Month: April 2026

Bahrain’s Interior Ministry said earlier that civil defense teams were “extinguishing a fire in a facility of a company as a result of the Iranian aggression,” but did not identify the company or provide details on the extent of the damage, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
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Amazon declined to comment on any specific strike, according to the report.
The attack is the latest sign that the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran is spilling into the Gulf’s commercial technology infrastructure.
The development came one day after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened to target major US technology companies operating in the Middle East, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple, widening concerns that digital and economic assets may increasingly come into the line of fire.
Amazon said on March 2 that two of its data center facilities in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain sustained physical impacts from drone strikes.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its Middle East (Bahrain) Region in July 2019 as its first cloud region in the Middle East. AWS said the Bahrain region consists of three Availability Zones and serves customers seeking lower-latency cloud infrastructure in the region.​​​​​​​

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In a statement issued on Wednesday, the ministry said the decision violates the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter and international law, particularly those concerning respect for national sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs, News.Az reports, citing Iran’s English-language Press TV.
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It described the move as “a strategic mistake” and “an unforgivable insult” to the Iranian nation, adding that it reflects what it called the Argentine government’s misguided alignment with Israel and the United States, which it accused of continuing “aggression” against Iran.
“By declaring their alignment with the US and Zionist regime’s military aggression against Iran, the president and minister of foreign affairs of Argentina have positioned themselves as partners to the crimes committed (in Iran) and have placed themselves on the wrong side of history,” the ministry said.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry also warned that the designation would seriously damage bilateral relations and set a dangerous precedent in interstate affairs, creating international responsibility for the Argentine government.
Argentina’s presidential office said on Tuesday that it had designated the IRGC, justifying the move by alleging that the elite Iranian force has backed the Lebanese group Hezbollah, which Argentina blames for a deadly 1994 bombing in Buenos Aires.
Press TV added that the announcement came amid what it described as continued pressure from US President Donald Trump on allies to designate the IRGC and take part in what it called “joint aggression” with Israel against Iran.

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said traffic deaths fell 6.7% to 36,640 and the fatality rate fell to 1.10 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, the second lowest in U.S. history. American road deaths jumped dramatically during the 2020 COVID pandemic and remained elevated for years, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.
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U.S. traffic deaths jumped 10.8% in 2021 to 43,230, the most in a single year since 2005. Pedestrians and cyclists killed on American roads rose to the highest number in more than four decades.
Jonathan Morrison, who heads the U.S. auto safety agency, said the agency is “doubling down on safety strategies that reduce risky driving behaviors before they cost lives.”
This is the fourth straight year of declines. Traffic deaths fell 3.8% in 2024 to below 40,000 for the first time since 2020.
As U.S. roads became less crowded during the pandemic, some motorists perceived police as less likely to issue tickets, experts said, resulting in riskier driving. Some drivers were also more likely to drive while being impaired by alcohol or drugs consumed at home during the pandemic.
The U.S. fatality rate rose much higher than for other developed nations during the pandemic.
Congress approved $5 billion over five years as part of a $1 trillion 2021 infrastructure law to address road safety.

A 2023 NHTSA study found crashes directly cost taxpayers $30 billion, and society as a whole $340 billion. When quality-of-life valuations were included, the total cost to society ran to $1.37 trillion – equivalent to 1.6% of U.S. economic output.

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Details remain limited, but early information suggests that several victims sustained injuries during the incident. Authorities have not yet confirmed the exact number of casualties or the condition of those affected, News.az reports, citing Xinhua.
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Emergency services are believed to be at the scene, with police launching an initial response as investigations begin.
Information still emerging
At this stage, officials have not released details about the suspect, motive, or whether any arrests have been made. German authorities typically urge the public to avoid speculation in the early phases of such incidents while facts are being verified.
The situation remains fluid, and further updates are expected as more information becomes available.
Context of previous incidents
The city of Solingen has previously witnessed violent knife attacks, including a 2024 incident at a public festival that left three people dead and several others injured.
While it is not yet known whether the current event is related in any way, such incidents have heightened security concerns across Germany in recent years.
Authorities monitoring the situation
Police are expected to provide official statements once the situation is under control and more verified details are available.
For now, reports continue to describe the attack as ongoing or recently contained, with emergency responders prioritising medical assistance and public safety.

