Pope brings Africa tour to Angola as Trump feud drags on

The future of Apple is being entrusted to a company veteran said to combine hardware brilliance with "the soul of an innovator."

John Ternus, 50, will take over as Apple chief executive in September, with Tim Cook becoming executive chairman of the iPhone maker's board of directors.

"John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor," Cook said when his successor was revealed.

"He is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future."

That claim was the subject of debate on Tuesday, with some wondering whether software skills were more vital to Apple's success given how artificial intelligence is shaking up the tech world.

"Despite popular opinion, I think hardware will be critical to AI uptake," said Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi.

"Hardware, especially silicon (chips), is what brings AI to life."

- Calm continuity -

Ternus joined Apple's design team in 2001, working his way up to senior vice president of hardware engineering, reporting to Cook.

Ternus leads the engineering teams for Apple's product line-up, including the iPhones that account for most of its revenue and Mac computers with performance well-suited for AI tasks.

He earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an engineer at Virtual Research Systems prior to joining Apple.

Ternus is credited with leading a drive to make Apple products more durable, reliable and resilient, as well as innovative designs that reduced their carbon footprint.

Picking Ternus as its next chief signals Apple prioritizing market-calming corporate continuity over radical change, according to Francisco Jeronimo, vice president of client devices at market analytics firm IDC.

"Few people inside or outside the company understand Apple's product architecture as well as he does," Jeronimo said.

"The short and medium-term business is probably in safe hands."

Apple has an enormous base of loyal users and improved models of iPhone, Mac, and wearables in the pipeline that promise to bode well for its fortunes in the near future, Jeronimo reasoned.

"The harder question is what comes next, and specifically how Apple will pivot to new growth engines when the steam from the iPhone begins to fade," Jeronimo said.

"The next significant wave of consumer technology is not about the phone; it is about AI."

That is where strategic pressure on Ternus will be most acute, according to the analyst.

- Channeling Steve Jobs? -

A big question will be whether Ternus has "the appetite for the kind of bold, occasionally uncomfortable decisions" that defining an Apple AI platform will require.

Legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was known for brutal honesty and unyielding perfectionism that led to culture-changing devices.

Ternus has a reputation as a decisive leader, where Cook was known for shepherding teams to collaborative conclusions.

"Ternus brings a fresh, younger view of the world and clearly an appetite for success," analyst Milanesi said.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives expects Apple's annual developers conference in June to put Ternus and his vision for the company center stage.

"In this AI World Apple has more cash, consumers, and brand recognition than any company in the world -- but now is the time to flex the muscles and go on the offensive instead of the defensive," Ives wrote in a note to investors.

"Ternus is not going to take over the CEO baton with a treadmill approach in our view and this is a good thing."

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SpaceX on Tuesday announced a partnership with AI coding company Cursor, saying the alliance comes with an option to buy the startup for $60 billion later this year.

The move by Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company comes as it prepares to become publicly traded, and shortly after it took over the billionaire's artificial intelligence outfit xAI.

Cursor, founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco, specializes in AI for creating software code, particularly for business uses.

"SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI," the company said in a post on X.

Combining Cursor's software and product expertise with SpaceX's "Colossus" AI training supercomputer will enable the company "to build the world's most useful models," it said.

Musk announced in February that SpaceX would acquire xAI, a step in his plan to launch solar-powered, satellite-based data centers to run future AI models.

SpaceX has set the pace in the space launch market, offering reusable rockets that vastly reduce the cost of putting satellites into orbit and itself owning the largest satellite constellation, Starlink.

The company is set for a stock market listing this year widely expected to be the biggest in history, with media reports pointing to an initial public offering (IPO) as early as June.

Musk called SpaceX's absorption of xAI "not just the next chapter, but the next book" for the companies.

"Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions... The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space," Musk wrote when his companies were merged.

The project fits into Musk's long-term ambition to build colonies on the Moon and Mars and is "a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization," he wrote.

Coined in the 1960s by a Soviet astronomer, the futurist term refers to a civilization able to use all of the energy from its home system's star.

SpaceX filed papers early this year with US regulators that set the stage for what could be the largest-ever public stock offering, a source familiar with the matter told AFP.

The confidential filing puts the rocket and satellite builder on track to list its shares on a public exchange by July, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing unidentified sources.

Media reports have said the initial public offering could be valued at a whopping $75 billion or more, for a venture with stratospheric ambitions.

