Family of Journalist Austin Tice Kidnapped in Syria Says He Could Be Alive in Iran
The family of missing American journalist Austin Tice believes he is alive and may have been transferred to Iran after the collapse of Bashar Assad’s regime in 2024, according to statements by his sister Naomi Tice.
Austin Tice, a former US Marine whose reporting was published by The Washington Post and McClatchy newspapers, disappeared at a checkpoint near Damascus in August 2014 while covering the Syrian civil war. A video released shortly after his disappearance showed him being led away by armed captors.
His sister, Naomi Tice, said the family believes Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps may have moved him from Syria following the fall of Assad’s government, Houston Public Media reported.
Naomi Tice said Assad consistently denied holding Austin Tice but noted that some detention facilities in Syria operated under Iranian control. She said that arrangement may explain why Assad denied responsibility if Iranian officials oversaw the sites where detainees were kept.
“With the regime change, we do think, at that point, Austin might have been brought over to Iran during that time,” Naomi Tice said. “Once again, this isn’t confirmed, but we have strong reason to believe that might be the case.”
Searches conducted after the Assad regime fell, including inspections of former government prisons in Syria, did not determine Tice’s whereabouts.
In 2025, The Media Line’s Rizik Alabi reported that human remains believed to possibly belong to Tice were discovered in a remote area of Aleppo province in northern Syria.
The remains of three people were reportedly recovered based on testimony from a former Islamic State member believed to have had direct or indirect involvement in the kidnapping and killing of journalists and activists during the early years of the Syrian conflict.
After DNA testing in the US, it was determined that the remains didn’t belong to Austin Tice. FBI and Qatari search teams later uncovered additional remains believed to belong to Islamic State victims, though Tice’s family rejected reports that his remains were among them and continued to maintain he is alive.
The family is urging the Trump administration to contact sources in Iran and said it has been in communication with US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz regarding possible negotiations for Tice’s release.
They are also requesting that President Trump pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek information from Assad, who is living in exile in Russia, about the journalist’s whereabouts.
The Tice family has also sought Israeli assistance regarding Khaled al-Halibi, a former Syrian brigadier general currently detained in Austria on war crimes allegations. Al-Halibi was publicly identified by The New York Times as a double agent linked to Israeli intelligence.
Austin Tice’s brother, Jacob Tice, said the FBI should question al-Halibi in an effort to obtain information that could help clarify Austin’s fate or location.
China has played key role in Iran war and will continue to do so
An Iranian walks next to an anti-US mural in a street in Tehran on May 4. Photo: Abedin Taherkenareh / EPA
Donald Trump has paused “Project Freedom”, the US operation aimed at restoring commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. In a post on social media just days after the operation was first announced, Trump said he had made the decision to give US negotiators time to reach an agreement with Iran to end the war.
Iranian state media framed the suspension as a US failure. Iran had warned that it would target vessels attempting to enter the waterway and subsequently launched missiles and drones at civilian ships and the United Arab Emirates. It is unclear where the conflict will go from here. But whatever happens next, the role of China will be crucial.
China has kept Iran’s economy afloat in the first two months of the war. Before the war, China accounted for up to 90% of Iran’s oil exports, importing over a million barrels each day. Iran continued to send large amounts of crude to China during the war’s early stages, with CNBC reporting that at least 11.7 million barrels were shipped between February 28 and March 10.
Payments for Iranian oil have been processed by institutions such as China’s Bank of Kunlun and the Cross-border Interbank Payment System. These are alternatives to the US-dominated Swift global payment system that enable oil trades to be settled in yuan. This has helped Iran bypass western sanctions by putting oil revenues out of the reach of the US Treasury.
The flow of oil from Iran to China has dropped since mid-April, when the US imposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports. But China remains able to provide Iran with a revenue lifeline – albeit a more limited one – moving forward.
On May 2, China’s Ministry of Commerce ordered firms not to comply with US sanctions on five Chinese refiners linked to the Iranian oil trade. This enables the refiners to continue processing Iranian crude that arrives by train or is already outside the blockade area. Roughly 160 million barrels of Iranian crude were in transit or in floating storage at sea as of April 21.
China’s economic support for Iran is emerging as a source of friction between Washington and Beijing ahead of Trump’s upcoming summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In an interview with Fox News on May 4, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said China’s continued purchases of Iranian oil amounted to funding global terrorism.
However, the influence of China over Iran’s economy gives it leverage over Tehran. And it does appear to be in the interests of China for the war to end. Rising prices are beginning to affect the Chinese economy, and helping the conflict come to an end would also assist the Chinese government in its push to present itself as the responsible global power.
China has already played an important diplomatic role in the conflict. While Pakistan has served as one of the key mediators between the US and Iran, many analysts have credited China as being the key driving force behind the April ceasefire. At that time, Iranian officials said China had asked them to show flexibility and defuse tensions.
China seems to have continued pressing Iran to negotiate with the US since then. Hours after Trump announced he was pausing the US effort to guide vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Beijing. This is the first time Araghchi has travelled to China since the war broke out.
The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, holds talks with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, in Beijing on May 6. Photo: Cai Yang / Xinhua
In a statement released after the meeting, the Chinese foreign ministry said: “China considers that a complete cessation of fighting must be achieved without delay … and that continuing to negotiate remains essential.” Also after the meeting Araghchi said Iran would protect its “legitimate rights and interests in the negotiations” but will “accept a fair and comprehensive agreement.”
