Boar's Head plans to reopen the Jarratt, Virginia, facility at the center of a deadly Listeria outbreak last year despite federal inspections continuing to find sanitation violations at three of the food company's other facilities, according to federal records obtained by The Associated Press.

The AP obtained 35 pages of inspection reports via a Freedom of Information Act Request. Those reports cover inspections between January 1 and July 23 at three other Boar's Head facilities: Forrest City, Arkansas; New Castle, Indiana; and Petersburg, Virginia. Overall, the reports reveal a suite of violations, including mold, condensation dripping over food areas, overflowing trash, meat and fat residue built up on walls and equipment, drains blocked with meat scraps, and pooling meat juice. The reports also recorded staff who didn't wear the proper protective hairnets and aprons—and didn't wash their hands.

In one violation, reported in the Petersburg facility, inspectors found meat waste collecting under equipment, including "5-6 hams, 4 large pieces of meat and a large quantity of pooling meat juice."

The problems echo the sanitation violations recorded at the Jarratt plant before contamination with Listeria—particularly linked to the company's liverwurst—caused an outbreak that led officials to shut it down. That outbreak spanned July to November of last year and sickened 61 people across 19 states, hospitalizing 60 and killing 10. Inspection reports revealed problems with mold, water leaks, dirty equipment and rooms, meat debris stuck on walls and equipment, various bugs, and, at one point, puddles of blood on the floor.

Amid the outbreak response, Boar's Head vowed to make big changes to improve its food safety systems. Those included setting up a panel of food safety advisers, which included Frank Yiannas, a former Food and Drug Administration official, and Mindy Brashears, who served as the US Department of Agriculture undersecretary for food safety during Trump's first term and has been nominated for the position again in Trump's second.

“Not completely under control”

The USDA, which shut down the Jarratt plant last September, told the AP that the plant was cleared for reopening on July 18. “The facility is in full compliance of the guidelines and protocols set for the safe handling and production of food and the serious issues that led to suspension have been fully rectified,” officials with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service told the AP in an email.

But the new inspection reports for other Boar's Head facilities raise questions about the company's commitment to food safety. And the company has not been forthcoming about its work. The AP reported that Boar's Head canceled a scheduled interview, refused to discuss the inspection reports, and declined to let Yiannas detail the findings of his internal investigation on the company's contamination woes.

"Boar’s Head has an unwavering commitment to food safety and quality," the company said in a statement. "That commitment is reflected in recent enhancements to our practices and protocols," which are listed on the company's website.

"We have also been working with the USDA in developing a plan to reopen our Jarratt facility in a measured, deliberate way in the coming months," Boar's Head said.

Barbara Kowalcyk, who directs the Institute of Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University, told the AP that the inspection reports reveal a "food safety culture problem."

Kowalcyk advised that consumers, particularly older people who are more vulnerable to foodborne threats like Listeria infections, should be cautious. "I think they need to be aware that there are issues at this organization that still are not completely under control, apparently," she said.

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Ahead of an August 12 deadline for a US-China trade deal, Donald Trump's tactics continue to confuse those trying to assess the country's national security priorities regarding its biggest geopolitical rival.

For months, Trump has kicked the can down the road regarding a TikTok ban, allowing the app to continue operating despite supposedly urgent national security concerns that China may be using the app to spy on Americans. And now, in the latest baffling move, a US official announced Monday that Trump got Nvidia and AMD to agree to "give the US government 15 percent of revenue from sales to China of advanced computer chips," Reuters reported. Those chips, about 20 policymakers and national security experts recently warned Trump, could be used to fuel China's frontier AI, which seemingly poses an even greater national security risk.

Trump’s “wild” deal with US chip firms

Reuters granted two officials anonymity to discuss Trump's deal with US chipmakers, because details have yet to be made public. Requiring US firms to pay for sales in China is an "unusual" move for a president, Reuters noted, and the Trump administration has yet to say what exactly it plans to do with the money.

