Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo, deported to Honduras, is latest military spouse to face removal amid Trump 2.0

The wife of an active-duty US soldier was deported on Monday to her native Honduras, according to her family and the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo is at least the seventh spouse or parent of an active-duty US soldier to be deported under the immigration crackdown during Donald Trump’s second presidency.

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Alarm as Republicans warn that ‘flooding’ stores with 300,000 metric tons of beef imports will hit US farmers

Donald Trump is facing growing criticism from within his own party over his decision to temporarily pause US tariffs on foreign beef in a bid to bring down grocery prices.

The president’s announcement that the US will import up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef without charging higher tariffs has alarmed some senior Republicans, who warn that “flooding” stores with imports will hit US ranchers. This comes as the US faces a 75-year low in cattle inventory.

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Exclusive: Nearly 100 Labour MPs support commission on changing the system used for Westminster election

• Why do some Labour MPs want electoral reform and will it happen?

Andy Burnham will face an immediate test of his backing for electoral reform in his first week in parliament as prime minister, with almost 100 Labour MPs supporting a bid for a new national commission.

Burnham, a longtime advocate of electoral reform, will be asked to support the new commission into ditching first past the post in his first 100 days as prime minister.

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Barcelona legend wants to emulate Johan Cruyff’s total football philosophy after taking over as the Netherlands head coach

“My feeling today is that I’m going to the university of football.” Those were Xavi Hernández’s opening words at his presentation as the Netherlands coach on Tuesday. “I learned a lot from this university of football during my career as a player and as a coach. I have many connections with this country.”

Those connections date back to when Xavi was drafted as a youngster into La Masia, the famed Barcelona academy whose fundamentals are rooted in Dutch total football, inspired by Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff. Xavi’s first-team debut came under Louis van Gaal, and he spent many years under Frank Rijkaard before becoming one of the main pillars of the dream team under Pep Guardiola, who was hugely inspired by Cruyff.

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Lily Tomlin, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bernie Sanders and Kacey Musgraves are among those remembering the queen of country after she died aged 80

• Alexis Petridis on Dolly Parton’s peerless career that turned country music cliches inside out

• Dolly Parton – a life in pictures

• Country music legend Dolly Parton dies aged 80 – latest updates

Tributes have poured in for Dolly Parton, the country singer, songwriter and actor, after her death aged 80.

News of her death was shared by her nephew on social media. “Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus,” he said.

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Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:

NGC 3256 is a pair of colliding, gas-rich spiral galaxies merging into a single massive system. Chandra’s X-ray data (pink) isolates point sources and shock-heated gas, Hubble’s optical light (blue and white) captures tidal tails of stars, and Webb’s infrared vision (red and orange) cuts through the dust to show hidden star formation. Galaxy collisions like this offer a preview of our far future, showing what might happen if our own Milky Way collides and merges with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy.

Read more: chandra.si.edu/photo/2026/galaxies/

Image credit: Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare

Image description: NGC 3256, a pair of overlapping spiral galaxies merging into a single massive system. Here, the merged galaxy is shown face-on, its thick pink, white, and orange spiraling arms dotted with large pink specks, amid a hazy grey cloud.