Chinese military support
At the same time, there are some signs that China is hedging its bets. A protracted war involving the US in the Middle East has advantages for China too, primarily because it would divert US attention from the Asia-Pacific region. Reports suggest that China is considering taking steps that would help Iran militarily if a full-blown conflict returns.
According to US intelligence, Beijing has weighed transferring air defense systems to Iran, possibly routing the shipments through other countries to mask its involvement. CNN reported in April that the defense systems in question were shoulder-fired anti-air missiles known as Manpads. China responded by saying it “has never provided weapons to any party to the conflict.”
Chinese technical assistance also enhanced the effectiveness of Iran’s military earlier in the war. Since 2021, Iran has been implementing BeiDou, a Chinese satellite navigation system. As an alternative to the US-run Global Positioning System (GPS), BeiDou has helped guide Iranian missile strikes in the conflict and has enabled more effective monitoring of US military deployments.
China has played a key role in how the conflict has played out so far. And given its position of influence over Iran, it will be a leading factor in whether the war reaches a negotiated end or spills back into open conflict.
Anthropic raises Claude Code usage limits, credits new deal with SpaceX
SAN FRANCISCO—At its Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to utilize the entire compute capacity of the latter’s data center in Memphis, Tennessee.
On stage at the conference, CEO Dario Amodei said the deal was intended to increase usage limits for Anthropic’s Pro and Max plan subscribers.
The announcement was accompanied by an increase in those usage limits; Anthropic doubled Claude Code’s five-hour window limits for Pro and Max subscribers, removed the peak-hours limit reduction on Claude Code for those same accounts, and raised API limits for its Opus model. The table below outlining the Opus changes was shared in the company’s blog post on the topic.
Opus usage limit changes on May 6, 2026. Credit: Anthropic
Anthropic claims the deal gives the company access to more than 300 megawatts of new compute capacity. For its part, SpaceX focused its announcement on the capability of the Colossus 1 supercomputer that’s at the center of the deal. “Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators,” SpaceX wrote.
Additionally, Anthropic “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to build up “multiple gigawatts” of orbital compute capacity, tying into a recent (but unproven) focus on exploring orbital data centers as an answer to the problem that “compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter.”
The deal might be surprising to those who have followed Musk’s recent public comments—he was, until now, critical of Anthropic. For example, in February, he declared on X that “Anthropic hates Western Civilization,” while sharing a false tweet from Trump administration official Emil Michael about Anthropic’s practices with its constitution for Claude.
The tune changed with the deal—or into the lead-up to it, as Musk tells it. “I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday. “No one set off my evil detector.”
Exploding demand amid constrained compute supply
Anthropic has seen a significant increase in demand for Claude Code and other products related to its models over the past few months. The increase has been driven partly by users moving away from OpenAI after controversy over its agreements with the United States military, increasing adoption of Claude Code in professional software development organizations, and a user behavior (and product) shift away from single-agent, chat-based tasks to more demanding multi-agent workflows.
The company has made controversial moves lately to address demand outpacing available compute capacity, amid outages and other problems. That included introducing new usage limits during peak hours, and even a short-lived and very limited trial, apparently testing the notion of removing Claude Code from the $20/month Pro plan.
Vocal frustration with usage limits has been a staple of Hacker News, Reddit, X, and other platforms where software developers congregate. Many developers are using these models and tools, and they’re frustrated that they can’t use them more.
Last month, Anthropic reportedly signed massive deals with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and more to scale up its access to compute infrastructure. The company credits those, along with this SpaceX deal, for its ability to raise limits, though gains from some of them will take time to materialize.
Sweden announces new spy agency in rethink prompted by war in Ukraine
Sweden has announced plans to establish a new foreign intelligence agency as part of a broader security overhaul driven by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said the new service, to be named Sweden’s foreign intelligence service (UND), is expected to begin operations in January 2027 and will focus on overseas threats and strategic intelligence gathering.
She said the war in Ukraine has highlighted how crucial rapid information, technological adaptability and intelligence superiority are, comparing the planned agency to the UK’s MI6. The move reflects Sweden’s reassessment of its defence posture after abandoning two centuries of military non-alignment and joining NATO in 2024 following Russia’s invasion.
Sweden already operates the Military Intelligence and Security Service (MUST), which handles external military threats, alongside the domestic-focused Swedish Security Service (SAPO) and the signals intelligence agency FRA. The new body will take over some responsibilities from MUST and work closely with these agencies and the armed forces.
Stenergard said Sweden’s NATO membership brings “new expectations” in terms of intelligence cooperation and collective security responsibilities.
The reform is part of a wider effort to strengthen Sweden’s defence and intelligence capabilities in response to a more volatile European security environment, ensuring better coordination between military and civilian intelligence structures while improving the country’s ability to respond to emerging global threats.
Melania Trump Brutally Trolled After ‘Struggling’ to Read (Video)
Melania Trump is once again finding herself at the center of online backlash — this time after stumbling through part of a public speech while introducing husband Donald Trump at a White House event honoring military mothers ahead of Mother’s Day.
The First Lady, 56, delivered a heartfelt introduction praising the president as a compassionate leader, but social media critics quickly zeroed in on her thick Slovenian accent and a few awkward pauses during the speech.
“Most know my husband as the strong Commander in Chief, but his empathy transcends the role and shapes a caring leader,” Melania told the crowd during the May 6 ceremony.
