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The Trump Administration Aims to Penalize Disabled Adults Who Live With Their Families

By
Eli Hager
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The Trump Administration Aims to Penalize Disabled Adults Who Live With Their Families

Even a glance at Shy’tyra Burton’s life reveals her need for the sort of federal government assistance that helps disabled Americans stay in their homes. Born two months prematurely into a poor family in Philadelphia, unable to breathe or swallow without tubes and largely confined to medical facilities until age 4, Burton was diagnosed with a litany of developmental and intellectual disabilities that left her with an IQ below 70.

She persevered and graduated from a high school special education program, then attempted community college. But she struggled to grasp basic tasks and information. She couldn’t get hired, including at McDonald’s. After multiple medical and psychological evaluations and a hearing before a judge, the federal government approved her for the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides a basic income to those with severe disabilities and to indigent older people.

For Burton, now 22, the $994 monthly benefit is lifesaving but not enough to completely support herself on her own. So, like many SSI recipients, she has continued to live with her father, who makes around $2,000 a month as a Philadelphia sanitation worker.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is poised to penalize people like Burton simply for living in the same home as their families, according to four federal officials, internal emails and a federal regulatory listing. The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third — about $330 a month in Burton’s case — or ending their support altogether.

The effort to cut SSI for families who also rely on food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was initiated by top White House and Department of Government Efficiency officials last year, multiple Social Security officials said. It marks a second attempt by the Trump administration to quietly but dramatically downsize disability benefit programs overseen by the Social Security Administration, despite those programs’ strict eligibility standards and minimal instances of fraud. White House Budget Director Russell Vought and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano abandoned a different proposed regulation involving disability payments last year after ProPublica and other news outlets reported on the harm that the plan would cause to hundreds of thousands of largely blue-collar workers in red states. (The disability programs are administered by the Social Security Administration but separate from the retirement program for which the agency is named. The Trump administration has promised not to cut Social Security retirement payments.)

The likely SSI cut will affect not just younger adults with disabilities such as Down syndrome and severe autism who are still living at home with their low-income parents, but also older people with health or financial problems who have had to move in with their adult children on tight budgets. All told, as many as 400,000 poor and disabled people and indigent older people across the United States could have their support cut or eliminated, according to a ProPublica analysis of actuarial figures from the Social Security Administration.

Protecting the SSI program from such a fate is “about how the faithful will be judged, and our care for the most vulnerable,” said Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals and himself the father of a 35-year-old son with Down syndrome who lives at home and receives SSI. Carey said it’s wrong to reduce a disabled person’s SSI benefits for choosing or needing to live with loved ones. “Knowing that they are contributing and not a burden to the family can be a source of great pride,” he said. (Some 40 Down syndrome organizations recently sent a letter to Bisignano expressing their opposition to the planned change.)

The reason this will especially affect SNAP families is complicated. Essentially, under a long-standing federal policy that was updated during the Biden administration, if a household has already demonstrated its poverty via SNAP or other public assistance programs’ own extensive income-reporting requirements, then the family is officially deemed unable to financially support a disabled loved one living at home. (The typical SNAP household that is also supporting a person who receives SSI has an annual total income of just $17,000, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

The Trump rule will undo this approach. It won’t matter if the SNAP program has already determined a family is poor enough to receive aid; anyone living at home beyond age 18 without paying full rent will be treated as if they have a benefactor. The value of their bedroom as well as any income and assets their family may have will be calculated and recalculated as often as every month and deducted from their SSI check.

The SSI rule change is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, a process that involves editing the draft regulation and considering where it falls on the list of the president’s priorities. Once it’s returned to the Social Security Administration for initial publication, there will be an opportunity for public comment; it could take until next year to be finalized, depending on the amount of opposition it faces.

Presented with a detailed list of this article’s findings, Rachel Cauley, the OMB’s communications director, asserted that “this story is false because it speculates about policies that have not yet been decided.” Asked to specify what was false, Cauley did not identify anything, instead reiterating that the story is “trash.” A Social Security Administration spokesperson said “Commissioner Bisignano remains committed to protecting and strengthening Social Security and serving America’s most vulnerable populations.”

A mother, wearing glasses and a leopard-print shirt, and son, wearing a bright yellow shirt, smile and pose with their heads leaning together. The mother’s eyes are closed and the son is smiling.
Opal Foster’s son Jeremiah has Down syndrome and receives SSI. He turned 18 last year but is still living at home as he tries to start a career as a chef. Caroline Gutman for ProPublica

ProPublica interviewed families who rely on the SSI program in Philadelphia and across the country. We talked to a young couple struggling to support not just their kids but also a parent with Alzheimer’s. We heard from a mother, Opal Foster, whose 18-year-old son has Down syndrome and lives at home as he strives to become a chef. And we spoke with a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia and panic disorder who lives with her brother’s family because she can’t hold down a job and fears being left alone in a nursing home.

All of these people could have their SSI benefits cut because they live with family, even though disability advocates, evangelicals and budget experts agree that it’s more humane and less expensive for adults with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional facilities. The potential cut to Burton’s SSI benefit, for example, would save taxpayers about $11 a day. But if her dad as a result of the reduced support can’t afford to provide for her anymore, then it could cost taxpayers many hundreds of dollars a day or more to house her at a residential facility, according to the state of Pennsylvania’s fee schedules.

Supplemental Security Income, which serves 7.5 million Americans who are unable to make a living because of severe disabilities or destitution in old age, has never been easy to qualify for. Fewer than a third of applicants are approved, and the process often takes years. Recipients of these benefits in turn regularly have their finances reevaluated, and are also intermittently examined by medical and vocational experts, to determine whether their payments will continue.

This paperwork-and-review-heavy process generates hefty overhead. The SSI program distributes just 5% of all Social Security Administration benefits yet accounts for nearly 35% of the agency’s administrative budget. Month after month, staffers have to pore over microscopic changes to SSI beneficiaries’ living arrangements and family members’ incomes and assets.

Current and former Social Security officials have told ProPublica over the past year that the SSI program’s complexities and absurdities remain perhaps the agency’s biggest bureaucratic headache. As ProPublica reported last summer, DOGE did nothing to address this, mostly ignoring SSI despite its obvious inefficiencies. In fact, DOGE and the White House pushed out roughly 7,000 Social Security employees, many of whom had been working on SSI reforms and backlogs.

The Biden administration had tried to do something about SSI’s excessive red tape. Under existing law, disabled people whose families have already established themselves to be poor by qualifying for certain other public assistance programs, such as veterans’ benefits or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, don’t have to do all of the same check-ins, over and over again, to receive SSI. In 2024, Biden added SNAP — which is more widely used now than when these SSI rules were created — to the list of such programs.

This was ultimately an act of government efficiency, said Marianna LaCanfora, who was for years the deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy at the Social Security Administration, including during Trump’s first term. Safety net programs like SSI don’t have to be so complicated and thus expensive, LaCanfora and others at the agency said. But they often are that way because of all the effort spent triple-checking that the poor are actually poor.