For US firms, the deal may set an alarming precedent. Not only have analysts warned that the deal could "hurt margins" for both companies, but export curbs on Nvidia's H20 chips, for example, had been established to prevent US technology thefts, secure US technology leadership, and protect US national security. Now the US government appears to be accepting a payment to overlook those alleged risks, without much reassurance that the policy won't advantage China in the AI race.

The move drew immediate scrutiny from critics, including Geoff Gertz, a senior fellow at the US think tank Center for a New American Security, who told Reuters that he thinks the deal is "wild."

"Either selling H20 chips to China is a national security risk, in which case we shouldn't be doing it to begin with, or it's not a national security risk, in which case, why are we putting this extra penalty on the sale?" Gertz posited.

At this point, the only reassurance from the Trump administration is an official suggesting (without providing any rationale) that selling H20 or equivalent chips—which are not Nvidia's most advanced chips—no longer compromises national security.

Trump “trading away” national security

It remains unclear when or how the levy will be implemented.

For chipmakers, the levy is likely viewed as a relatively small price to pay to avoid export curbs. Nvidia had forecasted $8 billion in potential losses if it couldn’t sell its H20 chips to China. AMD expected $1 billion in revenue cuts, partly due to the loss of sales for its MI308 chips in China.

The firms apparently agreed to Trump's deal as a condition to receive licenses to export those chips. But caving to Trump could bite them back in the long run, AJ Bell, investment director Russ Mould, told Reuters—perhaps especially if Trump faces increasing pressure over feared national security concerns.

"The Chinese market is significant for both these companies, so even if they have to give up a bit of the money, they would otherwise make it look like a logical move on paper," Mould said. However, the deal "is unprecedented and there is always the risk the revenue take could be upped or that the Trump administration changes its mind and re-imposes export controls."

So far, AMD has not commented on the report. Nvidia's spokesperson declined to comment beyond noting, "We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets."

A former adviser to Joe Biden's Commerce Department, Alasdair Phillips-Robins, told Reuters that the levy suggests the Trump administration "is trading away national security protections for revenue for the Treasury."

Huawei close to unveiling new AI chip tech

The end of a 90-day truce between the US and China is rapidly approaching, with the US signaling that the truce will likely be extended soon as Trump attempts to get a long-sought-after meeting with China's President Xi Jinping.

For China, gutting export curbs on chips remains a key priority in negotiations, the Financial Times reported Sunday. But Nvidia's H20 chips, for example, are lower priority than high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, sources told FT.

Chinese state media has even begun attacking the H20 chips as a Chinese national security risk. It appears that China is urging a boycott on H20 chips due to questions linked to a recent Congressional push to require chipmakers to build "backdoors" that would allow remote shutdowns of any chips detected as non-compliant with export curbs. That bill may mean that Nvidia's chips already allow for US surveillance, China seemingly fears. (Nvidia has denied building such backdoors.)

Biden banned HBM exports to China last year, specifically moving to hamper innovation of Chinese chipmakers Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

Currently, US firms AMD and Micron remain top suppliers of HBM chips globally, along with South Korean firms Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, but Chinese firms have notably lagged behind, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported. One source told FT that China "had raised the HBM issue in some" Trump negotiations, likely directly seeking to lift Biden's "HBM controls because they seriously constrain the ability of Chinese companies, including Huawei, to develop their own AI chips."

For Trump, the HBM controls could be seen as leverage to secure another trade win. However, some experts are hoping that Trump won't play that card, citing concerns from the Biden era that remain unaddressed.

If Trump bends to Chinese pressure and lifts HBM controls, China could more easily produce AI chips at scale, Biden had feared. That could even possibly endanger US firms' standing as world leaders, seemingly including threatening Nvidia, a company that Trump discovered this term. Gregory Allen, an AI expert at a US think tank called the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told FT that "saying that we should allow more advanced HBM sales to China is the exact same as saying that we should help Huawei make better AI chips so that they can replace Nvidia."

