By PETER SMITH A social-media tribute to Coptic Christians. A billboard in Amish country. A visit to a revered Jewish gravesite. While Donald Trump’s lock on the white evangelical vote is legendary, he and his campaign allies also wooed smaller religious groups, far from the mainstream. As it turned out, Trump won by decisive margins, but his campaign aggressively courted niche communities with the understanding that every vote could be critical, particularly in swing states. Voter surveys such as exit polls, which canvass broad swaths of the electorate, aren’t able to gauge the impact of such microtargeting, but some backers say the effort was worth it. Just one week before the election, Trump directed a post on the social-media platform X to Coptic Christians in the United States —- whose church has ancient roots in Egypt. He saluted their “Steadfast Faith in God, Perseverance through Centuries of Persecution and Love for this Great Country.” “This was the first time seeing a major U.S. presidential candidate address the community in this manner,” said Mariam Wahba, a Coptic Christian and research analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based research institute. “It was really a profound moment.” She said many Copts share the conservative social views of other Christian groups in the Republican constituency, and they may already have been Trump supporters. But the posting reinforced those bonds. Coptic bishops sent the president-elect congratulations after his victory and cited their “shared social and family values.” Some Assyrian Christians — another faith group with Middle Eastern roots — similarly bonded with Trump, whose mispronunciation of “Assyrian” at a rally created a viral video moment and drew attention to their support. Sam Darmo, a Phoenix real estate agent and co-founder of Assyrians for Trump, said many community members cited the economy, illegal immigration and other prominent voter issues. They echoed other conservative Christians’ concerns, he said, on issues such as abortion, gender identity and religious expression in public. But he said Trump supported various Middle Eastern Christians recovering from the Islamic State group’s oppressive rule. Darmo also credited Massad Boulos, father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Tiffany, for mobilizing various Middle Eastern Christian groups, including Chaldean Catholics, and other voters, particularly in Michigan, such as Muslims. “He brought all these minority groups together,” he said. “We’re hoping to continue that relationship.” But members of Middle Eastern-rooted Christian groups, and their politics, are far from monolithic, said Marcus Zacharia, founder of Progressive Copts, a program of Informed Immigrants, an organization that promotes dialogue on sensitive topics among such groups in the United States and Canada. He said many younger community members question Trump’s stances on issues such as immigration, and sense that conservatives sometimes tokenize them by focusing on the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East while neglecting wider issues of repression in countries there that the U.S. supports. He said there needs to be more informed dialogue across the political divide in these communities. “There is no more high time than these next four years to have that way of conducting conversations,” he said. Courting the Amish Republicans also made an aggressive push for Amish voters , particularly in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where they are most numerous at about 92,000 (many below voting age). The GOP has made similar efforts in the past, even though researchers have found that less than 10% of them typically vote, due to their separatism from society. But Republicans used billboards, mailers, ads and door-to-door campaigner to drive turnout in Lancaster County, home base to the nation’s largest Amish settlement. On Election Day, Amish voters Samuel Stoltzfus and his wife Lillian Stoltzfus said they were supporting Trump, citing their anti-abortion beliefs. “We basically look at it as murder,” Stoltzfus, 31, said outside a polling center in the Lancaster County community of New Holland, where dozens of other members of the local Amish community voted. Trump has wavered on the issue, dismaying some abortion opponents, though many have said Republicans still align more closely to their views. Stolzfus added: “Make America great again and keep the moral values,” he said. “Let’s go back to the roots.” Steven Nolt, a history professor at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster College who studies the Amish and their voting patterns, said that while it’s too early to say definitively without further research, he doesn’t see evidence of a larger turnout this year. Lancaster County as a whole — most of which is not Amish — is a GOP stronghold that Trump won handily, though both parties’ votes edged up from 2020, according to unofficial results posted by the Pennsylvania Department of State. Trump’s biggest increases were in urban or suburban areas with few Amish, while some areas with larger Amish populations generally saw a modest increase in the Trump vote, said Nolt, director of the college’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. “Bottom line, percentage-wise, not much change in the parts of Lancaster County where the Amish live,” he said. Paying respects at a Chabad grave Trump directly reached out to members of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, a prominent and highly observant branch of Orthodox Judaism. Related Articles National Politics | Attorneys want the US Supreme Court to say Mississippi’s felony voting ban is cruel and unusual National Politics | Trump convinced Republicans to overlook his misconduct. But can he do the same for his nominees? National Politics | Trump gave Interior nominee one directive for a half-billion acres of US land: ‘Drill.’ National Politics | Trump’s team is delaying transition agreements. What does it mean for security checks and governing? National Politics | Judge delays Trump hush money sentencing in order to decide where case should go now On Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war, Trump made a symbolically resonant visit to the “Ohel,” the burial site of the movement’s revered late leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. Wearing a yarmulke, the traditional Jewish skullcap, Trump, who has Jewish family members, brought a written prayer to the Ohel and laid a small stone at the grave in keeping with tradition. The site in New York City, while particularly central to Chabad adherents, draws an array of Jewish and other visitors, including politicians. About two-thirds of Jewish voters overall supported Trump’s opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters. But the Trump campaign has made a particular outreach to Orthodox Jews, citing issues including his policies toward Israel in his first administration. Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowitz of Chabad Lubavitch of Southwest Florida said it was moving for him to see images of Trump’s visit. “The mere fact that he made a huge effort, obviously it was important to him,” he said. Associated Press journalist Luis Henao contributed.
