John Ternus était auparavant vice-président principal de l'ingénierie matérielle dans l'entreprise.

A city in Oklahoma tried to charge a farmer more than $17,000 to fulfill a public records request for information related to a proposed data center and the farmer’s arrest at a city council meeting. Now, in a win for the farmer, the State’s attorney general has stepped in and told the city to drop the fees and “provide access promptly” to the documents.

Farmer Darren Blanchard attended a meeting about Project Mustang — a proposed 225 acre data center in Claremore, Oklahoma — in February and planned to speak in opposition to the project. He left in handcuffs after the city council ordered him arrested for going 30 seconds over his allotted three minute speaking limit.

Claremore charged Blanchard with trespassing, a municipal crime with a $200 penalty. Blanchard pleaded not guilty, hired an attorney, and vowed to fight the charges on free speech grounds. As part of his defense, Blanchard and his lawyers filed a public records request asking the bodycam footage from the arrest and city records related to previous disturbances at public meetings. Claremore told Blanchard and his lawyers that they’d be happy to fulfill his request, but it would cost $17,125.44.

Katie Griffin, one of Blanchard's lawyers, filed a complaint with the Oklahoma Attorney General about the fees and requested someone at the State take a look. Claremore sent its own letter to the AG, outlining why it thought the fees were justified. “The City knows and is aware that any documents released to Mr. Blanchard and to those associated with him, regardless of the privacy implications of individuals named in such documents, are subject to wide distribution, including on social media,” said Claremore’s lawyers in a copy of the letter obtained by 404 Media.

Claremore’s lawyers also complained that Griffin wouldn’t narrow the focus of her request.“Her persistence in maintaining an overly onerous request demonstrates that this dispute has nothing to do with transparency and likely has everything to do with causing excessive time/money expense to the City in order to generate public sympathy for her client and negative publicity for the City,” Claremore’s lawyers said.

The bulk of the fees Claremore wanted to charge are for a legal review of 2,800 records related to Blanchard’s arrest and Claremore’s relationship with security contractors and Rogers State University where the meeting took place. Claremore said that the legal review “to ensure that all information which must be withheld relating to members of the public and the City’s personnel is redacted in order to protect their privacy” would cost $16,540.44.

Claremore also wanted to charge a fee of $585 for a 15 hour search — roughly what it costs to employ a city clerk for two days. To do otherwise, the city argued, would cause “excessive disruption to its essential functions,” according to a letter Claremore’s lawyers sent to the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office.

Anthony Sykes, an Assistant Attorney General for Oklahoma, didn’t accept Claremore’s argument, according to a copy of his response obtained by 404 Media. Sykes explained that Oklahoma’s laws only allowed the City to charge for “direct costs of record copying, or mechanical reproduction.” A public body can charge fees for records requests, but only for the direct cost of searching and copying. Critically, if it charges fees at all it must disclose them publicly.

“The City has not posted a schedule of fees as required by the Open Records Act. Having failed to give the requisite notice of the fees charged for public access to City records, the City is foreclosed from charging search fees,” Sykes said. “If I were to conclude otherwise, there would be no incentive for public bodies to comply with the statute. They could simply ignore what the ORA requires and charge what they deem reasonable on a case-by-case basis.”

“I also note that the City also failed to explain how 15 hours of staff time would cause ‘excessive disruption’ of its ‘essential functions,’ such that a search fee would be statutorily permissible in the first place,” Sykes added in a footnote. “Similarly, the City has not provided any justification for charging the hourly rate of the City Clerk — as opposed to a less costly member of the Clerk’s staff — to search for the records.”

Claremore also said it had found more than 10 hours of bodycam footage from Blanchard’s arrest but, again, needed time to review it “to ensure all available redactions are made to protect the privacy of the public and City personnel,” Claremore’s lawyers said. “Much of the footage at issue in Ms. Griffin’s request was taken in a very crowded room and  features an incalculable number of people. A review of this footage by legal counsel is required in order to determine what, if any, portions should be redacted as required by law.” 404 Media acquired a portion of the bodycam footage from Blanchard’s arrest and published it in June.

