Exclusive: Drug users face felonies and prison under Prop 36, with analysis showing racial disparities and little help
California prosecutors have filed nearly 20,000 drug possession felony cases under a tough-on-crime measure passed in 2024. But despite promises to get people into services, the vast majority of those arrested have not received drug treatment, state data reveals.
Proposition 36, a state ballot measure, enacted harsher penalties for minor theft and drug offenses, with proponents pledging the crackdown would lead to “mass treatment to keep people alive, out of jail, and off our streets”.
Continue reading...Longtime Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes: Nearly a trillion dollars has been wiped from software stocks in 2026, with hedge funds making billions shorting Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian. At FOSDEM 2026, cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg shut down his bug bounty program after AI-generated slop overwhelmed his team. A new article on HackerNoon argues that most commercial SaaS could inevitably become OpenSource, not out of ideology but economics. The author points to Proxmox replacing VMware at enterprise scale and startups like Holosign replicating DocuSign at $19/month flat as evidence. The catch, the article claims, is that maintainers who refuse to embrace AI tools risk being forked, or simply replicated from scratch, by those who do.
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Trump pick to replace Kristi Noem signaled he avoid her mistakes but defended president’s immigration campaign
Markwayne Mullin defended his ability to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and expressed regrets for comments he made about a US citizen killed by immigration agents at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, which began on an unusually quarrelsome note when a fellow Republican senator accused him of encouraging violence.
Donald Trump earlier this month nominated Mullin, a first-term Republican senator from Oklahoma, to lead DHS, after the president ousted Kristi Noem amid public blowback against the administration’s aggressive approach to its mass deportation agenda and the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Continue reading...After 17 months of negotiations, the WNBA and its players have agreed to a new CBA. From salaries to revenue sharing, here’s what’s changing and why it matters
The WNBA and its players’ union (WNBPA) have reached a verbal agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement, ending 17 months of negotiations after players opted out of the previous deal and averting mounting fears of a strike.
The agreement would be the sixth in league history and is being framed by both sides as a major step forward for player empowerment and the league’s growth.
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Committee chair Rand Paul and Markwayne Mullin exchange heated remarks at hearing to confirm new homeland security secretary
Rand Paul seemed immediately frustrated with Mullin as he opened the hearing. While he was speaking, he suggested that Mullin wasn’t listening to his remarks, during which he pushed Trump’s nominee on his vote against Paul’s amendment to stop all funding for refugee welfare programs.
“You decided to transfer the blame. You told the media that I was a ‘freaking snake’ and that you completely understood why I had been assaulted,” Paul said, referring to when he was attacked by a neighbor in Kentucky in 2017, which resulted in Paul breaking several ribs and developing pneumonia.
Continue reading...Dave Knott shares a report from the New York Times: On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, said Drs. Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard had won this year's Turing Award for their work on quantum cryptography and related technologies. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the two scientists will share. [...] The two met in 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic just off the north shore of Puerto Rico. They were taking a break while attending an academic conference in San Juan. Dr. Bennett swam up to Dr. Brassard and suggested they use quantum mechanics to create a bank note that could never be forged. Collaborating between Montreal and New York, they applied Dr. Bennett's idea to subway tokens rather than bank notes. In a research paper published in 1983, they showed that their quantum subway tokens could never be forged, even if someone managed to steal the subway turnstile housing the elaborate hardware needed to read them. This led to quantum cryptography. After describing their new form of encryption in a research paper published in 1984, they demonstrated the technology with a physical experiment five years later. Called BB84, their system used photons -- particles of light -- to create encryption keys used to lock and unlock digital data. Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, the behavior of a photon changes if someone looks at it. This means that if anyone tries to steal the keys, he or she will leave a telltale sign of the attempted theft -- a bit like breaking the seal on an aspirin bottle.
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If Europe is sucked into this illegal conflict with Iran, public support for rearmament could collapse – and only Putin will benefit
Once again, Donald Trump has deployed Nato as leverage to get the US’s European allies to submit to his will. After launching an unprovoked war against Iran, in response to which Tehran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz to shipping has sent oil prices soaring, Trump now wants his Nato allies in Europe to step in to help clean up his mess. Europeans should do nothing of the kind.
Trump’s war of choice with Iran is not going well. Iran has retaliated by targeting US assets and allies in the Gulf. At least 13 US service members have so far been killed in this conflict – a figure dwarfed by more than 1,200 civilian Iranian deaths. The US has spent $16.5bn on just the first 12 days of the war, more than its total humanitarian assistance budget for 2024. Prolonged high oil prices could lead to a recession in Europe and parts of Asia.
Armida van Rij is a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform
Continue reading...National intelligence director says Iran’s conventional military projection capabilities had been ‘largely destroyed’
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence who in 2019 was selling “No War With Iran” T-shirts, told the Senate intelligence committee on Wednesday that US strikes on Iran had been a strategic success.
“I’d like to remind those who are watching what I am briefing here today conveys the intelligence community’s assessment of the threats facing US citizens, our homeland and our interests,” Gabbard told the committee, “not my personal views or opinions”.
More details soon…
Continue reading...Committee chair Rand Paul and Markwayne Mullin exchange heated remarks at hearing to confirm new homeland security secretary
Rand Paul seemed immediately frustrated with Mullin as he opened the hearing. While he was speaking, he suggested that Mullin wasn’t listening to his remarks, during which he pushed Trump’s nominee on his vote against Paul’s amendment to stop all funding for refugee welfare programs.
“You decided to transfer the blame. You told the media that I was a ‘freaking snake’ and that you completely understood why I had been assaulted,” Paul said, referring to when he was attacked by a neighbor in Kentucky in 2017, which resulted in Paul breaking several ribs and developing pneumonia.
Continue reading...Thomas Abt, a researcher, says online taunts and barbs from songs can intensify shootings in underserved areas
Whenever the US tries to make sense of a high-profile mass shooting, it inevitably turns to one source: the social media accounts of the suspect. Law enforcement, reporters and the public scrutinize these digital footprints, hoping to find clues about a possible motive.
Less explored, however, is the role social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube play in shootings that happen in underserved Black and Latino communities and are scarcely covered outside of local crime news. These shootings, Thomas Abt, the lead author of a new Violence Reduction Center white paper on the topic told the Guardian, are increasingly being fueled by online disputes and barbs being traded back and forth in songs and music videos and shared online.
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