A massive military parade in Washington DC to mark 250 years since the founding of the US Army coincided with Donald Trump’s 79th birthday. At the same time, protesters in thousands of cities rallied with the message that Americans want ‘No Kings’.
Published On 15 Jun 2025
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UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will authorise a full statutory inquiry into the scale and extent of child sexual exploitation, after months of pressure on him to do so.
Starmer on Saturday said he had accepted the need for a national inquiry into grooming gangs on the recommendation of Baroness Louise Casey, whose near 200-page report into the scandal will be published on Monday.
Casey has been carrying out an audit of the scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country, the subject of fierce political controversy, after scandals first emerged in the north of England in 2013.
The report is expected to deliver searing criticism of public authorities, which have been accused of failing to act decisively against “grooming gangs” of men of predominantly Pakistani origin over fears of racism.
The Conservatives and Reform UK have demanded a national inquiry for months and Yvette Cooper, home secretary, will be accused by opponents of dragging her feet when she makes a statement to MPs on Monday.
Starmer, speaking en route to a G7 summit in Alberta, Canada, said of Casey’s review: “Her position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry.
“She has looked at the material and she has come to the view that there should be a national inquiry on the basis of what she has seen.”
The scandals — in which gangs of men groomed and raped girls who were largely white — have already led to several inquiries.
The issue re-emerged earlier this year after billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media platform X about the issue and called for a national inquiry, a demand that was echoed by the Tories and Reform.
In January, Downing Street said that victims “do not want to see a national inquiry, they want action taken to deliver justice”.
But on Saturday Starmer said: “I have never said we should not look again at any issue. I have wanted to be assured that on the question of any inquiry . . . that’s why I asked Louise Casey, whom I hugely respect, to do an audit.”
The prime minister added that he had read “every word” of Casey’s report and that he was “going to accept her recommendation”.
“That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit,” Starmer said. “I asked her to do that job to double-check on this. She has done that job for me and having read her report — I respect her in any event — I shall now implement her recommendations.”
Starmer said the report would be “statutory under the Inquiries Act” but would take some time to set up “in an orderly way”.
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative party leader, said: “Keir Starmer doesn’t know what he thinks unless an official report has told him so. Just like he dismissed concerns about the winter fuel payment and then had to U-turn, just like he needed the Supreme Court to tell him what a woman is, he had to be led by the nose to make this correct decision here.”
Badenoch said the inquiry should be done “properly and quickly”.
Earlier this year Cooper announced government-backed local inquiries into grooming gangs, offering £5mn in funding for up to five locally led probes into historic cases, including one in Oldham.
They are expected to follow the model of a judge-led inquiry that took place into grooming gangs in Telford.
Renewed Iranian missile attacks on Israel have killed at least ten people overnight. More than a hundred others were injured and several people are missing.
Iran’s foreign minister has said that strikes on Israel would end once it halts its military campaign.
In Iran, state media has made no mention of casualties from Israeli attacks, which included a strike on the Shahran oil depot.
Translational Data Illustrate a Mechanism of Greater Potency with Verekitug, a Novel Antibody Antagonist of the TSLP Receptor
Some of the country’s most elite institutions are offloading parts of their private equity portfolios. As funds take longer to return money to investors, Harvard and Yale are selling at a discount with endowments looking for more liquidity and flexibility amid economic turbulence.
But both sides of such deals can make surprising gains.
This portfolio maintenance doesn’t appear linked to President Donald Trump’s attack on university finances, including a possible tax hike on endowments. Industry skeptics think these sales, however, highlight growing concerns that returns in the opaque world of private equity aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be.
“With elite universities’ private equity investments on the auction block, the big reveal is coming,” Nir Kaissar, founder of asset management firm Unison Advisors, wrote in a Bloomberg opinion column on Thursday.
University endowments typically make for ideal investors in alternative assets—with virtually infinite investment horizons, they can ride out wild gyrations in the public markets by locking up billions of dollars over several years.
On its face, that move has been a no-brainer. As Kaissar noted, Bloomberg’s weighted index of U.S. PE funds returned 9.4% year over year from 2007 to 2024. The index’s annualized standard deviation, a common measure of volatility, was just 7.2%.
The S&P 500 gained 10.5% in that span with a standard deviation of 16.8%, a much worse return on a risk-adjusted basis.
These numbers, however, may not reflect the underlying picture. Unlike stocks trading on public exchanges, the prices of private assets don’t change based on the whims of investors day-to-day.
Instead, valuations of most private companies, real estate properties, and other assets PE firms hold are typically based on subjective assumptions that don’t fluctuate like public equity markets do, Tim McGlinn, an investment veteran and former adjunct finance professor at Seton Hall, told Fortune.
