a document the department sent in error. A Sopra Steria spokesperson told The Register: "Sopra Steria was not excluded by the DWP from the procurement, and we do not accept that there was any breach of the Ethical Wall Agreement." In its defense, the DWP also alleged that Sopra Steria’s bid was “excessively high.” In the recently disclosed reply to the defense, Sopra Steria denies that claim by producing evidence from the "Should Cost Model" the department developed during the procurement in accordance with Cabinet Office guidelines. The model put the contract price at £642 million. Sopra Steria notes its price was less than the model price, and not "excessively high" as the DWP alleged, although details of its bid are redacted. Cabinet Office guidelines state that complex outsourcing projects shall produce a “Should Cost Model Estimate” as part of the delivery model assessment. They refer to a Sourcing Playbook which states that the model can help “demonstrate value for money, to inform the development of payment mechanisms or to help protect government from ‘low-cost bid bias’.” The Playbook says that if a bid is more than 10 percent lower than either the average of the other bids or the “Should Cost Model” estimate, it should be referred to the Cabinet Office’s Government Commercial Function. The Register asked the DWP if it had referred the Capita bid in that way. Officials said it would be inappropriate to comment further, as the procurement is currently subject to an ongoing legal process. Last month, during a hearing of the UK’s Parliamentary spending watchdog, Labour MP Clive Betts questioned why the DWP would pick Capita after its performance on the Civil Service Pension Scheme, which has sparked protests. Users of the pension portal launched last year were quick to complain about login failures, broken links, and unfinished-looking pages after the launch. MPs later heard the system went live without full functionality in place and struggled to handle the volume and complexity of cases transferred from the previous administrator, MyCSP. Dianne Jeans, DWP Senior Responsible Officer for the Synergy Programme, told the Public Accounts Committee that the shared service award was “a very different scenario than from pensions.” She said the award to Capita followed all the government regulations and processes. “We also had strong legal and commercial oversight and subject matter experts from all four Departments assessing the competing bids throughout the whole process. Capita emerged as the clear preferred bidder under Government procurement processes,” she said. ®

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

Last December, the Department of Justice opened a new office in its Civil Rights Division called the Second Amendment Section. The goal of the office, as previously reported by Mother Jones and The Trace, is to identify firearm restrictions enacted by cities and states that the administration believes to be unconstitutional—and sue to overturn them.

And sue they have.

In the section’s first six months of operation, the Justice Department has brought cases against police departments in Los Angeles County and the Virgin Islands, the city of Denver, the state of Colorado, and the nation’s capital, Washington, DC. Virginia may be next: Minutes after Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed an assault weapon ban last month, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on X, “See you in court!”

“It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us.”

The Civil Rights Division typically fights for the disempowered by enforcing federal anti-discrimination statutes. It was created in 1957 to ensure Black voting rights and school desegregation. Gun rights “have never been a focus,” said Megan Marks, a former attorney in the division who is now deputy director and managing editor of Red Line for Civil Rights, a nonprofit initiative that tracks the politicization of civil rights enforcement under President Donald Trump.

Not surprisingly, pro-gun organizations are thrilled with the Civil Rights Division’s new direction. “It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us,” said Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, which has more than 50 active lawsuits seeking to void gun laws across the country. “Because courts, like it or not, do take the DOJ more seriously. And frankly it’s nice to have the DOJ at least seeing the Second Amendment as equal to all the other rights.”

The DOJ’s suits come at a time when the Trump administration has departed from more traditional civil rights issues—discrimination against marginalized groups based on race, sex, disability, and religion—by pursuing conservative policies, reshaping DEI initiatives, investigating “reverse discrimination,” and suing universities over affirmative action practices.

“Under the leadership of President Trump, this is the most pro-Second Amendment Department of Justice in history,” a Justice Department spokesperson told me. “We are committed to maximizing law-abiding citizens’ ability to fully exercise their right to bear arms and evenhandedly enforcing federal laws that do not infringe on Second Amendment rights.”