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The leaders of the International Energy Agency (IEA), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank will create a coordination group to enhance their response to the energy and economic effects of the war, according to a joint statement from the organizations, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
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The coordination group will assess the severity of impacts across countries, coordinate a response and mobilise stakeholders to deliver support to countries in need, the international bodies said.

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Cognichip is building a deep learning model to work alongside engineers as they design new computer chips, News.az reports.
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The problem it is trying to solve is one the industry has lived with for decades: chip design is enormously complex, ruinously expensive, and slow. Advanced chips take three to five years to go from conception to mass production; the design phase alone can take as long as two years before physical layout begins. Consider that the latest line of Nvidia GPUs, Blackwell, contains 104 billion transistors — that’s a lot to line up.
In the time it takes to create a new chip, Cognichip CEO and founder Faraj Aalaei says, the market can change and make all that investment a waste. Aalaei’s goal is to bring the kind of AI tools that software engineers have used to speed their work into the semiconductor design space. 
“These systems have now become intelligent enough that by just guiding them and telling them what the result is that you want, it can actually produce beautiful code,” Aalaei told TechCrunch.
He says the firm’s technology can reduce the cost of chip development by more than 75% and cut the timeline by more than half. 
The company emerged from stealth last year and said Wednesday that it had raised $60 million in new funding led by Seligman Ventures, with notable participation from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who invested through his venture firm Walden Catalyst Ventures and will be joining Cognichip’s board. Umesh Padval, a managing partner at Seligman, will also join the board. Cognichip has now raised $93 million altogether since its founding in 2024.
Still, Cognichip can’t yet point to a new chip designed with its system and did not disclose any of the customers it says it has been collaborating with since September. 
The company says its advantage is in using its own model trained on chip design data, rather than starting with a general-purpose LLM. That required getting access to domain-specific training data, which is no small feat. Unlike software developers, who share vast amounts of code openly, chip designers guard their IP closely, making the kind of open-source trove that typically trains AI coding assistants largely unavailable.
Cognichip has had to develop its own data sets, including synthetic data, and license data from partners. The firm has also developed procedures to allow chipmakers to securely train Cognichip’s models on their own proprietary data without exposing it.
Where proprietary data isn’t available, Cognichip has leaned on open-source alternatives. In one demo last year, Cognichip invited electrical engineering students at San Jose State University to try the model in a hackathon. The teams were able to use the model to design CPUs based on the RISC-V open-source chip architecture — a freely available design that anyone can build on.
Cognichip is competing against incumbent players like Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems, as well as a well-funded startups like ChipAgentsAI, which closed a $74 million extended Series A in February, and Ricursive, which raised a $300 million Series A round in January.
Padval said that the current flood of capital into AI infrastructure is the largest he’s seen in 40 years of investing.
“If it’s a super cycle for semiconductors and hardware, it’s a super cycle for companies like [Cognichip],” he said.

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The U.S. electric vehicles maker sold 2,920 cars in Italy last month, accounting for a market share of around 1.6%, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
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In the first three months of this year, Tesla registrations were up 27% compared to the same period of 2025, to 4,419 new vehicles, corresponding to a market share of 0.9%.