Nevertheless, conservative think tanks opposed the Biden SNAP policy, with some claiming that paying these low-income SSI beneficiaries less could save the federal government $20 billion over the next decade. And the White House included the rule change as one of its agenda items for the SSA heading into 2025. It was part of a broader push by the administration and DOGE to undo anything that the Biden administration had touched.

If enacted, the change will require intellectually disabled young people like Burton as well as very elderly people to file extensive monthly reports if they want to continue their benefits even at the reduced level. They’ll have to provide details about the property where they live: whether it’s leased or owned, as well as the names of anyone in the home, and whether any of these people has any new income or assets. They’ll also have to include documentation of all household bills and expenses, showing how much they do or don’t contribute personally, as well as financial documents such as bank statements and any pay stubs.

Burton will likely have to make an appointment and report in person at a Social Security field office any time her father’s hours or wages change even slightly; any time she and he switch up how they split utility bills; and any time an adult sibling spends even a few nights at the house and helps her with living expenses. If she doesn’t, she could later receive bills accusing her of having been overpaid by Social Security.

For his part, Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, wants to be seen as a leader who’s making the agency more businesslike and efficient, according to interviews with agency staff and recordings of him speaking in private executive meetings. But the SSI rule change, by all accounts, will increase the administrative burden not just on families like Burton’s but also on the staff who’ll have to constantly assess the living arrangements and family incomes of her and millions of other people.

Given the tension between what the rule will do and the sense of efficiency that Bisignano says he wants to instill at Social Security, some agency insiders told ProPublica that he could still push the White House to drop the plan.

Shy’tyra Burton’s monthly SSI support check is what allows her to contribute to her household, by paying her own phone and internet bills and buying many of her own meals, according to her father, Rondell. “I’m still barely managing, though,” he said. He has largely been a single parent to Shy’tyra and her siblings, who need some support too, although they’re more self-sufficient. Groceries and gas have only gotten more expensive.

Burton is calmer and better at managing her disabilities when she can sense that her family’s economic circumstances are relatively stable, her father said. When he blew out his shoulder last year trying to hurl a heavy recycling bin onto a garbage truck, and had to have surgery and take time off work, the loss of income soon manifested in her behavior, he said. “It’s a trickle-down effect,” he explained. “My daughter absorbs money stress in her body.”

One recent 75-degree afternoon, sitting on the front stoop of the rowhouse where she lives with her dad, Burton was rubbing her hands together vigorously, as if it were cold out. When asked why, she claimed it reminded her of being a baby in the neonatal intensive care unit and touching her parents’ hands through the small opening in her incubator.

Burton still has some childlike ways. She grips her stuffed animals when she’s nervous, which is often. She talks to imaginary friends out loud, the same ones she talked to when she was a girl. What she likes about living at home is in part that she can be herself, and her family will still be there to care for her. She doesn’t like the lack of freedom and that she can’t truly be “out there” like her adult siblings.

Burton wanted to go into the child development field, to help kids growing up with disabilities like hers, but some of the concepts were a bit too difficult. Now, she’s excited by cosmetology and intends to support herself one day as a hair stylist. She spends much of her time practicing on mannequin heads in her childhood room.

Thailand’s forever war greets Anutin with a vengeance

By
IwPost
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Thailand’s forever war greets Anutin with a vengeance

BANGKOK – As the United States struggles to find an early exit from the prospect of yet another forever war in the Middle East, recent weeks have seen its treaty ally, Thailand, again wrestling with its own forever war, an apparently intractable conflict along its southern border with no end in sight.

For over 20 years, the slow-burn secessionist revolt in the majority Malay-Muslim provinces of Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and parts of Songkhla has dragged on, out of sight and mostly out of mind, for national policymakers in Bangkok, 1,000 kilometers to the north.

But with a new government led by Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul in power since the beginning of April and the insurgents of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional Melayu Patani, better known simply as BRN, on an escalating rampage since the beginning of the year, Thailand’s southern forever war is back on the front burner.

Largely in disregard for an on-again/off-again peace process facilitated since 2013 by neighboring Malaysia, BRN’s military wing – an adaptive and resilient generational enterprise embedded in Muslim communities region-wide – has asserted itself alarmingly in recent weeks.

Actively supported by only a small minority of the Malay population but enjoying the sympathies of many, its staple tactics – bombings, drive-by shootings, targeted killings and arson sprees – have never escalated to a level that could wrest from Bangkok a region where the historical Muslim sultanate of Patani once ruled.

But since early 2026, BRN’s mostly part-time, village-based cells have displayed an evolving capacity not only for hard-hitting ambushes but, far more ominously, for region-wide coordinated operations that reflect the political appeal and organizational staying power of a cause that appears to have no difficulty attracting new recruits.

In the early hours of January 11, that coordination was demonstrated with unprecedented effect with a wave of attacks using large improvised explosive devices (IEDs) targeting petrol stations and adjacent 7-Eleven convenience stores across ten districts of all three primarily affected provinces.

In terms of scope and impact, the precisely coordinated blasts – carried out by attack teams of around 10 rebels between 00.50 and 01.30 – marked one of the most logistically and organizationally complex operations in the 22 years of an insurgency that is generally defined as having begun in January 2004.

Over its various stages – planning, reconnaissance and target selection, logistical preparation, attack and evasion – the attacks involved mobilizing several hundred operatives under tight security, with no more than a handful of senior commanders aware of the scope of the entire plan.

Nor were the targets chosen at random. In a made-for-TV blitz providing graphic footage of towering flames reaching into the night sky, the petrol stations were all owned by the giant, state-owned PTT corporation, a brand instantly recognizable nationwide.

In BRN’s ideological narrative of a region occupied by “Siamese” colonialism, both PTT and the 7-Eleven franchise owned by the huge Charoen Pokphand Group stand at the vanguard of predatory Sino-Thai capitalist penetration.

Not by chance, the entire coup de main was carefully executed to avoid civilian casualties: as they invaded the roadside facilities, BRN attack teams fired into the air and ordered staff and customers to evacuate the convenience stores before large IEDs brought in on motorcycles were detonated by digital timers and remote-control devices. Only five civilians and one policeman suffered minor injuries.

Even as BRN has been at pains to avoid civilian collateral damage, the 80,000 or more Thai security forces spread across the region have suffered a constant, but never critical, hemorrhaging of casualties.

 A string of recent attacks using the rebels’ hallmark IEDs packed into cooking gas tanks and buried under roads have struck police and army vehicles across the region.

On February 8, in Bannang Satar district of Yala, one massive blast flipped an eight-ton armored personnel carrier off the road, leaving seven soldiers inside bruised but alive.

In late March in Narathiwat’s Ra-ngae district, five police officers in an armored pickup truck were not so lucky. A similar device, typically weighing over 25 kilograms, struck the vehicle from the side, blowing it off the road and wounding all on board. Had the IED been buried and struck the truck’s underside, most, if not all, the officers would have died.

And in mid-April, BRN’s bombers in Bannang Satar were back with another attack on an army pickup with a buried device that detonated a second or two prematurely, wounding all seven soldiers on board but killing none.

In recent years, arson – a longstanding insurgent tactic – has typically targeted roadside CCTV cameras in overnight attack waves across one or two districts at a time.

