Microsoft senior software engineer Raymond Chen has explained what Windows is doing when you hold down the power button, and shared a story about the time a customer accidentally created a Goth Mode for Windows 3.1.

There's a section in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (actually, page 116 of this writer's dog-eared copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) in which Zaphod Beeblebrox observes of a ship's interior: "Every time you operate one of these weird black controls that are labeled in black on black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it."

The same turned out to be true of a user who called Microsoft customer support to complain that after Windows 3.1 booted up, all that remained after the product logo disappeared was a blank screen.

It turned out the customer liked black a little too much and, according to Chen, made themself a Goth theme.

The customer support engineer on Microsoft's end pieced it together. The customer had, according to Chen, "set the wallpaper color to black. They set the title bar color to black. They set the button color to black. They set the window background color to black. They set the window text color to black.

"Every possible color you could pick in the Colors control panel was set to black."

We suspect the mouse pointer, at least, would have stuck around, unless the customer had also managed to change some settings around this. And then there are the icons… However, Windows 3.1 was a long time ago, and this writer's attempts at theming then were the consequences of growing up in the '70s and '80s, which resulted in some interesting neon, orange, and brown combinations.

As for Goth mode, Chen said, "Once you get yourself into this situation, it's hard to get out because you can't see anything." One solution he suggested was deleting the [colors] section from the win.ini file.

Chen told the anecdote as a coda to the question - what exactly is modern Windows doing when you hold down the power button on a PC? According to Chen, after eight seconds of holding the power button, the Windows kernel realizes a forced power-off is happening and tries to take a kernel dump for diagnostics.

He explained that the kernel dumps were classified by Microsoft as "long power button hold" (LPBH) failures, with one of the bits of information captured indicating if all the pixels on the screen were black. The video driver might therefore be the culprit. Or whatever was responsible for drawing to the screen.

Today's Windows struggles with dark mode. But in the dim, distant past, every pixel being black might mean the user was either Hotblack Desiato or had done something very silly indeed. ®

There's a ridiculously simple test you can use to figure out whether AI mandates at a given company are well-considered, or are being shoved out the door by out-of-touch buffoons: What happens when an engineer documents that AI made a task worse? Are they taken seriously, or are they marginalized and eventually managed out?

Conveniently, this week Amazon published a treatise by Terk Terkowitz, a VP/Distinguished Engineer/Final Boss of Their Independent Contributor Technical Career Track, on the role of the developer in the age of AI. It was originally an internal missive sent to their software engineers and their managers back in September, which is an interesting lag for a document that sounds this confident. It also maps exceedingly well to what other organizations are struggling with.

I think it's a good document, but I can't help but view it with a somewhat cynical eye. I see it as an attempt to make the future of the profession of software engineering feel less bleak. And it's feeling mighty bleak for a lot of folks right now.

This treatise comes at a time of dramatic upheaval. Tech as an industry is no stranger to change (usually at 3AM, heralded by the pager), but something about the current AI-ification of the world strikes many of us as fundamentally dissimilar from previous revolutions. Folks are scared about their career prospects. "Should I give up tech and get into farming?" is a sincere question multiple people have asked me. I don't know! Tech is already a goat rodeo, so you've got a leg up if you do?

This anxiety isn't theoretical. In May, Amazon wisely shut down KiroRank, an employee-built cash incineration leaderboard that ranked people by token usage, after the obvious thing happened: people spun up junk tasks to climb the ranks. This is now called "tokenmaxxing," and the Terkowitz treatise specifically calls it out as being at odds with "frugality." Meta did the same thing with "Claudenomics" and 85K employees that same week. And Amazon reportedly announced another 250 job cuts this week. I can't tell you that these things are related. But I can tell you that every engineer who read the memo assumes that they are.

This document contains a lot of great stuff. I have a tremendous level of respect, both personal and professional, for Amazon's Principal Engineering community; I'm led to understand that that respect may not be reciprocated, but that's okay. I am, by their standards, a lapsed engineer who ran away to join the circus as one of its lesser clowns.

Terkowitz's memo emphasizes customer outcomes and engineering judgement, two things I would absolutely not delegate to AI any time soon. (Note: I am writing this in October of 2026, with the full understanding that previous comments on the capabilities where AI falls short tend to age like fine milk.) It documents work that (today) AI tools aren't improving. That's way better than assuming that every objection to AI inherently comes from some self-interested Luddite who's scared of being replaced. It also says something smart about measurement: look at the 90th percentile of AI adoption, at those teams burning the most tokens, and check whether their delivery actually went up commensurately. This is great! Shout it from the rooftops; we should all be doing such things.

But still, I wonder.

The memo says "If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing." Document it, bring it to your manager, work through the problem. I agree with every word of that! The question is whether anyone's promo doc is gonna survive citing it.

Here's what happens next. The memo concedes that input metrics are "deeply flawed," but then in the next paragraph says to go ahead and use them anyway, carefully. It then warns that non-adopters are falling behind. Those are three different positions within three sentences and they're not at all aligned with one another.

That's not muddled; I think it's cover. A manager can cite "a finding, not a failing" when a strong engineer skips the AI tool, and then cite "falling behind" when it's time to PIP someone. Both are congruent with their stated policy; you get to decide which interpretation you want to go with in a given situation.

How will managers handle justified AI non-use? Are promotion and performance decisions being made in a way that rewards these long term outcomes? Or are they instead taking the easy weasel way out, optimizing for what's cheap to measure, and rewarding tool activity? Because if you give me a metric, I will turn it into a target. So will an overwhelming majority of employees. When that happens, everyone loses — it's how KiroRank happened in the first place.

I write this after two days of attending GitHub Universe, where they talked about how agents start roughly 40% of PRs now. And yet, Jay Parikh's keynote argument was that useful output wasn't "more code," but rather completed outcomes: features shipped, bugs fixed, security issues addressed, loudmouth columnists silenced, etc. The problem here is that their entire business model cuts against that; they're billing in a model that charges customers on a consumption basis, not an output basis. There's nothing, today, that ties "AI spend" to "output that was worth the effort."

Which brings us back to Amazon. The memo says tokenmaxxing is at odds with frugality, and for Amazon's internal cost line, it is. Meanwhile AWS bills Bedrock and Kiro customers by the token. Inside the building, tokenmaxxing is a problem to be stamped out. Outside it, it's the revenue plan. ®

A temporary injunction in the coastline battle for beaches to be publicly accessible, not sealed off for private developments, is just a step in fighting what islanders call a tourism model that disadvantages Jamaicans

When the Australian human rights lawyer Eva Buzo emerged from the sea on to the shores of One Man Beach in Montego Bay on Sunday after her gruelling, nearly 11-hour-long swim, the thunderous pulse of welcome drums was drowned out by the chants of "free beach" from jubilant supporters.

Here in Jamaica's tourism capital, against a backdrop of jagged mountains and sunset-tinted clouds, Buzo - a celebrated marathon swimmer - said she was pleased to help support the important work of the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (Jabbem) and others fighting for free public access to Jamaica's beaches.

Today's bit of signage silage is either Windows 10 protesting that it is not part of London's Oxford Street pedestrianization, or someone failing to heed an alert before the public is made all too aware that things aren't going well…

Eagle-eyed Register reader Aaron Colwill spotted the sign outside the food hall entrance of a Marks & Spencer store on London's Oxford Street. It usually entices passersby through the doors with promises of treats inside, but today it appears to require a different kind of feeding. Disk space is running low.

Marks and Spencer (also known as M&S and Marks and Sparks) is no stranger to cyber whoopsies, having been the victim of an attack in 2025 in which crooks made off with customer data. Later that year, it reckoned cleanup costs would be about £136 million.