Meanwhile, Huawei is reportedly already innovating to help reduce China's reliance on HBM chips, the SCMP reported on Monday. Chinese state-run Securities Times reported that Huawei is "set to unveil a technological breakthrough that could reduce China’s reliance on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips for running artificial intelligence reasoning models" at the 2025 Financial AI Reasoning Application Landing and Development Forum in Shanghai on Tuesday.

It's a conveniently timed announcement, given the US-China trade deal deadline lands the same day. But the risk of Huawei possibly relying on US tech to reach that particular milestone is why HBM controls should remain off the table during Trump's negotiations, one official told FT.

"Relaxing these controls would be a gift to Huawei and SMIC and could open the floodgates for China to start making millions of AI chips per year, while also diverting scarce HBM from chips sold in the US," the official said.

Experts and policymakers had previously warned Trump that allowing H20 export curbs could similarly reduce access to semiconductors in the US, potentially disrupting the entire purpose of Trump's trade war, which is building reliable US supply chains. Additionally, allowing exports will likely drive up costs to US chip firms at a time when they noted "projected data center demand from the US power market would require 90 percent of global chip supply through 2030, an unlikely scenario even without China joining the rush to buy advanced AI chips." They're now joined by others urging Trump to revive Biden's efforts to block chip exports to China, or else risk empowering a geopolitical rival to become a global AI leader ahead of the US.

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It's easier than ever to manipulate video footage to deceive the viewer and increasingly difficult for fact checkers to detect such manipulations. Cornell University scientists developed a new weapon in this ongoing arms race: software that codes a "watermark" into light fluctuations, which in turn can reveal when the footage has been tampered with. The researchers presented the breakthrough over the weekend at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and published a scientific paper in June in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics.

“Video used to be treated as a source of truth, but that’s no longer an assumption we can make,” said co-author Abe Davis, of Cornell University, who first conceived of the idea. “Now you can pretty much create video of whatever you want. That can be fun, but also problematic, because it’s only getting harder to tell what’s real.”

Per the authors, those seeking to deceive with video fakes have a fundamental advantage: equal access to authentic video footage, as well as the ready availability of advanced low-cost editing tools that can learn quickly from massive amounts of data, rendering the fakes nearly indistinguishable from authentic video. Thus far, progress on that front has outpaced the development of new forensic techniques designed to combat the problem. One key feature is information asymmetry: An effective forensic technique must have information not available to the fakers that cannot be learned from publicly available training data.

Granted, digital watermarking techniques exist that make good use of information asymmetry, but the authors note that most of these tools fall short in other desired attributes. Other methods may require control over the recording camera or access to the original unmanipulated video. And while a checksum, for example, can determine if a video file has been changed, it can't tell the difference between standard video compression or something malicious, like inserting virtual objects.

Hiding in the light

Previously, the Cornell team had figured out how to make small changes to specific pixels to tell if a video had been manipulated or created by AI. But its success depended on the creator of the video using a specific camera or AI model. Their new method, "noise-coded illumination" (NCI), addresses those and other shortcomings by hiding watermarks in the apparent noise of light sources. A small piece of software can do this for computer screens and certain types of room lighting, while off-the-shelf lamps can be coded via a small attached computer chip.

“Each watermark carries a low-fidelity time-stamped version of the unmanipulated video under slightly different lighting. We call these code videos,” Davis said. “When someone manipulates a video, the manipulated parts start to contradict what we see in these code videos, which lets us see where changes were made. And if someone tries to generate fake video with AI, the resulting code videos just look like random variations.” Because the watermark is designed to look like noise, it's difficult to detect without knowing the secret code.

The Cornell team tested their method with a broad range of types of manipulation: changing warp cuts, speed and acceleration, for instance, and compositing and deepfakes. Their technique proved robust to things like signal levels below human perception, subject and camera motion, camera flash, human subjects with different skin tones, different levels of video compression, and indoor and outdoor settings.

“Even if an adversary knows the technique is being used and somehow figures out the codes, their job is still a lot harder,” Davis said. “Instead of faking the light for just one video, they have to fake each code video separately, and all those fakes have to agree with each other.” That said, Davis added, “This is an important ongoing problem. It’s not going to go away, and in fact it's only going to get harder,” he added.

ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3742892  (About DOIs).

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Ford will debut a new midsize pickup truck in 2027 with a targeted price of $30,000, the automaker announced today. The as-yet unnamed pickup will be the first of a series of more affordable EVs from Ford, built using a newly designed flexible vehicle platform and US-made prismatic lithium iron phosphate batteries.

For the past few years, a team of Ford employees has been hard at work on the far side of the country from the Blue Oval's base in Dearborn, Michigan. Sequestered in Long Beach and taking inspiration from Lockheed's legendary "skunkworks," the Electric Vehicle Development Center approached designing and building Ford's next family of EVs as a clean-sheet problem, presumably taking inspiration from the Chinese EVs that have so impressed Ford's CEO.

It starts with a pickup

Designing an EV from the ground up, free of decades of legacy cruft, is a good idea, but not one unique to Ford. In recent months, we've reviewed quite a few so-called software-defined vehicles, which replace dozens or even hundreds of discrete single-function electronic control units with a handful of powerful modern computers (usually known as domain controllers) on a high-speed network.

"This isn’t a stripped‑down, old‑school vehicle," said Doug Field, Ford's chief EV, digital, and design officer, pointedly comparing the future Ford to the recently revealed barebones EV from Slate Motors.

Starting from scratch like this is allowing vehicle dynamics engineers to get creative with the way EVs handle. Field said that the company "applied first‑principles engineering, pushing to the limits of physics to make it fun to drive and compete on affordability. Our new zonal electric architecture unlocks capabilities the industry has never seen."

Ford hasn't found it entirely smooth developing a software-defined platform and had to shelve one of the architectures it was working on earlier this year. But it's not alone there—Volkswagen Group got similarly overly ambitious recently, needing to invest heavily in Rivian to buy its way out of that problem.

Ford isn't giving away much about the pickup yet, which is still two years from the showroom. It should be about the same exterior size as a Ford Maverick, with as much or more interior space as a Toyota RAV4, with a frunk as well as a bed, and Ford says it will accelerate as quickly as an EcoBoost Mustang. And the 400 V LFP battery will be about 15 percent smaller than the average US EV pack. But the company isn't ready to get specific about things like charge times, battery capacity, or range estimates yet.

But it’s really about the manufacturing

To make these EVs cheaper, Ford had to make them simpler and quicker to manufacture. The simplified SDV domains mean that the wiring harness uses 4,000 feet (1.3 km) less copper. There are 40 percent fewer workstations, 20 percent fewer components, and 25 percent fewer fasteners than in a conventional Ford, and overall assembly time will be 15 percent faster than Ford's average.

Like the other new auto factories I've visited recently, it sounds like Ford has paid a lot of attention to worker ergonomics, and as parts arrive at workstations they'll do so in kits with all the fasteners, scanners, and power tools required, even in the correct orientation. Fewer workstations and fewer parts to assemble means about 600 fewer workers at the Louisville Assembly Plant when production starts in 2027, unfortunately.

Ford is splitting the production line into three. One assembles the front subassembly, another the rear subassembly, and the third the battery pack and interior, which then meet for final assembly. And it's moved to large single-piece castings for the front and rear subframe to allow this approach.

"There are other people that use large-scale castings but not in the way we do. We know of no one that has ever built a vehicle in three parts in this way and brought it together at the end," explained Field. "So it really goes way beyond a typical modular architecture that existing manufacturers have out there," he said.

"I don't think there's any platform that has been so blank-slate, architected around having a large subassembly that you can put a whole bunch of parts on," added Alan Clarke, executive director of advanced EV development.

As interesting as the new production process sounds, we shouldn't expect it to become the norm for Ford. "There are elements of it, of the assembly system, that could be applied, but not at the scale we're talking about here, which is very uniquely built for EV vehicles, said Kumar Galhotra, Ford's chief operating officer. While it sounds suitable for smaller unibody vehicles, it won't be that helpful for Ford's next body-on-frame pickups, including the somewhat delayed "T3" electric replacement for the F-150 Lightning.

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