If successful, SpaceX could arrive on Wall Street with a valuation exceeding $1.75 trillion, putting it among the world's ten biggest companies by market capitalization.

Besides SpaceX, two other tech heavyweights, the AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic, are reportedly planning IPOs this year.

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The Trump Justice Department announced the indictment on Tuesday of a prominent US civil rights organization over its use of donor money to pay confidential informants in extremist groups.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) faces charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Blanche alleged that the SPLC paid at least $8 million to eight individuals between 2014 and 2023 who were affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Party of America and other hate groups.

"The SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups," Blanche said at a press conference.

"The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred," he said. "It was doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing -- not dismantling extremism but funding it."

Bryan Fair, the interim president and CEO of the SPLC, said the group, whose stated mission is to fight white supremacy and create a multiracial democracy, will not be "intimidated into silence" and will "vigorously defend ourselves."

"For 55 years, the Southern Poverty Law Center has stood as a beacon of hope, fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice," Fair said in a video message.

"We are therefore unsurprised to be the latest organization targeted by this administration," he said. "They have made no secret of who they want to protect and who they want to destroy."

He acknowledged that the SPLC had used confidential informants in the past "to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups" but said it no longer does so.

"When we began working with informants we were living in the shadow of the height of the civil rights movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system," he said.

"This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence," Fair said. "We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement."

President Donald Trump has been accused by critics since taking office for a second time of launching criminal investigations of individuals and groups he sees as political or ideological opponents.

Blanche, Trump's former personal lawyer, recently defended the probes, saying "it is true that some of them involve men, women and entities that the president, in the past, has had issues with and believes should be investigated."

"That is his right, and indeed, it is his duty to do that," he said.

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Julio Cesar Jasso Ramirez, the 27-year-old gunman behind Monday's shooting at Mexico's famed Teotihuacan pyramids, drew inspiration from pre-Hispanic sacrifices and the notorious 1999 US shooting at Columbine High School, according to investigators. 

The attack, which ended with the assailant taking his own life, injured 13 people at the tourist attraction, and left a Canadian woman dead. 

Mexico State Prosecutor Jose Luis Cervantes Martinez said Jasso Ramirez lived in Mexico City, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the site, and "made preliminary visits on multiple occasions to the archaeological site, stayed in hotels near the site ahead of time, and from there planned his violent acts." 

A preliminary investigation into the attack found several ties to the mass shooting which took place exactly 27 years earlier at Columbine High School in the US state of Colorado. 

"The collected evidence...reveals a psychopathic profile of the attacker, characterized by a tendency to copy situations that happened in other places at other times by other people," Cervantes said at a press conference Tuesday.

The 1999 attack by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher, with 20 others injured from the gunfire. 

Reports by Mexican media said authorities found among the shooter's personal belonging an AI-generated image that showed Jasso Ramirez alongside Harris and Klebold. 

And the shirt Jasso Ramirez wore Monday when he arrived at the pre-Hispanic heritage site to carry out the attack was similar to one worn by the Columbine assailants, according to authorities.

- Sacrifices, not photos -

Witness accounts of the attack point to another possible influence regarding the location chosen by the shooter: the human sacrifices by pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas. 

Jacqueline Gutierrez, an American tourist visiting Teotihuacan the day of the shooting, told Mexican broadcaster Milenio: "One of the things he was saying to us was that this is a place for sacrifices, not for your little photos...and that it's the anniversary of the Columbine massacre."

Gutierrez was at the site with her parents and boyfriend when "14 minutes of terror" broke out, with nowhere to escape. 

"We couldn't move or we'd fall down the pyramid...if he had wanted to kill us all, he would have," she continued, adding that he said he had been planning the attack for three years. 

Investigators maintain the incident was the result of a lone gunman with no collaborators, with a search of his possessions yielding "literature alluding to attacks and to figures connected to this type of violence," Cervantes said.

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The gunman who killed a Canadian tourist and wounded 13 others at Mexico's famed Teotihuacan pyramids had planned the attack days in advance, officials said Tuesday, as evidence pointed to him being inspired by a US massacre.

President Claudia Sheinbuam called for tighter gun controls at tourist areas after Monday's attack -- which comes just weeks before her country hosts several World Cup football matches.