Apple on Tuesday heralded the imminent refresh of its headless Mac kit with new versions of the Mac Studio and the Mac mini that you can pre-order now for shipping on September 22, 2026. The diminutive desktops promise a high level of local AI performance with memory prices to match. "[T]he new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever," said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, in a statement, citing the integration of Apple's Neural Accelerators into processor GPUs and the utility of high-bandwidth unified memory to justify the assessment. The Mac Studio became Apple's high-performance standard bearer following the retirement of the Mac Pro in March. With the "most powerful" slot taken, the Mac mini has been dubbed "our most versatile Mac," as Srouji put it, highlighting the machine's recently discovered role as "an always-on agentic device." Earlier this year, the excitement around OpenClaw and open weight AI models led to a run on Mac mini hardware as AI aficionados found Apple's compact desktop made a comfortable home for AI agents and local inference. The Mac mini has unified memory – the CPU and GPU share the same RAM – making a Mac with ample unified memory (eg, 64 GB) well suited to GPU inference compared to a PC with 64 GB system RAM but only 16 GB GPU VRAM. What's more, Apple silicon hardware supports the company's MLX machine learning framework, which provides respectable private inference performance on hardware that draws far less power than a desktop GPU workstation. You have less power, but more money for memory. As outgoing CEO Tim Cook admitted in June, memory prices have been rising due to AI demand, and those costs are being passed on to customers. The Mac Studio comes with two flavors of chip, M5 Max ($2,499) and M5 Ultra ($5,499). The M5 Ultra, with up to 36 CPU cores and up to 80 GPU cores, is an inference beast, supporting up to 512 GB of high-bandwidth unified memory with 1.2 TB/s of unified memory bandwidth. That memory configuration isn't available until October, but the existing 256 GB memory option for an extra $4,000 should give you a sense of how pricey a maxed-out Mac Studio will be ($18,299 for 256 GB RAM, 16 TB SSD). The Mac mini can be had with an M6 chip ($899) or an M5 Pro chip ($1,699), but the base model has just 16 GB of shared memory and it costs a whopping $400 to step up to 32 GB. The M6 is the first Apple silicon to use a 2 nm process. It's a 12-core processor, which Apple notes is "two more cores than before." "Built using the cutting-edge 2 nm process, M6 combines a new CPU complex, two additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and more unified memory bandwidth to power through workloads with amazing energy efficiency," Sri Santhanam, VP of Apple's silicon engineering group, said in a statement. The M5 Pro offers more in the way of memory and memory bandwidth, making it a better choice for data-intensive development applications. The M6 supports up to 32 GB of memory and up to 170 GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the M5 Pro supports up to 64 GB of unified memory and 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The Mac mini comes with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, two USB-C ports that support USB 3, and a headphone jack. Its rear gunport comes with three Thunderbolt 4 ports for M6 and three Thunderbolt 5 ports for M5 Pro, not to mention HDMI and Ethernet (2.5 Gb or 10 Gb). Thunderbolt 5 allows for clustering, so multiple Mac minis can be connected together to run large AI models on-device. The Mac Studio also does Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thunderbolt 5, with support for PCIe expansion chassis. All of Apple's incoming hardware comes with macOS 27, which is expected to debut in mid-September. ®

Anthropic’s Claude chatbot knows a lot about its users, and now it's sharing its memories with the company’s everything-but-coding assistant, Cowork. The frontier lab on Tuesday announced that Claude and Cowork now share a memory, meaning that what Claude remembers about users is also available to Cowork. That’s a two-way street: Memories generated through users’ interactions with Cowork will also be available to the regular Claude chatbot. Services like Claude are able to store information about users, like what they’re interested in, the names of their friends, family members, and coworkers, or almost anything else that’s mentioned in the course of a conversation. Those memories are used to contextualize later responses so that Claude isn’t answering from a blank slate every time a user chats. As Anthropic explains in the announcement, memories are particularly helpful for work tasks of the type that Cowork is designed to perform. Cowork is a lot like Claude Code in that it’s designed to automate manual work tasks, but in this case it’s not about software development and is instead about everything else professionals deal with on a daily basis, like writing a report from a spreadsheet, creating a presentation from said report, or what have you. Y’know - work. “Ask Cowork to draft an update for your manager, and it already knows who that is and how she likes updates written,” Anthropic offers as one use of the new shared memory. As other examples, Anthropic posits brainstorming a conference agenda with Claude Chat and having Cowork know all about the event as it builds budget and logistics documents, or having to define once how a team likes metrics presented in a Claude chat and relying on Cowork to remember that format every quarter as you force it to do the work an intern used to have to be trusted to whip up. It’s worth noting that Claude Code’s memory is staying separate, Anthropic told us. The company also mentioned it had nothing to share about the future of Claude Code’s memory and whether it’d join the hive in the future. As for how Claude and Cowork create their shared memories, that’s changing, too, Anthropic explained in the announcement. Whereas the pair previously created memories by reviewing a conversation at its conclusion, memories are now created on the fly during chats. Memory generation is on by default for users on free, Pro, and Max tiers (Cowork isn’t available on Free accounts, though), but Anthropic said it doesn’t remember “sensitive” things without users opting to allow those to be stored in memory. Sensitive topics include things related to health, ethnicity, religious beliefs, politics, gender identity, and the like, though adding those to memory can be enabled if users so choose. Cowork will know those things too, mind you, and Anthropic told us there’s no option to separate Claude Chat and Cowork’s memories since they now use a shared system. An Anthropic spokesperson explained that the only way to keep Claude Chat and Cowork memories separate is to use different accounts. Other options, we’re told, are to entirely pause Claude’s ability to remember stuff, use incognito chats for conversations users don't want remembered, or manually prune Claude’s memory to get rid of individual topics. The new shared memory is available from Tuesday; for Team and Enterprise customers, admins control whether memory is available, so if any of those great business features mentioned above sound useful, you may have to call IT and have them enable it. ®