The line immediately drew laughter from people in the room — including Donald Trump himself — as many appeared amused by the description of the famously hard-charging president as “caring” and full of “empathy.”
Melania smiled and glanced back at her husband before continuing her remarks, calling him a leader who “constantly remembers each and every American soldier is someone’s child.”
But the internet wasted no time tearing into the First Lady after clips of the speech spread across X.
Political commentator Aaron Rupar posted video from the event and wrote, “Melania Trump is having some difficulty reading,” referring to a moment where she stumbled over the line: “A mother is awestruck when she welcomes her child into the world.”
Critics piled on almost instantly.
“She has been here for 28 years and speaks like someone who has been learning English for a week,” one user fumed.
Another mocked: “I’m told she speaks eight languages. Obviously English ain’t one of them.”
A third sneered: “Can someone please repeat what she said IN ENGLISH?”
Others called the First Lady “an embarrassment to this country,” while another critic slammed her for allegedly struggling to read from prepared remarks.
The backlash reignited a years-long debate over the relentless criticism Melania has faced since entering the political spotlight during Trump’s first presidential campaign.
Born in Slovenia, Melania moved to the United States in 1996 to pursue a modeling career and later became an American citizen in 2006. Despite speaking multiple languages fluently, her accent has frequently become a target for critics and late-night comedians alike.
One of the most infamous moments came during a 2018 episode of the daytime talk show The View when co-host Sunny Hostin appeared ready to imitate Melania’s accent on-air.
Moderator Whoopi Goldberg quickly stepped in, warning her twice: “Don’t do it.”
Hostin ultimately avoided directly mimicking the accent, but critics at the time still accused the panel of mocking the First Lady’s intelligence and immigrant background.
Melania’s former communications director Stephanie Grisham later blasted the controversy, accusing critics of hypocrisy and “disrespectfully mocking someone’s accent.”
Still, the latest White House appearance proves the scrutiny surrounding Melania Trump hasn’t faded — and neither have the brutal online attacks whenever she steps behind a microphone.
Israeli strikes in Lebanon kill 16, wound 21, damage school despite ceasefire
Israeli drone and air strikes in southern and eastern Lebanon killed 16 people and wounded 21 others, including paramedics, and damaged a school, Lebanese officials said on Wednesday, in the latest apparent violation of a ceasefire, Anadolu reports.
Two people were killed in drone strikes on the town of Mefdoun, while additional airstrikes targeted areas between Zawtar al-Sharqiya and Zawtar al-Gharbiya, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported.
Four more people were killed and three others injured in a separate strike that hit the home of a municipal council head in the town of Zellaya in western Bekaa, with rescue operations ongoing at the site, the agency added.
An Israeli strike also hit a car between the towns of Zawtar al-Sharqiya and Mifdoun in southern Lebanon, leaving two people dead, the same source said.
An Israeli drone targeted paramedics affiliated with the Islamic Health Authority in the town of Deir Kifa, wounding three of them, who were taken to nearby hospitals, the NNA said.
A separate Israeli airstrike on the town of Aadchit in the Nabatieh district killed one person, according to the same source.
The agency also reported that an Israeli strike on the town of Saksakiyeh in the Zahrani area killed five and wounded 15 others.
The Health Ministry said in a statement later that the strike on Saksakiyeh resulted in four deaths and the injury of 33 others, including six children and four women.
In the Tyre district, civil defense teams recovered two bodies following a strike that targeted a vehicle on the al-Haddathiya road near al-Siraj Secondary School between Wadi Jilo and Tayr Debba, the report said.
Israeli warplanes also carried out strikes on the towns of Rishknaniyah, Safad al-Battikh, Baraachit, and Qallawiyeh, causing severe damage to a school building in Burj Qallawiyeh, the agency said.
Israeli warplanes also carried out an airstrike on a residential home in the Bir Zbib neighborhood of the town of Doueir in the Nabatieh district, destroying it completely, NNA said.
On Tuesday, the Israeli army carried out about 60 attacks across Lebanon, killing five people and injuring others as part of ongoing hostilities since March 2.
Despite a ceasefire announced April 17 and extended until May 17, the Israeli army continues daily strikes in Lebanon and widespread demolition of homes in dozens of villages, echoing its years-long devastation of Gaza.
Since March 2, Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed at least 2,715 people and wounded 8,353 and displaced more than 1.6 million, about one-fifth of the population, according to the latest official figures.
Israel occupies areas in southern Lebanon, including some it has held for decades and others since the 2023-2024 war, and has advanced about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) inside the southern border during the current conflict.
Nearly $1 billion in oil shorts bet just before Iran peace report
Photo: Gnangarra / Wikimedia Commons
Observers are once again raising concerns about insider trading on Wednesday after a trader took a colossal crude oil short position just over an hour before a US-Iran peace deal was reported to be on the horizon, causing prices to fall.
The Kobeissi Letter, a financial newsletter, reported on X that at 3:40 am on Wednesday, “nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news.”
This was equivalent to $920 million in notional value, which the letter described as “an unusually large trade” so early in the morning. But it would soon pay off.
At 4:50 am, just 70 minutes later, Axios published an exclusive scoop by Middle East reporter Barak Ravid that the White House believed the US and Iran were on the verge of agreeing to a one-page “memorandum of understanding” to end the war, which included more nuclear negotiations, one of the key sticking points for US President Donald Trump.