The flurry of litigation began last September, when the Civil Rights Division filed suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over “unreasonable delays” in issuing concealed carry permits that allegedly stretched “as far as two years.” Six weeks later the division sued the police department in the Virgin Islands, a US territory, over “unreasonable delays” in its gun permitting process and requirements like bolted-in gun safes. Shortly after, the territory’s governor proposed laws establishing a 90-day deadline for approving or denying permits. The division then began targeting bans on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, first in Washington, DC, in December, then in Colorado in May.

Some experts and veteran civil rights attorneys said they are troubled by the Justice Department’s new direction. “The history of racial discrimination in the US is this deep scar, while gun rights were never really under assault in a country that has more guns than people,” said John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University. He said the Second Amendment Section is unnecessary because an army of well-funded pro-gun groups “are constantly bringing litigation.” He also pointed to the financial burden for states and municipalities that will have to spend money defending their laws in court. 

For decades, the National Rifle Association and allied groups have successfully waged legislative and legal campaigns to loosen firearm regulations across the country. They argue gun ownership is an innate human right—one that’s constantly under attack. These days most states allow gun owners to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit, and many even prevent municipalities from restricting the practice.

Marks, who spent nine years probing police misconduct in the Civil Rights Division before leaving in 2025, is concerned that the division is abdicating its responsibility to investigate serious law enforcement abuses in favor of instead “making AR-15s more accessible.” One of the key federal statutes that Marks and her colleagues enforced was passed after Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991. It authorized investigations to determine whether law enforcement agencies have engaged in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations, including excessive force or racial profiling.

The DOJ’s new Second Amendment Section is now utilizing that same language from the statute, but repurposing its meaning to “investigate law enforcement agencies that engage in a pattern or practice of infringing on law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights.” That trade-off, experts said, comes with a cost.

“What we’ve seen play out is the department walking away from a number of completed investigations where they found systemic misconduct,” said Marks, referring to the traditional cases the Civil Rights Division has more typically pursued in the past. By focusing on gun rights, she said, “the department is walking away from its responsibilities to marginalized communities.”

Moros, of the Second Amendment Foundation, disagrees, pointing to a historical analogue for the Trump DOJ’s view that gun rights are a key component of civil rights. After the Civil War, he notes, the War Department established The Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary division created essentially to stabilize the South and to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people. Among other things, the bureau helped formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient—and argued for their right to own guns. “I do think it’s a very clear precedent, because they stood up for people who the state and local governments were trying to disarm,” Moros said. “This is definitely something the federal government has taken an interest in in the past.”

Donohue, the law professor, rejects that argument, adding that the gun rights movement has a long history of co-opting the language of civil rights. The NRA, for example, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization” without a hint of irony. 

Former employees of the Civil Rights Division told Mother Jones and The Trace last fall that the revered unit had been co-opted by the Trump administration “to serve an agenda that is in some ways antithetical to civil rights.” In December, more than 100 former DOJ civil rights attorneys and staff published a letter warning of the destruction of the division, citing the retirement or removal of 5,000 career attorneys from the department overall. The new focus on guns is just another example of how the division has been repurposed to fulfill the administration’s ideological objectives, said Marks.

Marks said she hopes that if the next administration disbands the Second Amendment Section, the Civil Rights Division can return to its original focus of fighting for the disempowered. But she said it will take time. “I think it’s a question of, can they rebuild the resources? Can they ensure and reestablish norms like independent enforcement by career experts? So many of those guardrails are gone now. I don’t know that it can happen overnight.”