Sykes told Claremore to release the footage without a lengthy review and redaction process. “The footage sought here is of a public meeting attended by scores of people,” he said in his response to the City. “No one in attendance had any reasonable expectation of privacy, and the City has not identified any provision of state or federal law that justifies redaction of any portion of the footage [...] the City should be able to provide access promptly.”

Blanchard’s case is one of a number of people who’ve been arrested at public city meetings in the past year. Police arrested a high school teacher in Kansas for clapping during the public comment period of a city meeting about data centers. The city charged them with interfering with law enforcement and later dropped the case. In Texas a man was arrested in his driveway a week after he’d said “bullshit” during a public city meeting.

The City of Claremore, Oklahoma did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

Ukraine's Armed Forces are forming the 446th Separate Unmanned Systems Brigade, which is recruiting servicemembers while formation continues, MilitaryLand reported. The new unit joins a force that hit 32,485 Russian personnel over the summer alone, the Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) reported on 1 September.

Ukraine is facing a shortage of military personnel, yet the Armed Forces are forming their second separate unmanned systems brigade this year. The force's commander wants unmanned systems covering the entire front at tactical, operational, and strategic depths.

What is known about the 446th Brigade

Military personnel from other units can apply for a transfer through Army+, according to MilitaryLand.

The first of the two was the 445th Separate Unmanned Systems Brigade Chata, whose formation became known in July. Both units are recruiting for posts running from operators of ground robots, FPV, bomber, and interceptor drones to psychological-support officers, analysts, and accountants, Militarnyi reported.

The deployment of such units is part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' broader effort to increase the number of unmanned systems in the military. Ukrainian drones accounted for about 96% of Russian casualties in March—33,988 of roughly 35,000 killed or severely wounded—Zelenskyy said in April.

Why Ukraine is turning to drones

The expansion of unmanned systems brigades is part of a broader effort initiated by Robert Brovdi, callsign Madyar, to increase the role of the SBS within Ukraine's Defense Forces, Militarnyi notes.

Brovdi told Reuters in June that he wants to raise the drone forces from about 2.5% of Ukraine's armed forces to 5%, a goal he first stated publicly in September 2025. At that share, the drone units accounted for roughly a third of Russian losses over the previous 12 months, according to figures the force gave Reuters, which said it could not verify them independently.

Then Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi described unmanned systems as one of the key factors shaping modern warfare. Current Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Mykhailo Drapatyi stated that one of his priorities is the development and scaling of the unmanned component.

Overall, the SBS struck 58,465 targets in August, its own tally for 1–31 August shows.

I am standing in front of a camera that’s streaming to a giant video screen. The image recognition AI running on the camera puts a big green box around me. “PERSON,” it says. Artist Simon Weckert hands me his newest creation, a button-down shirt with flowery, blurry globs of green and pink. I put the shirt in front of me. The box and the word “PERSON” disappears. I pull the shirt away. The box pops back up. I put the shirt in front of me. It disappears. This is “digital camouflage,” and it has confused the algorithm. 

Weckert designed digital camouflage as a response to the proliferation of AI-powered surveillance cameras that detect people, vehicles, animals, bicycles, and other objects in their field of view. Many of these AI-powered cameras can detect when a person is lying down, “anomalous behavior” such as people loitering, people fighting, or an abandoned package, which can lead to a police response. These cameras are already relatively commonplace around the world, but Weckert created it because police recently deployed these types of cameras outside of Kotbusser Tor, a popular subway stop in Berlin. They are the first police-run object recognition surveillance cameras in the city.

“Obviously people don’t like it because it means that AI is tracking the movements and behaviors of people. It’s one thing to have somebody behind the camera watching you, but now we have AI doing this kind of analysis,” Weckert told me. “It can detect if somebody’s laying on the ground so that means homeless people could be detected and police get triggered.”

