from the breaking-people,-blowing-money dept

One of ICE’s largest detention centers is conveniently located only miles from the US border in El Paso, Texas. Erected on an apparently unused section of the Ft. Bliss military base, the detention center was crafted to hold up to 5,000 detainees at a time.

Camp East Montana has already earned the reputation as one of the worst places for detainees to be sent. Previous reporting has uncovered nasty things like guards setting up suicide death pools, rather than… you know… doing whatever they could to deter detainees from committing suicide.

In addition to this, there have been measles outbreaks and inspections detailing dozens of violations at the facility, including a seemingly deliberate unwillingness to provide basic medical care for detainees.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just released its report [PDF] on Camp East Montana and it doesn’t contain anything ICE (or its contractors) might legitimately consider to be a “win,” much less a “barely perceptible improvement.”

As NPR notes in its reporting on the GAO’s report, ICE is running through contractors rapidly, which suggests the companies hoping to get in on the temporary jail business aren’t particularly qualified to do so. To date, three different contractors have been in charge of this prison camp: Creative Corrections, Amentum Services, and this company (I guess it’s technically a company?) that was recently kicked to curb by ICE shortly after the GAO began its investigation:

When the Trump administration awarded a $1.26 billion contract this summer to build and operate a new tent city detention center in Texas, it made headlines, and not just because the facility, located at the Fort Bliss Army base, was expected to be the biggest of its kind in the country. The company that won the job, Acquisition Logistics, was so small it operated out of a single-family home in Richmond, Virginia. Almost nobody had heard of it. “A random house…just won $1.26 billion from ICE,” wrote the New Republic.

That likely explains a lot of the flaws the GAO uncovered. But the federal government has to take a lot of the blame itself. First off, this contract was somehow secured by the US Navy on behalf of ICE, which definitely makes it seem more shady than it already seems.

But ICE was so busy blowing billions on satisfying Trump’s bigoted fantasies that it couldn’t even be bothered to craft a contract that wouldn’t screw taxpayers out of even more money. In most prisons and detention centers, those being held by the government are often underfed. In the early days of Camp East Montana, it was the complete opposite:

The contract identified pricing for services needed to reach initial operational capacity of 1,000 detained noncitizens, along with pricing to increase the capacity of the facility by 250 detained noncitizens every week until it reached its full operational capacity of 5,000. Based on our review of contract documents and invoices, the Army began paying the full cost for guards, medical services, transportation, meals, and other services on August 1, 2025. However, there were no detained noncitizens at the facility until August 16. Between August 1 and August 15, 2025, the Army wasted up to $11.5 million for these services. Further, because the Army set a fixed price for meals based on the capacity of the facility, it paid about an additional $423,000 for meals it did not need when the facility was operating below its designated capacity from August 16, 2025, through September 30, 2025.

That’s the good news… somehow. It gets so much worse after that. While wasting food is certainly problematic when so many detainees at other prison facilities go hungry, this contractor was apparently so inept and inexperienced that pretty much everything it did made things worse or more dangerous for detainees.

According to an ICE report, there were no security cameras on the perimeter fencing and there were blind spots in the placement of cameras throughout the facility, increasing the risk of a sexual assault or an escape. In addition, during our visit to the facility on September 16, 2025, officials told us that the post responsible for monitoring security camera footage for all areas of the facility was understaffed.

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Contractors told ICE they were unable to accommodate detained noncitizens using wheelchairs. According to an ICE report, the facility did not have any Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant showers in the housing units when it opened.

[…]

In January 2026, a contract security guard at Camp East Montana lost their loaded firearm at the facility. According to an ICE official, despite several searches of the facility, as of March 2026 the firearm had not been recovered.

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[D]etained noncitizens with chronic conditions did not receive treatment and care in accordance with National Detention Standards. For example, none of the detained noncitizens with diabetes or HIV had treatment plans in place.

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On March 3, 2026, ICE issued a discrepancy report related to a detained noncitizen escaping from Camp East Montana in October 2025. ICE oversight officials attributed the escape to the contractor’s inability to account for detained noncitizens

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Your severity mileage may vary, but this covers everything from a lack of ADA compliance to losing a loaded handgun, with plenty of ineptitude/indifference in between.

There’s more. And it’s even worse than what’s seen above.

On February 20, 2026, ICE issued a discrepancy report for a detained noncitizen death by use of force in January 2026. The coroner’s autopsy found the death to be a homicide due to asphyxia. However, the contractor did not provide use of force and death reports to ICE, as required. In addition, evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed.

Don’t let the “or” fool you. Reports written by agencies that strive to be as neutral and non-judgmental as possible don’t tend to engage in speculation. If the GAO thinks evidence has most likely been destroyed, it’s going to portray it as just being one of two options. If the GAO thought it was more likely the evidence had just been misplaced or perhaps never gathered correctly, it would not have added “or destroyed” to this sentence.