But in recent months, the target set has widened with attack teams repeatedly torching heavy-duty wheeled vehicles at road construction projects, hitting contracting companies hard, and, by extension, the regional economy more generally.

Soft-power messaging

Compounding the rising mayhem wrought by IEDs, arson and targeted killings of off-duty security personnel, the first quarter of 2026 has also seen the insurgents’ most widespread propaganda campaigns to date –  operations that mobilize hundreds of BRN support elements in low-risk activity that carries pointed messages to a far wider audience.

 On the night of 5-6 February, in the run-up to Thailand’s national elections on February 8, insurgent messaging involved the hanging of cloth banners from roadside trees and power poles across all four provinces carrying messages in Thai, Malay and English: “ There can be no democracy under colonial occupation” and “National liberation is the precondition for peace.”

In March, the propaganda teams were back with a blunter message spray-painted in Thai script across roads in 18 of the 37 insurgency-impacted districts across the region: ‘Patani mai chai Siam’ – Patani is not Siam.

An apparently deteriorating situation has hardly been helped by some spectacular own goals at the seniormost level of the harassed and frustrated Thai security forces.

March 20 saw an attempted assassination of Kamolsak Leewamoh, a Muslim member of parliament and noted critic of the military’s alleged human rights abuses. A late evening attack using an M-16 assault rifle on the Narathiwat MP’s SUV as he returned home failed to harm him but seriously wounded his driver and police bodyguard.

Scandal erupted when ongoing police investigations established that all those implicated in the attacks – five of whom have now been arrested – were ex-military personnel, with the alleged shooter a former paramilitary Ranger.

No less damningly, the vehicle used by the attackers had been “on loan” from the motor-pool of the Forward Command of the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) – the point agency in the struggle to contain the rebellion headed by Lieutenant-General Norathip Phoey-nork, commander of the southern Fourth Army Region.

 There has been no suggestion that the bungled assassination bid by ex-military personnel was sanctioned from the top of ISOC’s southern command.

But Norathip successfully doused the fire of scandal with gasoline when, at an April 13 press conference to publicize arrests in the case, he was caught in an unguarded off-microphone comment noting that had he been behind the killing, the MP would not have survived.

Appointed to his current position from the Cambodian border last September and evidently unschooled in southern sensitivities, Norathip then blundered directly into the minefield of Islamic education in the region, with the incendiary assertion that Koranic seminaries and night schools, known as “ponoh” and “tadika”, which occupy pride of place in Patani Muslim communities, were involved in fanning the separatist revolt.

The resultant furor on, and well beyond, social media demanding his recall from the region required the intervention of a clearly alarmed Prime Minister Anutin, who, on April 17, publicly apologized for the commander’s gaffe as he left Bangkok on an emergencyvisit to the region.

Well before that, notably in the wake of the petrol station blitz, Anutin had been at pains to stress the need for better intelligence in a conflict in which, despite massive investments in local paid informants, BRN operations have invariably caught the security and intelligence services entirely off-guard.

Over 22 years of rebellion, a sprawling and hugely costly counter-insurgency campaign has rested on emergency legislation to make major advances in mapping the insurgency’s human terrain using DNA samples, ballistic forensics, CCTV footage, phone intercepts and thousands of arrests and interrogations.

But even as the revolt draws new recruits with no official records into its orbit, generating operational intelligence through human sources inside an intensely secretive and highly compartmentalized political and military organization has, for both operational and cultural reasons, proved essentially mission impossible.

Notwithstanding security force raids, arrests and occasional clashes that add new martyrs to the rebel cause, the battlefield initiative remains where it has always been – with the insurgents.

Strategic challenges

At the strategic level beyond the sputtering ground war, the Thai state faces two other daunting challenges. The first centers on an on-off peace process in danger of floundering for lack of momentum.  

On one hand, continuity and commitment around the process have been perennially bedeviled by national-level political disruptions in Bangkok. Last week, the Anutin government made yet another top-level change by appointing Thanat Suwannanon, director of the National Intelligence Agency, to head the southern negotiations team, replacing General (retired) Somsak Rungsita, a former National Security Council chief who had been in the job for only six months.

But at a deeper level, negotiations are overshadowed by profound skepticism in military and monarchist circles about the desirability of substantive administrative concessions in the border region that might undercut an essentially quixotic separatist cause yet threaten Thailand’s traditional standing as a unitary state.

 Within BRN, meanwhile, major questions persist over policy coherence among an opaque cabal of ‘Old Guard’ leaders, compounded by simmering tensions between the party’s negotiators and an increasingly assertive military wing, no less skeptical of political sellouts than its hardline Thai military counterparts.

Thailand’s second problem is Malaysia. Since 2013, the Malaysian government in Kuala Lumpur has served as a “facilitator” to the peace process.

That role is undertaken by an office headed by a retired senior official with a security and intelligence background – currently Mohamad Rabin Basir, a former director of Malaysia’s National Security Council – who interfaces with the two negotiating teams.

Malaysian Special Branch police, meanwhile, maintains close tabs on both senior BRN political leaders known to be based in the country and militant elements slipping back and forth across a notoriously porous border who are unlikely to be much inconvenienced by Thai plans to erect fencing along certain short stretches of a nearly 650-kilometer land frontier.

In this context, Malaysia is well placed to assert its own interests over a process aimed at resolving a conflict in which it is anything but an impartial observer.  Ironically, those largely ill-defined interests have fomented deep suspicions within both warring parties.

South of the border, BRN political leaders and their military operatives chafe under often hard-knuckle monitoring, manipulation and direction by Malaysian authorities while understanding all too well that they can never afford to alienate a government on which aging senior leaders depend for sanctuary and a quiet life.

Meanwhile, there are strong indications that Thai military intelligence officials have concluded that hard-hitting BRN operations in border districts, evidently planned and prepared south of the border, have benefited at very least from a nudge and wink from Malaysia’s Special Branch.

BRN’s evident use of Malaysian territory for training courses is a bone of contention that Asia Times understands has been pointedly raised with the Malaysians this year by the Thai military.

Indeed, from the very different perspectives of both belligerents north of the border, a common question may be taking shape: ultimately, is Malaysia interested in midwifing a sustainable settlement to a festering conflict at risk of escalation, or alternatively, in maintaining ongoing control over a powerful lever in the shape of BRN while watching Thailand twist in the wind of its seemingly intractable forever war?

China kills Meta’s acquisition of Manus as US-China AI rivalry deepens

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IwPost
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China kills Meta’s acquisition of Manus as US-China AI rivalry deepens

China has blocked US tech giant Meta’s acquisition of the AI company Manus that was founded by Chinese tech entrepreneurs. That development indicates how difficult it has become for US and Chinese tech companies to strike and sustain such deals as government authorities on both sides take an increasingly hard line amid the deepening US-China AI rivalry.