Grants of up to £50,000 given to social enterprises in this part of Gwent
Categorically, what is the biggest problem with PCIe 5.0 drives? It's the heat. At launch, and even now, those early 5.0 units complete with the Phison E26 controller and Micron 232-layer TLC run seriously hot. To the point it was almost impossible to run one without some form of active cooling baked into it. Corsair wasn't immune to this either, despite its street cred as a storage manufacturer first and foremost, and its MP700 line initially featured the reference Phison cooler, complete with in-built fan, and a touch of yellow branding to try and separate it from the crowd. A lot's changed since then, and we've seen a whole host of non-fan-cooled PCIe 5.0 solutions arrive with us. However, heat has still always been a major concern. That is what the MP700 Elite looks to rectify in its bold and brave quest to become one of the best SSDs out there today. In short, this is an exceptionally cool PCIe 5.0 drive that not only delivers relatively comfortable performance on the sequential front but does so with both a low power draw and radically lower temperatures as a result. I'm not saying you can run this without a dedicated heatsink just yet, but we're getting close. That does however come with some drawbacks. As for the hardware, Corsair's built the MP700 Elite around Kioxia's latest 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND, combined with Phison's E321T controller. That does mean it comes without any DRAM cache or buffers, but honestly, that's not a huge concern given the raw throughput that Kioxia's NAND can deliver. Capacity: 2 TB Interface : PCIe 5.0 x4 Memory controller: Phison E321T Flash memory: Kioxia 218-Layer BiCS8 TLC NAND Rated performance: 10,000 MB/s sustained read, 8,500 MB/s sustained write Endurance: 1,200 TBW Warranty: Five years Price: $260 | £235 It's also worth mentioning that this is a single-sided M.2-2280 design, making it pretty ideal for laptops and other consoles, although if you do get the heatsink variant, please do note that it's too large to fit into something like a PS5 Pro (although you can easily disassemble it if you do). On launch, it's a somewhat limited choice for capacity, sadly. You can grab one of these either as a 1 TB or a 2 TB configuration, and that's it. For this specific 2 TB model I've got on test here, it retails relatively respectable at $260 ($265 with the heatsink), or £235 in the UK (£240 with heatsink). Unfortunately, no AUD availability just yet. Right, the big thing I need to cover first is temperatures, because boy, is this quite literally a cool drive. At least compared to other PCIe 5.0 offerings. To be clear, almost always, I try to test all of the SSDs I get in for review underneath the exact same heatsink with the same thermal pads. That's done on an Asus ROG Strix X870E-E motherboard. If the drive comes with a heatsink, if possible, I strip it off and chuck it in the board for the full testing suite. So, for comparison, the Seagate FireCuda 540, a relatively early PCIe 5.0 drive, during its benchmark run, topped out at 83 C. The Crucial T700, which did use its own integrated heatsink, landed at 87°C. The MP700 Elite? 55°C. Ambient room temperature at the time of those tests was 24°C across all three SSDs. That is just a staggering drop in overall heat, and if we're generous and compare it only to the FireCuda 540, there's a 33.7% difference between them. This is all thanks to Phison's latest E31T controller. In short, it's basically a pseudo-evolution of the E26 found in the bulk of most 5.0 drives to date ( Teamgroup's Z540 a good example of that). Although it lacks any DRAM and features half the channels and bandwidth, it's wildly more efficient than the original controllers. That's thanks to Phison moving the manufacturing process from a 12nm FinFET solution to TSMC's 7 nm N7 process instead. It also