That's quite a lot, but not enough to buy a bigger hard disk for Windows 10, it seems. Storage prices have increased over the years, but surely not that much?

Colwill reckoned that Windows 10 21H2 LTSC was behind the problems. It could well be. While support for 21H2 ended for many users in 2023, Windows 10 LTSC 2021 will carry on until Jan 12, 2027, meaning engineers might have an exciting festive period ahead of them. Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 will receive extended support until Jan 13, 2032.

Either way, using Windows to advertise the Food Hall's wares seems slightly overkill. Simple posters, for example, never run out of disk space or attract the bork fairy's attention.

Perhaps they might use something that lacks the voracious appetite for storage that Microsoft's finest demands. According to the Windows biz, installing Windows 10 requires at least 32 GB of disk space, ideally more. It all seems a bit excessive for a cake-based caterpillar advert. Then again, when your operating system tends to have the resilience of a chocolate teapot, using it to advertise a chocolate insect might not be such a bad idea after all. ®

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — When it opened in early 2024, Engage Men's Health Clinic served as a free, one-stop shop for sexual health, gender-affirming medical care, and HIV prevention, testing, and treatment. Located within a short distance of seven universities, it was a place where many college students came before "they'd even had sex for the first time," a former worker told The Intercept. This made Engage a "high-impact" clinic for distribution of the HIV prevention drug PrEP. 

The building, on a tree-lined stretch of Reserve Street in Johannesburg, was adorned with the logo for the President's Plan For AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR; a rainbow-colored mural of Simon Tseko Nkoli, the gay anti-apartheid activist who helped start one of Africa's first Pride celebrations and who died of AIDS in 1998; and a sign for USAID saying the site was a gift "from the American people."

Today, it would be very hard to get help here, despite the welcoming-but-outdated signage. The clinic, once staffed full-time by professionals, closed abruptly during the first hours of the second Trump administration. Its replacement, an unrelated volunteer clinic called USpace, is open a mere four hours a week. They can do HIV tests here. But they have no HIV treatment, HIV prevention, or gender-affirming medication to distribute. 

South Africans account for about a fifth of the 41 million people living with HIV around the world. Out of a population of nearly 64 million, some 8 million people in South Africa are living with HIV, which is roughly 1 in 8. Managing their healthcare is a matter of international concern and requires global coordination and an immense local network. In a nation with such high rates of HIV, public health workers can't just wait for people to walk into clinics; they must proactively go to them. 

Yet over the last year and a half, this crucial work has been stymied. By Jacqueline Pienaar's count, HIV prevention groups have lost track of approximately 20,000 people with HIV in the Johannesburg and Pretoria region alone since U.S. President Donald Trump came back to the White House. "It used to be if someone didn't show up to get their medication, you'd go to them," said Pienaar, a principal investigator and global health specialist at the Aurum Institute, an NGO that offers medical care and contact tracing for the region's massive HIV-positive population. 

For years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded her work. Many of her patients were homeless, unemployed, and extremely poor. If they are unaccounted for and unmedicated, their viral loads will spike, all but assuring large transmission increases in a country that is already home to 20 percent of the world's HIV-positive population.

With U.S. funding vanished, South Africa now finds itself at risk of unmitigated HIV spread. 

Now, at organizations like the Aurum Institute, interviews with Pienaar and other workers reveal how funding cuts have devastated the care apparatus. Employment in HIV care and prevention has become precarious, and resources to slow HIV transmission are increasingly scarce. As elsewhere in the world, this is creating a crisis of unemployment for Black LGBTQ+ workers, which itself creates higher risk for HIV. Gender-affirming care, which is a crucial tool for preventing HIV, has disappeared almost entirely. 

Until the second Trump administration, the United States government sent a bit more than half a billion dollars a year to the Republic of South Africa. Of the $580 million the U.S. sent in 2024, 78 percent ($455 million) went towards HIV/AIDS.

Related Ebola Outbreak Rages After Trump Gutted Global Health Safeguards

But this money from America was hardly charity or lacking in self-interest. Because viruses know no borders, what happens with AIDS in the country with the most infections affects everyone on Earth. Controlling HIV in South Africa makes the entire world safer by preventing the emergence of dangerous viral mutations, reducing the global burden of infectious diseases, and strengthening health systems that detect future pandemics. Because viruses mutate rapidly when allowed to replicate unchecked, poorly controlled epidemics anywhere pose a direct threat to global health security.

South Africa also leads the world on another important front: medical research to address HIV. The republic is home to more clinical trials than any other country for seeing how medications of all kinds (including Covid vaccines) impact those with HIV. The profits of American drug companies depend on South Africans undergoing research trials. 

And after a year-and-a-half of dialing down HIV funding and only allowing it with many caveats which have caused major harm, the United States announced in June — during America's LGBTQ+ Pride Month — that it will end all HIV funding in South Africa. 

The ramifications of this will be felt globally for years to come.

They are already being felt by the millions of South Africans for whom HIV care has become harder and harder to find. And the effects are most severe for those already on the margins of South African society: those already living with HIV/AIDS, immigrants, trans women, and the poor, including thousands of newly unemployed HIV prevention workers.

On January 20, 2025, Trump signed two executive orders: 14169, "Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid," and 14168, "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."

Within hours of Trump taking the oath of office, the vast majority of workers for OUT LGBT Well-Being, which ran the Engage clinic, were told not to come in to work the next day nor to even open their work laptops again. According to one, 82 of 86 workers were let go. They would become part of the one-third of South Africans who are already unemployed.

Trump executive order 14155 formally pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in January 2026. Trump's cuts came after the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden reportedly failed to pay some $130 million in 2024 WHO dues, leaving the organization with a $1.9 billion gap. As a consequence, WHO implemented a 30 percent reduction in its workforce.

South Africa's response to HIV has been shaped by its two most famous citizens: Nelson Mandela and Elon Musk. 

Mandela, the first president of the republic, played a large role making sure combating AIDS was part of national policy, even guiding the writing of gay, lesbian, bisexual and even trans rights into the constitution (the first constitution in the world to do so). Musk, for his part, can take credit for exacerbating the plague. 

During Trump's first term, with Musk merely cheering from the sidelines, U.S. funding for LGBTQ+ health and HIV did not decrease significantly, at home or abroad. But ahead of Trump's second term, it was Musk who first recommended a U.S. "government efficiency commission" to Trump in 2024, planting the seeds for what was to come.

Related How Trump's Embrace of Afrikaner "Refugees" Became a Joke in South Africa

HIV funding nationally and globally have plummeted in Trump's second term through cuts largely enacted at the behest of Musk's short-lived Department of Government Efficiency. (These have been paired with an immigration policy so racist, over the last six months, literally the only refugees to enter the U.S. have been white South Africans.) 

Musk quit just a few months into his tenure in 2025, before DOGE shut down entirely. He reportedly took a swath of DOGE data with him, saw his wealth skyrocket, and became the world's first trillionaire. Reporting on mathematical projections about how many people have been or will be killed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, cuts he pushed have ranged from hundreds of thousands to about 10 million to even tens of millions. (When Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., accused Musk of executing "a death sentence for an estimated 4.5 million children around the world," Musk threatened to sue him.) 

"We have rights for trans women only on paper."

But not all harm results in immediate, quantifiable fatalities. HIV-related deaths usually take many years to occur, and South Africans who die of HIV, or due to an increasingly transphobic healthcare system, are unlikely to be mourned in any numerically comprehensive database.