The Chinese government formally asked Meta to unwind the acquisition on April 27 after deciding to ban foreign investment in Manus based on national security concerns. It had already spent months officially scrutinizing Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus that took place in December 2025—Chinese regulators announced they were reviewing the deal in January 2026 and instructed the two Manus cofounders to not leave China while the investigation was ongoing, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Manus burst onto the scene in March 2025 with its “general AI agent,” designed to help users with tasks such as searching real estate sites for a new home or booking airline tickets and hotels for an international trip. The Manus AI agent is an “agentic wrapper” or “agentic harness” that enables an underlying AI model—in this case, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet—to take actions to carry out user requests. But Manus actually incorporates multiple AI agents to perform and verify tasks, including a planner agent that assigns tasks and an executor agent that can browse and interact with websites, create spreadsheets, use various software tools, and even code new applications.

That quickly drew the attention of Silicon Valley and Meta in particular, given CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s big business push in 2025 to develop “personal [AI] superintelligence for everyone.” When Meta acquired Manus, the US tech company began incorporating the Manus AI agent into its services, such as Meta’s Ads Manager, which is the main platform for advertisers to create and track ad campaigns on Meta’s social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

The ties that bind

The Manus founders, Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao, have already relocated most of their team from China to Meta’s Singapore office and have taken pains to cut any lingering Chinese ties in the lead-up to the Meta acquisition late last year—even turning down Chinese authorities’ requests for meetings or investment, according to The Wire China. They paved the way for the move to Singapore by registering the firm Butterfly Effect Pte and setting up Butterfly Effect Holding as a parent company based in the Cayman Islands.

Now, the Chinese government’s decision to quash the deal creates significant uncertainty for both Manus and Meta’s future AI ambitions. For example, Manus may not be able to continue deploying its AI agent service using Anthropic’s Claude models, given that Anthropic has restricted AI sales to entities in China. “If Manus had remained a Chinese company, its core product would have disappeared,” said Chris McGuire, a former national security official with the Biden administration who designed US restrictions on tech exports and investments relating to China, in an interview with The Wire China.

The unwinding of the deal would also represent a setback to Meta’s pivot to AI, which comes after the US tech company spent $80 billion over half a decade in an attempt to make the metaverse catch on with consumers. Beyond incorporating the Manus AI agent into its own services, Meta has “deeply integrated” the Manus team with Meta’s own teams in the Singapore office, according to The New York Times.

What is clearer is that Chinese tech founders face dim prospects when trying to pivot from being a homegrown Chinese company to the US tech scene. The apparent failure in this case of the “Singapore-washing” model, frequently used by Chinese tech founders attempting to reestablish their company outside of China, suggests that founders will need to think about setting up shop outside China from “day one,” said Wayne Shiong, managing partner of the Silicon Valley seed investment firm Argo Venture Partners, in a CNBC interview.

King Charles in US for state visit amid differences over Iran war

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IwPost
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King Charles in US for state visit amid differences over Iran war


Britain’s King Charles and Queen Camilla arrived in the United States on Monday ​for a four-day trip, welcomed by self-proclaimed royal fan Donald Trump even as the U.S. president has differed with the British government over ‌the Iran war.

The state visit, by far the most high-profile and consequential of Charles’ reign, marks the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence from British rule, and is the first to the country by a British monarch in two decades.

WATCH: POTUS and FLOTUS welcome King Charles and Queen Camilla at the White House

After landing at Joint Base Andrews, the site of a brief arrival ceremony, Charles and Camilla proceeded to the White House, ​where they were greeted by Trump and first lady Melania Trump, who exchanged kisses on the cheek with the king and queen while the ​president shook their hands. The four stood briefly for photographers before retreating inside for a private tea.

The king and queen ⁠later appeared at a garden party at the British ambassador’s recently renovated residence, where a choir sang the British and American national anthems.

Charles and Camilla mingled ​with a crowd that included media leaders, Washington socialites and officials such as U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and ambassadors from other countries.

The week’s ​schedule also includes a Tuesday address to Congress, a lavish state dinner at the White House and a Wednesday stop in New York City. The Washington events take place with much of the capital city still on edge following the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooting on Saturday.

The king’s speech to Congress will last about 20 minutes, a palace source said. While ​written on the advice of the British government, much of the language and tone come from Charles himself, the source added.

The king will note that while ​the UK and U.S. have not always agreed on all matters over the past 250 years, “time and again, our two countries have always found ways to come together.” He will say that ‌by defending ⁠their shared democratic values the two countries can promote security and prosperity for the world.

Source:  Reuters

Libya, Greece discuss maritime border demarcation, irregular migration

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IwPost
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Libya, Greece discuss maritime border demarcation, irregular migration

The Libyan foreign minister in the Tripoli-based government, Taher Al-Baour, held talks Monday with his Greek counterpart, Giorgos Gerapetritis, to disuss maritime border demarcation and bilateral relations, Anadolu reports.

Discussions in the Libyan capital dwelt on avenues to expand cooperation in strategic sectors, including energy, infrastructure, and maritime transport, Libya’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The two diplomats also discussed irregular migration, stressing the need for a comprehensive approach based on burden-sharing, enhanced security, technical cooperation, and increased training programs, the statement said.

READ: More than 7,600 migrants died or went missing in 2025, UN agency says

The talks between the two sides also took up the work of the joint Libyan-Greek technical committee on maritime border demarcation, with the two sides reaffirming their commitment to continuing constructive dialogue in line with international law.

Tensions between the two countries date back to 2004 over energy-rich areas near the island of Crete, where negotiations on maritime boundaries stalled.

In July 2020, both sides agreed to form a joint technical committee, which began its work in September 2025 with talks held in Athens.

Tensions resurfaced in 2025 after Greece launched an international tender for oil and gas exploration south of Crete, including areas disputed with Libya, inviting strong objections from Libyan authorities.

READ: UN says 53 migrants dead or missing after boat sinks off Libya

With new patch design, the Crew-13 astronauts clearly aren’t superstitious

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IwPost
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With new patch design, the Crew-13 astronauts clearly aren’t superstitious

NASA has assigned its first crew to launch on a mission “13” since Apollo 13 “had a problem” on the way to the Moon 56 years ago.

Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney with NASA, Joshua Kutryk with the Canadian Space Agency, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov will lift off for the International Space Station as Crew-13 on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in mid-September. The four will serve as members of the station’s Expedition 75 and 76 crews, before returning to Earth about five months later.

“This flight is the 13th crew rotation with SpaceX,” NASA’s announcement read. “The crew will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future exploration missions to the moon and Mars, and benefit people on Earth.”

Rather than give in to triskaidekaphobia (the fear or avoidance of 13), the crew is embracing it, or at least their connection to the last US launch to be similarly numbered. The Crew-13 mission patch includes visual nods to the insignia worn by Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert in April 1970.

montage of four portraits, including a Black woman and three Caucasian men, all wearing flight or space suits

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 members Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov.

Credit: NASA/CSA/Roscosmos

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 members Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov. Credit: NASA/CSA/Roscosmos

Imitation is an option

“NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 patch looks ardently toward the future of space exploration while honoring the legacy of those who came before,” reads the official description of the emblem.

At the center of the Crew-13 patch is a golden dragon, which is both a reference to the name of SpaceX’s capsule and the golden horses depicted on the Apollo 13 insignia. (Lovell and his crewmates worked with NASA contract artist Norman Tiller and muralist and sculptor Lumen Winter, who proposed the equestrian design, to create their flight badge.)