Weckert says one of the problems with Berlin’s cameras is that it’s not clear exactly which image recognition it’s running. But many image recognition cameras run a variation of YOLO (You Only Look Once), a family of open source image recognition algorithms. So Weckert installed YOLO on his own camera and began trying to confuse it by iterating on different types of random patterns. 

He starts with a random pattern he said, and shows it to the YOLO algorithm to see if it detects a human, and with how much certainty. “When YOLO returns 100%, I know the pattern obviously isn’t working,” he said. “And then step-by-step, I change the pattern, I rotate certain parts of the pattern, change the colors, flip it so on and so forth. And every time we ask how much confidence do you have this is a person using something called gradient ascent to get away from the category of a person. And then suddenly you as a person, with the pattern on you, aren’t detected as a person because the algorithm can’t make sense of it.”

Weckert has done a series of buzzy projects before. Back at Motherboard, we covered the virtual traffic jam he created on Google Maps by sticking a bunch of GPS-enabled cell phones in a red wagon and walking slowly through the streets of Berlin. Digital camouflage sits alongside projects by other artists intended to hide people’s faces from facial recognition cameras or to confuse automated license plate reader cameras with shirts made of nonsense license plate graphics. Over the years, AI surveillance has improved to a point where many of these techniques don’t actually work anymore, but for the moment, digital camouflage does, at least on the very popular YOLO algorithms. Weckert said one of the major problems is that police won’t say specifically what algorithm they’re using, making it difficult to say whether his shirts work on the cameras at Kotbusser Tor.

“The problem is that we don’t know what technology is behind these camera systems, so therefore I cannot claim 100 percent that the t-shirt works against this specific camera system, but I can say I know it works for the very public and famous YOLO algorithm,” Weckert said. He said that just as fashion brands have seasonal updates, so too will his digital camouflage “Every time there’s a new YOLO, a new pattern will come out. Just like in fashion, the summer winter collection, here it’s the every YOLO edition.”

He said the project is not just intended to help people avoid surveillance, but to teach people about it and to show people there’s lots of ways to protest and push back against it. “It’s to give them the feeling that there are actually certain tools we can use against surveillance. It's not like we just have to accept what the lawmakers and police are doing.”

Tyler Robinson has not yet entered a plea, but should a judge find probable cause, an arraignment could follow

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Nearly a year after Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a Utah university, a judge on Tuesday is expected to rule ⁠on whether the Utah ⁠man accused of ​killing the conservative activist will stand trial and whether he should face the death penalty.

At a 10am hearing in Provo, Utah, judge Tony Graf ⁠will decide whether there is sufficient evidence to try Tyler Robinson, 23, and allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty for the murder of one of the US ⁠right’s most prominent figures.

Selon les derniers bilans, on dénombre 3916 personnes disparues au Népal et 546 en Chine.

Spectacular Villa Aurora, which was nearly destroyed in last year’s fires, leading the recovery as Pacific Palisades emerges from a dark chapter

A hillside villa that served as a cultural hub for German writers and artists fleeing the Nazis and narrowly escaped destruction in last year’s Los Angeles wildfires reopened its doors to the public this weekend, marking the latest milestone in the city’s slow recovery from one of the darkest chapters in its history.

Hundreds of friends of the Villa Aurora, a 1920s Spanish Mediterranean house that has taken on a second life as a cultural center with a fierce commitment to artistic freedom, international dialogue and democracy, crowded into the house on Sunday to mark the resumption of speaker events and artistic residencies.

Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said in an interview aired on 31 August that Russia remains "more than a strategic partner" because existing treaties make the two countries allies, adding that the change in the government program's wording should not be interpreted as an end to that relationship.

Mirzoyan was responding to Armenia's new 2026–2031 government program, which replaces the "strategic ally" and "strategic partnership" language used in the previous five-year plan with a commitment to "transform and deepen" relations with Russia. The previous program referred to an "Armenian-Russian strategic alliance" and pledged to strengthen "allied relations and strategic partnership" with Moscow.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan explained on 27 August that keeping the strategic-partnership language would raise questions about why Russia and the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization had failed to fulfill their security obligations to Armenia in 2022.