By 7:00 am, just over two hours after Axios dropped its report, oil prices had fallen by 12%, allowing the savvy investor to make $125 million in a matter of hours, which led to accusations that it was yet another example of “epic insider trading” by those in the know about Trump’s plans.
Prices have since rebounded by about 8% after Iran announced the creation of the new “Persian Gulf Strait Authority,” to mediate the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz on its terms.
The Trump administration has already been deluged with accusations that its members are using insider information to take advantage of financial markets and prediction market apps.
Last month, an active-duty US special forces soldier was indicted by the Department of Justice after he made about $400,000 betting on Polymarket that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power, a bet he allegedly placed using classified information about an operation he himself was involved with.
More bettors collected around $1 million in profits from bets on the specific timing of Trump’s war with Iran in late February. The Financial Times also reported a surge of more than $580 million in oil futures trading right before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iran’s energy facilities in March.
Of course, Wednesday’s bet theoretically could have been made without the aid of insider information.
The new peace framework is the latest in what has seemed to be an endless pattern over the past several weeks in which US officials tell media outlets that a peace agreement is on the horizon, causing oil prices to dip, only for it to collapse later in the week, often with Trump issuing hostile threats or making new demands.
It has become such a familiar story that some have speculated that the announcement of productive ceasefire talks is deliberately choreographed to calm oil markets and bring down prices, which have become a growing problem for Trump among voters.
But as The Economic Times explained, the bet placed Wednesday morning likely “is not a routine hedge” or “a portfolio rebalancing move.”
“At that hour, in that size,” it said, “a crude oil short of that magnitude is a deliberate, high-conviction directional bet.”
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a one-time Trump cheerleader who’s become one of his leading critics, suggested Trump’s erratic approach to negotiating an end to the war was just a tool used by him and his allies to profit.
“When is everyone going to start realizing that the on-again, off-again war/peace rhetoric is really just insider trading? And sprinkle in some murder,” Greene wrote on social media. “Only a select few in the top tax bracket are benefiting from this, and the majority of you ain’t in it.”
Democrats in Congress have urged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate what Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) suggested could be “mind-blowing corruption” by the White House, not only related to Trump’s wars, but also to his tariff regime, which has caused similar market chaos that bettors have been able to capitalize on with fortuitously timed wagers.
But critics have described profiting from the machinations of a war that has killed more than 1,700 civilians as particularly grotesque.
“This has to stop,” said Fox News commentator Jessica Tarlov. “Lives on the line so they can insider trade!”
SpaceX is starting to move on from the world’s most successful rocket
It is far too soon to mention retirement, but astute observers of the space industry have noticed SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is not launching as often as it used to.
The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem at SpaceX or with the Falcon 9. Rather, it is a manifestation of SpaceX’s eagerness to shift focus to the much larger Starship rocket, an enabler of what the company wants to do in space: missions to land on the Moon and Mars, orbital data centers, and next-gen Starlink.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX conducted 165 launches with the Falcon 9 rocket (no Falcon Heavy missions) last year, up from 134 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2024 and 96 Falcon flights in 2023. The company plans “maybe 140, 145-ish” Falcon launches in 2026, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier this year. “This year we’ll still launch a lot, but not as much,” she said. “And then we’ll tail off our launches as Starship is coming online.”
Letting off the gas
We’re beginning to see what the long, slow tail-off will look like. The changes are most apparent at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where SpaceX has launched the lion’s share of its rockets. Until last December, SpaceX launched Falcon 9s with regularity from two pads on Florida’s Space Coast—one at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and another a few miles to the south on military property at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
SpaceX is transitioning the site at Kennedy, known as Launch Complex-39A, to launch Starships. LC-39A is out of the rotation for Falcon 9 launches, although it remains available for occasional flights of the more powerful triple-core Falcon Heavy. SpaceX launched the first Falcon Heavy in a year and a half last week from LC-39A, and a handful more Falcon Heavy flights are on tap later this year.
Activity at SpaceX’s oldest launch site, Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral, is also waning. Last month, SpaceX retired one of its two Florida-based seagoing landing platforms from service for future use as a transporter to ferry Starships and Super Heavy boosters from SpaceX’s factory in South Texas to Florida. SpaceX is constructing a second Starship factory at Kennedy Space Center, but officials want to begin Starship flights from Florida before the factory is operational.
“With 39A becoming a primarily Falcon Heavy and Starship pad, we don’t actually need two operational droneships on the East Coast to maintain our Falcon manifest,” wrote Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, in a post on X last month. The other landing vessel in Florida can support a launch and recovery every four days, according to Dontchev, and some Falcon missions can return their boosters to land onshore.
But those four-day turnarounds are becoming rare at Cape Canaveral. Most SpaceX missions launch satellites for the company’s Starlink broadband constellation. The bulk of SpaceX’s Starlink missions will now depart from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, where Falcon 9s can launch from the same pad as often as every three or four days. For now, the new norm at Cape Canaveral will average about one Falcon 9 launch per week, approximately the same as SpaceX’s launch cadence at the Florida spaceport in 2023.
The Falcon 9 is not going away anytime soon. The rocket that made SpaceX the world’s most successful space company will remain operational at least as long as the International Space Station. The retirement of the ISS, previously targeted for 2030, is now unlikely to occur before 2032. The Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule are the only US vehicles available to transport crews to and from the station. The Space Force will also rely on the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy into the 2030s.