The dragon’s tail on the Crew-13 patch wraps around Earth in a manner reminiscent of the blue contrail that connects Earth with the horses on the Apollo 13 insignia. In the 1970 artwork, it was a nod to the Roman and Greek god Apollo; today, it is a “bridge between Earth, the International Space Station, the moon and Mars,” per NASA’s caption.

The use of Roman numerals for “XIII” (13) and the lack of crew names on the Crew-13 patch also mimic elements of the design from almost six decades ago, wherein the golden stars are symbolic of the Crew-13 families, and the overall capsule shape (as opposed to a circle) references the “possibilities born out of human collaboration toward a common goal,” according to the space agency.

It comes after 12

The STS-13 crew, redesignated STS-41-C, created this patch that highlights superstitions and triskaidekaphobia.

Credit: collectSPACE.com

The STS-13 crew, redesignated STS-41-C, created this patch that highlights superstitions and triskaidekaphobia. Credit: collectSPACE.com

Prior to Crew-13, NASA managers leaned into the superstition and devised a less intuitive but more data-driven designation that went into effect after the ninth space shuttle mission. Hence, what would have been STS-13 became STS-41-C, where the 4 was the fiscal year (1984), the 1 was the launch site (Kennedy Space Center in Florida), and C was the order of launch (C was the third planned flight of the year).

“I mentioned it was 41-C that originally was STS-13, and my friend Jim Beggs, who was the administrator of NASA, had triskaidekaphobia, and he said, ‘There’s not going to be [another] Apollo 13 or a Shuttle 13, so come up with a new numbering system.’ So we did come up with this complex system for numbering the shuttles during that period of time,” said Bob Crippen, STS-41C commander, in a NASA oral history interview.

NASA later reverted to a straightforward numerical designation after the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and the STS-51L crew in January 1986. As such, there was an STS-113, which launched aboard space shuttle Endeavour in 2002, but not before having to make late crew changes due to medical issues. The last time that NASA faced the same decision was on Apollo 13.

“We were joking a lot about being number 113,” commander Ken Bowersox told the press at the time. He added that to play it safe, the mission patch used Roman numerals (CXIII).

On board the International Space Station, the 13th crewed expedition began on April 1, 2006, 10 days before the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 13 launch.

The Russian space program launched six crewed missions designated as number 13. At least one of those times, the head of the country’s space agency suggested it be skipped.

“Many people have superstitious beliefs,” said Roscosmos director Anatoly Perminov, according to his press secretary, in 2008. “That’s why I think that it is a good idea to change the number of the next spaceship.”

Despite the concern, Soyuz TMA-13 went forward as planned. As did Soyuz 13, Soyuz T-13, and Soyuz TM-13 before it.

Soyuz TMA-13M launched Reid Wiseman, and Soyuz MS-13 landed with Christina Koch. Both US astronauts went on to fly aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission earlier this month, a crewed fly-by of the Moon that broke the distance record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts.

ASML as the last polite monopolist

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ASML as the last polite monopolist

Some seemingly regular events are so massive in their implications across various domains that they deserve their own write-up. TSMC’s highly unusual public complaint of ASML’s latest EUV pricing falls in that category.

Not only because the “very very expensive” complainer is relentless in utilizing its own pricing power, but also because it is not usual for these institutions to wash their dirty linen in public. 

We had discussed the near-monopsony and near-monopoly clash one sees in the TSMC and ASML battle first in 2024. Time to refresh in more detail as we traverse through Elon Musk’s Terafab, Japan’s Rapidus, Samsung’s strike, and a few other topics, while first discussing whether ASML’s famed equipments are sufficient when one is thinking about a fab, aka whether a fab can be built by anyone with enough cash, and then whether they are necessary.  

Part One: the Sufficient Question

The premise sounds rhetorical, almost juvenile. Of course a fab is more than an ASML machine. But the version of this question worth asking is sharper. Every semiconductor fab in the world is a collection of equipment whose suppliers are well-known and, China aside, accessible to any major economy or tech oligarch with the cash to pay.

So can someone with enough will and enough budget build a leading-edge fab from a standing start?

The Catalog is Open. The Barrier is Elsewhere.

Walk through what a leading-edge capital expenditure actually buys. You get EUV scanners from ASML. You get deposition and etch tools from Lam Research, Applied Materials, and Tokyo Electron. You fold in metrology and materials from KLA, Shin-Etsu, Lasertec, BESI, and Teradyne. The tools are astronomically expensive, but the catalog is wide open.

Yet, this open catalog raises a glaring paradox: Why would TSMC, currently benefiting from an unprecedented global supply crunch, use plans to defer its latest fab development as a negotiating tool against its suppliers?

The lesson the catalog does not teach is that the equipment, even when assembled in a multi-billion Dollar clean room, is the easy part. The hard part is everywhere. Most of those problems are not solved by buying a tool.

Each is solved by tens of thousands of correction loops, accumulated over decades, written in process documents that no single engineer carries in their head and no rival can copy by hiring twenty defectors. The table below covers some of the more devilish operating challenges that even with the best equipment up and running.

The above list is a small sample collection of the things that go into making a successful fab operation. In fact, what goes into making a cutting-edge fab is as describable as writing an essay on what makes a great artist with common pestles in her hand. It is the art part that makes TSMC wield its pricing power against everyone around it, including the supposed 100% market-share supplier like ASML.

However, there is another point out here, particularly in light of the high-sounding plans of some of the newer players from around the globe.

ASML has new clients, or does it?

Regardless of what we say above, there is a rising horde of entities that want to embark on building semiconductor manufacturing facilities, including some at the most advanced end. We may try to claim that the cutting edge is impossible for anyone without experience, but not everyone believes in it.

Musk is certainly one of them. Everything about Terafab defies conventional logic. The initial budget is massive, but plausible at around US$25 billion. While the project will have Intel as a partner, one must remember the lack of experience and no working chip team.

The target of a terawatt of compute requires over 20m Rubin-class wafers and over 15m HBM4E wafers, apart from a lot of other things. At realistic yields and cycle times, that is more than the capacity of a few hundred of the best current fabs. The spread between announcement and physics is two orders of magnitude. 

A more grounded, yet incredibly risky, plan is unfolding in Japan. Rapidus, founded in 2022, has backing from eight Japanese conglomerates and the government, as well as technology transferred from IBM. Cumulative public funding has reached roughly $15 billion.

Mass production is targeted for 2027, starting at 6,000 wafers per month and scaling to 30,000 later. For comparison, TSMC produces over 150,000 at leading nodes. There is no way to say whether Rapidus will succeed in these goals, but some experts see the possibility of competitive operations in single digits even by 2030.

China is the third experiment, the forced one. Sanctions block EUV. SMIC has nonetheless built a 7nm-class node using DUV multi-patterning, and Huawei’s Kirin 9030 sits between 7nm and 5nm. The engineering is genuine. So is the cost. SMIC’s 7nm yield is estimated at 20-40% against TSMC’s ~80% at the same node. The 5nm-class yield is reportedly under 20%. Per-chip cost runs roughly 50% above TSMC’s EUV-based equivalent. 