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far.

The August 2026 edition of "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most "AI-exposed" occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption. Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent.

[...] Digging deeper into the data, the researchers found that this phenomenon is mainly manifesting itself through lower hiring rates for entry-level workers in AI-impacted fields, rather than increased firings or employees quitting. They also found that the labor market effects among this age group were mostly seen in lower overall employment, rather than reduced pay rates. But not all jobs that show potential for AI "disruption" are created equal, the researchers found. In its Economic Index, Anthropic differentiates between queries related to tasks that are "automative" (i.e., fully replacing work previously done by a human) or "augmentative" (i.e., helping human workers be more effective at tasks they are still needed for). By this measure, jobs like "accountants and auditors" and "receptionists and information clerks" were among those judged most susceptible to AI automation, while jobs like "chief executive" and "registered nurse" were among those using AI augmentation most often.

Unsurprisingly, jobs where AI automation is prevalent are the ones showing the worst relative employment levels for entry-level workers these days. "The findings are consistent with automation-oriented uses of AI substituting for labor while complementary uses are associated with flat or rising employment," the researchers write. Interestingly, the researchers found that the impact is strongest in entry-level jobs built around "codified" knowledge, which is the formal, documented skills that AI can more easily replicate. Meanwhile, experienced workers in roles relying on tacit, practice-based knowledge have seen stronger employment growth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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In de Verenigde Staten hangen de komende zeven dagen alle vlaggen halfstok op orders van president Trump en dat zegt veel over de unifying force die Dolly Parton was voor dat land was. Dolly overleed vandaag op 80-jarige leeftijd, daarom draaien we in dit Stamcafé enkel bangers van de Queen of Country. Ze verkocht gedurende zes decennia meer dan 100 miljoen platen wereldwijd en dat is maar goed ook, want het kost een heleboel geld om er zo goedkoop uit te zien. We zijn Dolly Parton nooit op straat tegengekomen maar tegelijkertijd weten we dat niet zeker, want de paar mensen die haar ooit zonder pruik, decolleté en glitterstenen zagen beweren dat ze in het dagelijks leven absoluut onherkenbaar was. Het beroemde Dolly-voorkomen heeft ze overigens gestolen van hoe de lokale prostituees erbij liepen in Sevierville, Tennessee, waar Dolly Parton als vierde in een gezin van twaalf kinderen opgroeide in armoede. Het diva-uiterlijk was nog functioneel ook, want met haar lange arcylnagels als stand-in metronoom schreef ze haar beste liedjes. Jolene is er in werkelijkheid trouwens nooit in geslaagd om Dolly's man af te pakken, want Carl Dean (die ze net als haar echte haren vrijwel nooit aan de buitenwereld toonde) bleef bij haar tot hij vorig jaar overleed. Dolly is hem achterna, maar gelukkig hebben we de liedjes nog.

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A Rorschach test with a side of meatballs.