In South Africa, being trans is not a crime — it's legally protected thanks to its 1996 constitution shaped by Mandela. And yet, as one trans HIV-prevention worker put it, "we have rights for trans women only on paper." Because trans care was largely being financed largely by USAID, PEPFAR, and CDC research, when U.S.-money disappeared, trans care went away — along with a lot of the much-needed HIV prevention for everyone.

In South Africa, LGBT Pride celebrations happen in the fall to connect gay history to the September 24 Heritage Day national holiday. 

At last year's Soweto Pride in the all-Black township where Winnie Mandela once lived, there were no corporate sponsors and zero presence from the U.S. Embassy or any U.S.-based NGOs. 

It was here The Intercept first met Sibonelo Ncanana Trower, the worker at OUT LGBT Well-Being which had run the now-shuttered Engage clinic. He and his partner were wearing matching rainbow sweaters. Nearly nine months after being laid off, he was still looking for work — and it was one of his first times going to a gay event.

Though he was no longer getting paid, Sibonelo still was doing a lot of public health work for free, out of a sense of communal responsibility.

"If you go on Grindr — and I don't suggest that you do, it's too dangerous," Sibonelo said, "you will see many of my former colleagues offering services." People who had been trained as social workers and peer educators to provide care to sex workers were now working as sex workers. In an email to The Intercept, Sibonelo said he is back to working at OUT as of early June.

As the festivities continued, the almost entirely Black crowd danced to a mix of hip hop, rap, and dance hall on a grass field, bordered on one side by tents. Under the banner "The Queer Nation Has No Borders," a group of volunteers and workers at the SafePlace International tent welcomed LGBTQ+ migrants and refugees and offered help for finding housing and work.

While Europeans are routinely worried about African refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to Greece or Italy, SafePlace explained that most migrants in Africa are not trying to leave the continent at all — and most queer and African migrants fleeing legal persecution head down to South Africa. They try to go south because they've correctly heard that South Africa is legally good for queer Africans and that they can claim asylum. But they also come because they've heard — rather incorrectly — that South Africans welcome migrants. (In recent decades, migrants have faced great hostility in South Africa, especially in the lead-up to 2025's G20 summit in Johannesburg, which Trump boycotted, and in increasingly bold xenophobic protests in 2026.)

Mpho is a lesbian from rural South Africa, and she spoke about a kind of refugee status few Westerners consider. Mpho explained that people who come from within South Africa to Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria or Johannesburg are often called immigrants, for their distinct cultures, languages (South Africa officially has 12 languages), and understandings of sexuality, gender, and being intersex. She herself knew she was different; but in her township, where there is not constant connectivity with mass media, she didn't know anyone like her until she came to a big city. 

Masi has had an even more challenging route. He is a trans man born in Zambia who made his way to South Africa, after surviving an arranged marriage and a community shunning.

Related DOJ Escalates War on Trans Youth Healthcare With Criminal Subpoenas

Mpho and Masi have both known trans people who have experienced extreme body dysmorphia, including trans men who have started to have periods again once they lost access to hormone replacement therapy due to the Trump-Musk cuts. They know someone who has gone into the public health system, had their doctor leave the room in the middle of a genital exam — and then return with a group of colleagues to laugh at their body.

This has led to a wave of depression and suicides among their friends. Masi has made the difficult decision to only "socially transition." He has chosen to dress and live as a man without hormonal or surgical intervention, because he does not want to begin any process that he can't finish, or which could be taken away from him for any time.

A few days later, Masi and Mpho drove into Johannesburg in a car early on a Saturday morning, decked out in "the queer nation has no borders" swag. With them was Mandi, a trans woman from Uganda. While Mandi waits for surgeries she plans to have, she has found a way to get estrogen — and stay on it — despite "the cuts."

The three friends were on their way to perform an "Act of Kindness," a part of SafePlace's program where queer and trans people perform service projects which confer dignity upon each other. (SafePlace is privately funded, and like other privately funded NGOs, its work and workers are stressed in trying to meet the profound additional need in the wake of U.S. and WHO cuts.) Masi, Mpho, and Mandi would be serving lunch at a shelter for displaced queer women in the Vaal area, south of Johannesburg.

Related By Slashing Foreign Aid, Trump Is Fueling the Spread of HIV in Uganda

Mandi grew up assigned as a boy but knew she liked other boys. Uganda only made being gay a capital offense in the last couple of years, but it has been illegal in various forms since at least 2014. As in many places, Mandi's legal problems did not come from random government surveillance; rather, she kissed a friend, whose parents found out, who told their school, who told the authorities, who arrested them both. This, in turn, outed Mandi to her family, who threw her out on the street. (She has never seen them again.)

Eventually, she made her way 5,000 kilometers by land to South Africa. 

Mandi had an idea that South Africa "accepted people like me," and while living on the streets of Cape Town (and then in the back of a restaurant where she did unpaid labor), someone pointed her to SafePlace. They found her a home, helped her get healthcare, and supported her in starting to live as a woman.

After crossing the Mandela Bridge, the roads shifted from highway to unpaved, red-clay-earth roads. They arrived in the Vaal and approached Orange Farm, an area well known to AIDS researchers for its high prevalence of HIV and for hosting many research studies, including the world's first trial to see how circumcision could affect rates of HIV transmission.

Mpho, Masi, and Mandi pulled up to a nice home, double wide in size, which had a rainbow flag on its fence. This was the shelter where they'd be serving lunch.

The group set up a precarious gas stove in the garage and began cooking massive amounts of chicken, vegetables, and pap, the South African grain dish that is akin to Cream of Wheat in America or polenta in Italy. 

Before the meal, Mandi got up in front of important community elders from the neighborhood and told her story. She implored them that the most important thing about having an LGBTQ+ child is to not kick them out and to stay connected. As a cautionary tale, she warned them that her elders now wanted her to return to Uganda to take care of them in old age — even after they'd abandoned her. 

Gwendolyn Dube lives in the Orange Farm section of the Vaal, in a tin-roofed shack with no running water or electricity, not far from the Steve Biko Elementary School. 

At 35, she has lived with HIV for more than 20 years; she was infected when she was raped as a child. She was among the first cohort of South African children to receive antiretroviral medication, or ARVs, in the early 2000s. 

For many years, she received free medical care and ARVs at a clinic across the street from Eyethu Orange Farm Mall. It encompasses many buildings across a large campus, and its rooms are simple and very crowded. A small pride flag hangs on a poll beside the South African flag — both are at half mast, for no discernible reason.

While this is not officially an HIV clinic, Orange Farm has one of the highest rates of HIV anywhere in the world, and HIV is part of most medical care here. In a room with racked, connected plastic chairs like a bus terminal, signs read: "Are you or your child on ARVs? Do you know your VIRAL LOAD?"

Moving through the hall full of hundreds of mothers with children carried on backs in baby wraps, Gwendolyn recalled how difficult it's become to get medicine. She used to get three months of treatment at a time, then two, then one. Then she was told there was no file for her. 

"I think they say that when they're overworked," she said. 

One of the workers behind the check-in desk told The Intercept that things have gotten much harder since the cuts: "We don't turn people away. But we don't have enough staff. People will come here and wait for 8, 10, even 12 hours — and sometimes they don't even get to see someone about what they need." (For people living in abject poverty, the loss of a day's earnings can be devastating — especially if they have HIV and have to face this risk regularly.) 

Another clinic worker shared that since the cuts, many visiting healthcare workers on U.S.-funded grants not only left, but also took their equipment with them.

"I used to send teams out every day. Now, it's maybe once a week."