However, SpaceX will put Starship to work as soon as possible by launching upgraded Starlink Internet satellites. Eventually, SpaceX aims to tap Starship to launch nodes for an orbital data center constellation, a project forged by SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI, another Elon Musk company. NASA and SpaceX will also require an untold number of refueling launches each time Starship lands astronauts on the Moon.
File photo of a Falcon 9 launch from Space Launch Complex 4-East at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
Credit: SpaceX
File photo of a Falcon 9 launch from Space Launch Complex 4-East at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Credit: SpaceX
All in at Vandenberg
SpaceX is launching more often than ever at Vandenberg, some 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles. More than half of all of SpaceX’s launches so far this year have lifted off from the California spaceport. Last year, it was less than 40 percent, and in 2024, it was one-third. Sources tell Ars this trend is expected to continue this year, putting Vandenberg on pace to become SpaceX’s busiest launch site. It’s a remarkable turnaround for the spaceport on the hillsides of California’s Central Coast. In 2020, Vandenberg hosted just a single space launch.
Vandenberg may overtake Florida’s Space Coast—combining NASA- and military-owned launch pads—in launch activity this year, depending on how often other companies like Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance fly their rockets. The last time Vandenberg launched more rockets than Cape Canaveral was in 1987 and 1988, during the grounding of NASA’s Space Shuttle fleet after the Challenger accident.
Nearly 180 rockets took off from the Florida and California spaceports last year, including satellite launches and long-range missile tests. While those numbers may plateau or slightly decline this year, the overall trend points upward. How quickly the launch rates rise will largely hinge on when SpaceX’s Starship becomes operational.
“We see those rates potentially tripling in the near term, the next five years,” said Col. James Horne, commander of Space Launch Delta 30 at Vandenberg, in a roundtable with reporters last month.
Col. Brian Chatman, commander of the military unit overseeing Cape Canaveral’s launch range, said the Space Force is preparing for as many as 500 launches per year from Florida’s Space Coast by 2036. The growth will require new construction, access to utilities, and increased reliance on automation at the military ranges, which are responsible for ensuring public safety during rocket launches.
SpaceX aims to routinely launch Starships from multiple launch pads in Florida and Texas (it has not announced plans for a Starship pad in California), and last month, the Space Force selected Blue Origin to build a brand new launch pad for its New Glenn rocket on an undeveloped site at Vandenberg. Stoke Space and Relativity Space are building launch sites at Cape Canaveral. The only other orbital-class spaceport on federal property is at Wallops Island, Virginia, where Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, and Firefly Aerospace plan to base their rockets.
This doesn’t count privately owned spaceports, like SpaceX’s Starbase in South Texas, which operate outside the Space Force’s jurisdiction.
Lawyer on EEOC’s New York Times Lawsuit Has History Battling Discrimination Against Men
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a key achievement of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the federal agency tasked with protecting American workers from employment discrimination, sued the New York Times on behalf of a white man claiming the company discriminated against him based on his race and sex.
North was suspended as a college student over a rape allegation in a case that he claimed violated his civil rights; he has consistently denied the charges. North went on to do work arguing that Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination at federally funded institutions, has been used to discriminate against the rights of men.
North’s signature on the new lawsuit against the New York Times could mean he wrote it, said Chai Feldblum, a former EEOC chair.
Asked about North’s role, EEOC spokesperson Victor Chen referred The Intercept to the complaint.
The suit comes as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies across the country, including his administration’s efforts to use the EEOC to these ends.
The new EEOC suit, filed Tuesday on behalf of an unnamed man whose identity New York Magazine speculated about, alleges that the employee was passed over for a position because he is a white man.
The claimant applied for a job as a deputy real estate editor in January 2025 but, the lawsuit claims, despite meeting all the requirements for the position, he didn’t get it because he “did not match the race and/or sex characteristics NYT sought to increase in its leadership.” Instead, the job went to a multiracial female candidate who the lawsuit alleges was not qualified.
“There is no actual evidence that he was more qualified than her.”
Feldblum, the former EEOC chair, was skeptical of the agency’s legal argument.
“There is no actual evidence that he was more qualified than her,” Feldblum said. Of the EEOC, she said, “They’re putting out their best facts in this complaint, and the facts are pathetic.”
Particularly for leadership positions, she pointed out, there are many aspects that go into deciding who is the most qualified candidate.
“Their assertion that she was less qualified than him is based on their view of the facts,” she said. “We’ll see what the facts actually say.”
In a statement, the New York Times said it has merit-based employment practices.
“The New York Times categorically rejects the politically motivated allegations brought by the Trump administration’s EEOC,” said Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha. “Throughout this process, the EEOC deviated from standard practices in highly unusual ways. The allegation centers on a single personnel decision for one of over 100 deputy positions across the newsroom, yet the EEOC’s filing makes sweeping claims that ignore the facts to fit a predetermined narrative.”
Diversity Without Discrimination
The EEOC’s lawsuit claims that the company has “engaged in unlawful employment practices” since at least October 2024 through its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. It cites the company’s self-published diversity goals, including a 2021 document setting a goal for increasing Black and Latino leadership by 50 percent within four years.
The Times was making “employment decisions on the basis of race and sex to achieve its desired demographic goals,” the lawsuit alleges. “A necessary consequence of NYT’s intent to increase the percentage of non-White leaders would be a decrease in the percentage of White leaders.”
The assertion that the company has engaged in illegal racial and sex discrimination and is making employment decisions solely on those bases “is simply not borne out by the evidence,” Feldblum argued. The EEOC would instead have to have found evidence that hiring decisions were made expressly and intentionally based on such characteristics.
Instead, the actions the New York Times took are “the most basic, acceptable, legal ways to try to increase diversity in a workplace,” Feldblum said. “There is literally nothing illegal in anything that the EEOC has detailed.”
The only place where the Times could have potentially run into legal trouble, she said, was when it was requiring diverse candidate pools for jobs. But if done carefully, she said, that can follow the law as well — for example, by expanding a pool of candidates without removing any qualified white or male ones.
“One can include diversity as an employer without discriminating against white people,” Feldblum said.
Kalpana Kotagal, the sole Democratic commissioner on the EEOC after Trump fired the others contra statute, said she voted against authorizing the lawsuit against the New York Times “because I disagree with the substance of the case and don’t believe it’s a good use of scarce agency resources.”
She added that “a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), without more, is not evidence of discrimination.”
As a reporter at the Times told New York Magazine, “I’m sorry, there are plenty of white guys at the top of the New York Times. Not really something that’s holding you back.”
The complaint comes after EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas directly solicited complaints from white men alleging that they were discriminated against based on their race and/or sex. She has also instructed agency officials to focus on cases that are in line with her personal priorities, which include “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” and cases claiming reverse racism have been “accelerated through the process,” the New York Times recently reported, even though staff are struggling to find complaints with merit.
Feldblum argued that the lawsuit is “quite an inappropriate use of EEOC resources.” The agency’s staffing is currently at its lowest level in decades, so any focus on a particular issue comes at the expense of others.
She said, “It is truly a sad day for anyone who cares about civil rights to see what the EEOC is spending its resources on today.”
Yeshiva University President Says Faith Must Have ‘a Seat at the Table’ as AI Takes Shape
Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman says “the good AI” must beat “the bad AI” as YU expands in technology, draws students and faculty from elite universities where they felt unsupported after October 7, and answers antisemitism with “pro-semitism”
Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman does not talk like a university president under siege. At a time when antisemitism is surging, elite campuses are under scrutiny, artificial intelligence is rewriting the terms of public life, and parents are increasingly unsure what kind of world their children are inheriting, Berman sounds less alarmed than resolved. Kind in demeanor and gentle in speech, Berman nevertheless gives the impression of someone unafraid to say what he thinks—a deep thinker who comes across as authentic, genuine, and real. He speaks about turbulence the way some leaders speak about opportunity—not because he underestimates the danger, but because he believes institutions with deep roots are uniquely equipped to meet it. “We were made for this moment,” he says.
We were made for this moment
That confidence is not naïveté. Berman, now nearly nine years into the presidency of Yeshiva University (YU), says plainly that he could not have predicted what was coming. “There is no way I could have anticipated a whole host of challenges that would come, including COVID,” he says, calling the pandemic “pretty much a curveball.” YU, primarily based in New York City, was “the first university in the Northeast to actually have a student who was diagnosed with COVID.” Then came October 7 and the shock waves that rippled across campus life in America. But if the crises were unanticipated, his response to them was not. “My approach to all of the changes and challenges of these past years,” he says, “is where can you find the opportunity?”
Berman is adamant that YU’s role in this era is not simply to shield Jewish students from hostility, though that matters. It is to offer a model of moral seriousness at a time when too many institutions, in his view, have lost the will to speak plainly. He is direct on the subject of anti-Israel rhetoric. “Anti-Zionism is definitely antisemitism,” he says. He insists the reasoning is straightforward: if Israel alone is denied the right to exist as a Jewish state while Muslim and Christian states are treated as ordinary facts of international life, “that is a double standard. It is discrimination. And by definition, that is antisemitism.” The lesson he wants students to absorb is equally clear: they must learn “to have the courage to call it out and to stand for what is true.”
Anti-Zionism is definitely antisemitism
At the same time, Berman is careful not to reduce campus life to political combat alone. When controversial political figures in New York entered the broader conversation, he says YU itself has not felt a direct institutional impact. “We haven’t felt the effects of Mayor Mamdani and hasn’t had any implications for YU,” he says. But that practical distinction does not soften his larger conviction that students need moral clarity and a firm vocabulary for naming discrimination when they see it.
That phrase—moral clarity—runs through much of Berman’s vision. After October 7, as universities around the country struggled or refused to respond, he moved to organize. “Absolutely. It was very important. And it’s still very important,” he says of the effort to bring presidents and academic leaders together. His position continues to try to hold multiple truths in view at once: “We stand with Israel, with the Palestinian people who suffer under Hamas’s cruel rule in Gaza, and all people of moral conscience.” The line matters because it rejects both terrorism and the flattening habits of campus discourse, where sympathy for civilians can become a pretext for erasing moral distinctions.
Out of that effort came an alliance that Berman describes with pride. “We created a coalition of universities united against terrorism,” he says, and “we had over 100 universities who signed up to join us.” The significance of the coalition is not merely numerical. It is symbolic. “Especially when there were some universities that were silent in the face of these atrocities, it was very important for the country to know that there are good universities too,” he says. “There are presidents who know how to speak with moral clarity.”
The upheaval on campuses has also reshaped where students are choosing to study. Berman says that after October 7, YU saw “a sharp increase in transfer students.” Over time, he adds, there has been “a significant increase in the percentage of students from our feeder schools who would otherwise have gone to these elite universities” but are now choosing YU instead. He is careful to note that the University’s growth did not begin with the current crisis; he says students had already begun recognizing “the excellence of our education.” Still, he offers one figure that captures the shift: early decision applicants are up “over 70% over the past two years.” Those are, he says, “the top students who would otherwise have applied early decision to Ivy League universities.”
What is changing at YU, however, is not simply a matter of student recruitment. Berman describes a broader realignment that includes faculty as well. In fields central to the technological future, he says, professors are increasingly coming to YU after feeling exposed or unsupported elsewhere.
“It’s a story that’s not yet being told,” he says, “which is not just students who want to leave those universities and come to YU, but the faculty.” He ticks through examples: “the former chair of math at Rutgers left Rutgers,” a former chair of electrical engineering at Cooper Union is joining Yeshiva, and “we have a professor from MIT who left MIT in computer science to come to Yeshiva.” The reason, he says, is that after October 7, many discovered that “their peers at best were indifferent to who they are.”
This helps explain why Berman speaks about engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence with such urgency. YU, he says, “just opened up an engineering track,” backed by a major donation, and is expanding aggressively into the disciplines shaping the next century. “We’re becoming experts in it,” he says of AI. He points to new faculty in math and computer science, and says YU is “at the forefront of research in AI, including in tech health fields.” For Berman, the point is not simply to keep up but to help define the field. “Being at the cutting edge of knowledge is essential,” he says.
Yet Berman does not regard artificial intelligence as merely a technical frontier. For him, it is a moral one. Students must learn to use AI “positively and ethically with values,” he says, and universities cannot afford to treat such questions as peripheral. “AI itself is obviously morally neutral,” he says. “The question is how it’s deployed, and what are the policies, and what are the innovations that we’re going to afford.” That formulation matters because it places responsibility not on the tool itself but on the people who build, regulate, and normalize it.
He is especially concerned with the role AI now plays in misinformation and social distortion. “This is going to be the key issue of the age,” he says, describing the challenge as learning “how to both separate out what’s fake and what’s real, and to be inside the conversation as AI is being formed, so that we do not actually meet a dystopian future, but one that has our values.” YU recently hosted a “hack the hate” event, he notes, that brought together innovators and policy figures, including “the chief policymaker at Meta,” to explore how AI can identify falsehood. “The good AI,” he says, must learn to beat “the bad AI.”
Still, Berman’s questions about AI reach far beyond detection tools and policy frameworks. He speaks of the subject in almost civilizational terms, which is why he has moved to place YU in global conversations about ethics and technology. About a year and a half ago, he traveled to Hiroshima “to sign on to the Rome Call of AI and Ethics.” There, he found himself in a room with faith leaders not only from monotheistic traditions but from Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Shinto communities as well. What stays with him from that gathering is a scene both humorous and revealing. A Shinto priest told him that “there’s a spirit inside of everything,” including AI. Berman turned to a Buddhist monk seated nearby and asked, “Is there a Buddha in AI?” The monk answered, “Rabbi, that’s why I’m here to find out.” When Berman followed up later—had he found the answer?—the monk replied, “I need two more conferences.”
Global faith, political and industry leaders meet at the AI Ethics for Peace Conference, Hiroshima, Japan, July 2024. (IBM)
The anecdote lightens the mood, but Berman’s conclusion is serious. “You have to be in the leadership,” he says. “You have to have a seat at the table in terms of how it’s unfolding right now.” YU is now part of “a consortium of other faith-based universities right now with BYU and Notre Dame” focused on how faith is represented in AI. He sees that work as indispensable. “We don’t know where the world is going,” he says, “but YU has a seat at the table to help bring the Jewish values and the thousands of year tradition that we have in our Talmudic texts and our biblical texts to inform where the future is going to go with AI.”
For Berman, the same principle extends beyond technology into public truth itself. One of the central burdens of our times, he suggests, is not just that lies travel quickly, but that truth is often overshadowed by drama. “The truth will win out at the end,” he says. Then he sharpens the point with a line that feels almost like a creed: “one truth will spread the light that will shatter a thousand lies.”
But if truth is to prevail, it needs people willing to tell it. Berman does not believe truth is collapsing so much as being underreported. “I wouldn’t say it’s failing,” he says. “I think that what I see in the world is actually it’s spreading.” The problem, in his view, is that public attention is skewed toward hatred and conflict. “We are so intrigued by the anti,” he says, because hate and violence “always makes the news.” What is missed is what he calls “the common story,” namely, “the love and appreciation for Jews, for Israel.”
That hidden story, from his perspective, has been one of the most surprising and consequential elements of recent years. When he began organizing support after October 7, some of the first people he reached were leaders at faith-based universities. One Christian leader told him, “Ari, whatever you write, I’m going to sign. You don’t even have to show it to me. I’m with you.” Another, the president of a historically Black faith-based university, offered him a biblical image that Berman clearly treasures. “The Jews win when Moses holds his hands up,” she said, “but who is holding Moses’s hands up? It’s Aaron and Hur. Let us be your Aaron and Hur. You can lean on us.”
What these exchanges have revealed to him is not merely support in a difficult season, but the possibility of a larger coalition grounded in faith and mutual respect. “We have friends and allies in the United States and around the world,” he says. And those allies are not limited to Christians. Reflecting on the coalition, he says, “It’s not just Christians, we have Muslims and Hindus, like we have religions and people of faith all throughout the world who appreciate the Jewish tradition.” This, he argues, is the story too often left untold: “We’re so focused on antisemitism that we’re not doing the pro-semitism.”
That conviction has also shaped YU’s outreach to Christian communities eager to understand Judaism more deeply. Berman says he recognized a real search in the Christian world to understand Judaism from authentic Jewish voices and saw in that search an opening. “We should extend ourselves outward,” he says. The result has been “enormous interest” from students in the United States and abroad, including partnerships with “two Christian universities in South Korea.” YU is not only collaborating with them; “we actually have classes in Korean that we’re teaching Jewish texts in Korean.” Tying together language, technology, and theology, Berman asserts that “especially with AI, [we] have an opportunity to reach everyone in their own language and bring the world back to a time of fellowship.”
Korean delegation meets with faculty from the Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies in a cross-cultural exchange. (Courtesy Yeshiva University)
He even sees evidence of this growing fascination with Jewish tradition in unexpected places. He notes he had “very strong positive conversations with Charlie Kirk,” whom he describes as one of the possible “harbingers” of a movement among some Christians toward Sabbath observance and a deeper engagement with Jewish ethics. Berman recalls Kirk wanting to visit YU and speaking admiringly of the university. Kirk, known for saying college is a scam, once began talking that way to one of Berman’s sons before realizing whose son he was addressing. He quickly amended his position by saying, “College is a scam except Yeshiva.” Beyond the joke, Berman says, Kirk “believed so deeply in the Jewish tradition as a basis of ethics and morality and as a means to inform the entire conversation, certainly in the United States.”
The through-line in all of this is Berman’s conviction that tradition is not a brake on modernity but a source of strength within it. He says YU’s philosophy, since its founding, has been to be “deeply rooted and forward-focused.” He sees modern instability not as proof that the old foundations have failed, but as proof of how badly those foundations are needed. “The fact that we are built on 3,000 years of tradition gives us a stability,” he says, and allows the university “to be nourished by the past generations, as opposed to being cut off from them.”
He reaches for an old rabbinic image to explain the point: “a tree without roots easily breaks in torrential winds. But a tree with roots can withstand times of great turmoil and instability.” The lesson, as he applies it to YU, is twofold. “The first step is to be deeply rooted,” he says. “But the second step is to be forward-focused.” That means “not to shy away from the technological changes and innovations, but to lean in.” For Berman, this is not a balancing act between two competing loyalties. It is a single philosophy: “rather than seeing tradition as conflicting with innovation, to see it as forming the basis that allows you to lead positive, progressive, and flourishing lives.”
This has implications not just for college students, but for younger children and the parents trying to raise them in a digitally saturated age. “Parents today are worried, and rightfully so,” Berman says. “We’ve never seen children who’ve had such exposure to what these kids have,” and they are being raised “digitally native” in an environment that can intensify “mental health and anxiety.” He says he shares those concerns, and he invokes a conversation with Jonathan Haidt to explain why he believes the answer is not simply technological regulation or educational reform. “The answer actually is rooted in tradition.”
Berman recounts Haidt’s metaphor of a world filled with toxins, in which some cities are protected by a bubble that allows families to flourish. “Those bubbles are tradition and faith,” he says. Communities with a moral center are able “to navigate and sort of filter out the bad toxins to allow the good things to come in.” Without that rootedness, modern life becomes “truly a dangerous world.” With it, students can move confidently into contemporary professions, from computer science to other cutting-edge fields, because “they’re not hiding from progress,” but are “rooted in who they are.”
If Berman’s vision sounds expansive, it is because he is already looking beyond the present moment. He mentions speaking in Dubai on Holocaust Memorial Day, being “the first as an American and Israeli to speak at the [US presidential] inauguration,” and participating in faith events more broadly, each appearance part of a wider effort to place Jewish ideas into global conversations. He is guarded about specifics but clearly energized by what he sees coming next. “We have actually a lot planned,” he says.
Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman (C), president of Yeshiva University, delivers a benediction as US President Donald Trump (L) and former US President Joe Biden (L) listen during President Trump’s inauguration ceremony in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, Jan. 20, 2025. (Shawn Thew/Pool via Reuters)
Some of those plans, he suggests, are tied to a changing geopolitical landscape. “After the Abraham Accords, we had a lot of possibilities that were a little held back after October 7, but now we’re able to lean in on,” he says. He expects “a lot of Jewish connection with countries throughout the world that otherwise, in the past, would have been very reluctant to partner with the flagship Jewish university.” He also sees YU moving further into research, not simply consuming existing knowledge but producing it. “As we grow in excellence in research, as we continue to not just study knowledge, but create knowledge, we’re finding incredible partnerships that will help society flourish deeply.”
That word—flourish—comes up often with Berman. It signals the difference between mere survival and something fuller, more ambitious. He is not only trying to protect a university or defend a community, but to argue for a larger model of human development: rooted, ethical, technologically literate, intellectually serious, and open to partnership. In a public culture that often treats faith as either private comfort or political identity, Berman is making a different case—that religious tradition, seriously lived, can be a source of institutional confidence, cultural clarity, and civic repair.
The future of Yeshiva is bright
“The future of Yeshiva is bright,” he says. It is the sort of line many university presidents might offer. But for Berman, it carries a broader aspiration. YU is not simply trying to navigate an age of fracture. It is trying to show that ancient commitments and future-facing ambition need not cancel each other out. If anything, he suggests, each may be impossible without the other. “We’re looking to build a better world for all.”