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The project, known as BrainWhisperer, is designed to convert brain signals into written language, offering potential new communication pathways for people with speech impairments or paralysis, News.az reports.
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The system has already demonstrated the ability to reconstruct complex sentences from neural signals recorded via intracranial implants.
In one example shared by the company, BrainWhisperer successfully decoded phrases generated purely from brain activity, highlighting the rapid progress of brain-to-text technologies.
A new step in brain-computer interface development
BrainWhisperer forms part of a broader initiative by Tether, described as “Brain OS” – an open-source platform intended to connect brain-computer interfaces with artificial intelligence systems and wearable technologies.
The company says the system is built on top of AI models inspired by Whisper, adapting automatic speech recognition techniques to neural signals rather than audio input.
By converting brain activity into phonemes and then into text, BrainWhisperer aims to reduce word error rates and improve decoding precision across different users and conditions.
Competitive performance and technical benchmarks
Tether reported that its system ranked fourth out of 466 participants in a recent international brain-to-text competition hosted on Kaggle.
According to the company, BrainWhisperer achieved a word error rate of 1.78%, placing it close to the top performers in the field.
The system uses a multi-stage architecture combining several machine learning models, ensemble techniques and phoneme-to-text conversion frameworks to maximise transcription accuracy.
Towards universal decoding across individuals
One of the key challenges in brain-computer interface research is the need to calibrate systems for each individual user – a process that can take hours or even days.
Tether says it is working on “cross-subject” decoding, a method aimed at creating a universal system capable of interpreting neural signals from different individuals without extensive recalibration.
Early results suggest that this approach could significantly reduce setup times while maintaining competitive accuracy compared with existing state-of-the-art models.
Balancing performance and accessibility
Current high-precision systems often rely on invasive brain implants, which require surgical procedures. Tether says it is also exploring non-invasive alternatives, including wearable sensors that can capture signals from the skin or muscles.
These approaches could make brain-to-text technologies more widely accessible, though they face technical challenges such as signal interference and reduced precision.
Implications for healthcare and human-AI interaction
Advances in brain-to-text systems are widely seen as a potential breakthrough for assistive technology, particularly for individuals who are unable to speak or move.
By enabling direct communication from neural signals, such systems could transform how people with severe disabilities interact with the world.
Tether says its long-term goal is to develop systems that allow users to communicate more naturally and efficiently, while maintaining privacy by processing data directly on personal devices.
While independent verification of the latest results is still awaited, the announcement underscores the accelerating pace of innovation at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

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Documents filed after the hearing show Harry was messaging with Mail on Sunday reporter Charlotte Griffiths over about a month from December 2011 to January 2012, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.

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This was before he met his current wife Meghan Markle.

During the hearing Harry had rejected that he had corresponded with the journalist.

But documents filed showed Facebook messages between the pair, with Griffiths calling Harry “Mr Mischief” and him referring to her as “sugar”.

The pair had reportedly met in Ibiza, the party island.

In one message Harry told Griffiths: “I miss our movie snuggles” and signed off a message with “mwah” and strings of kisses.

Griffiths told Harry “what a fun weekend of naughtiness, can’t we all get up to no good in the countryside every weekend damn it, smooches CG String xxx”

Harry then responded that it was “without doubt the best of those weekends I’ve been to.

“Ooh, apparently cinderella’s shoe was found outside that door … sou can relax.please stop panicking!!!! X”.

Earlier, a judge overseeing the lawsuit brought by Prince Harry, singer Elton John and other high-profile figures against ‌the publisher of the Daily Mail at London’s High Court says it will take some time before he can deliver his ruling.

The Duke of ‌Sussex, 41, and six other claimants are suing Associated Newspapers for alleged widespread unlawful activities ranging from hacking voicemail messages, bugging landlines and obtaining private information by deception over more than two decades from the early 1990s.

The publisher ‌rejects their case ‌as ⁠being “preposterous smears”.

During almost 10 weeks of argument, judge Matthew ​Nicklin has heard evidence from the claimants as well as numerous current and former senior journalists from Associated, which also publishes the Mail on Sunday.

David Sherborne, the lawyer for Harry and the other claimants, said there was a culture ⁠at Associated’s titles where its journalists would ‌use ​private investigators to carry out unlawful activities on their behalf.

“Any finding of ​unlawful activity is ‌a disaster,” Sherborne said in his concluding remarks.

The publisher’s lawyer Antony ​White argued that there was no evidence to back up the allegations, the claimants’ witnesses were unreliable and the case against the papers ​was ​scattergun and part of a ​conspiracy by people with a grudge ‌against the press.

“The remaining task is, of course, now mine,” Nicklin said at the end of the trial.

“Judgment will take some time. After a short break over Easter … I will be working on the case and the ​judgment effectively full-time … so I won’t be doing anything else … and I ​will be toiling ⁠away on the judgment.”

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