Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of Palantir systems now means agency officials effectively have a list of 20 million people readily accessible on their iPhones, increasing the speed at which ICE can find houses to raid and people to arrest, according to comments made by a senior ICE official last week during a border security conference.

While ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally won’t answer questions from journalists about how the agency is using Palantir’s technology, senior officials were much more talkative during the Border Security Expo which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, last week. 404 Media spoke to four people who attended the conference. Here companies looking to sell their technology to ICE or other agencies gathered for two days of speeches, Q&As, and product pitches.

To savor a fresh baguette from a bakery in Paris is truly a feast for the senses, and often a highlight for foodies on holiday abroad. Few offerings stateside compare, though, with grab-and-go bakeries that all too often imitate the look of a standard French café, with little variation.

The Bread Club in Dallas offers a different experience, with a contemporary take on traditional fare and favorite spots in the City of Light. Designed by INK+ ORO Creatives and inspired by the ritual of bringing loaves home from a Parisian market, it looks sophisticated without the contrived elements that would overwhelm the 1,120-square-foot eatery.

“The biggest challenge was reminding ourselves that we couldn’t turn the space into a French boulangerie,” says Tiffany Woodson, founder and CEO of the studio. “We kept coming back to strong architectural basics, trusting that restraint would do more to enhance the concept and showcase the product more than any decorative flourish could.”

The curved plaster ceiling adds a sense of volume, yet doesn’t seem heavy. It also serves as a marker that defines where customers line up, and highlights a main point of interaction, the counter. Delicate light boxes illuminate fresh goods, while shelving is accessible to both front-of-house staff and bakers that work in the rear. A coordinating vertical display stores the signature baguettes, and matching cases hold cold beverages and provisions.

The overall palette is neutral, but has just enough warmth, which forms a backdrop that will still align with the rest of the interior even as items on the menu or other facets change. Blue lettering on signage offers a hint of color. Luxe touches evoke the same softness as bread. Tiles with a subtle crackle finish complement the custom millwork. Walls with the same treatment used overhead provide a buttery texture throughout.

The Bread Club blends the essence of Paris and its home base to reimagine what a bakery can be, no matter the location. “There’s a subtle nod to Texas wheat woven into the design’s sensibility, but it’s never literal,” Woodson notes. “It gives the space a timeless, unpretentious quality that feels welcoming to everyone.”

To see this and other works by the design firm, visit inkandoro.com.

Photography by Aaron Dougherty.

Time is one of the hardest intangibles to fathom. It can feel both fleeting and unending; perceptively tied to specific places and conditions, yet also entirely untethered by context. With the advent of industrialization nearly four centuries ago—electric light “allowing” us to operate beyond the limitations of natural, seasonal rhythms—the perception of time itself accelerated.

The best we, as humans, have done to formalize and comprehend this unceasing force is the invention of the clock. This ubiquitous, endlessly reinterpreted instrument was modeled on ancient sundials and, before that, the inherent patterns of Earth’s rotation. Like a compass helping us navigate longitude and latitude, the conventional mechanism clearly demarcates cyclical measures of passing time through swinging hands moving across radial dashes or uniformly depicted numbers. Until now, this predominantly visual convention has, for the most part, remained unchallenged.

With innovative tech brand BALMUDA’s newly released The Clock, that changes. The small, handheld yet mighty device—cleverly hewn from a single block of aluminum and reflecting the form and feel of an old-school pocket watch—champions the new Light Hour system. With sequential dashes illuminated from behind in gentle gradients, there’s no need for additional apparatus or the aesthetically overloaded layering of hands. Rather than somewhat ominous, anxiety-inducing ticks, The Clock signals the passing of time through soft chimes and ambient soundscapes.

With a growing desire to push beyond, rather than simply revert from, the mounting pressures ushered in by industrialization, this fresh paradigm better supports actual human cadences. It is designed to facilitate the needs of today’s more health-conscious consumer. Through the meticulous chronomatic sequencing of light and sound, The Clock offers Wake, Focus, and Relax functions. The first gradually fades in. The second introduces white noise to reduce distraction. The third emits rainfall, cathedral bell, and crackling firewood sounds to imbue its surroundings with calm.

“As an adult, sleep takes effort, and lately I found myself relying on rain sounds played from a tablet to help me relax before sleep,” says Gen Terao. “However, using a connected device in the bedroom never felt quite right. This led to a simple idea: to create a dedicated clock designed to support better sleep through sound and light. The Clock was developed as a focused, distraction-free tool to improve how we rest.”

With its lightweight, compact form, the device is inherently portable and capable of doing its thing almost anywhere, untethered by context.

To explore The Clock and other products by the brand, visit balmuda.com.

Photography provided by BALMUDA.

Adrienna Matzeg’s work often recalls bright summer afternoons, her vibrant table scapes conjuring a lunchtime setting at an alfresco cafe. But her latest series, After Hours, departs from her previous work completely. The punch needle pieces on black linen depict nighttime moments as conjured by memory. The collection, on view at Toronto’s Abbozzo Gallery, is Matzeg’s first physical solo show (she also exhibits her tapestries online). And it draws inspiration from her experiences on a trip to Jeju Island, South Korea and Kyoto, Japan.

It was so hot and humid during the days that Matzeg and her partner could only sightsee in the morning and at night. “I had this crazy vertigo the whole trip. So that’s what defined the night portion of this project,” she explains. “We did more at night because of how uncomfortable it was to go outside during the day.” The two had also purchased a new camera that allowed them to use a film-like setting. The result: dreamy images of cities at night.