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A City of York Council email mishap exposed the email addresses of hundreds of Blue Badge holders in the ancient Viking capital, inadvertently revealing their status as disabled residents and triggering a data breach investigation. The council confirmed to The Register that it’s investigating what it described as a "personal data breach" after emails sent to residents last week were distributed without using the blind carbon copy (BCC) function, allowing recipients to see everyone else on the mailing list. According to local reports, the council sent three emails containing Blue Badge-related updates before issuing a fourth message acknowledging the error and asking recipients to delete the previous emails, including from their deleted items folders. Recipients were also warned to remain alert for suspicious messages following the incident. While the exposed information appears to have been limited to email addresses, the breach is especially sensitive because everyone on the distribution list was receiving communications intended for Blue Badge holders. In practice, that meant recipients could identify hundreds of people as members of a group generally associated with disabilities or mobility impairments. One affected resident told local media that the disclosure had left her upset because most people in her life were unaware she held a Blue Badge. "Honestly, I think it's just disgusting – we've been given the details of hundreds of disabled people, which feels unsafe," she said. In a statement to The Register, a spokesperson at City of York Council said it activated its data breach procedures as soon as the error was identified and is conducting a risk assessment in line with guidance from the UK Information Commissioner's Office. "We're working carefully to establish exactly what's happened, alongside conducting a thorough risk assessment ... to understand any potential impact on individuals," a spokesperson said. “Our investigation is ongoing, and we’ll continue to be as open as possible while ensuring the accuracy of the information we provide.” The spokesperson declined to say how many individuals were affected or whether the issue was caused by human error or a technical issue. The council added that it was assessing whether the incident meets the threshold for notification to the ICO within the statutory 72-hour reporting window. That may depend less on the email addresses themselves than on what the mailing list revealed. A spokesperson at the ICO told The Register: "We can confirm that we have received a data breach report on this matter, and following an assessment of the information provided we have closed the case with advice given.” For all the talk of AI-powered cyber threats, it seems some organizations remain committed to the classics. ®

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

For all the talk of a governor’s race between two Republicans, or even two Democrats, it’s looking like voters are in for a typical partisan matchup in November.

In predictably Democratic California, there’s no need for a political science degree or a crystal ball to confidently predict the result of a general election face-off between Xavier Becerra, the current Democratic front-runner, and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican.

Despite the top-two primary system in which the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party, likely Democratic cakewalks abound further down the ballot after Tuesday’s election. 

So why is it so rare in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006 and where Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans almost 2-to-1, to put two Democrats on the ballot in the general election?

For all its political reputation as the left coast, California is simply not overwhelmingly Democratic enough to regularly advance two Democrats to the general election, said Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who has studied the effects of California’s top two. 

With Democratic candidates regularly earning roughly 60% of the statewide vote, the electorate is sufficiently left-leaning to make the outcome of Democrat-versus-Republican general elections fairly predictable. But Democrats don’t make up quite enough of the vote share to push two Democratic candidates through the open primary except in somewhat unusual circumstances, he said.

“After about 60% to 65% Democratic vote share, it starts to get much more likely to get D-on-D races,” he said. In recent statewide races, the percentage of votes cast for the Democratic candidate has hovered around 60%, “right in the electoral dead zone,” said Sinclair. 

The promise of top two

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

California’s unusual “top two” election system puts every candidate on the same primary ballot; the first and second place winners progress to the general election. The idea, approved by voters in 2010, was advertised as an engine of both political moderation and more meaningful choice. Both the Democratic and Republican parties were opposed.

Proponents argued that pulling candidates out of a purely partisan primary system would encourage them to appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum, rather than just the party base. 

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks during an event hosted by the Sacramento Press Club in November 2023. Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters

The new voting scheme would “change the dysfunctional political system and get rid of the paralysis and the partisan bickering” in California politics, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the proposition, said at the time.

In districts where one party dominates the field, allowing multiple candidates from that same party to compete was meant to make general elections competitive.

But if current election results hold — and with so many ballots still left to count, they may not — Californians don’t appear likely to see many competitive statewide races in November. 