“There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that,” said McGlinn, who blogs about the alternatives industry at TheAltView.net.
But when investors or prospective investors believe the holdings can actually be sold at those prices, “that’s when things become problematic.”
Ultimately, private equity firms make money for investors by exiting their investments, when they attempt to turn notional valuations on paper into cash. Therefore, there must be some correlation between the performance of public and private assets, said Jason Reed, a finance professor at the University of Notre Dame.
“If the market’s doing really well broadly, well then you’re going to have lots of opportunities for businesses to buy your company, other private equity companies to buy your company, to take them public and IPO them,” he told Fortune. “But if the economy is not doing great, businesses are struggling, then you’re not going to have as many opportunities overall to sell.”
Billionaire hedge fund owner Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumnus, has claimed his alma mater’s $53 billion endowment, almost 40% of which is allocated to private equity, is significantly overstated.
“I believe that a substantial part of the reason why many private assets remain private despite the stock market near all-time highs is that the public market will value private assets at lower values than they are being carried at privately,” Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital, wrote in a social media post last month.
The Harvard Management Company, which oversees the university’s endowment, declined to comment. It recently agreed to sell roughly $1 billion of its PE stakes, following a similar move in the summer of 2021. That came at a time of “significant ebullience,” the university noted in its 2022 financial report, allowing the school to avoid discounts the funds would have faced just over a year later.
Yale, meanwhile, is negotiating a nearly $3 billion sale of private equity holdings at a discount of less than 10%, a spokesperson for the Yale Investments Office told the school’s newspaper. The university pioneered the institutional push into alternative assets, with 95% of its $41 billion endowment allocated to growth-oriented assets like PE, venture capital, real assets, and global equities.
“Following a months-long review, the University is in process to sell select private equity fund interests,” Yale said in a statement to Fortune. “Private equity remains a core element of our investment strategy, and we continue to commit significant capital to our existing world-class partners, while pursuing new private equity opportunities to support the long-term growth of the Endowment.”
This doesn’t appear to be a distressed sale, McGlinn said, but the deal is otherwise hard to evaluate. More mature funds trade very differently than newer ones, and various positions are typically packaged together in these types of transactions.
“Yale being Yale, you can assume they’re getting the best price they can,” McGlinn said.
Still, investors in PE funds, known as “limited partners,” sold their stakes at an average discount of 11% compared to the net asset value, or NAV, of these holdings on their balance sheets, according to Jeffries.
It may seem odd that universities are looking to sell when valuations are likely down across the board this year as borrowing costs remain elevated. But demand in the secondary market is booming. Secondary sales increased 45% to $162 billion last year, per Jeffries.
As a result, Yale, Harvard, and other universities could take much less of a haircut than they might have feared while also booking gains on their initial stakes.
That’s because there is reason to believe many buyers are willing to overpay, McGlinn said. Regardless of what secondary funds dish out to acquire these stakes, he explained, they are allowed to then mark these investments up to the old net asset value.
McGlinn calls this process “NAV squeezing.” As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, it can result in one-day windfalls of 1,000% or more, gains that McGlinn said secondary funds report as real returns.
“It makes your brain melt,” he said.
Comparing NAV squeezing to a Ponzi scheme might go too far, said Jeffrey Hooke, a senior lecturer in finance at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and a longtime critic of PE. But he agrees it looks quite shaky, even if the technique is permissible according to generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP.
“It’s almost like a full wash and rinse cycle,” said Hooke, formerly the principal investment officer of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.
Universities, of course, get to be on the other side of these deals. Even though they are selling their PE stakes at a discount to NAV, they could be getting more than the capital they had committed to those investments up until this point.
In other words, endowments might still be escaping with a profit.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Fitter and Faster Swim Camps is the proud sponsor of SwimSwam’s College Recruiting Channel and all commitment news. For many, swimming in college is a lifelong dream that is pursued with dedication and determination. Fitter and Faster is proud to honor these athletes and those who supported them on their journey.
Rylee Harris from Clarkston, Michigan has announced her commitment to continue her academic and athletic careers at Hillsdale College in fall 2025.
“I am so incredibly blessed to announce my verbal commitment to continue my academic and athletic career at Hillsdale College. I give all my thanks to God, my family, friends, and my coaches and teammates at OLY. So excited for these next 4 years! Go chargers!”
Harris swims for OLY Swimming out of Rochester, Michigan and just finished her senior year at Clarkston High School. She swam for Clarkston as a freshman and sophomore, making the Division I (big schools) State Championship meet in both seasons.
She only swam in three meets this past SCY season, concluding her season at the MCSA Senior Cup Championship. She swam to a season best 54.13 100 free, 1:55.89 200 free, and 59.81 100 back.
The Hillsdale women finished 2nd out of 10 teams at the 2025 Great Midwest-Mountain East Conference Championship. Elise Mason led the team as she won conference titles in the 500 free, 1000 free, and 1650 free.
Based on her best times, Harris has the potential to make an immediate impact upon her arrival. Her best time in the 200 free would have been 5th at the conference level while her 200 back would have been 6th. Her 100 free and 100 back would have made the ‘B’ finals. In addition to her individual impact, Harris would have been 3rd on the roster this past season in the 100 free while her 200 free would have been 4th, giving her relay potential as well.
Harris will arrive this fall as a member of the class of 2029 along with Sasha Alles, Aine Maloney, and Avery May.
If you have a commitment to report, please send an email with a photo (landscape, or horizontal, looks best) and a quote to [email protected].
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As renewable energy becomes firmly established, the focus shifts to optimizing its potential. From employing perovskites to enhance photovoltaic panel efficiency to developing larger wind turbines, numerous strategies are emerging to generate clean energy more effectively. One such strategy focuses not on the technology itself but on the location of the installations. While we’ve previously discussed solar panels installed on reservoirs or offshore wind farms, today we’ll explore a newer concept: nearshore renewable energy.
What this article covers:
Nearshore renewable energy is a type of offshore renewable energy involving the installation of wind turbines or solar panels in shallow waters, typically less than 15 kilometers from the coast, with solar setups often situated mere meters offshore. This strategic positioning takes advantage of nearshore conditions while mitigating some challenges associated with deeper water installations.
In the case of nearshore wind energy, the kinetic energy of coastal winds is harnessed to generate electricity. Turbines are anchored to the seabed in relatively shallow waters, enabling them to capture stronger, more consistent winds than those available on land. Additionally, their proximity to the shore simplifies maintenance and reduces the complexity of transmitting electricity to the grid.
As for nearshore solar energy, it involves floating solar panels installed in shallow waters. After proving successful in marsh environments, these panels are now being evaluated for use in coastal areas, as detailed later in this article.
Although both involve placing turbines or solar panels over water, nearshore and offshore renewable energy differ significantly, particularly in their distance from the coast and the associated technical and economic challenges.
Nearshore renewable energy offers several compelling benefits, making it an appealing option in the push for sustainable energy solutions:
While most current nearshore projects focus on wind energy, there are notable photovoltaic initiatives in similar environments, such as the 2 MWp floating solar power system at the Soneva Secret resort in the Maldives. This project aims to reduce reliance on diesel generators by harnessing solar energy through three 74-meter-diameter floating rings, all without occupying valuable island space.
The installation is engineered to withstand waves over two meters high, ensuring reliable operation in the Maldives’ marine environment. This initiative not only reduces the resort’s carbon footprint but also demonstrates the viability and advantages of integrating renewable energy solutions in nearshore settings.
Nearshore renewable energy strikes a balance between technical feasibility and economic viability, positioning it as a promising alternative in the transition to cleaner energy sources. By leveraging favorable coastal wind conditions while avoiding the complexities of deepwater installations, these projects deliver sustainable energy in an efficient and effective manner.
Innovative projects, like the floating solar system in the Maldives, underscore the potential of nearshore renewable energy and highlight how advancements in this field can cut emissions and foster environmental sustainability.
If you are curious about other forms of clean energy derived from the sea, consider reading about blue energy or salt-gradient power.
Source:
The forward, set to link up with Inter Milan in LA, is stranded in Iran after his home country’s airspace was shut down.
Inter Milan’s Iranian forward Mehdi Taremi could miss the FIFA Club World Cup 2025 in the United States after being unable to leave his home country to join his team amid Iran’s airspace closure due to its ongoing exchange of aerial fire with Israel.
Taremi, who was named in Inter’s squad for the 32-team tournament, was expected to link up with his team in Los Angeles as they gear up for the tournament, but media reports in Italy and the US said on Saturday that the striker is likely to miss the first match on Tuesday and perhaps the entire competition.
“The Iranian striker will not join the Nerazzurri, neither for the first match nor for the others,” Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport reported on Saturday.
“Inter have been in close contact with the Iranian authorities in Italy over the last 24 hours to comfort the player and try [to find] a solution that is currently impossible. The player is in Tehran in a safe place and sheltered from the bombings,” the report added.
The Italian side open their campaign against the Mexican side, Monterrey FC, at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, Los Angeles, on Tuesday, but Taremi is unlikely to be part of the squad.
The 32-year-old captains Iran and was among the goal scorers as they beat North Korea in their AFC World Cup qualifying match at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran on June 10. A day later, he won the inaugural Iranian Toopa Award (Golden Ball).
While it is unclear when the forward was scheduled to fly out of Tehran, his departure for the US was put on hold when Israel began its attacks on Iran on Friday morning, leading to the indefinite closure of its airspace.
Iran responded to the attacks later on the same day, and both countries have been involved in an exchange of fire ever since.
Taremi, who joined Inter Milan on a three-year contract in July 2024, has scored three goals in 43 appearances for the Nerazzurri.
Milan and their opening-game opponents Monterrey are placed in Group E for the Club World Cup alongside Argentinian club River Plate and Japanese side Urawa Red Diamonds.
Sony Corporation is expanding access to its 360 Virtual Mixing Environment (360VME) audio technology to creators across music, education, and film & television for the first time.
The Japanese electronics giant, which owns Sony Music Group, on Thursday (June 12) said it has struck deals with Guitar Center Professional and Advanced Systems Group to distribute the 360VME system.
The technology uses specialized headphones to recreate the acoustic environment of professional studios, allowing anyone to produce studio-quality mixes in any location.
It addresses some challenges that are common in music production, such as the need to book expensive studios to achieve professional-level mixes.
Masaaki Oshima, Head of Personal Entertainment Business Unit, Sony Corporation, said: “Sony audio is committed to pushing the boundaries of innovation in audio technology, and our partnerships with Guitar Center Pro and ASG mark an exciting milestone in making 360 Virtual Mixing Environment (360VME) more accessible than ever.”
“With these collaborations, we are thrilled to set a new standard for the way immersive content is mixed and experienced, and look forward to seeing how creators bring this transformative technology to life.”
“With these collaborations, we are thrilled to set a new standard for the way immersive content is mixed and experienced, and look forward to seeing how creators bring this transformative technology to life.”
Masaaki Oshima, Sony Corporation
The 360VME technology allows producers to capture the sound characteristics of reference studios and reproduce them through headphones.
Sony explained that the system works by taking “a one-time studio measurement” of a reference studio, then using personalized Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) data and binaural processing to recreate the environment through headphones like Sony’s MDR-MV1.
Guitar Center Professional has started offering public access to the technology at its Hollywood flagship store and Nashville Custom House experience center.
The retailer is also dispatching personnel to conduct on-site measurements at client facilities, allowing musicians to replicate their preferred studio environments.
Advanced Systems Group, which focuses on post-production and studio technology, plans to integrate 360VME into its client workflows. The company recently acquired Audio Intervisual Design, expanding its capabilities in film and TV audio work.
Sony first tested 360VME by sound talent at Sony Pictures Post Production Services during the pandemic. It played a role in mixing Columbia Pictures‘ Venom: The Last Dance and the upcoming Until Dawn horror film.
Applications of the technology extend beyond traditional recording. Big.Ass.Kids., a collaborative music platform, is using 360VME systems at multiple Shangri-La Studios locations in Los Angeles for its Pigeons & Planes See You Next Year compilation project.
The project brings together emerging artists, producers, and songwriters to create original music, with Sony providing 360VME hardware to participating studios.
Additionally, educational institutions have also started incorporating the technology into their programs. New York University, home to the Sony Audio Institute, along with Drexel University and the University of Toronto, are using 360VME to address space limitations in their audio engineering programs.
Jeff Wolpert, Adjunct Professor, University of Toronto & multi-award winning engineer, mixer, producer and editor, said: “It immediately became apparent upon being introduced to the Sony’s 360 Virtual Mixing Environment, that a system that could recreate our immersive studio with such accuracy would serve to virtually expand our facility with no additional construction required.”
“It immediately became apparent upon being introduced to the Sony’s 360 Virtual Mixing Environment, that a system that could recreate our immersive studio with such accuracy would serve to virtually expand our facility with no additional construction required.”
Jeff Wolpert, University of Toronto
“We now measure profiles for the incoming students to the Music Technology and Digital Media graduate program each year, so that every student has an accurate monitoring environment wherever they are.”
The technology represents Sony’s latest attempt to remain relevant in the music production landscape. Sony launched its 360 Reality Audio experience in 2019 to compete with Apple‘s Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos
Over a month ago, Sony partnered with social music platform BandLab Technologies to integrate its 360 Reality Audio technology directly into BandLab‘s platform, allowing its 100 million users to both experience and create music in spatial audio using just smartphones and standard headphones.
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