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Super Micro Computer stock plunges on report of federal probe
Super Micro Computer’s stock price fell sharply on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice is investigating the server maker.
Shares of the company, which sports a market capitalization of nearly $24 billion and which has been boosted by investor interest in artificial intelligence, sank $54, or roughly 12%, in afternoon trade.
The Journal cited people familiar with the matter in reporting that the Justice Department has opened a probe into Super Micro, with the investigation in its initial phases.
The agency’s investigation followed a critical report in August about Super Micro by Hindenburg Research, an investment firm that specializes in short-selling, or betting that a company’s stock price will fall. Hindenburg’s report alleged “glaring accounting flags, evidence of undisclosed related party transactions” and other issues at Super Micro, a Silicon Valley maker of computer servers and storage technology.
According to the Journal, a prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco is seeking information possibly tied to a former employee who accused the company of accounting violations and who had filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Super Micro in April. The Hindenburg report focused in part on the ex-employer’s allegations.
On August 28, a day after the Hindenburg report, Super Micro said it would file its fiscal 2024 annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission late.
Super Micro declined to comment.
In a September 3 letter filed with the SEC, Super Micro founder and CEO Charles Liang disputed Hindenburg’s claims.
“You may have also heard about a recent report from a short-seller hedge fund that contains false or inaccurate statements about our company including misleading presentations of information,” he said. “We will address these statements in due course.”
Hindenburg and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Dozens of Britons were “killed and butchered” and then cannibalized after Bronze Age massacre, research shows
New research suggests that dozens of Bronze-Age era Britons were killed in an attack unlike any previous known to archaelogists studying that time period and location.
The research on human remains from Charterhouse Warren in southwest England, conducted by a team of researchers from multiple institutions including Oxford University, was published in Antiquity, a journal of world archaeology. It found that at least 37 Bronze Age-era men, women and children were “killed and butchered” and then cannibalized, with their bodies then thrown down a nearly 50-foot deep natural shaft. While archaeologists have found the remains of Bronze Age and later Britons who died violently, those incidents were largely isolated. Mass graves from this era have also been found, but the remains were laid to rest respectfully, unlike those studied.
Researchers first became aware of the shaft in the 1970s. Two excavations were conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. The human remains, as well as some artifacts including a flint dagger, were found at multiple spots in the shaft during these digs. More than 3,000 individual human bones and bone fragments have been recovered overall. Those bones were used to estimate that at least 37 individual sets of remains were in the shaft. Different bone lengths show that the people killed were both male and female, and ranged in age from infants to grown adults. Ongoing research is working to determine how the people were related to each other.
The way the remains were disposed of made the detailed examination possible, the researchers said. The shaft helped preserve the bones and keep them grouped together.
The bones “display clear evidence of blunt force trauma,” according to researchers, suggesting that many of the people in the shaft “suffered a violent death.” Other injuries, including removal of the scalp and severed muscles in the jaw suggesting removal of the tongue or lower jaw, also likely occurred, evidenced by marks on the bones, the researchers said. Some of the victims may have been beheaded or dismembered.
It’s possible that the victims were held captive or ambushed, because of the severity of the injuries, the researchers said. It’s not clear who could have carried out the attacks.
There is also evidence that the bodies were cannibalized, the researchers said, including human teethmarks on the bones and indicators that marrow, the soft tissue inside bones, was removed. The researchers said the cannibalism was likely conducted “within a context of a violent conflict, in which individuals are dehumanized and treated as animals.”
“Some 37 men, women and children—and possibly many more—were killed at close quarters with blunt instruments and then systematically dismembered and defleshed, their long bones fractured in a way that can only be described as butchery,” the researchers said.
Later in the publication, the researchers referred to the scene as a “massacre,” and suggested it may have even been a “political statement” of violence so brazen it would have “resonated across the wider region and over time.” However, it’s not clear what could have led to the violence: “Neither climate change, ethnic conflict nor competition over material resources seem to offer convincing explanations,” according to the researchers, leaving the only likely option that the violence broke out as part of a pattern of revenge or violence between communities.
“At this stage, our investigation has raised as many questions as it has answered,” the researchers said. “Work is ongoing to shed more light on this decidedly dark episode in British prehistory.”
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Trump team working out immigration plans, pushing for large-scale deportations
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Breaking down the judge’s rejection of Trump’s immunity claim in “hush money” case
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