In Tuesday’s races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller and treasurer, a series of high-profile, well-financed Democrats are competing against Republicans who range from long- to longer-shot. In congressional contests in West Los Angeles and Napa Valley, where upstart progressives challenged moderate incumbents, the upstarts appear to have been boxed out, leaving the two veteran Democratic representatives, Mike Thompson and Brad Sherman, to face ill-fated Republicans. 

A notable exception is the insurance commissioner’s race, in which two Democrats — Jane Kim and Ben Allen — hold the two top spots. The 2018 lieutenant governor’s race was also a Dem-on-Dem contest. It’s happened a few times in U.S. Senate races. But in most cases, a reversion to the polarized partisan norm is the rule. 

That’s in part thanks to the primary electorate itself.

Fewer voters tend to turn out in June elections, and those who do tend to be committed partisans prepared to vote for one party or another. Though the top-two system is officially nonpartisan, Democratic voters treat it like a partisan primary, herding around the person they consider the strongest representative of their party, with Republicans doing the same, said Eric McGhee, a political researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

There might be a handful of “pure independents in the middle” who will swing between parties, moderating the outcome and potentially crossing party lines to put a centrist over the top. 

But such voters are rare — especially in June.

Case in point: Matt Mahan, the moderate Democratic mayor of San Jose who ran for governor criticizing “extremism on both sides.” With his focus on pocketbook issues and promises to limit his own party’s state spending, Mahan was the “poster child” for a top-two system designed for “all those so-called people who are going to come to the middle,” said Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio.

“He got 4%,” said Maviglio, a top-two critic who voted for Mahan. “Voters are partisan, at the end of the day.”

Does the system create more moderates?

Californians are much more likely to see same-party general election contests in local races, where an individual district is more likely than the state as a whole to be overwhelmingly dominated by one party.

In congressional races in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and across Los Angeles and in legislative races in liberal enclaves across California, two Democrats are on track to head to November. 

USC political science professor Christian Grose said over the last decade, about a third of legislative general election races have been between two members of the same party.

Removing the choice between parties from the general election can have benefits like allowing voters to choose based on true policy differences or perceptions of competence rather than simply siding with a party, he said. But it can also invite voters to make choices based on “things not related to governance,” like gender or race. 

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In a 2020 paper, Grose found that congressional candidates in top-two states have an incentive to tack toward the center, suggesting the top-two system works as intended whether or not the candidates end up competing in a same-party general election. 

And in a newly created purple district that runs northeast of Sacramento, former Republican turned independent Rep. Kevin Kiley appears to have claimed first place in his race. Running without official party backing might be easier under a nonpartisan primary system.

Shutouts and cynical games

There are obvious downsides.

Tom Charron, co-founder of the California Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, says the top-two primary system is vulnerable to “cynical gaming” in which one candidate boosts the candidate they consider easier to beat in the general election.

Newsom did that in 2018 by tacitly steering Republican voters toward Republican John Cox, whom he viewed as a weaker opponent than fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa. 

Likewise, in the 2024 primary, a super PAC backing Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff put millions of dollars behind Republican candidate Steve Garvey, undercutting Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter’s chances.

Another possible problem popped up early in the life of the reform. In 2012, the first cycle after voters approved the top two, four Democrats crowded into a race to represent San Bernardino in Congress. Two Republicans did the same. The Democrats ended up slicing up the left-of-center vote so thinly that the Republicans won the top two spots, despite Democrats holding a modest voter registration edge. 

A more egregious example took place 10 years later when too many Republican candidates vying to represent a deeply conservative state Senate district east of Fresno divided the GOP vote, leaving Democrats in the top two.

From left, Katie Porter speaks as Chad Bianco, Antonio Villaraigosa, Xavier Becerra and Matt Mahan listen during a California gubernatorial debate hosted by CBS Bay Area and the San Francisco Examiner in San Francisco on May 14. Credit: Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press, pool

That perverse outcome was top of mind for many Democratic voters earlier this year when a glut of Democrats running for governor threatened to leave the top two spots to Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Bianco.