Mexico State Prosecutor Jose Luis Cervantes, speaking at a press conference alongside Sheinbaum on Tuesday, said the gunman had made multiple visits to the pyramids, "stayed in hotels near the site ahead of time, and from there planned his violent acts."

The gunman, who shot and killed himself as military personnel moved in, was identified as 27-year-old Mexico City resident Julio Cesar Jasso Ramirez.

The Canadian woman who died was in her early 20s.

Cervantes said that a backpack had been found at the scene with a gun, knife and 52 rounds of ammunition.

The bag contained literature and images linked "to violent events that are known to have occurred in the United States in April 1999," Cervantes said, in an apparent reference to the infamous Columbine High School shooting.

Two students, aged 17 and 18, attacked the Colorado high school on April 20, 1999, killing 12 classmates and a teacher in a matter of minutes, before taking their own lives.

Several other mass shooters in the United States have subsequently cited the high-profile Columbine tragedy as inspiration for their attacks.

An American who survived Monday's attack, Jacqueline Gutierrez, told the Mexican newspaper Milenio that the shooter had mentioned Monday being the anniversary of the Columbine massacre.

He also mentioned the pyramid being a place for ritual sacrifices in pre-colonial times, she said.

Designated as a World Heritage site of "outstanding universal value" by the United Nations, the structures at Teotihuacan were built between the first and seventh centuries AD.

The shooting occurred on the Pyramid of the Moon, a 45-meter (nearly 150-foot) high monument that visitors are allowed to climb using steep steps carved of volcanic rock. 

Sheinbaum said the shooter had "psychological problems" and "was influenced by events that had occurred abroad."

She said there were no suspected links to organized crime in the attack, which left at least 13 people injured, including some who suffered gunshot wounds.

Among the wounded, who were taken to different hospitals, were a six-year-old boy and a woman from Colombia, another Canadian woman, a Brazilian man and two Americans.

The president said it was the first time something like this had happened at an archaeological site in Mexico and called for increased security at tourist sites around the country.

"We need to have better security to make sure someone can't enter an archaeological site, a tourist site, with a firearm," she said.

According to official tourism figures, Teotihuacan was Mexico's second most-visited archaeological site last year, trailing only Chichen Itza.

Authorities announced that the site will reopen on Wednesday with increased security protocols.

Juan Carlos Mejia, executive director of the Estur tourism agency, welcomed the announced reinforcement, telling AFP that previously "they never check you" before entering the site, he told AFP.

Mexico City hosts the World Cup's opening match on June 11.

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Mizzou men's basketball announced via X that it is scheduling a nonconference matchup with Big East Conference foe Marquette on Nov. 15 at the United Center in Chicago.

The tilt with the Golden Eagles will be the Tigers' first against a Big East opponent since a 93-87 loss to Seton Hall on Dec 17, 2023, in Kansas City. 

Mizzou and Marquette have met up nine times, with the Tigers holding a 5-4 edge all-time in the series. The last meeting between the two came in the 2009 NCAA Tournament. The Tigers defeated the Golden Eagles 83-79 in the second round en route to the Elite Eight. 

Marquette is coming off its first losing season under coach Shaka Smart. It finished just 12-20, with a 7-13 mark in conference play. 

The United States is looking to give former Afghan allies stuck in Qatar a choice between emigrating to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo or returning to their Taliban-ruled homeland, an activist said Tuesday.

President Donald Trump's administration, which has made a sweeping crackdown on immigration a signature policy, had given a March 31 deadline to close a camp where more than 1,100 Afghans were staying at a former US base in Qatar.

Afghans have been going through the base for processing while seeking to move to the United States, fearing persecution by the Taliban for having worked with US forces before they withdrew and the Western-backed government collapsed in 2021.

Shawn VanDiver, a US veteran who heads AfghanEvac, a group seeking to help former Afghan allies, said he was briefed that the Trump administration was looking to offer the Afghans a choice to go to DR Congo or otherwise return to Afghanistan.

He said he expected the Afghans to decline to go to the African country, which has its own refugee crisis after years of war, including ongoing hostilities linked to Rwanda.

"You do not relocate vetted wartime allies, more than 400 of them children, from American custody into a country in the middle of its own collapse," he said in a statement. 

"The administration knows this. It is the point," he said alleging a way to force the people back to Afghanistan.

The State Department declined to confirm that DR Congo was being eyed as a destination but said the United States was looking at "voluntary resettlement" from the as-Sayliyah camp in Qatar.