The nurses of the clinic move with a military precision, even wearing military rank epaulets on their shoulders. The head of them is the "matron," who, when asked by The Intercept, denied that they've run out of any medication, or that they turn people away (a claim Gwendolyn and others disputed). The matron conceded that sometimes people have to wait so long "they will leave" — and maybe don't come back. She acknowledged that the clinic doesn't always have the specific medication people need when they need it. She also bemoaned that it's hard to keep staff, burnout and turnover are high, and that her mobile teams, which would go out into the townships, are severely limited. 

"I used to send teams out every day," she said. "Now, it's maybe once a week." 

Shon, a Black trans woman living with HIV, is still working at the Aurum Institute — at least for now. Unlike at the shuttered Engage clinic in Johannesburg, some staff remain in Aurum's Pretoria office, but they decreased in number. As a result, Aurum is offering fewer services and steering patients to the public health system, where trans people receive little necessary care.

Aurum used to be a "one-stop shop" for trans women, Shon said. But now, after the cuts, doctors visits are no longer free and hormone drugs aren't available at Aurum's popular Pop Inn clinics. "The ladies do come to get [HIV medication], others come to get PrEP, but they cannot get hormones," Shon said. "They're told to go to a public clinic," but "they don't know anything about trans women!" Shon added that patients will be addressed with derogatory and incorrect terminology at such locations. 

The stigma is too high to go to a public clinic, so Shon goes to a private doctor herself, when she can afford it. But getting hormones is now tough. While patients aren't being blackmailed as they are in Uganda, "a pharmacist might say, 'What do you need this for? No, I'm not giving it to you for that. I have other patients who really need it,'" Shon said.

Trans women are struggling, Shon said, recalling how she knew two "who were suffering from depression. One couldn't take hormones, became really religious," stopped hormones, and became suicidal. Another was suffering from liver problems after buying hormones on the contraband market, without the supervision of doctors.

Whenever transgender patients are taking contraband hormones via syringes which might not be sterile, they are being exposed to increased risks of contracting HIV and hepatitis — all because DOGE cuts took sterile medical care away from them.

Amid the devastating cuts to global HIV care, a potential breakthrough treatment is just beginning to reach patients. Lenacapavir, a new medication, promises to prevent HIV for six months with just one injection. But it comes with a prohibitively expensive $28,000-a-year price tag, making it out of reach for those who need it most.

Related Trump Gutted AIDS Health Care at the Worst Possible Time

Recently, the Global Fund for HIV, Tuberculosis, and Malaria struck a deal with pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences to produce the shot for $40 in limited quantities. Small amounts are headed to South Africa.

At an outdoor cafe under a massive tree in the picturesque city of Cape Town, Fatima Hassan, a legal and HIV scholar, blasted the pilot study coming to the republic.

The government's approach was "making the same mistake" of excluding those who were most affected: sex workers and men who have sex with other men.

The plan is to bring a one-time shipment of 40,000 doses — a woefully inadequate number for a country of more than 60 million people where about 1 in 5 adults is living with the virus is living with the virus. 

Worse, only a tiny fraction — 5 percent, or 2,000 doses — is to be set aside for testing on men who have sex with men.

None are going to be set aside for sex workers. 

And another problem: So many of the people who would be needed to distribute lenacapavir to the people who need it most — to the gay college students who used the shuttered Engage clinic on Joburg's Reserve Street, to the trans women who went to the Pretoria Pop Inn clinic — have been fired. Without those workers, can South Africa even distribute the medication?

Steps from the cafe, within sight of well-appointed apartments topped with electrified razor wire and the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, there is a shantytown of cardboard-and-wood dwellings, home to some 100 Black adults without anywhere else to live. 

A conservative estimate means that probably at least 20 of them were living with HIV, if not more. 

And because of Trump and Musk, the people who used to find them and treat them have been fired — and are at higher risk of HIV themselves.

The post How Trump Destroyed South Africa's Effort to Slow HIV Transmission appeared first on The Intercept.

Pedro Acosta won the MotoGP Tissot Sprint race Saturday afternoon at Petronas Sepang International Circuit, in Malaysia. Riding his Red Bull KTM Factory Racing RC16 on Michelin control tires, the Spaniard won the 10-lap race by 0.578 second.

Seven-time MotoGP World Champion Marc Marquez was the runner-up on his Lenovo Team Ducati Desmosedici GP26.

Marco Bezzecchi finished third on his Aprilia Racing RS-GP26.

Ai Ogura crossed the finish line fourth on his SuperFile Trackhouse Aprilia RS-GP26.

Fabio Di Giannantonio got fifth on his Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team Ducati Desmosedici GP26,

Marc Marquez leads the championship with 374 points, 19 ahead of Jorge Martin who has 355 points. Marco Bezzecchi is third with 322 points.

More, from a press release issued by MotoGP:

Acosta denies Marc Marquez and Bezzecchi in tense Sprint showdown at Sepang. Gold goes to the Shark as wet-dry conditions in Malaysia see the front group get their elbows out - and Ogura just lose out. 

Pedro Acosta (Red Bull KTM Factory Racing) is back on top! In a tense dry-wet showdown at the Petronas Grand Prix of Malaysia, the #37 got his elbows out at the front to fend off a three-strong group and take the spoils with half a second in hand. Championship leader Marc Marquez (Ducati Lenovo Team) takes second and increases his points lead after duking it out in the group, with key rival Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia Racing) locking out the Saturday rostrum.

Early leader Alex Marquez (BK8 Gresini Racing MotoGP) crashed out in the flag-to-flag encounter, which saw some riders gamble on a switch but the front group stay the course on dry tyres.

As the lights went out, it was a drag race in the first few metres but Alex Marquez managed to arrive into Turn 1 with some breathing space, taking the lead as instead, Ai Ogura(SuperFile Trackhouse MotoGP Team) attacked Marc Marquez and made it stick - sticky as it was around Turns 2 and 3 between the duo. Marc Marquez was shuffled down to third and before the end of Lap 1, front row starter Acosta had also barged his way past the #93. Bezzecchi, meanwhile, tailed his Championship-leading quarry.

Drama was in the air on Lap 2. As the field headed round the final sector, the white flag came out - indicating spots of rain on track and signifying that riders were allowed to pit to change bikes to their second machines - with wet setups.

Jack Miller (Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP Team) headed in to do just that - but when the Australian arrived at the box the machine wasn't prepped yet. Much more drama then hit as Alex Marquez, who had been holding a clear lead despite the spits of rain, suddenly slid out at Turn 14 - rider perfectly ok but bike cartwheeling across the gravel. His Sprint was over, and Ogura led.

The #79 had Acosta hot on his heels, with marc Marquez next up behind the duo. The rain was increasing around Turns 4, 5 and 6, but the rest of the track remained pretty dry. With the limited laps of a Sprint - and only six remaining - was it worthwhile to pit?

Joan Mir (Honda HRC Castrol), Iker Lecuona (BK8 Gresini Racing MotoGP) and Franco Morbidelli (Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team) took the gamble at the end of their Lap 4, as the lead trio continued onto Lap 5. Ogura leading Acosta, gaining metres where it was dry then losing a couple in the damp, with Marc Marquez maintaining a watching brief - and Bezzecchi gaining.

Support for Office 2021 ended on October 13, 2026 and there will be no extension and no extended security updates. All of your Office 2021 apps may continue to function. However, you could expose yourself to serious and potentially harmful security risks. We recommend you upgrade Office.

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Where do you go, what do you do, after you have created a riff for the ages? For Keith Kahn-Harris, that's the question that Boris & Sunn O)))'s Altar seems to ask

By any objective standard, the riff that dominates 'Etna', the opener to the Boris / Sunn O))) collaboration Altar, should be as celebrated as 'Walk', 'Whole Lotta Love' or 'Symptom Of The Universe'. As a song, there is little else to it but the riff - an extended intro that builds and locks into an audaciously simple chord sequence, eventually giving way to a lavishly elongated breakdown into a squall of guitar noise. It's 9 minutes and 50 seconds of metallic perfection, the apotheosis of focused guitar power, without...

The post Sacrificial Riffology: Reconsidering Altar by Boris & Sunn O))) appeared first on The Quietus.

Cop17, focused on protecting nature and restoring ecosystems, concludes on Saturday with critics saying system allows 'one idiot' to stall progress

Calls are growing for major reforms to UN biodiversity summits as countries fail to deliver on their promises to halt the destruction of the natural world, with governments likely on track to continue their record of never having met a target in the 34-year history of the convention.

Two weeks of negotiations at biodiversity Cop17 in Yerevan, Armenia, concluded on Saturday morning with countries vowing to redouble their efforts to meeting this decade's targets, which include commitments to protect 30% of the planet for nature, restore nearly a third of Earth's degraded ecosystems and reform $500bn (£410bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies.

More than 100,000 species are traded globally, whether illegally smuggled, sold as ornaments or in fisheries, timber and fashion industries, study finds

The number of plant and animal species in use or sold in the wildlife trade is more than twice as high as previously thought, researchers have discovered.

A study, published in Science Advances, warns that there are huge gaps in global assessments of how wildlife is traded, and that past estimates have failed to keep up with changes such as the boom in the online exotic pet trade, where sellers offering to post spider eggs across the world or sneak reptiles on to planes are just a click away.

Andrea Egan calls for same political focus on teachers, care sector and NHS and says Jackdaw decision 'a serious misstep'

The leader of the UK's biggest trade union has called for the same political focus to be given to NHS, education and care sector workers as there has been on those employed in North Sea oil and gas.

Andrea Egan, the general secretary of Unison, said too often public sector workers were treated as an "afterthought" by the government compared with the "massive political focus" on protecting jobs in the North Sea.

Voters are feeling the pinch of Trump's anti-climate agenda as energy costs rise, but a shake-up in Congress could shift things

If the polls can be believed, the US could see a blue wave in the midterms, giving Democrats a chance to take back the House and Senate, and gaining up to four governor's seats.

These wins could give Democrats new power to resist Donald Trump's anti-climate agenda, and to push forward climate policies at the state level. But if Republicans maintain power, it could further embolden Trump's "drill, baby, drill" agenda and leave intact his administration's latitude to continue dismantling regulatory measures his critics say protect public health and the planet.

Slimbridge, Gloucestershire: A chance meeting led me and my partner into an afternoon of discovery and generosity that is nothing like a certain YouTube documentary on birding

"What did you just see?" a bearded man asked, through the open window of his old Mini Cooper.

"Just some crows in that tree."

Nvidia is more than just a leader in graphics and AI hardware. It has also become a titan of the networking industry with bigger datacenter Ethernet sales than any other vendor.

In Q2, Nvidia's networking revenues topped $17.5 billion. To put that in perspective, Cisco's revenue during that same period, across all products, was $17.3 billion.

GPUzilla's arrival as a networking power feels sudden, yet Jensen Huang started working towards this status in 2019 with the $6.9 billion acquisition of long-time networking partner Mellanox .

At the time, Mellanox wasn't a big name in Ethernet switching. The company was mostly known for its ConnectX NICs and InfiniBand switches. Outside of high-performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing clusters, and a big deployment at Microsoft, InfiniBand wasn't widely deployed in hyperscale datacenters.

Buying Mellanox allowed Nvidia to reposition itself as a system builder, which means something different in the context of distributed compute. Nvidia understood its datacenter customers weren't interested in buying GPUs or even servers; they wanted clusters of systems. For that, Nvidia needed interconnect and Mellanox's InfiniBand fit the bill.

Over the years, Huang has talked about co-design - designing components and software to work together for specific set of jobs rather than to be the best GPU, switch, or NIC. Its work with Mellanox is a prime example of that approach.

According to Dell'Oro Group analyst Sameh Boujelbene, Nvidia's decision to integrate compute and networking became key to the company's success.

"Customers choose Nvidia for its tightly integrated compute and networking architecture, optimized for AI workloads," she told The Register. That integration makes deployments easier and speeds time to market.

Ben Mabey, CTO of pioneering AI and machine learning company Recursion, told The Reg Nvidia's integration schemes won him over.

Founded in 2013, nearly a decade before ChatGPT made AI the subject of dinner-table discussion, Recursion sought to apply machine learning running atop GPUs to the problem of drug discovery.

This work involved churning through massive datasets which, Mabey tells us, now total more than 50 petabytes in size.

"When you think about our workloads, it makes LLMs workload training seem easy compared to the amount of data that has to be moved around," he told The Register.

"In the biological space and sciences in general, it's not well appreciated just how big the data actually is," he added. "The internet's big, but in the grand scheme of things, the text that people are training on is actually pretty small, versus the petabytes of data that we have of these images."

Recursion's first cluster was a system called BioHive Zero which it cobbled together from GTX 1080 graphics cards originally intended for gaming systems. It used Ethernet to connect GPUs and ran into the limits of conventional networking.

So, for its second cluster, an A100-based machine with around 300 accelerators, Recursion went with Nvidia's Quantum InfiniBand switches and ConnectX NICs.

As Mabey explains it, buying its compute and interconnects from the same vendor vastly simplified optimization and troubleshooting. When Recursion reached out to Nvidia for help tuning the system, they were able to consider it as a single system, rather than discrete compute and networking resources. This level of integration had only previously been offered by boutique supercomputer builders like Cray or Atos (Eviden/Bull/whatever it gets renamed next).

Nvidia hasn't always listed networking revenue as a single line item in its financials. However, based on CFO commentary and a little back of the napkin math we can fill in the blanks.

Nvidia's networking revenues have grown steadily since the Mellanox acquisition. At two moments, its revenue shot up suddenly.

The first came in the 2023 calendar year (FY24) after OpenAI kicked off the AI gold rush with the launch of ChatGPT.

The second spread across 2024 and 2025, when Nvidia started selling Blackwell-generation GPUs and then started to ship them in large quantities.

"I see two major inflection points, both coinciding with the Blackwell platform ramp: the introduction of NVLink switches and the accelerating adoption of Spectrum-X Ethernet switches for AI back-end networks, driven by growing deployments of Nvidia GPU clusters and increased attach rates of Nvidia switches, NICs, optics, and cables," Boujelbene said.

It was around this time that users started deploy to Ethernet switches in large volume across Nvidia clusters. Elon Musk's Colossus supercomputer was one of the earliest examples.

As we reported at the time, the first half of the 200,000-chip H100 and H200-based cluster came online in 2024 and, at the time, was among the largest ever clusters deployed using Nvidia's Spectrum-X Ethernet switches.

Meta has also made extensive use of Nvidia's Spectrum switches in its own training clusters, including at its million-GPU Prometheus site in New Albany, Ohio.

There are a couple reasons Nvidia's Spectrum-X offering is doing so well.

First, through a combination of Spectrum Ethernet switches, superNICs, and some clever software optimizations, Nvidia was able to replicate many of the qualities that made InfiniBand so attractive while also benefiting from significantly higher radix and interoperability.

Ethernet switches, including Nvidia's own, have historically offered more ports. The higher the radix, the fewer switches are necessary to support a cluster at a given port speed.

This often gets misconstrued to mean that InfiniBand can't scale beyond clusters of a certain size, which isn't necessarily the case. But for clusters exceeding a certain number of GPUs, Ethernet is often more economical because it requires less equipment while achieving similar utilization.