With Becerra and fellow Democrat Tom Steyer well ahead of Bianco in the vote count, the shutout didn’t happen, showing how unlikely it was, said Claremont McKenna’s Sinclair. 

“In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make [a shutout] happen,” Sinclair said. He pointed to a “low-quality field of candidates” likely to divide the vote evenly, the abrupt exit of front-runner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and the failure of the party or any of its California luminaries to endorse anyone.

If nothing else, the fear among highly engaged Democratic voters may have led a decisive number to vote strategically to avoid a shutout, Sinclair said.

Changes on the way?

Even though it was eventually averted, the prospect of a Republican governor in California in 2026 has led some to reconsider the top two.  

Maviglio has filed a proposed ballot measure to repeal the top-two system and return to partisan primaries. 

“The fact that there are any [same-party general elections] is simply undemocratic,” Maviglio said. “People have the choice between only one party, like they’re in the Soviet Union?”

In theory, Democrat-on-Democrat races are supposed to give voters a choice between distinct ideological options within the same party — a business-backed moderate, say, and a Bernie-boosting progressive. 

In practice, voters are quite bad at making such distinctions, said McGhee at PPIC.

“The evidence we have of how voters view these contests is that they don’t have a clue who the moderate or the liberal is,” he said. “It’s always a good bet that voters are way way way less tapped into the nuances of what’s going on than you are if you’re interested in politics.”

Others are pushing for a third option — ranked-choice voting. 

Charron, with the Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, said his group is advocating for California to move toward an Alaska-style voting system in which the top four or five primary finishers advance to a ranked-choice general election.

Ranked choice allows voters to rank their candidates by preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t receive enough votes to win, their vote goes to their second preference, then third, and so on. Several California cities already use it for mayoral contests, including Oakland and San Francisco.

Charron said the system encourages a more diverse field of candidates and gives voters more choice, since few would worry about being a “spoiler” for a fellow party member. 

In May, the nonpartisan nonprofit Independent Voter Project launched a group aimed at bringing ranked choice to California via a constitutional amendment that could go before voters in 2028.

“It’s very exciting for us right now that these conversations are coming up because of some of the risks that we’ve seen in this primary season, in particular,” said Charron.

Kate Wolffe contributed reporting for this story.

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Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) has been told to urgently overhaul an IT estate so dysfunctional that officers say they are fighting serious organized crime despite the technology rather than because of it. A new report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) has delivered a bruising verdict on the National Crime Agency's tech, concluding that the systems underpinning Britain's fight against organized crime are no longer up to the job. The criticism lands despite inspectors otherwise finding much to like. The NCA was graded "Good" in several operational areas, including tackling serious and organized crime and working with partners. But throughout the report, inspectors repeatedly return to technology as a fundamental weakness running through the entire organization. "The NCA's IT infrastructure isn't fit for purpose," the report states. Inspectors backed that assessment with a long list of examples, from officers manually re-entering data and sharing information by hand to teams relying on spreadsheets and other workarounds due to a lack of confidence in official systems. According to the report, around 70 percent of critical IT incidents each month are linked to that technical debt, the result of years spent prioritizing short-term fixes over long-term modernization. Officers told inspectors they did not trust the agency's systems, while others described technology as a major drag on productivity. One interviewee summed up the mood: "IT is a blocker; we achieve in spite of it." Another was even less flattering. "When I started in policing 15 to 20 years ago, I had better technology than I do in the NCA." The report paints a picture familiar to anyone who has worked in a large public sector IT environment. Officers told inspectors they routinely enter the same information multiple times, rely on manual processes, and manually transfer data to external partners. Some said the agency lacks even a basic personnel directory, making it difficult to find the right colleague when they need help. While the NCA operates a corporate system called ATLAS CM, inspectors heard that officers are using as many as 50 different case management methods across the agency, including spreadsheets and other manual workarounds, often due to a lack of confidence in the official platform. The agency's security architecture has also produced its own headaches. Because data sits across multiple government security classifications, many officers reportedly require at least two laptops to do their jobs. Inspectors spoke to some staff who were using four separate machines and said they witnessed the resulting inefficiencies firsthand. In a separate HMICFRS inspection published last year, inspectors found the agency was still relying on around 260 legacy IT systems more than a decade after beginning a project to modernize IT, with technical debt consuming roughly 80 percent of entire IT budget. These ongoing IT problems appear to be taking a toll on morale as well. In the NCA's 2024 staff survey, only 33 percent of respondents said they had the tools needed to do their job effectively. Inspectors concluded the problems are not solely the NCA's responsibility. They also pointed the finger at the Home Office, arguing that short-term funding cycles and a lack of coordinated investment have slowed modernization efforts. HMICFRS has given the NCA and Home Office until September 30 to explain how they intend to dig the agency out of its technology hole, complete with timelines, funding requirements, and a plan to retire aging systems. Criminals may have embraced ransomware, encrypted communications, and industrial-scale cybercrime. But according to inspectors, the NCA is still trying to get some of its own systems to talk to each other. ®