has half the number of channels, and because of that power draw, equally has been cut significantly as well. What that leads to is a significant drop in overall temps as a result. Certainly compared to drives like Crucial's T700 or Gigabyte's Aorus Gen5 12000. As for the numbers game, general sequential speeds are about what we saw with the initial PCIe 5.0 launch, albeit with one exception. Crystal Disk manages 10,197 MB/s, respectively, on the read, but 8,608 on the write (the latter quite a bit slower than the FireCuda 540 and Crucial's T700). Where the MP700 Elite picks its head up, however, is in the random 4Ks. It dominates that field, with 88 MB/s on the read and a whopping 336 MB/s on the write, pipping both of our other PCIe 5.0 drives to the post. As for in-game performance, it basically sat in the middle of the pack, landing a load time of 7.426 seconds in Final Fantasy's Shadowbringers benchmark. PC Gamer test bench CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | RAM: 64 GB (2x32GB) Team Group T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | PSU: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: Geometric Future Model 5 The real kicker is the price. There's a lot of tech and hardware featured here that's relatively new to the playing field. Whether that's Phison's E31T controller, which landed with us in September 2024, or Kioxia's latest 218-layer BiCS8 NAND, it all costs money up front to bring this together to the table, and despite this drive being pitched as sort of a "mid-range" entry-level option, it's got some tough competition from older hardware that right now, just kind of works. ✅ Random 4K performance and cooling are everything: The MP700 Elite delivers impressively potent random 4K performance, along with some phenomenally low temperatures due to improved power efficiency. That should translate well in game. ❌ You're looking for the fastest sequential drive around: With 8 GB/s on the write and 10 GB/s on the write, it lacks the sequential grunt of other older, and cheaper PCIe 5.0 drives. Crucial's T700 is a fine example of this (and it's not alone either). If you go for the non-heatsinked variant, at time of writing, you can pick up 2 TB for just $210, and it's consistently been that price for the last four months (even lower during Black Friday). Corsair's MP700 Elite, on offer right now, is still slightly more expensive, despite dropping in price to $215. And to be fair, you can only grab that deal directly from its webstore. Admittedly, you can get the MP700 Elite with a heatsink for just $5 extra versus the $50 investment needed for the T700 heatsinked, but, in reality, most folk buying this are likely just going to chuck it behind a motherboard M.2 heatsink anyway, negating the issue. Then there's the performance delta between those two drives. Although the random 4K numbers are higher for the MP700 Elite, those sequential numbers, particularly on write performance, are awkwardly lower by contrast. Depending on your workloads, that could be a real deal breaker. Similar to graphics cards and CPUs, it feels like at this point that excess heat generated by most modern, less-efficient PCIe 5.0 drives has already been accounted for and designed around. Whether that's through better motherboard heatsinks or standard ones included with the drives themselves, it's no longer an issue. Although Phison's latest controller is impressive, it's technology that really should be utilized to better improve the performance of the next generation of PCIe 6.0 SSDs instead. Combine those facts with just how limited that extra performance is for gamers, and well it's a real tough sell. Still, the MP700 Elite is a solid all-round performer. If you're looking for something a little cheaper and budget is a factor, if you can get this thing on offer, it'll deliver on its promise, and then some, all without breaking the bank.