That said, Nvidia's Spectrum-X isn't exactly unique. Broadcom, Cisco, AMD and others have managed to achieve utilization similar to InfiniBand through various investments in smartNICs and switches.

Nvidia's main differentiator, as Mabey and Boujelbene noted earlier, is the level of integration between the compute and networking.

Then Blackwell hit the market, enabling much greater scale and creating a surge in Nvidia's networking revenue.

Prior to Blackwell, Nvidia's NVLink and NVSwitch interconnect tech had largely been limited to single systems with up to eight GPUs. With the launch of the GB200 NVL72, these NVSwitches were broken out into dedicated appliances. (And yes, we remember GH200 NVL256 and NVL32, but from what we can tell these were never shipped in any meaningful volume, if at all.)

For every NVL72 rack system sold, Nvidia also sold nine NVSwitch trays, which enabled the system's six dozen GPUs to function as a single enormous GPU. This effectively guaranteed steady networking revenue growth: even if customers didn't buy Nvidia's scale-out switches, if they wanted NVL72 racks, they were automatically buying NVSwitch.

"We estimate that NVSwitch now accounts for roughly one-third of Nvidia's networking revenue, up from virtually zero less than two years ago," Boujelbene told El Reg. "This underscores how quickly NVLink switching has become a major growth engine for Nvidia's networking business."

Nvidia is now moving to grow its networking business even further with a new licensing program.

Until recently, Nvidia's NVSwitch tech was limited to its own accelerators. However, with the introduction of NVLink Fusion early last year, Nvidia opened the interconnect tech up to third parties to license.

Many chip designers, including Marvell, Qualcomm, Arm, Fujitsu, MediaTek, and d-Matrix, have announced plans to develop CPUs and XPUs using NVLink Fusion. The adoption of the interconnect opens the door to additional NVSwitch sales, as the chips using NVLink Fusion still rely on them for chip-to-chip communications, and there's no other place to get them, as Nvidia has yet to license out NVSwitch.

"NVLink Fusion allows Nvidia to extend its networking footprint beyond its own GPUs into the rapidly growing custom accelerator market. I see it as a strategic move to capture a larger share of AI networking spending, even in clusters that do not use Nvidia GPUs," Boujelbene said.

Nvidia's networking ambitions don't stop there.

"Nvidia continues to pursue opportunities in emerging networking domains as network requirements evolve to keep pace with increasingly demanding AI workloads," Boujelbene added. "The latest example is scale-in networking, designed to address the new requirements of agentic AI, while innovations such as CPO will help overcome growing bandwidth, power, and scalability challenges." ®

Daniel Holgado earned pole position during Moto2 World Championship qualifying Saturday afternoon at Petronas Sepang International Circuit, in Malaysia. Riding his CFMOTO RCB Aspar Team Kalex on Pirelli control tires, the Spaniard turned a 2:02.875 to top the field of 28 riders.

Angel Piqueras was second-best with a 2:03.416 on his QJMOTOR - MSI Kalex.

Izan Guevara claimed the third and final spot on the front row with a 2:03.486 on his BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha Boscoscuro.

Row-two qualifiers included Aspar Team's David Alonso (2:03.491), ITALJET Gresini's Alonso Lopez (2:03.516) and Red Bull KTM Ajo's Collin Veijer (2:03.560).

American Joe Roberts finished the qualifying session 14th on his OnlyFans American Racing Team Kalex with a time of 2:04.133. 

More, from a press release issued by MotoGP:

Holgado soars to stunning Sepang pole with Gonzalez P9. Over half a second was the gap between the Aspar star and second-place Piqueras as Guevara earns P3 to head into Sunday with the upper hand in the title battle.

Pole position by 0.541s? That's unheard of when the topic is Moto2, but that's exactly the margin Daniel Holgado (CFMOTO RCB Aspar Team) clinched pole by at the PETRONAS Grand Prix of Malaysia after notching up a blistering 2:02.875 in a Q2 session that saw rookie Angel Piqueras (QJMOTOR - MSI) claim a career-best P2, and title-hunting Izan Guevara (BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha Moto2) stick it on the front row.

How significant that P3 will be for Guevara is unknown, but with World Championship leader Manuel Gonzalez (Liqui Moly Dynavolt Intact GP) riding wounded after his Friday crash and now starting from P9, the onus is on the rider 5.5 points away in the championship to pounce on Sunday.

Fronting the second row after coming through the jungle of Q1 is Colombia's David Alonso (CFMOTO RCB Aspar Team), with Alonso Lopez (ITALJET Gresini Moto2) and Dutchman Collin Veijer (Red Bull KTM Ajo) completing a rapid Row 2.

Alex Escrig (KLINT Racing Team) was another of the Q1 graduates; the Spaniard claimed P7 in Q2, as he and Daniel Muñoz (Italtrans Racing Team) sit ahead of Gonzalez on the third row. Right behind the title race leader on the grid? Third in the championship Ivan Ortola (QJMOTOR - MSI).

Moto2 qualifying results from Malaysia!

The post Moto2: Holgado Takes Pole Position At Sepang appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Maximo Quiles earned pole position during Moto3 World Championship qualifying Saturday at Petronas Sepang International Circuit, in Malaysia. Riding his CFMOTO Gaviota Aspar Team KTM on Pirelli control tires, the Spaniard topped the 25-rider field with a lap time of 2:10.396. 

Red Bull KTM Ajo's Brian Uriarte was the best of the rest with a 2:10.480, and home hero Hakim Danish claimed the third and final spot on the front row with a 2:10.529 on his AEON Credit - MT Helmets - MSI KTM.

Row-two qualifiers included IntactGP's David Almansa (2:10.571), Red Bull KTM Ajo's Carpe (2:10.604) and LEVEL UP - MTA's Matteo Bertelle (2:10.844).

More, from a press release issued by MotoGP:

Quiles grabs pole at Sepang while Danish takes Malaysia's first front row since 2012 in P3. The reigning Champion takes P1 at Sepang as Uriarte and Danish compete the front row.

Maximo Quiles (CFMOTO Gaviota Aspar Team) remains the rider to beat in Moto3 as he secured pole on a sweltering Saturday afternoon at the Malaysian Grand Prix, edging out Brian Uriarte (Red Bull KTM Ajo) and Hakim Danish (AEON Credit - MT Helmets - MSI) for the top spot. Danish takes the front row on home turf, however, becoming the first Malaysian rider to do so since 2012.

Q1

Guido Pini (Leopard Racing) led Q1 early with a 2'11.614s lap before a 2'11.4s from Adrian Cruces (CIP Green Power) rang in early to send the Italian to P2. Replacement rider Leo Rammerstorfer (SIC58 Squadra Corse) was on the receiving end of contact from Kiattisak Singhapong (Rivacold Snipers Team), earning a warning from the FIM MotoGP Stewards for the incident.

Farther up the order, Pini didn't improve his time in the session, but as it turned out, he didn't need to. Ryusei Yamanaka (AEON Credit - MT Helmets - MSI) took a spot in Q2 with the third fastest lap, just five hundredths behind the Italian's time. Snagging the final ticket into Q2, Marco Morelli (CFMOTO Gaviota Aspar Team) set a very late 2'11.708s, punching in just ahead of a pack of riders, including Valentin Perrone, who mistimed their final stint and didn't cross the lap in time to set a final lap.

Q2

Riders began throwing darts at pole position straight out the gate in Q2. Looking for his seventh top ten in a row, Matteo Bertelle (LEVEL UP - MTA) continued his shining form in qualifying sessions to sit pole early.

Moments later, Alvaro Carpe (Red Bull KTM Ajo) took P1 from Bertelle, before the #83's countryman David Almansa (Liqui Moly Dynavolt Intact GP) further raised the bar to 2'10.571s for first position on his third lap.

As the session ticked down to below two minutes, riders began their final stint, led by a three-rider convoy with 2026 World Champion Quiles, who set his eventual pole-winning time of 2'10.396 with his fifth lap. Pole position arrives as his first qualifying-leading time since Assen back in June.

Chasing the Champion across the line, Uriarte took P2, benefitting from the slipstream of both home hero Danish and the #28 ahead of them. Danish is forced to settled for third but it's an impressive front row start on home turf, his country's first since Zulfahmi Khairuddin back in 2012.

Despite earning P2 with his fifth lap, Uriarte crashed at Turn 2 on the subsequent lap, moments before Almansa saw his session ended similarly early as he ran wide at Turn 4 on his final run. His prior 2'10.571s time held, however, for P4 to lead row 2. Carpe will set off behind him, his time just three hundredths slower than the seven-time 2926 pole sitter, with Bertelle to close row two tenths farther back.

Australian Joel Kelso (GRYD Racing) clinched P7 just a hundredth behind the Italian, while Indonesian rider Veda Pratama (Honda Team Asia) will start eighth due to a 2'10.861s time only six thousandths behind the #66.

Adrian Fernandez (Leopard Racing) and David Munoz (Liqui Moly Dynavolt Intact GP) closed out the top ten with the best pair of times in the session within the 2'11s range. Fernandez led the pair of Spaniards home on Saturday with just three hundredths separating Muñoz from the #31.

See the full Moto3 Quali results

The post Moto3: Quiles Claims Pole Position In Malaysia appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

MotoGP standings after Sepang sprint:

• Read more about 2026 MotoGP Championship Standings After Round 19 Sprint, Sepang, Malaysia
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Results and summary of the MotoGP sprint at Sepang:

• Read more about 2026 Sepang MotoGP Sprint Result: Drizzling Some Drama
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Welcome to a special Saturday edition of Best of Bylines, featuring an article from one of our 10 UK national and regional publications, hand-picked by our editors-in-chief and delivered directly to your inbox.

This time we hand over to Kurdish-British writer, political analyst and North East Bylines contributor Greng Hassan for a thoughtful and personally informed analysis of arguments about immigration in the UK.

Stay tuned to the end of Greng's story for news on the latest Bylines Network Gazette, all about what it will take to build a better media.

I came to Britain in 2002. I have lived here long enough to watch this country tie itself in knots over immigration - the speeches, the targets, the promises, the panic. I have watched governments of both parties announce that this time, finally, they are going to get a grip. I have watched those announcements produce nothing except the next announcement.

I have also spent years working inside Britain's immigration system - not as a politician or a policymaker, but close enough to watch what it actually does to people. And what strikes me, every time, is not the scale of the problem. It is the scale of the dishonesty surrounding it.

Not dishonesty about the numbers. Dishonesty about the question itself. Britain's immigration debate has never really been about immigration. It has been about something else entirely - and until the country admits that, nothing will change.

The Conservative Party spent seventeen years in government promising to reduce net migration. They never came close. Under David Cameron, net migration rose. Under Theresa May, it rose. Under Boris Johnson, it rose. Under Rishi Sunak, it reached a record high of over 700,000 in a single year. The Rwanda scheme cost hundreds of millions of pounds and relocated four volunteers.

This was not incompetence. A party that governs for seventeen years and consistently fails to achieve its stated priority on a single policy is not unlucky. It is running a con. The Conservative Party needed immigration as an electoral instrument - a permanent problem that could always be blamed on someone else, always be promised away, and never actually be solved, because solving it would remove the instrument. The British public was told, year after year, that control was coming. It was not coming. It was never coming. Because the people making the promise had no intention of keeping it.

That is not a left-wing critique. It is arithmetic.

Labour's failure is different, and in some ways more troubling, because it comes wrapped in the language of compassion.

Labour represents millions of people from migrant and minority communities who understand, from the inside, what the hostile environment actually means - the landlord checks, the bank account closures, the Windrush letters. It also believes, or tells itself it believes, that it must appeal to a working-class electorate that polling shows wants firmer controls. The result is a party permanently at war with itself, producing policies that satisfy nobody and explain nothing.

But the deeper failure is this: Labour has never been willing to say clearly that asylum and immigration are not the same thing. Asylum is a legal right under international law - it cannot be capped, targeted or bargained away by a Home Secretary's speech. Economic migration is a policy question on which democratic debate is entirely legitimate. Conflating the two - treating every arrival as part of a number to be reduced - is not just intellectually dishonest. It makes genuine policy impossible, because you cannot design a coherent system around a category that does not exist.

The left talks about cruelty when it suits them and about control when it does not. Neither position is a policy. Both are postures.

Here is what an honest conversation would sound like.

It would say that Britain's asylum backlog - which reached over 175,000 cases at its peak - was not caused by too many people arriving. It was caused by a system that was deliberately starved of resources, that operated a refusal culture generating appeals it then complained about, and that used delay as a deterrent rather than decision-making as a process. The cost of housing people in hotels while their claims are pending ran to billions of pounds - money that would have funded the caseworkers, judges and legal aid that would have cleared the backlog years earlier. The hostile environment did not reduce immigration. It increased the cost of managing it while making it crueller.

It would also say something that neither party will say to the communities receiving new arrivals: you have been let down. Not by the people who arrived. By the governments that cut local authority funding, reduced housing stock, underfunded schools and GP surgeries, and then pointed at the nearest visible newcomer when voters asked why services were struggling. The pressure on public services in places like Newcastle, Birmingham and Leeds is real. Its cause is twenty years of austerity, not twenty years of arrivals.

And it would say, plainly, that no government can promise to reduce asylum numbers, because asylum is not a number. It is a legal obligation. A government that promises otherwise is either ignorant or lying. The British public deserves to know which.

I am not arguing for open borders. I am not arguing that all immigration is good or that concerns about its pace and management are illegitimate. Those are serious questions and they deserve serious answers.

What I am arguing is simpler: Britain cannot have a serious debate about immigration while its politicians are using the issue rather than addressing it. The right has used it to win elections. The left has used it to avoid difficult conversations. The media has used it to sell papers. And the people caught inside the system - the young man from Iraq trying to explain in Kurdish why he cannot go home, the family in temporary accommodation waiting three years for a decision, the community in the North East absorbing new arrivals without a penny of additional support - have paid the price of everyone else's dishonesty.

Britain is capable of better than this. It has built, at its best, institutions of genuine fairness — a judiciary that is genuinely independent, a civil society that is genuinely engaged, communities that have absorbed wave after wave of newcomers and made something remarkable out of the encounter. None of that is nothing. All of it is threatened by a political culture that prefers a useful argument to a true one.

Twenty years of noise. It is time for a sentence of truth.

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Results and summary of qualifying for the Moto2 class at Sepang:

• Read more about 2026 Sepang Moto2 Qualifying Result: Keeping The Title Battle Hot
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In these reflexive moments I'm gripped fast
by a sort of terror, that at last
the trivial horror of who I was
shall be revealed, and just because
I didn't take those needed steps of self erasure
to prevent such accidental shocks arising from exposure.
I really don't want my personal obsessions
exposed, like I don't want my possessions
rummaged through, or forgotten conversations
repeated over exclamations
of wonder, surprise, disgust or disbelief.
But I can reflect, with a sigh of relief
that the chastening truth is that most of the time
all the stuff I got up to was not worth a dime..

.

Stephen A. Linstead
Picture Liana S (@cherstve_pechivo) via Unsplash.

.