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A UC Santa Cruz student recently sent a request for available housing to Nextdoor after she and her seven roommates were out on the streets because the owner sold the property without warning them. 

It’s the university’s job to provide housing for its students and it hasn’t lived up to this job for years. I advised the students to voice their situation to the chancellor. If not, I told them I would. The UCSC admissions office keeps signing up too many applicants for whom there is not enough housing. 

When will they stop? If the students can find other students in the same situation, I suggest asking them to protest in front of the chancellor’s office and the housing office.

UCSC has a lot of property (which it refuses to develop) on which temporary housing could be erected in time for fall term 2026.  

Kathy Cheer

Santa Cruz

The post Letter to the editor: UCSC should build more housing for its students appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

California regulators passed a rule in January 2024 that they said would protect communities from one of the state’s most popular, and dangerous, pesticides.

For decades, they knew that 1,3-dichloropropane, or 1,3-D, causes tumors in multiple organs in laboratory animals, which led the state to flag it as a carcinogen in 1989. Yet regulators allowed growers to fumigate fields with large volumes of 1,3-D to kill anything living in the soil before planting strawberries, almonds, grapes and other billion-dollar crops.

But now, a year after regulators implemented a rule they said would reduce cancer risk by decreasing the amount of 1,3-D in the air, applications of the highly volatile compound have spiked, state records show. 

PESTICIDES IN THE PAJARO VALLEY: Read Lookout’s news and Community Voices opinion coverage here

Growers applied a million more pounds of 1,3-D last year than they did in either 2023, before regulators enacted the “residential bystander” rule, or in 2024, after they implemented it. 

Increases were highest in Kern and San Joaquin counties, where it was used mostly on almond and grape plantings. Notably, the “adjusted total pounds”—which accounts for different application methods, weather conditions and other factors that affect how much of the volatile pesticide escapes into the air—nearly doubled in both counties and increased by almost 20% statewide.

“Their new regulations are failures,” said Mark Weller, the campaign director for the statewide public-interest group coalition Californians for Pesticide Reform. “They put in new regulations and 1,3-D use went up.”

The Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) enacted new rules in 2024 to restrict the use of 1,3-D to protect residential bystanders by implementing setback distances, requiring deeper injection in soil with higher moisture content, along with new fumigation methods and tarp requirements to reduce fumigant emissions into the atmosphere, said agency spokesperson Amy MacPherson. “DPR specifically developed methods that could allow for comparable levels of use while reducing overall emissions.”

Anne Katten, pesticide and work health and safety project director for the nonprofit California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, analyzed emissions detected at an air monitor in Delhi, California, one of six monitors operated by DPR. Katten found a 30% increase in average levels of 1,3-D in the air during the first three quarters of 2025 (the most recent publicly available data) compared to the same period in 2024.