NoneAnge Postecoglou described a Tottenham forward Timo Werner's performance against Rangers as 'not acceptable' in a stinging spray. Postecoglou's side drew 1-1 with Rangers in the Europa League, meaning the Scottish club are still yet to beat an English Premier League club in European competition since November 1992. It was Rangers who struck first in the 47th minute as Hamza Igamane lashed home an inviting cross by James Tavernier from the right. However, Tottenham's Dejan Kulusevksi ensured the visitors would leave Ibrox with a point when he scored 15 minutes before the end. Kulusevski began the contest on the bench but was thrown on at the start of the second half. The Swede came on in place of Timo Werner , who was largely ineffectual for the opening 45 minutes and gave Postecoglou little reason to keep him on. Postecoglou didn't mince his words on Werner's performance and he certainly let the German know it. "He wasn't playing anywhere near the level he should," Postecoglou said in his post-match press conference. "When you’ve got 18-year-olds it’s not acceptable to me. I said that to Timo. He’s a senior international, he’s a German international. "In the moment we’re in right now, it’s not like we’ve got many options. I need everyone to at least be going out there trying to give the best of themselves. "His performance in the first half wasn’t acceptable." Postecoglou added: "We need everybody including him to be contributing, because we don’t have the depth to leave people out if they’re performing poorly. "We need them to play their part. Especially the senior guys. When I’m asking younger guys to do massive jobs. "I expect a level of performance from some of the senior guys and today wasn’t that." Werner's blank against Rangers meant his goal tally this season remained at just one from 19 appearances across all competitions. It was far from a perfect performance from Tottenham, whose defensive issues were exposed once more. In fact, Igamane's strike ensured Postecoglou's side had kept just one clean sheet from their last 11 games. Rangers also finished the contest with more shots and shots on target than their Premier League counterparts despite having 41 per cent possession. The display, especially defensively, left former Tottenham player Jamie O'Hara feeling like he's 'had enough'. "My patience is wearing thin," O'Hara said on The Sports Bar. "Patience is wearing thin. Ange Postecoglou, mate. I've had enough. "You know, we go on and like, oh yeah, the football's great. Is it? Is it great? “I'm not watching Barcelona. I'm just watching a good team, you know, in moments, have some decent spells, but you know, every team plays good football. “It's not like I'm watching Barcelona play, but can't defend, but when we've got the ball, it's just, you know, it's brilliant to watch. All I'm watching is a Tottenham team that I've watched a million times before. Boring. “There's nothing special.” Postecoglou will hope Tottenham's winless run doesn't stretch to a sixth game on Sunday as they travel to lowly Southampton .Fine Gael won 35 seats in the 2020 election, but 18 of those TDs did not seek re-election in Friday’s poll. An exit poll puts the party’s support at 21%, a fraction of a percentage behind the main opposition party Sinn Fein. Mr Harris, the outgoing Taoiseach, was elected with 16,869 first preference votes, well above the quota. He celebrated with his wife Caoimhe, his parents Bart and Mary, his sister Gemma and his political team at the count centre in Greystones, Co Wicklow. Ahead of his re-election, Mr Harris told reporters he was “cautiously optimistic” about the election result and said it was “clear that my party will gain seats”. “It’s also clear that Fine Gael will top the poll in at least 10 constituencies, many more than we did the last time, that we will gain seats in constituencies where we haven’t had seats in many years, like Tipperary South and Waterford, and that we will add second seats in other constituencies as well,” he said. “I think the people of Ireland have now spoken. We now have to work out exactly what they have said, and that is going to take a little bit of time.” In one of the five consecutive broadcast media rounds he did from the Greystones count centre, he said there were a lot of areas where there were “straight shoot-outs” between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael for final seats. He described the Sinn Fein vote as “pretty significantly down”, the Fianna Fail vote as “marginally down” and the Fine Gael vote as “static” compared with its 2020 vote. He said it was “a very close, a very competitive election” and that “we haven’t seen a Sinn Fein surge or anything like it”. He said: “It was predicted by many that I would become the Taoiseach for a brief period of time, take over from Leo Varadkar, and then have to rebuild my party from the opposition benches as Sinn Fein led a government. “We don’t know what’s going to happen on government formation yet, but that is now looking less likely than it was.” He acknowledged that it was “a very difficult day” for the Green Party and paid tribute to their work in the coalition government, alongside his party and Fianna Fail. “Definitely, politics in Ireland has gotten much more fragmented,” he said. Fine Gael minister Helen McEntee said that her party’s campaign had been “positive”. “The feeling on the doors was very much that people were relatively happy with the government,” she said on RTE Radio. “It will come down to the last seats and it will come down to transfers,” she said of the final result, adding that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were performing better than the exit poll estimated.