The pattern across three live experiments is the same, supplemented by a half a dozen other announcements from Saudi Arabia, India, to Germany and other places in Europe. Money buys the equipment, and possibly the people. What it cannot buy is the experience that is critical in mastering the tiny steps. The instruments are sold from a catalog. The art is not.

The Apple Paradigm: The Danger of Weaponized Leverage

The cleanest way to test the “money plus engineering equals fab” thesis is to walk through the graveyard of those who tried. The list of entities that failed to crack the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing reads like a tech hall of fame: IBM, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and a litany of once-dominant Japanese conglomerates.

None of these titans lacked capital. None lacked brilliant engineers. Each had access to the exact same equipment catalog as TSMC, often years earlier. What they lacked was the institutional art. Money buys the instruments; it does not buy the instinct.

This is precisely why ASML cannot simply replace TSMC with a syndicate of ambitious upstarts. On paper, ASML holds all the cards. They possess a 100% absolute monopoly on the EUV lithography machines required to keep the AI revolution breathing. But a monopoly is only as powerful as its buyer’s capacity to consume.

TSMC is not just a customer; it is a monopsony of competence. It is the only entity on earth capable of absorbing ASML’s bleeding-edge supply at the volume required to fund ASML’s massive R&D pipelines.

If TSMC pauses its CapEx, ASML’s forward revenue projections crater. TSMC’s pricing power isn’t merely derived from being the biggest; it comes from being the only player who knows how to wield the world’s most expensive paintbrush without ruining the canvas.

So when TSMC walks into an industry symposium and publicly balks at ASML’s staggering $350 million price tag, it is running a playbook it learned from the other side of the table. For the better part of a decade, Apple did to TSMC exactly what TSMC is now attempting to do to ASML.

Apple was its apex customer. It was effectively the only client with the sheer volume necessary to justify the financial risk of TSMC’s each new node for best part of last two decades. Apple weaponized that leverage, extracting preferential pricing and exclusive first-run access that no other customer could match.

TSMC accepted the squeeze because Apple’s commitment bankrolled their process leadership. But while TSMC fueled Apple’s multi-trillion-dollar ascent, its own profit margins were kept on a tight, Cupertino-controlled leash.

By now, the tables have turned. Buoyed by the insatiable demands of Nvidia, AMD, and the broader compute ecosystem, TSMC’s customer base has broadened. They no longer rely exclusively on Apple to keep the lights on. Consequently, the era of absolute preferential treatment has also ended.

Today, TSMC dictates pricing and timeline terms to the iPhone maker without hesitation, forcing even Apple to wait in line.

The warning for 2026: the fracturing dependency

This history reveals the long-term peril of TSMC’s current standoff with ASML. TSMC is aggressively flexing its monopsony muscles, betting that it remains irreplaceable.

But ASML’s customer base is broadening in the exact same way TSMC’s did. The dependency is fracturing. Memory manufacturers are now voracious consumers of EUV systems.

SK Hynix aggressively procured roughly thirty EUV machines in early 2026, willingly paying a premium for expedited delivery, while Samsung accelerates its own EUV purchases for 1c DRAM. Meanwhile, Intel, desperate to claw back foundry leadership, has already committed entirely to High-NA for its 14A node.

The reality in 2026 is stark: the customer refusing to pay the premium for High-NA EUV is exactly one. Everyone else is buying. ASML didn’t necessarily engineer this independence; the market’s broadening demand for compute is doing it for them. TSMC’s leverage is real but could be peaking, and they must tread carefully.

In the semiconductor industry, it is remarkably wise not to do unto your suppliers what you wished your greatest customer had not done unto you.

Part Two: The Necessary Question

Equipment is not enough. That is settled. The harder question is whether ASML’s latest equipment is necessary, or whether the industry can keep extracting performance from older tools and clever process work for long enough to call ASML’s bluff.

The art of squeezing more out of the same 

When TSMC took the stage in April 2026 and declared it would stick with its current generation of EUV lithography through at least 2029, the industry gasped. Stripped of corporate theater, TSMC’s claim was a profound flex of engineering arrogance: they believe they can indefinitely find throughput, defect, and design-rule improvements without writing a 350 million euro check for ASML’s bleeding-edge High-NA tools.

And as an engineering matter, they are largely right. The quietest, most consequential story of the past five years has not been the invention of new machines, but the ruthless extraction of performance from existing ones.

The argument adds up to something. A leading-edge logic node circa 2026 is using a roughly twenty-twenty vintage EUV scanner running at twice the productivity, with better resists, better masks, better software, and a process flow that has been reorganised around what the existing tool can do well.

None of this is free, and none of this is finished. But it does mean that the question “do we need High-NA in 2027” has a credible answer of no. TSMC believes the extension runs to A14 in 2028 and possibly to A13 in 2029 without crossing into High-NA. Others may disagree on timing, but no one in the industry argues the extension is fictional.

China takes the same playbook to its limit

China is running the same extension play, except without EUV at all. The result is the most strenuous test in the industry of how far cleverness can substitute for the latest tool.

Sanctions block ASML EUV exports to mainland China and have done since 2019. SMIC has nonetheless built a 7nm-class node using DUV multi-patterning, with each layer requiring three or four exposures where TSMC uses one.

Huawei’s Kirin 9000s shipped in the Mate 60 Pro in 2023 was the first commercial proof. The Kirin 9030, announced in 2025, sits between 7nm and 5nm by TechInsights’ measurement and is the most advanced chip currently producible in China.

The engineering is genuine. The cost is also genuine. SMIC’s 7nm yield is widely estimated at twenty to forty percent against TSMC’s eighty plus at the same node. The 5nm-class yield is reportedly under twenty. Per-chip cost runs roughly fifty percent above TSMC’s EUV-based equivalent. The workaround works, but it pays a tax that only sovereign demand can absorb.

The infrastructure to support a longer Chinese run without EUV is now being built. SMEE, the state-backed lithography effort, has 90nm DUV in production and a 28nm immersion system in late development. Shanghai Yuliangsheng, linked to Huawei’s SiCarrier, delivered an immersion DUV tool to SMIC for testing in September 2025.

SiCarrier debuted more than 30 domestic process tools at SEMICON China in 2025. Domestic equipment share inside Chinese fabs rose from roughly 25% in 2024 to 35% in 2025. None of this matches ASML at the leading edge. All of it threatens ASML’s position at mature nodes and also poses other worth-keeping-in-mind questions about the future.

There is even a Chinese EUV prototype. In December 2025, Huawei and SiCarrier confirmed a functional EUV light source using laser-induced discharge plasma rather than ASML’s laser-produced plasma architecture. The prototype generates 13.5nm light at roughly 100 to 150 watts against ASML’s 250 plus. No working chip has been produced.

The most realistic forecasts put a Chinese EUV production attempt in 2028 and a competitive system in 2030. Even if these dates slip by two years, which they probably will, the long-term threat is not zero. Other extension paths exist outside China. Canon’s nanoimprint lithography, the FPA-1200NZ2C launched in 2023, prints features at 14nm resolution at roughly a quarter of an EUV scanner’s price and a tenth of the power.