When she got home, Matzeg also bought a colour printer; she printed out her photographs, cut them out and pinned them up. Images of a 7-Eleven facade lit up from within, a lantern glowing against a wall and – of course – a portable fan lying prone on an inscrutable surface are just some of the textile depictions she crafted from these images. One of the most evocative is of a taxi heading out into the night. “In Kyoto, the cabs are all these vintage crown comfort Toyotas, and they all have different little emblems on the top for the different companies — like a flower clover. They’re so precious.”

Matzeg sources her cotton threads in France and Japan. The black linen was completely new to her. “What the black linen does is take these scenes from a crazy, busy part of the city and everything else just falls away.” The objects and architectural structures sometimes seem to be floating against the backdrop — Matzeg likes to play with how she positions them on the canvas — the way that “memory comes to the surface, and everything else is just empty space around it,” she explains. “And I think that’s very special.”

For Matzeg, nudging fibre art from the realm of hobby craft is a core consideration. “I intentionally try to elevate the medium in the way that I approach it — in the detail, in the colours that I choose, also how I think about it, which is more like painting.” She’s shaping her scenes by sculpting shapes and carving colours, rather than relying on line work. This means that her architectural themes are uncannily tangible, even if they also feel like flattened snapshots. She’s translating the chrome and plastic surfaces of a karaoke bar facade into thread; she’s blending her loops into smooth gradients. “I think about it more in terms of planes and materials,” Matzeg says.

At the After Hours show at Abbozzo Gallery, the works are installed in shou sugi ban frames (by Superframe) and mounted on an aubergine-painted wall. Together, they appear like a series of windows into vibrant remembered moments — the vivid hues and sharp forms of the scenes popping against their black backgrounds like vivid reliefs. Sometimes, they even gently wrap around the borders of the canvas, blurring the boundaries between object and frame. They’re on show to delight and inspire until May 30.

All photos courtesy Abbozzo Gallery.

The University of Michigan has sent a legal threat over a yearlong pause that would prevent water hookup to a proposed nuclear weapons research and AI data center. Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Michigan are looking to build a $1.2 billion, 220,000 square foot data center in Ypsitlanti Township. On April 22, the Ypsilanti Community Utility Authority (YCUA) passed a 365-day moratorium on the delivery of water to hyperscale data centers in the area while it conducted environmental sustainability and long-term water use studies.

As first reported by MLive, the University hand delivered and emailed a legal threat to the YCUA on April 21, the day before it was to vote on the proposed water moratorium. According to a copy of the letter obtained by 404 Media, the university feels the moratorium is “unlawfully discriminatory” against data centers and it promised to pursue “all rights and claims for relief” if its demands weren’t met.

Luther Blackburn, YCUA’s executive director, told 404 Media that the organization had no comment on potential or pending litigation, but did confirm that he’d received a legal communication from the university.  “YCUA staff are working on a Request for Proposal to complete the investigations and studies outlined in the moratorium,” he said. “I believe YCUA has acted lawfully and in accordance with industry best practices by issuing the moratorium.”

The university disagreed. “The University objects to any such sector-specific moratorium which would be legally invalid because, among other defects, it would be unrelated to any documented utility or public health needs,” the letter said, according to a copy obtained by 404 Media. “As a threshold matter, a moratorium on utility service is permissible only when linked to legitimate utility considerations such as documented capacity constraints, public health issues, or genuine financing challenges.”

The University argued, citing various legal precedents, that the courts will not be on Ypsilanti’s  side and claimed that the area has plenty of water. “The record contains no evidence supporting any such YCUA capacity constraint,” the letter said. “To the contrary, YCUA’s leadership has publicly stated that serving the University’s proposed facility would not affect the authority’s ability to provide or treat water.”

The letter quoted Blackburn as saying he had confirmed in 2025 that the data center’s proposed use of 200,000 gallons a day were within YCUA’s 8-10 million gallon per day capacity. “In addition, YCUA leadership has stated that serving the University's project would likely help mitigate overall utility costs by improving efficiency and cost distribution,” the letter said.

Sean Knapp, the YCUA’s director of service operations, told Planet Detroit last year that the YCUA is operating below capacity at the moment. “Adding the data center as a customer would help mitigate overall costs by improving efficiency and cost distribution,” he said at the time.

After saying it was illegal for the Ypsilanti community to not give it water, the University claimed the moratorium discriminated against data centers. “Beyond the above legal deficiencies, the proposed moratorium is pretextual and unlawfully discriminatory because it singles out ‘data centers’ by label rather than by utility impact,” the letter said. “It is discriminatory to permit other users to connect and consume currently available capacity while the utility conducts undefined studies to determine whether there is sufficient capacity for the University’s proposed facility.”

The University then asked the YCUA not to pass a moratorium and promised to “pursue” the matter. “The University respectfully requests that YCUA refuse to issue any sector-specific moratorium, instead basing any service decisions on documented utility factors, applied evenhandedly through existing permitting and technical review processes,” the letter said. “If these legal requirements are not followed by YCUA, the University reserves the right to pursue all rights and claims for necessary relief.”

The University of Michigan did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

Ypsilanti Township has been fighting the proposed datacenter for more than a year now. Data centers are wildly unpopular in the United States. They often cause noise pollution, affect water quality, and drive up utility bills for their neighbors. Local opposition to the Ypsilanti Township data center has been compounded by its connection to America’s nuclear weapons industry.