Delhi is a largely Latino town in Merced County, where the $10 billion agriculture industry employs one in five residents and farmers primarily use 1,3-D to grow almonds and sweet potatoes. Merced is also where regulators detected alarmingly high levels of 1,3-D at a junior high school in 1990 and suspended its use for five years.

Public health policy assumes that there is no safe level of exposure to a carcinogen, to account for disparities in exposure and variable susceptibility across different populations. Fumigants like 1,3-D can also produce severe short-term symptoms, including respiratory distress, chest pains, eye irritation and dizziness.

A sign at a Watsonville strawberry field warns of pesticide use. Credit: Liza Gross / Inside Climate News

In 2023, researchers in China reported what they believed to be the first death from inhaling 1.3-D, which commonly causes nausea, dizziness and headaches in exposed California farmworkers. A 50-year-old Chinese greenhouse worker died of renal failure and brain swelling more than a week after a brief encounter with 1,3-D in a poorly ventilated workspace.

1,3-D is now banned in 40 countries, according to Pesticide Action Network International.

The whole point of the regulations was not necessarily to reduce 1,3-D use but to reduce emissions, said Caroline Cox, a retired pesticide scientist and former research director at the nonprofit Center for Environmental Health. “It just doesn’t seem like the regulations are really doing what they were designed to do.”

Farmworker communities and their allies have tried lawsuits, media campaigns and die-in protests to compel pesticide regulators to protect them from 1,3-D. In February, they returned to court to seek relief from DPR’s “continued failure to meet its legal obligations to protect farmworkers and other members of the public from … a toxic, cancer-causing fumigant.”

DPR now has two separate safety levels for the same chemical, the 2024 residential bystander rule and another rule for occupational bystanders, which went into effect at the beginning of 2026. Having two different 1,3-D regulatory targets for residents and workers does not account for the fact that farmworker communities, where people live and work next to treated fields, typically face much higher exposure risks from childhood to old age. 

“Both regulations miss the mark and allow for the continued use of 1,3-D in a way that neither satisfies DPR’s mandatory legal obligations nor sufficiently protects public health,” farmworker and community advocates argued in their legal brief.

Before enacting the new rules, DPR capped the amount of 1,3-D growers could apply within a roughly 36-square-mile area called a township. DPR did not include a township cap in the 2024 regulations because agency officials expected the setbacks and other additional requirements to mitigate both acute and cancer risks. Still, the cap remained in place, due to a court order, until January, when the occupational bystander rule went into effect.

One township in Kern County already exceeded the previously required annual township cap, and several in Kern and Merced counties are approaching it, in just the first quarter of this year, state records show. As a 2024 Inside Climate News analysis found, the disproportionate burden of pesticide exposure falls on immigrants with limited English proficiency—which describes the majority of California’s farmworker population.

DPR’s MacPherson attributed increased applications of 1,3-D to “unusually high replanting of vineyards and orchards in Kern County, which only occurs about once every 10 to 20 years.”

DPR is monitoring areas with relatively high use in the first quarter, she said, but needs to see a full year of data before drawing “meaningful conclusions.”

DPR released a plan to accelerate sustainable pest management in 2024 with a top goal of eliminating the adverse human health and environmental impacts associated with pesticide use. It does not include a list of priority pesticides.

Seeing elevated emissions of 1,3-D after regulators removed the cap troubles Katten at the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. “They were saying everything was going to be OK because things were on a downward trend, and they clearly aren’t,” Katten said. “Their sustainable pest management efforts are not bearing fruit yet.”

At a recent meeting with DPR, Weller told staff members the agency used to be committed to reducing fumigant use in California. “Are you still interested in that?” he asked.

No one answered yes, he said.

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The post California pesticide regulators say new rules protect communities as applications of a dangerous fumigant rise appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

In a letter to the editor, a Santa Cruz resident expresses doubt over the future of local passenger rail under the current leadership of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission.