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Israel continues to expand settlements in the occupied territory, which are illegal under international law.

The Israeli government has allocated a first tranche of an expected $388m in new funds for the construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The anti-settlement group Peace Now reported on Thursday that the government had allocated 152 million shekels ($51m) to prepare construction plans for 69 illegal settlements and outposts in the occupied West Bank.

The cabinet later reportedly postponed a decision about a 1-billion-shekel ($338m) allocation. That proposal, if passed, would mark one of the largest expansions of illegal Israeli settlements in decades.

“The government decided to postpone the decision [on the 1-billion-shekel allocation] and refer it to the Security Cabinet which is expected to convene on Sunday,” Peace Now wrote.

Under the yet-to-be-approved plan, construction for the settlements, including infrastructure and public buildings, would begin despite necessary planning protocols not having been carried out in accord with Israeli law.

Peace Now accused the government of intending to bypass planning and construction regulations.

“October 7 proved that the right-wing approach has failed: the conflict cannot be ‘managed,’ and the Palestinians cannot be ‘defeated’,” the group said in a statement.

“Israel must reach a political solution and diplomatic agreement, but instead the government is only sinking us deeper into the mire and condemning us to many more years of bloody conflict.”

Israel has come under growing condemnation for expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are illegal under international law.

On Tuesday, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France and Norway imposed sanctions on networks involved in financing, enabling and carrying out settler violence against Palestinians.

According to Peace Now, the current Israeli government has approved 103 settlements since it took office in December 2022. From that figure, 51 are entirely new settlements.

On Wednesday, Amnesty International published a report accusing the Israeli government of playing a central role in what it describes as the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The report described the government’s actions as “integral”.

At least 117 villages in the West Bank have been subject to either complete or partial displacement due to settler attacks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Amnesty also condemned the upcoming “Great Israeli Real Estate Event”, which is due to take place in London on Sunday.

The event, which has also been held in the United States and Canada, promotes the sale of properties in the occupied West Bank, which campaigners say is in violation of international law.

Every morning, Harvard-Westlake tennis player Chase Klugo’s house shakes like it’s in the middle of a small earthquake. His alarm clock, a big and bulky machine that’s Bluetooth-connected to the house’s fire alarm, rattles his room until he finally shuts it off.

Klugo’s moderate-to-severe hearing loss requires hearing aids to navigate life, a daily reminder that he isn’t like his teammates. Instead of forgetting his sneakers or a racket at home, Klugo might mistakenly leave without his hearing aid’s batteries.

He also worries about the California state government more than his SATs, college enrollment or his future in tennis matches, despite Harvard-Westlake winning the 2026 CIF Southern Section Division 1 boys tennis championship.

In Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom is negotiating with the legislature to pass the 2026-27 budget by a June 15 deadline. Klugo wants to add language to the budget to include hearing aid coverage — an idea that, despite bipartisan support, has stalled on Newsom’s desk multiple times.

“It’s been instilled in me since I was young that it’s important for not only yourself to thrive, but your community to thrive,” Klugo said, sitting in his family’s house in the San Fernando Valley. “I find it insane how someone can be denied one of their five senses, and not only one of their five senses, but one of the most important senses that you could possibly have.”

Off the court, Klugo is quieter, more reserved. His coach at Harvard-Westlake, Robert “Bo” Hardt, described him as a 45-year-old man trapped in a 17-year-old’s body. Hardt reminds Klugo to go to parties and enjoy his high school experience, but it’s the furthest thing from Klugo’s mind.

Instead, he does community outreach for the about 20,000 deaf or hard-of-hearing children in the state whose hearing aids are not covered by their insurance. He works with Michelle Marciniak, the founder of Let California Kids Hear, to share his story.

California’s current $30 million plan, the Hearing Aid Coverage for Children program, had just 314 active participants as of April. The $6,000 out-of-pocket cost every three years of hearing aids can force some parents into debt or to delay or skip treatment, Marciniak said.

An insurance mandate would decrease the taxpayer money spent on the HACCP, reducing the number of children who need the program’s assistance. Instead, more private insurance companies would cover costs associated with hearing aids for children and young adults under 21-years-old, she said.

Harvard-Westlake tennis coach Robert “Bo” Hardt described Chase Klugo as a 45-year-old man trapped in a 17-year-old’s body.

(Courtesy of Harvard-Westlake)

Newsom has cited concerns about the precedent of adding requirements to California’s affordable care act insurance and raising prices for those who don’t need the hearing aid coverage, favoring expanding the state-funded program instead, according to Cal Matters.

Let California Kids Hear and Klugo have been steadfast in their response that insurance costs would be minimal and the state program falls far short of fulfilling needs throughout the state. Thirty-five other states require coverage of children’s hearing aids — through a state mandate for all insurers, their affordable care act insurance or both.

Klugo is persistent for a reason. Those most affected by any legislation can’t knock on state representatives’ doors or write letters to Newsom, he said. Deaf and hard-of-hearing children are more likely to achieve a high quality of life personally and professionally when hearing concerns are identified and intervened with before they’re 6 months old, according to the World Health Organization.

Children who don’t receive treatment for hearing loss are more likely to be at risk for developmental issues in speech perception, language, cognitive and social skills, according to the World Health Organization’s 2021 world report on hearing.

“These babies, they can’t tell their stories about what’s actually happening. I’m sure the parents are obviously furious and they can advocate, but they don’t have that experience of what it’s like to actually firsthand experience it,” Klugo said. “So I think it’s my job to do that.”

Marciniak has worked with hard-of-hearing teenagers like Klugo to spread awareness for nearly a decade.

“It’s a really heavy weight,” Marciniak said. “Every single person, every single year has supported this. It’s not a red, it’s not a blue issue. This is about a child’s ability to hear, and it shouldn’t be dependent on their zip code or their family’s income.”

“It haunts me.”

Tennis has been Klugo’s outlet to release the weight he feels on his shoulders sometimes, he said. An overflowing duffle bag of tennis balls sat by the front door, the only chaos in a tidy house. Klugo’s parents — Karen, a former tennis player in high school, and his father, a Penn State swimmer — each carried the genes that could lead to hearing loss. Neither, though, was affected.

Karen first found out about hearing loss when Klugo’s older sister failed a routine newborn auditory test. Klugo did, too. The family adapted to its new normal, and Klugo and his sister enrolled in athletic programs.

Still, Klugo’s hearing loss couldn’t be brushed away. In fourth grade, he was reading a book and had turned off his hearing aids. He only realized something was wrong when he looked at his teacher, whose face was drained. He looked around. All his classmates had pushed in their chairs, and he was the only one left in the classroom in the middle of a fire drill.

Not every situation is life-threatening, but most that Klugo encountered in school required self-advocacy. Sure, teachers needed to talk louder, especially when they turned around and Klugo couldn’t read their lips. But he also needed his friends to be more patient. Sometimes it took one or two times to understand what they were saying.

When the family moved from Ohio after his freshman year, Klugo’s self-reliance helped elevate the tennis team. In return, Klugo joined a built-in support system.

“He’s intense, but he’s good, and they respect the way he works, and that rubbed off on a lot of the team, too. It’s like a pro in his practice habits and his work,” Hardt said. Take his doubles teammate Aaron Chung, for instance. Chung speaks in a low, hushed tone, but to accommodate Klugo, he becomes a bit louder — though not too loud to give away their attack plans to their opponents.

“I told him that you got to speak up, because I’m not gonna be able to hear if it’s super loud and you’re very quiet,” Klugo said. “He’s typically a pretty quiet person too on the court, which has been cool to see him transform a little bit. He’s been doing a great job helping me out.”

After Chung and Klugo huddle, they line up on the court like two halves of the same body, moving in tandem as the balls ricochet off rackets. It’s a flow of squeaking of tennis shoes and the pitter-patter of the ball hitting the concrete court until either Klugo or Chung scores. The same teenager who drafts op-eds to send to places like the Times plots his next battle attack.

When either of the two scores, Klugo releases a full-chested yell in celebration, and they slapped hands, a rhythm that repeats until the sets are over, until the game is over. From a distance, his mom watches in the shade on the benches. His dad paces in the background.

Every so often, the sun catches on the small, clear wires of Klugo’s hearing aids. Otherwise, they’re shielded from the sun under his white baseball cap and his curly hair.

Klugo’s teammates help out with more than winning sets. Klugo’s Bluetooth alarm clock isn’t portable, and the hotel alarms ring too softly for him to hear. He can’t sleep in his hearing aids. The device will completely block the ear canal and cause a low buzzing noise that makes drifting off hard. So, when Harvard-Westlake travels, one of his teammates wakes him.

Klugo wears his hearing aids while competing, but even then he might miss something. Karen has watched her son accidentally miss his opponents saying something as he turns to get a stray ball.

Nonetheless, Klugo’s leadership as a junior on the team makes him a leading team captain candidate next season, Hardt said.

On the court, the well-spoken, thoughtful Klugo sheds any semblance of the person who takes time to answer questions and lists off numbers about hearing loss.

But, tennis doesn’t change who Klugo is, Karen said. The sport only amplified his personality.

“It’s helped me be a better person off the court,” Klugo said. “On the tennis court, too. It’s a game of who’s going to be better on that day, and I feel like the person who wants the most and is advocating the most for themselves is going to end up winning.”

The NCAA announced Thursday that it will expand its two March Madness tournaments by eight teams each next season, a long-expected move that will drop more games into the first week of the highly popular and lucrative showcase without substantially changing its overall form.

The new, 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games — for a total of 12 involving 24 teams — into the front half of the first week of the men’s and the women’s tournaments. It will turn what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair that will now be called the “March Madness Opening Round.”

The 12 winners will move into the main 64-team bracket that will begin, as usual, on Thursday for the men and Friday for the women.

It is the first expansion of the tournaments in 15 years, when they were bumped to 68 teams each.

The NCAA said it will distribute more than $131 million in new revenue to schools that make the tournament. That money will come via expanded TV advertising opportunities for alcohol, the likes of which were previously restricted. It said the value of the rights agreement will increase $50 million each year on average over the course of the six years.

Most of the eight new slots are expected to go to teams from the power conferences that were already commanding the lion’s share of entries in the bracket. Two years ago, the Southeastern Conference placed a record 14 teams in the men’s bracket. Last season, the Big Ten had nine.

Keith Gill, the chairman of the Division I men’s basketball committee, called the expansion “a nice way to create some access but make sure we have the bracket we all love when we start Thursday at noon.”

The move is a product of the times, which includes massive expansion — the Atlantic Coast Conference, for instance, has grown from nine to 17 teams since 1996 — and the reality that mid-major schools with top-notch players will often see them plucked away by programs with bigger budgets and the ability to pay them through revenue sharing.

Cinderella? There will still be room for those stirring runs in the tournaments, though not a single mid-major advanced past the first weekend of either tournament the last two seasons.

This is hardly a concern of the decision-makers anymore, who will point to TV ratings that traditionally spell out fans’ preference for the likes of Duke and North Carolina over St. Peter’s and San Diego State, especially once the Sweet 16 starts.

What matters more to the biggest schools is that their teams have a chance to compete in what remains the best postseason in college sports and that they aren’t iced out by lower conference champions who earn automatic bids.

“You’ve got some really, really good teams who are going to end up in that 9, 10, 11 [seed] category that I think should be moved into the” 64-team bracket, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last year in discussing how he favored expansion.

Also, the money. The new beer and wine money will add to what the NCAA can distribute in “units” that are earned for placing teams in the bracket and then for every round those teams advance. Last year, that amounted to about $350,000 per unit for the men’s tournament. The Big Ten made nearly $70 million from both tournaments, won by conference members Michigan [men] and UCLA [women].

Leaders in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC have all acknowledged that smaller programs help make March Madness what it is, all the while steadily expanding their own power in NCAA decision-making. That brings with it the tacit threat of fracturing the single thing the NCAA does best — the basketball tournament.

This move might forestall that. What it isn’t expected to do is drastically change the TV deal beyond the advertising.

The current deal for the men’s tournament is worth $8.8 billion and runs through 2032. Adding a few extra games between mid-level Power Four teams on Tuesday and Wednesday won’t change that much.

One reason this took as long as it did was the NCAA negotiations with CBS and TNT, which themselves have been in negotiations over their own ownership.

The more drastic option of expanding the tournament to 96 teams or beyond would involve adding an extra week to a tournament that has thrived in part because of the symmetry of a six-round bracket that gets whittled down over three weeks.

That basic shell began in 1985, with only slight tweaks, the latest of which came in 2011 when it was upped to 68.

May 5 (UPI) — The Center for AI Standards and Innovation, part of a U.S.government agency, announced Tuesday that it will test artificial intelligence models from some top firms before release to vet them for security risks.

CAISI has deals with Microsoft, xAI and Google DeepMind for this testing and targeted research “to better assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security,” it said in a release. The center is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.

This follows similar deals in 2024, under the Biden administration, with prominent AI leaders OpenAI and Anthropic, which have been “renegotiated” to fit Trump administration directives, Politico reported.

The government has increasingly shown interest in matters of AI technology and security. CNBC also reported Tuesday that the Trump administration is considering an executive order to create a process for AI oversight by the White House.

Some of this interest has been heightened by the announcement last month of Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model. The company described the model as excelling “at identifying weaknesses and security flaws within software” and limited its initial use to certain companies. These companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, will use it as part of defensive security work and as part of Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative, Anthropic said.

The announcement Tuesday from CAISI said that the center has completed more than 40 evaluations of AI models so far.

“Independent, vigorous measurement science is essential to understanding frontier AI and its national security implications,” CAISI director Chris Fell said in a statement. “These expanded industry collaborations help us scale our work in the public interest in a critical moment.”

Ever-growing power conferences are the driving force behind an impending expansion of the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, which ESPN reported could be formalized within weeks and begin next season.

The field would grow from 68 teams to 76 that would include eight additional at-large teams in each tournament. The current First Four — eight teams playing four games — would expand to 12 games played by 24 teams at two sites on the first Tuesday and Wednesday of the tournament. The traditional 64-team bracket would begin Thursday as usual.

Mid-majors likely are tempering any celebration. The change might not mean more invitations to the Big Dance for underdogs because the NCAA and its media partners favor large, established schools with large, established fan bases for viewership and revenue.

The Power Four — the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC — plus the Big East comprise 79 schools and continue to add rather than subtract. Even teams with conference records under .500 are usually considered more desirable additions to March Madness than mid-major potential Cinderellas.

Power conference teams play more highly regarded opponents than do mid-majors, who often struggle to schedule top opponents. That’s called strength of schedule, and advanced metrics such as KenPom, NET and Wins Above Bubble usually favor power conference schools.

It’s a bit too soon to start listing schools that likely would make the cut next March after missing out in recent years. The NCAA cautioned that the expansion is not official — yet.

“Expanding the basketball tournaments would require approval from multiple NCAA committees, including the men’s and women’s basketball committees, and no final recommendation or decisions have been made at this time,” the NCAA said in a statement.

Those final steps have been initiated, and one anonymous source told ESPN that approval by those committees “are just formalities.”

The women’s tournament would include the same expansion — and likely also favor the addition of teams from the power conferences.