"Moving the (camp) population to a third country is a positive resolution that provides safety for these remaining people to start a new life outside of Afghanistan while upholding the safety and security of the American people," a State Department spokesperson said.

Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said that sending Afghan allies of the United States to DR Congo would be "insane."

"We told these Afghans that we would help ensure their safety after they helped us," he said.

"We have an obligation to follow through on our promise because it's the right thing to do, and because going back on our word will only make it harder for us to build the kinds of partnerships we may need to advance our national security in the future."

More than 190,000 Afghans have found new homes in the United States, with the vast majority living without incident, after the Taliban stormed back to power.

The program was initiated by former president Joe Biden but initially backed by many Republicans, who had largely supported the 20-year Afghan war at its onset.

Trump has dismantled the broader US refugee resettlement program and ordered a halt to processing for Afghans after one Afghan, who had worked with US intelligence and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, shot two National Guard troops in Washington last year, one fatally.

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The Center Square) – Members of Congress debated a bill on Tuesday that would change how the federal government handles air quality monitoring influenced by wildfire mitigation.

House Resolution 6387, known as the FIRE Act, is sponsored by U.S. Reps. Gabe Evans, R-Colorado, and Adam Gray, D-California. The legislation would revise regulations under the Clean Air Act “governing the review and handling of air quality monitoring data influenced by exceptional events or actions to mitigate wildfire risk.”

The House's vote on the bill was postponed to Wednesday following Tuesday's discussion on the floor.

Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., said the bill would mean states wouldn’t be penalized for wildfire mitigation efforts such as prescribed or controlled burns. 

“States currently limit these practices for fear of falling out of attainment with national air quality standards,” he said on the floor. “Unlike wildfires, prescribed burns do not automatically qualify as an exceptional event under the current provisions of the Clean Air Act.”

According to Palmer, only one prescribed burn has qualified as an exceptional event in the last decade.

Despite the bipartisan support for H.R. 6387, several Democrats spoke against it.

Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., called the FIRE Act “yet another dishonest attempt, in my opinion, by Republicans to weaken the Clean Air Act, which would make Americans sicker while health care costs skyrocket.” 

"Republicans are peddling this dangerous bill as an attempt to promote prescribed burns and combat wildfires,” he said. “But as has been true, like for the other dirty bills that we’ve considered over the last week or so, this bill fails to address the stated goal and instead provides overly broad exemptions that will harm American families and children.”

Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., cited public health concerns for her opposition.

“The FIRE Act undermines a centerpiece of the Clean Air Act: the National Ambient Air Quality Standards program,” she said. “Right now, there are narrow exceptions to the rules that set limits on how polluted our air can be. Republicans want to blow those exceptions wide open.”

Evans, the bill’s primary sponsor, said states like his home of Colorado should not be penalized for smoke and emissions that are outside of their control.

The bill removes those penalties "while still maintaining strong environmental protections and incentivizing good forest management practices to prevent wildfires," he said on the House floor.

“The Front Range of Colorado has consistently struggled to meet ozone attainment levels set by the federal Clean Air Act, despite the fact that data and science show that more that 70% of emissions originate from sources outside of Colorado,” Evans said.

(The Center Square) – The Pentagon's top budget official said Tuesday that the agency's failure to pass eight consecutive audits shouldn't stop Congress from approving the largest military budget in American history, a $1.5 trillion request that represents a 42% increase over current spending.

Pentagon acting comptroller Jules "Jay" Hurst defended the Department of War's audit record at a news briefing Tuesday, saying the problem wasn't sloppy spending but the complexity of tracking decades-old assets.

"Tracking obligations has never been an issue for us passing an audit," he told reporters. "We buy a nuclear missile in the 1970s and then we have to account for the present-day value, which includes every single repair or modification we made of that missile over 50-plus years. That's the kind of stuff that makes it hard for the department to get an audit; it's not tracking our funding in the year of execution."

Hurst said he expects the Department of War to pass an audit by 2028, before the end of Trump's second term.

The $1.5 trillion request does not include costs related to the ongoing conflict in Iran or the special operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of former leader Nicolás Maduro. Trump is expected to request up to $100 billion more from Congress in a separate supplemental funding bill for Iran operations.