Armenia has removed the language of alliance from its government program without ending the treaties, CSTO membership, or energy ties that still bind it to Moscow.

Azerbaijan attacked Armenian territory near Jermuk in September 2022, striking positions inside sovereign Armenia rather than the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Yerevan invoked Article 4 of the Collective Security Treaty, the clause treating an attack on one member as an attack on all, and requested assistance. The alliance sent a fact-finding mission but no troops. requested military assistance. Armenia froze its participation in the CSTO at all levels in 2024, stopped financing it, and has boycotted its summits and military exercises.

Why the alliance frayed

Armenian trust in Moscow had deteriorated further by September 2023, when Azerbaijan retook Nagorno-Karabakh after a brief offensive and Russian peacekeepers deployed to the region did not intervene. Armenian officials accused them of failing to protect the enclave's population.

Yerevan has since moved closer to the European Union. In March 2025, Armenia's parliament passed a law to launch the accession process, though Pashinyan has said any actual membership would require a referendum, and Armenia has not applied to join.

What still ties Armenia to Russia

Even so, Armenia remains heavily dependent on Russia for energy. Russia supplied the bulk of Armenia's natural gas in 2021, and Armenia imports all of its nuclear fuel from Russia, leaving it effectively reliant on imported fuel for nearly 70% of its electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. The country remains a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union.

Mirzoyan acknowledged that strains had emerged in recent years, citing statements by Russian officials, coverage in Russian media, and Moscow's restrictions on imports of Armenian goods. He called for relations to be made "healthier" and returned to a course of "mutual respect," and said Yerevan did not want a "war of words" with Moscow. Pashinyan said on 1 September that he expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin later that day in Bishkek.

On 1 September 2026, Latvia banned imports of Russian- and Belarusian-made books, clothing, toys, and other consumer goods, including shipments routed through third countries, Latvian Public Media reported.

The restricted goods were worth approximately €12.5 million ($14.5 million) in 2025, or 6.5% of Latvia’s remaining imports from the two countries. Although modest economically, the measure goes beyond EU-wide sanctions and advances Riga’s effort to deny Moscow and Minsk revenue during Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The restrictions cover the following:

• Books, newspapers, and other printed material
• Clothing, textiles, footwear, and headwear
• Toys, games, and sporting equipment.

Latvia’s Cabinet approved the final product list on 25 August following a Foreign Ministry proposal, completing restrictions parliament authorized on 23 July.

The ban applies regardless of whether the products arrive directly or through another country. Russian- and Belarusian-made goods may still transit Latvia on their way to other EU markets, Meduza reported.

Food and beverages are not covered. The restrictions are scheduled to remain in force until 1 July 2027 and will be reviewed annually.

The Foreign Ministry said the measure is also intended to limit the entry of Russian propaganda material. The targeted products accounted for only 0.05% of Latvia’s total imports in 2025, according to Euronews.

How Latvia has been cutting off trade with Russia and Belarus

Latvia’s combined imports from Russia and Belarus have already fallen by 91%, from €2.13 billion ($2.47 billion) in 2022 to €193 million ($224 million) in 2025, according to Latvian Public Media. Much of that decline followed the country’s departure from Russian energy supplies and the Baltic states’ disconnection from the Russian and Belarusian electricity grids.

The latest prohibition blocks consumer goods that Brussels has not collectively banned.

Latvian Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs previously pledged to eliminate the country’s remaining commercial links with Russia and Belarus, although pharmaceutical exporters were expected to remain exempt.

In August, Latvia also resumed publishing a monthly register of businesses trading with either country, naming 171 companies. Inclusion on the list does not itself indicate a sanctions violation.

Russia's Zircon runs on two solid-propellant motors, a booster and a sustainer, Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) said in a breakdown of the missile's structure and components. That leaves no room for the scramjet Moscow advertised, Defense Express wrote.

Russia presented Zircon as a hypersonic missile capable of penetrating modern air defenses. HUR says it instead uses solid-propellant motors, which Defense Express reads as demolishing Moscow's claims about a superweapon. The intelligence agency also listed an Altera programmable chip and a TriQuint amplifier among the missile's components, the same finding investigators keep making in Russian weapons.

