Seattle's U.S. attorney is ordered back to a job he held for 54 minutes

Word of the Day

Karel Capek used the word in his 1920 play R.U.R., short for Rossum's Universal Robots, and credited his brother Josef with proposing it, from the Czech robota, "forced labour." ¹ The two records differ on the rest. Merriam-Webster dates the English word to 1922 and has Josef proposing it as Karel worked on the play. ¹ The Online Etymology Dictionary gives 1923 and, citing Rawson, says Josef coined the word and used it first in a short story. ²

News

Three charged with diverting $510 million in Nvidia AI servers to China

A federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted three men on 19 March 2026 over the diversion of advanced AI servers to China, and the case still stands. ³ The defendants are Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, 71, a co-founder and senior vice-president at the server maker; Ruei-Tsang "Steven" Chang, 53, the general manager of its Taiwan office; and Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun, 44, a broker. ³ Prosecutors say a customer called "Company-1" bought about $2.5 billion in servers from the manufacturer between 2024 and 2025. ³ Of those, roughly $510 million were rerouted to China over three weeks from late April to mid-May 2025. ³ Each faces three conspiracy counts: to violate the Export Control Reform Act, to smuggle goods, and to defraud the United States, carrying maximum terms of 20, 5 and 5 years. ³ The manufacturer, identified in trade reporting as Super Micro Computer, was not itself charged. ⁴ As of that reporting, Liaw had been arrested in California and released on bail, Sun was held awaiting a detention hearing, and Chang remained at large. ⁴

News

A court reinstates Roger Rogoff, and the administration appeals the same day

On 1 October 2026 a federal court granted Roger Rogoff a preliminary injunction and ordered him reinstated as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington. ⁵ The district's judges had appointed him to the long-vacant post under the statute that lets a court fill a U.S. attorney vacancy. He was sworn in on 15 July, and the White House removed him about 54 minutes later. ⁶ Rogoff sued, arguing the removal exceeded the administration's authority and violated the Appointments Clause and the vacancy statute, and he asked to be restored while the case proceeds. ⁶ The court's full opinion is not public, so that reasoning is his theory and the implied basis of the injunction, not a holding anyone has read. ⁵ The reinstatement is contested: the defendants, among them the President and the Acting Attorney General, appealed to the Ninth Circuit the same day, where a stay could still interrupt it. ⁵

News

The DNC sues over a dropped overseas-voter checkbox

The Department of War has revised the form that U.S. citizens abroad use to register and request an absentee ballot. ⁷ In an emergency request to the Office of Management and Budget in August 2026, the department asked to change the Federal Post Card Application, also known as Standard Form 76. ⁷ The department, renamed from the Department of Defense in 2026, said the revisions would eliminate voter confusion and bring the form into strict compliance with the statutes governing overseas and military voting. ⁷ The change removed a checkbox that had let citizens who have never resided in the United States identify themselves when registering. ⁸ A 2016 government estimate put that group at about 11,590 people. ⁹ On 1 October 2026 the Democratic National Committee sued over the change, calling it "arbitrary and capricious" under the Administrative Procedure Act and arguing the department skipped the required notice-and-comment. ⁹ The available reporting did not name the court or docket for the suit. ⁹

Technology

PostgreSQL 19 nears release with an online table-rebuild command

PostgreSQL 19 is not out yet. ¹⁰ The PostgreSQL Global Development Group released a fourth beta, 19 Beta 4, on 24 September 2026, with a release candidate expected in early October and general availability targeted for this autumn. ¹⁰ The version's headline addition for database operators is REPACK, a new command that rebuilds a table in place. ¹⁰ Its CONCURRENTLY option runs that rebuild online, so reads and writes can continue. ¹¹ Beta 4 is still stabilising the command, with fixes in this release for crashes and for invalid indexes and materialized views. ¹⁰ One capability that earlier betas listed will not ship as things stand: Beta 4 reverted SQL/PGQ, the property-graph query support, so it is not part of 19. ¹⁰

Technology

Visual Studio 2026 adds bring-your-own-key model choice in preview

Visual Studio 2026 version 18.10.0, released on 8 September 2026, lets developers point its AI features at model keys they supply. ¹² Microsoft calls it bring-your-own-key: the editor can run against models from Microsoft Foundry, OpenAI, Anthropic or Ollama, or a custom endpoint, with or without a GitHub sign-in, and no Copilot subscription is required. ¹² The feature is in preview and enabled by default across the Community, Professional and Enterprise editions. ¹² The New Stack reports the release also loads solutions about 40% faster than Visual Studio 2022, with roughly half as many interface freezes. ¹³