It works for memory, particularly 3D NAND and certain DRAM layers, where overlay tolerances are forgiving. It does not work for leading-edge logic, where defectivity is too high and overlay too tight. Directed self-assembly, in which block copolymers organize themselves into patterns at sub-EUV resolutions, has been a promising laboratory technology for 15 years and remains so.

Each of these is an argument against the proposition that ASML is forever. None is an argument that ASML is dispensable in 2026.

The toll collector’s gambit

But there is a fatal flaw in the extraction thesis. Squeezing more life out of current machines is a brilliant strategy, but none of it is free. And the entity collecting the toll is still ASML.

TSMC’s narrative implies a break from ASML’s pricing power, but the reality is an inescapable tether. Extending the current generation of EUV scanners is not a solo endeavor; it requires deep, continuous, and highly expensive collaboration with the manufacturer. When TSMC upgrades an NXE:3800E scanner from 220 to 230 wafers per hour, ASML doesn’t send a technician with a wrench.

ASML sends a software key. That upgrade is sold as a premium productivity package. The new resists require multi-year qualification loops with ASML. The replacement parts, the laser maintenance, the optics calibration—it is a closed ecosystem. The cumulative effect is that a 2020-vintage EUV tool, fully upgraded, runs roughly twice as productively in 2026 as it did at delivery, but ASML has monetized every single step of that evolution.

For decades, ASML operated like a bespoke European R&D lab that happened to sell machines. In 2026, they have finally realized they are an absolute monopoly, and they are learning to wield the pricing power that comes with it, perhaps like memory makers in 2026.

If TSMC refuses to buy the 350 million-euro High-NA tool, ASML will not starve. They simply tighten the screws on the installed base. They control the service contracts and the software upgrades for the standard EUV machines TSMC desperately needs to execute its “extraction” strategy. ASML owns the air supply.

The deeper point is that ASML’s pricing power is not limited to High-NA. ASML is also the sole-source supplier of Low-NA EUV, and the dominant supplier of advanced DUV immersion. Nikon and Canon are present in DUV but irrelevant at the leading edge of immersion.

The same monopoly that lets ASML price High-NA at EUR 350 million applies, in slightly diluted form, to the Low-NA tools every fab in the world is currently running and will continue to run for the next decade. ASML has held DUV pricing roughly flat through 2024 to 2026, which is a choice, not a constraint. If ASML decides to raise DUV prices materially in 2027 or 2028, the customers’ realistic responses are limited. 

Furthermore, the physics of extraction has a hard, mathematically brutal limit. As feature sizes drop into the angstrom era, stochastic defects, or random errors caused by the unpredictable behavior of individual photons, multiply exponentially. Multi-patterning on standard EUV requires running the same fragile wafer through the scanner two, three, or four times.

Below the A14 generation, the layer count, the mask count, and the sheer cycle time of multi-patterned standard EUV start to shatter the economic viability of the node. You end up spending more money trying to force the old machine to work than you would have spent simply buying the new one.

The rest of the industry has already done this math. The memory makers concluded that the line crosses even earlier for DRAM than it does for logic. SK Hynix installed its first High-NA EUV tool in late 2025 to secure dominance in 1c DRAM and HBM. Samsung is aggressively integrating High-NA into its 2nm logic survival plan.

Intel, fighting for its foundry life, has committed entirely to High-NA for its 14A node. Once again, the customer holding out at €350 million is, as of April 2026, exactly one

Conclusion: The expiration of politeness

For 14 years, ASML has held an absolute monopoly on the most strategically critical machine in the global economy, yet it has wielded that power with baffling restraint. By any standard metric, they have operated more like a distinguished European research syndicate than a capitalist apex predator.

Their pricing tracks engineering costs rather than desperate scarcity, and their CFO frames supplier negotiations as “healthy peer pressure.” But this politeness has an expiration date. Every employee in Veldhoven must be watching the boardrooms at its Taiwanese and Korean clients gloat over absurd, historic margins.

ASML must learn how to ask for more like the employees of these companies. These downstream giants wield immense pricing power and are forced into massive capital expenditures to stretch their roadmaps. As the singular physical chokepoint of the entire silicon revolution, ASML should, by every law of monopoly economics, be extracting a vastly larger tax.

The complication is that ASML does not sell across a counter to a fragmented market; it sits across a bespoke table from three or four sovereign corporate states. This extreme buyer concentration is the only reason ASML’s dominance has historically felt like a partnership rather than an extortion racket.

TSMC has aggressively weaponized this dynamic, publicly drawing a line in the sand by deferring High-NA EUV until 2029. And, TSMC’s threat is now colliding with ASML’s bulletproof ledger. Backed by SK Hynix placing its largest EUV order in history and a 38 billion euro order book, ASML can mathematically afford to let TSMC sit out the High-NA generation and still coast into a record-breaking decade.

Everything we have mapped out is theoretical leverage, but high-stakes negotiations ultimately boil down to a single behavioral variable: who blinks first. Will the next price list for standard Low-NA tools surge the way it mathematically could? Will the next software productivity package be priced like an incremental upgrade, or like the ransom-ware of enterprise tech?

History suggests we should temper our expectations. The 2012 customer co-investment fundamentally wired ASML to view these giants as partners, led by a CEO who publicly refuses to be a “bottleneck.” ASML’s politeness is also reflected in how it is never seen lobbying for China business the way someone like Nvidia does. It may not succeed, but it does not even try. 

So the conclusion is brutally simple. ASML holds every single card required to win this hand; the only question is whether they have finally learned how to play them. 

Nilesh Jasani is the founder and CEO of GenInnov Pte Ltd Singapore. This article first appeared on www.geninnov.ai and is republished with permission. Read the original here. Read more at www.geninnov.ai/blog

NGO Monitor Accuses Doctors Without Borders of Promoting Anti-Israel ‘Genocide’ Claims

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NGO Monitor Accuses Doctors Without Borders of Promoting Anti-Israel ‘Genocide’ Claims


NGO Monitor on Monday released a 35-page report in Jerusalem alleging that Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders has become a leading source of anti-Israel misinformation, particularly in promoting claims of “genocide” related to Gaza.

The report examines MSF’s publications, messaging, and political activities, noting that the organization operates in more than 70 countries and has a $2.4 billion budget. It asserts that MSF has shifted from a humanitarian focus to what it describes as an “unprecedented influence operation” targeting Israel.

According to the study, MSF played a central role in anti-Israel campaigns and what it calls Holocaust inversion narratives, including the “genocide” accusation. It further alleges systemic omission of Hamas’ use of hospitals in Gaza for attacks and the application of legal arguments directed solely at Israel.

The report also cites links to Hamas and other groups among MSF staff and volunteers and says MSF personnel in Gaza did not address Hamas’ presence in medical facilities.

The findings also address MSF’s refusal to comply with Israeli anti-terror registration requirements and examine its messaging following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. The report states MSF joined advocacy efforts describing Israel’s response as “genocide,” relying on what it calls manipulated evidence and excluding what it describes as key operational context.