According to Department of War budget documents released Tuesday, the proposal includes: $17.9 billion to begin building the Golden Dome missile defense shield; $65.8 billion for 18 new battle force ships and 16 support ships—the largest shipbuilding request since 1962; more than $74 billion for drone and counter-drone technologies, tripling FY26 spending and marking the largest such investment ever; more than $75 billion for the Space Force; $71.4 billion for the nuclear enterprise, including $16.2 billion for Columbia-class submarines, $6.1 billion for the B-21 stealth bomber, and $4.6 billion for the Sentinel ICBM program; $102 billion to grow air power, a 26% increase over FY26, including ramping F-35 procurement to 85 aircraft; $64.5 billion for land power including missiles, armored vehicles, and helicopters; over $20 billion for cyber capabilities; and $756.8 billion in defense industrial base investments to expand production capacity and supply chains.

The budget also proposes $21.5 billion to repair and construct military barracks and family housing, and $45.7 billion for military medical readiness and healthcare.

Hurst said the investment could generate more than 800,000 American jobs, many in manufacturing and engineering. He cited the F-35 fighter jet program, which costs $80 million to $100 million per aircraft and relies on 2,100 suppliers, as an example of how defense spending ripples through the broader economy.

"As we drastically increase the number of munitions and weapons systems we buy, the department needs to make investments to solidify America's industrial base," Hurst said. "Large defense firms are critical to our national security, but they rely on tens of thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses that provide the parts, components and materials to larger firms."

The budget also calls for adding 44,000 service members and a $5.8 billion military pay raise – 7% for the most junior troops at E-5 and below, 6% for E-6 to O-3, and 5% for O-4 and above.

When the budget was first released earlier this month, Republican leaders on the Senate and House Armed Services Committees praised it as a necessary response. U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., called it essential to confront growing global threats, while Senate Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island called it a "bloated, undisciplined budget" and said the Pentagon "doesn't lack funding, but it currently lacks responsible civilian leadership and management."

Not all Republicans were on board. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a fiscal conservative, told NOTUS the defense increases need to be offset elsewhere.

"We need to not grow deficits," Roy said. "So if we have to prioritize defense, then we need to, you know, de-prioritize other things."

House Democrats on the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus were sharper in their criticism. Reps. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said in a statement earlier this month that the proposal "could be the most egregious waste of taxpayer dollars we have ever seen," calling it a "giveaway to defense contractors at the expense of the American people." They also tied the audit issue directly to the budget, saying, "we cannot justify continuing to increase the Pentagon's budget when the agency cannot even successfully pass a fiscal audit. No other federal agency is allowed to operate this way."

The budget request lands as the nation's fiscal outlook grows increasingly precarious. Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office warned Congress that the federal government is on an "unsustainable fiscal path," cautioning that a persistent gap between spending and revenue threatens U.S. economic stability. The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and in fiscal year 2025 alone, the deficit reached $1.7 trillion, about 6% of GDP. Last May, the U.S. lost its final AAA credit rating when Moody's downgraded the country, after similar downgrades by Fitch in 2023 and S&P Global in 2011.

Amid these fiscal challenges, administration officials said the defense budget was a strategic investment in national security for the coming decades.

"We are delivering on President Trump's commitment to expand American military dominance for decades to come," Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in a statement. "Previous administrations underinvested in our military while our enemies grew stronger and more dangerous, so we are now changing the game. This budget builds this arsenal without compromising readiness that will ensure we remain the world's premier fighting force, we protect the homeland, and we create peace through strength now and into the future."

(The Center Square) – A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire and bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering,

FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the indictment Tuesday from a grand jury in the middle district of Alabama.

"The SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups," Blanche said at a news conference. "The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."

The Southern Poverty Law Center came to prominence during the civil rights movement in the U.S. for reporting on white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, but it's been criticized in recent years for identifying a number of Christian organizations as hate groups.

The Tuesday indictment alleges SPLC "secretly funneled more than $3 million in funds to members of white supremacist and extremist groups" to fan the flames.

"It was doing the exact opposite of what its told its donors it was doing, not dismantling extremism, but funding it to carry out this scheme," Blanche said. "SPLC created bank accounts in the name of at least five completely fictitious organizations that had no bona fide employees or legitimate business purpose. The money was passed from SPLC to one sham account, to a second sham account, and then loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups. This was designed to shield the source of those funds, and because of this, SPLC is also charged with one count, as I said earlier, of conspiracy to commit money laundering."