The armies of the night
might as well be
stray cats on a fence
having choir practice,
a twelve-tone scat fest
improvising new
metaphors for hunger
as a grey, lunar ash
covered the backyards
and corners of old buildings
that haven't been
entirely seduced by the dark.
I sat up,
a head full of conquests and amours
receding like retractable cable,
reaching for something to fill my hand,
harmonica? shoe? Lunch Poems by O'Hara?
to be frank,
I turned on the radio
but kept the room dark,
ad-libbed Coltrane extravaganzas in the cool shadows,
got up and tripped over my shoes,
on the floor, I heard Benny Golson
stomp at the Savoy,
sweet tenor notes and
rhythms that made
skip the elevator
and take the stairs.
then there was static,
the radio was silent,
so to speak,
the darkness became deep,
the cats had found
another dark window to
haunt.
i saw your silhouette
as you sat up
in the bed
and asked

what the matter was
and I said I was dreaming
of moons and music,
serenades under many stars
and thought I heard
you laugh,

and
then realized
after getting to my feet
that
you were not there,
still absent,
somewhere beyond
the window drapes, the city's skyline,
the night itself and the day that follows.

.

Ted Burke

.

                  I dunno,maybe,
                  what would the cats do?                 

                  This summer wind makes a furnace world
                   and my friend has caught me wanking
                   and my belly burns as if of acid I
                   had drunk
                   and the woman walking through the
                   kitchen
                   today does not soften what i smash my
                                           face against the brick wall of
                                                          this life

                    in the outhouse I'd do it
                    with the webs and wet walls
                    and the sneering spiders
                    and the beams where i once
                    saw a roosting bat

.

                   Niall Griffiths
Picture Pierre Molinier

.

The Red Almirah is trying to remember something ,
and your name stays here, in this house.

I do not know when mahua blooms all around,
others know when the water bodies dry up.

You once called this hour crepuscular, and holy.
Now I embrace the mundane as if it is mystical.

The psithurism in the neem leaves brings succor,
I feel a quiet sense of vellichor in your study.

Outside the blue mountains waits, unruffled, silent,
everything lately feels liminal, half-remembered.

I am trying to unlearn my old obduracy.
Somewhere the crushed leaves move in the wind.

I sit late in the veranda with my black coffee
I wish this light will stay with me forever.

.

Gopal Lahiri
@gopallahiri

……………………………………………………

Gopal Lahiri is a bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator with 33 books published, including eight solo/jointly edited books. His poetry and prose are published across more than one hundred journals and anthologies globally His poems are translated in 18 languages and published in 19 countries. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2021 and Best of the Nets for poetry in 2025. His 'Selected Poems' was published by Classix, New Delhi. His recent book 'Wasp and Filament ' was published by Hogg Press, Madison, US.

.

These expressions are straight out of Goya,
he said. Nobody wants to climb six floors,
never mind twenty, but narrative is not the
only story & when play resumes we need to
regain our focus. What is sleep like for some-
one who has eyes without eyelids?

I once had an English teacher called Merkelian,
she said, but I thought it was Magellan. We've
been watching these Coelacanth for hours, &
they've hardly moved a fin, he said. It's a gift of
geography but a life in the shadows is the norm
& here is the safest place to be.

Colosseum or Procol Harum? The missiles struck
in the middle of the morning when the school
was full of children. Not all diaries look the same
but you need to remember to wash your hands
after handling raw fish, he said. Leon Rosselson
or Billy Bragg? Whose version do you prefer?

It's The World Turned Upside Down, she said.
Spicy tuna rolls or egg mayonnaise sandwiches?
A major quake is due around the area of the San
Andreas Fault but the sea is a field of primal
encounter & we need to get off the bus. Are you
daydreaming again, she said.

I'm sure there is more to this than suppressed
trauma but we are working at a high level of
abstraction & either way we are history. An area
of low pressure will bring unsettled weather today
but we are also in for a heatwave. There's something
in the aphorism that nature abhors a vacuum, he said.

Tonight, we are looking at caterpillars that glow
in the dark. Am I the only one here with any grasp
on reality? Having tasted power, we are not content
to share it but we all present an image to the world,
he said. She may be a megalomaniac but she's posing
as a narcissist, almost obsessively, you might say.

.
Steve Spence

.

(courtesy of Google Maps)

Drive along TRUMP Highway until you reach

TRUMP Junction, then turn right onto TRUMP Lane,

follow the road across TRUMP Bridge (spanning

the Golden Showers River), skirt around

Lake TRUMP (famously full of bullshit), head

past the TRUMP Monument, with its red "LUSA"

baseball cap, and take the orange-brick road

through the Arc de TRUMP—zig-zag to confuse

any snipers!—and you're in TRUMP City.

Now you're there, rest up at the TRUMP Motel;

it's the trashy one, with the flashing sign—

"Grab Pussy Here!"—out in the parking lot,

near the Epstein Toxic Massage Parlour,

down TRUMP Alley. Later, enjoy a stroll

along TRUMP Way, see the TRUMP Library

(still no books inside!) and, next door, the TRUMP

Mental Health Asylum, also empty,

since that night all the lunatics broke out

and formed the government. Close by, you'll find

a Taco Stand, last outpost of the TRUMP

Headless Chicken Empire. It even has

a large-screen TV, where you can watch him

plot to kill off the I.C.C. and win

a second FIFA Piss Prize! But take care,

or the TRUMP ICE Gestapo will snatch you

off the street, and you'll end up sleeping with

the alligators down in TRUMP County.

 Or you could just stay here, in the sane zone,

pretend this isn't really happening,

and pray one demented jackass won't drag

us all to Hell. Where—breaking news!— he's done

a deal with the Devil to rebrand it

the TRUMP Inferno Golf Course and Hotel—

a gated (and very last) resort for

the mega-rich and the ultra-evil.

.

Graham Lock

.

As far as I can see; the vanishing trail
Jumbled words, shrouded figures, quietly walking
Drifting shapes, I stretch my arms out to touch
There, faint sounds, footsteps behind the rising wind

I cup my hand around my ear
Strain to hear what they are saying
Raindrops, then a deluge clears the mist
Thunder shatters the words I had for you

Jagged flashes of light, stark stick figures leap out
Branches swing; gesturing trees are creatures talking
Crouching bushes protect me, I'm safe on this path
I walk to the forest edge, come to a crossroads

Look! A sign. Compass points. North West South East
Let me choose the way I want to go!  

© Christopher 2026

/

I searched
And I ended up in the first place
Either there was nothing to search
For
searching is in vain
I thought about 'where I'm going'
Without knowing where I am
So I would feel lost
If I ended up here

Some promised me a better life in the afterlife
I hope life means something else to me
And some told me about a way
Certain about a road and destination
While I, a stranger to every step
Defining and measuring every definition
I don't know any direction
And I don't know me
How one can expect me to finish
My destiny
So what?
I sat and thought
About all questions
And I didn't find no any answers, just more questions
So a wise man showed up promising one
And expecting me to follow
Without examination
And I sat again and laughed
At the illusion presented
As reality

.

John the Outsider
Picture Chris Bill

.

Repressed for the first time in nearly thirty years, Derek Jarman's book Kicking the Pricks, including the director's notes and diaries from the making of his seminal film The Last of England, offers a portal into a rotting UK that feels all too familiar

The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1987). All images courtesy: British Film Institute

In Kicking The Pricks Derek Jarman poses the question: what use is a film, book or artwork that presents a nostalgic future warning for an unloved and thwarted isle? A companion piece to Jarman's most overtly political film, The Last Of England, the book is part memoir, part production diary, and a scattering of interviews. Taken together, the two works show Jarman drawn into a...

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