“In its ‘genocide’ propaganda and heinous Holocaust inversion, many MSF officials promoted blatantly false testimonies, violating basic principles of medical ethics,” said Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg, President of NGO Monitor.

“To restore its shattered reputation and resume its mission of providing aid, an independent investigation leading to fundamental organizational changes and close oversight is vital. MSF in its current framework is no longer a trustworthy humanitarian organization,” he said.

The report also states that MSF’s claims were amplified in international media, professional medical journals, university frameworks, United Nations agencies, and proceedings before international courts.

Recommendations include independent investigations into MSF International and its national branches, including MSF USA and MSF UK; an end to “genocide” and related allegations; external vetting of personnel; and a review of charitable status.

EU tells Google to open up AI on Android; Google says that’s “unwarranted intervention”

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EU tells Google to open up AI on Android; Google says that’s “unwarranted intervention”

In January, the European Commission began an initial investigation, known as a specification proceeding, into how Google has implemented AI in the Android operating system. The results are in, and the EU says Android needs to be more open, which is not surprising. Meanwhile, Google says this amounts to “unwarranted intervention,” which is equally unsurprising. Regardless of Google’s characterization of the investigation, the commission may force Google to make Android AI changes this summer.

This action stems from the continent’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping law that designates seven dominant technology companies as “gatekeepers” that are subject to greater regulation to ensure fair competition. Google has consistently spoken against the regulations imposed under the DMA, but it and the other gatekeepers have been subject to the law for several years now, and there’s little chance the commission backs away from it.

The issue before the commission currently is the built-in advantage for Gemini on Android. When you turn on any Google-powered Android phone, Gemini is already there and gets special treatment at the system level. The European Commission is taking aim at the lack of features available to third-party AI services. The commission believes that there are too many experiences on Android that only work with Google’s Gemini AI, and as a gatekeeper, Google must change that.

“As we navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, it is clear that interoperability is key to unlocking the full potential of these technologies,” said Commission VP for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen in a statement. “These measures will open up Android devices to a wider range of AI services, so that users will have the freedom to choose the AI services that best meet their needs and values, without sacrificing functionality.”

The commission does have a solid track record pushing for openness so far. Since the DMA came into force, Google has been required to make numerous changes to its business in Europe, like implementing search choice screens on Android, allowing alternative payment methods in the Play Store, and limiting data sharing across services. Now, the EU wants Google to make the Android platform more hospitable to third-party AI services.

Google’s objection focuses on preserving the autonomy for device makers (including Google) to customize AI services. “This ​unwarranted intervention would strip away that autonomy, mandate access to sensitive hardware and device ​permissions; unnecessarily driving up costs while undermining critical privacy and security protections for European users,” said Google senior competition counsel Claire Kelly.

EU rules could mean more AI, not less

Just because Gemini is preinstalled on virtually every Android phone doesn’t mean you have to use it. You can easily install ChatGPT or Grok and turn to that chatbot when the need arises. However, these apps won’t have the same access to data and features as Gemini. The commission cites a few examples where Gemini is the only route, like sending an email in your default mail client or sharing a photo with friends.

European regulators are proposing several broad changes to the way AI tools operate on Android phones. Some of this is straightforward, like allowing third-party AI tools to be invoked system-wide via hot words or button presses. This might also include allowing AI tools to view screen context when the user opens them. Context also extends to allowing alternative AI systems to access local data to generate proactive suggestions and summaries. The report actually describes something that sounds like Google’s Magic Cue, which relies on Gemini to offer suggestions based on your activity.

Gemini on device UI

Gemini has exclusive system-level access to generate proactive suggestions on many Android phones.

Credit: Google

Gemini has exclusive system-level access to generate proactive suggestions on many Android phones. Credit: Google

Google has also started experimenting with allowing AI to control certain apps. As we saw when this feature debuted on the Galaxy S26, Gemini is currently pretty bad at using apps on your behalf. The commission wants to explore allowing other AI services to autonomously control installed apps and system features on Android phones. Maybe someone else could do better?

Many of the Gemini AI features in Android, including Magic Cue, rely on running local models, and Google has been slow to allow third parties the system access to make that work effectively. So the EU is also suggesting a mandate that would ensure developers have the necessary hardware access to run local models “with high levels of performance, availability and responsiveness.”

Finally, Google may be required under the DMA to create new APIs and offer technical assistance to other AI makers who want to plug into Android. The commission also specifies that these tools must be made available free of charge.

So far, this is just a framework for how AI on Android might change. The European Commission is currently accepting feedback from interested parties. That part of the process will wrap up on May 13. A final decision on this investigation will be made no later than July 27 of this year. Failure to enact required changes could result in big fines. The DMA allows for penalties up to 10 percent of a company’s annual global revenue.

Google probably won’t be required to fling the doors open right away, though. Creating avenues for third-party AI apps to access system tools and data would take time. Rushing the process could risk security or privacy issues. And naturally, there’s no guarantee any of these proposed changes would be seen outside of the EU.

Rising Country Star Dead at 24

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Rising Country Star Dead at 24


A young country singer who once turned heads on national TV is gone in a flash of tragedy.

Dylan Carter, a breakout talent from season 24 of The Voice, has died at just 24 years old after a horrific car crash in South Carolina, sending shockwaves through fans and his tight-knit hometown community.

The rising country artist was killed late Saturday, April 25, in Colleton County following a road collision, according to local officials. News of his sudden death was confirmed by Moncks Corner Mayor Thomas Hamilton Jr., who shared an emotional tribute as the town grappled with the loss.

“Our family is heartbroken,” the mayor said in a statement. “Dylan wasn’t just a gifted performer who lit up our events—he was a friend. His kindness, his charm, and his presence meant so much to all of us.”

The tragedy is even more gut-wrenching considering Carter was just days away from taking the stage again. He had been scheduled to perform on April 27 at Moncks Corner’s popular “Music on Main” event—an appearance that will now never happen.

A native of St. George, South Carolina, Carter first captured national attention in 2023 when he appeared on The Voice, landing on Reba McEntire’s team after a stunning blind audition that earned him a rare four-chair turn. His emotional performance of I Look to You, dedicated to his late mother, struck a chord with viewers across the country.

Though his journey on the show ended during the Battle Rounds—after performing Til You Can’t—Carter didn’t fade away. Instead, he returned home and quietly built a life that blended music, business, and giving back.

Known locally as “The Singing Realtor,” Carter balanced gigs and songwriting with a career in real estate, using his day job to fuel his dreams on stage. But it was his heart for others that truly set him apart.

He co-founded The Local Voice, a nonprofit focused on helping women battling breast cancer through music-driven fundraisers and community events. In a heartbreaking Facebook tribute, the organization described him as “the heart of what we do.”

“Dylan believed every voice matters,” the post read. “Through his music, his kindness, and his smile, he brought people together and made everyone feel seen.”

Friends say Carter’s impact stretched far beyond his performances—from county fairs like the Coastal Carolina Fair to local charity stages, he was a familiar face with an unforgettable voice.

Now, that voice has been silenced far too soon.

His sudden death adds to a growing string of tragedies rocking the country music world, leaving fans once again asking how quickly rising stars can be taken before their time.

An investigation into the crash is ongoing.

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