What’s absolutely unclear is whether or not the contractor acted alone. The GAO doesn’t discuss this further, which does leave this part open to speculation. Either the contractor acted alone because it felt it might be held accountable for this death, or it was urged to eternally “misplace” evidence that might implicate the contractor and/or ICE itself.

Either way, there’s nothing in this report that suggests ICE or its contractors are going out of their way to ensure the health and safety of detainees. And if this is happening here, it’s certainly happening anywhere else ICE is stashing arrestees.

The government has decided the best use of our resources is rounding up as many non-white migrants as possible and toss them into prison camps. And it has decided it doesn’t care how this is done. It only cares that it gets done. This nation — if it manages to survive this constant onslaught on our ideals — will have to deal with repercussions of the actions of a handful of hateful people for decades to come.

Filed Under: camp east montana, detention facilities, dhs, el paso, ice, mass deportation, rights violations, trump administration

Companies: acquisition logistics, amentum services

OpenAI’s release of its newest model, GPT 5.6, reportedly won’t be like its previous releases. Instead of distributing it to the public, the company plans to share it only with a select group of close partners because the Trump administration told it to, reports The Information.

At a meeting this week, CEO Sam Altman reportedly told staff that the government would be “approving access customer by customer” during a preview period. Altman reportedly added that if the limited release goes well, OpenAI hopes to follow with a general, broader release a “couple of weeks later.”

In other words, the Trump administration appears to be pressuring OpenAI to do what Anthropic is already voluntarily doing: keeping its most powerful AI models under wraps.

According to The Information, OpenAI’s new model is not only being reviewed by the administration, but its staffers also “worked closely” with the government on the upcoming release. The agencies that reportedly asked for a limited release were the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The Trump administration — which originally positioned itself as taking a “hands off” approach to AI — has in recent months pushed for federal oversight of new models. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order directing certain AI companies to voluntarily submit new models to the government for testing and evaluation before releasing them publicly. 

Earlier this year, Anthropic sparked no small amount of controversy when it announced that its new frontier cyber model, Claude Mythos, would only be released to a small coterie of partners through a program called Project Glasswing. Anthropic argued that its model was simply too powerful and could, in the wrong hands, cause more harm than good. Observers have since debated whether Anthropic’s rhetoric is a mere marketing gimmick or a legitimate attempt to keep a powerful model from being misused. The answer may be somewhere in between.

Cybercriminals have used automated tools for a very long time, but in the age of generative AI, they now have more digital ammunition than ever before. LLMs have proven adept at writing malware, and some can even execute entire ransomware attacks autonomously.

The specific concern with frontier cyber tools like Mythos is that they are ostensibly capable of both identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities at speeds that no human analyst could match. Since many software systems contain hidden bugs that act as entry points into enterprise networks, this obviously poses an obvious and significant problem for any organization running complex software infrastructure. That said, since these models remain closed to the public, it’s difficult to tell just how much of a threat they really are.

There are a ton of laptops on the market at any given moment, and almost all of those models are available in multiple configurations to match your performance and budget needs. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed with options when looking for a new laptop, it’s understandable. To help simplify things for you, here are the main things you should consider when you start looking.

Price

The search for a new laptop for most people starts with price. If the statistics chipmaker Intel and PC manufacturers hurl at us are correct, you’ll be holding onto your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to stretch your budget a little to get better specs, do it. And that stands whether you’re spending $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less upfront with an eye toward upgrading memory and storage in the future. But laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making components easily upgradable, so again, it’s best to get as much laptop as you can afford from the start. 

Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design from higher-end materials or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things add to the cost of a laptop. I’d love to say $500 will get you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. Right now, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office or school tasks is between $700 and $800 and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming upwards of about $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more laptop for less. 

Operating system

Choosing an operating system is part personal preference and part budget. For the most part, Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS do the same things (except for gaming, where Windows is the winner), but they do them differently. Unless there’s an OS-specific application you need, go with the one you feel most comfortable using. And if you’re not sure which that is, head to an Apple store or a local electronics store and test them out. Or ask friends or family to let you test theirs for a bit. If you have an iPhone or iPad and like it, chances are you’ll like MacOS too. 

But when it comes to price and variety (and, again, PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want MacOS, you’re getting a MacBook. While Apple’s MacBooks regularly top our best lists, the least expensive one is the M1 MacBook Air for $999. It is regularly discounted to $750 or $800, but if you want a cheaper MacBook, you’ll have to consider older refurbished ones. 

Windows laptops can be found for as little as a couple of hundred dollars and come in all manner of sizes and designs. Granted, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop we’d give a full-throated recommendation to, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email and word processing, they exist. 

If you are on a tight budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience than Windows; make sure the applications you need have a Chrome, Android or Linux app before making the leap. But if you spend most of your time roaming the web, writing, streaming video or using cloud-gaming services, they’re a good fit. 

Size

Remember to consider whether having a lighter, thinner laptop or a touchscreen laptop with a good battery life will be important to you in the future. Size is primarily determined by the screen — hello, laws of physics — which in turn factors into battery size, laptop thickness, weight and price. And keep in mind other physics-related characteristics, such as an ultrathin laptop isn’t necessarily lighter than a thick one, you can’t expect a wide array of connections on a small or ultrathin model and so on. 

Screen

When it comes to deciding on a screen, there are a myriad considerations: how much you need to display (which is surprisingly more about resolution than screen size), what types of content you’ll be looking at and whether you’ll be using it for gaming or creative work.

You really want to optimize pixel density; that is, the number of pixels per inch the screen can display. Though there are other factors that contribute to sharpness, a higher pixel density usually means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen at DPI Calculator if you don’t feel like doing the math, and you can also find out what math you need to do there.) We recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.

Because of the way Windows and MacOS scale for the display, you’re frequently better off with a higher resolution than you’d think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller — to fit more content in the view — on a low-resolution screen. This is why a 4K, 14-inch screen may sound like unnecessary overkill but may not be if you need to, say, view a wide spreadsheet.

If you need a laptop with relatively accurate color, that displays the most colors possible or that supports HDR, you can’t simply trust the specs — not because manufacturers lie, but because they usually fail to provide the necessary context to understand what the specs they quote mean. You can find a ton of detail about considerations for different types of screen uses in our monitor buying guides for general purpose monitors, creators, gamers and HDR viewing.

Processor

The processor, aka the CPU, is the brains of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as a new third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer a staggering selection of mobile processors. Making things trickier, both manufacturers have chips designed for different laptop styles, like power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will let you know what type is used. You can head to Intel’s or AMD’s sites for explanations so you get the performance you want. Generally speaking, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.

Apple makes its own chips for MacBooks, which makes things slightly more straightforward. But, like Intel and AMD, you’ll still want to pay attention to the naming conventions to know what kind of performance to expect. Apple uses its M-series chipsets in Macs. The entry-level MacBook Air uses an M1 chip with an eight-core CPU and seven-core GPU. The current models have M2-series silicon that starts with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU and goes up to the M2 Max with a 12-core CPU and a 38-core GPU. Again, generally speaking, the more cores it has, the better the performance. 

Battery life has less to do with the number of cores and more to do with CPU architecture, Arm versus x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus PCs we’ve tested offer better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

Graphics

The graphics processor handles all the work of driving the screen and generating what gets displayed, as well as speeding up a lot of graphics-related (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). As the names imply, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates with directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.

Because the iGPU splits space, memory and power with the CPU, it’s constrained by the limits of those. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but doesn’t perform nearly as well as a dGPU. In fact, there are some games and creative software that won’t run unless they detect a dGPU or sufficient VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing and other nonspecialized apps will run fine on an iGPU, though.

For more power-hungry graphics needs, like video editing, gaming and streaming, design and so on, you’ll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some based on the Xe-branded (or the older UHD Graphics branding) iGPU technology in its CPUs.

Memory

For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up fast. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is slower. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which in conjunction with a slower disk can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have the memory soldered onto the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it’s soldered and can’t be upgraded. 

However, some PC makers will solder memory on and also leave an empty internal slot for adding a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or find the laptop’s full specs online to confirm. And check the web for user experiences, because the slot may still be hard to get to, it may require nonstandard or hard-to-get memory or other pitfalls.

Storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. But not all SSDs are equally speedy, and cheaper laptops typically have slower drives; if the laptop has only 4GB or 8GB of RAM, it may end up swapping to that drive and the system may slow down quickly while you’re working. 

Get what you can afford, and you likely need less than you think. If you need to go with a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two down the road or use cloud storage to bolster a small internal drive. The one exception is gaming laptops: We don’t recommend going with less than a 512GB SSD unless you really like uninstalling games every time you want to play a new game. 

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It’s one of those grids with no blank squares–every part of it is filled with a letter. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Where you’ll find two hands on one arm
Answer: WATCH

6A clue: State that’s home to Shoshone Falls
Answer: IDAHO

7A clue: Linking point
Answer: NEXUS

8A clue: Vote into office
Answer: ELECT

9A clue: Seats for office workers
Answer: DESKS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: ___ and dined
Answer: WINED

2D clue: Singer of “Hello” and “Skyfall”
Answer: ADELE

3D clue: Some paycheck withholdings
Answer: TAXES

4D clue: Apt name for a pet groundhog?
Answer: CHUCK

5D clue: “S.N.L.” V.I.P.s
Answer: HOSTS

• Ukraine’s autonomous interceptors stalk and destroy Russian Shaheds without human controls
• Ukraine compressed years of drone development into twelve battlefield months
• Brave1’s interceptor automates 95% of the kill chain — the human only picks the target

Ukraine has cleared its first autonomous drone interceptor for battlefield deployment following combat testing completed recently in the Kharkiv region.

The system was developed under the Brave1 defence accelerator specifically to counter Shahed drones, which Russia increasingly launches in coordinated saturation attacks against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.