HUR published an interactive 3D model of Zircon through its War&Sanctions database, the latest in a series on Russian ballistic weapons. The agency said the recorded maximum speed to date does not exceed Mach 6.8—about seven times the speed of sound—and that the missile does not hold it through the whole flight. Russia claims Mach 9 at some stages of flight. Zircon carries a roughly 120-kilogram warhead.

Defense Express reported that a 2010 contract with solid-fuel specialist NPO Iskra indicates that this propulsion system was planned from the earliest stages of Zircon's development.

Built for ships, moved onto a coastal launcher

Zircon is a Russian anti-ship missile developed for surface ships and nuclear-powered submarines. Russia later adapted it for Bastion-M coastal launchers amid difficulties operating its Black Sea Fleet, HUR said.

Ukrainian forensic experts first confirmed Russia had fired a Zircon at Kyiv in February 2024. Defense Express reported that Ukraine intercepted two more over the capital the following month. Russia has continued using Zircon against land targets: in February 2026, it launched four at Ukraine’s power grid, of which Ukrainian air defenses downed two.

What solid-fuel propulsion changes

Solid fuel does not make Zircon slow: Mach 6.8 is still hypersonic. A scramjet draws oxygen from the atmosphere to sustain hypersonic flight; Zircon instead flies on self-contained rocket motors. HUR calls it a ballistic missile rather than the hypersonic cruise missile Russia advertised, and notes its onboard computer is the type fitted to all Russian ballistic missiles. Defense Express says the trajectory may be aeroballistic and the motor possibly dual-pulse, given the range Russia wanted from a missile that had to fit a ship's launch silo.

Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in 2019 that the missile could reach Mach 9 and travel 1,000 kilometers, up from earlier official figures of Mach 6 to 8 and 400 to 500 kilometers. A year earlier, the former head of its manufacturer said it flew on a jet engine, Defense Express said.

In February 2024, Kyiv's forensic institute concluded from the debris that the engine was air-breathing rather than solid-fuel, and Defense Express went further the following month, reporting from its own sources that Russia had built a working scramjet. The outlet has since appended a correction to that article, noting that HUR found a solid-fuel 3L2211 motor from NPO Iskra where the scramjet was supposed to be.

The US chips inside Zircon

HUR identified two components from US manufacturers inside Zircon: a programmable gate array from Altera, now part of Intel, and a TGA2704 amplifier from TriQuint Semiconductor, now Qorvo. It also mapped 70 companies involved in its production, along with their personnel and foreign manufacturing equipment.

The finding fits a wider pattern. Investigators have found Western electronics in Russia's UMPK glide-bomb kits and traced at least 28 foreign parts from 15 companies in the Kh-101 that struck Kyiv's Okhmatdyt children's hospital.

A 2026 examination found 62 US-made parts in an Iskander missile, while a Russian Geran drone combined a Soviet missile with Western electronics and a Chinese modem.

PEN America study details verbal and physical threats to librarians, funding cuts and proliferation of book bans

Public libraries in the US are “at breaking point” because of an onslaught of political interference, harassment and ideological censorship, a new report published on Tuesday said.

Book bans, cancelled story hours, attacks on librarians, funding cuts and the undoing of libraries’ independent governance are examined by the free expression advocacy group PEN America in its study called Out of Circulation: Expanding Censorship in Public Libraries.

Ces frappes marquaient le sixième jour consécutif d’attaques russes intensives contre Kiev.

• Japanese player wears Iverson’s signature cornrows

• Outfit also has newspaper clippings about Osaka

Naomi Osaka channeled former NBA star Allen Iverson before her US Open first-round victory over Anastasia Zakharova on Monday.

Osaka made her usual fashionable entrance for her tournament opener, which she won in straight sets. The two-time US Open champion emerged on to the court at Arthur Ashe Stadium wearing a long, white skirt and a gray, hooded robe featuring newspaper clippings about her.