"They handcuffed her hands and feet like she was a dangerous criminal," he told French outlet Ouest-France.

His mother had moved to the US after marrying her long-lost love - an American man named Billy whom she had met in the 1960s, when he was a soldier stationed in the Nato base of Saint-Nazaire, and she a secretary. Billy returned to the US in 1966. He and Marie-Thérèse lost touch, got married - each in their own country - and had children.

According to Ouest-France, the two reconnected in 2010 and visited one another with their spouses. By 2022, both were widowed and started a relationship. Billy was a "charming, adorable man", Marie-Thérèse's son said, and the couple were in love "like teenagers". They married last year and Marie-Thérèse relocated to Alabama, applying for a green card that would grant her the right to remain in the US.

But Billy died suddenly in January, and his son and Marie-Thérèse reportedly entered a dispute over his inheritance. According to Ouest-France, Billy's son "threatened her, intimidated her, and even went so far as to cut off her water, internet, and electricity," her son said.

Marie-Thérèse hired a lawyer, but was arrested by ICE the day before a scheduled hearing. Neighbours alerted her children.

There is no proof that it was a report by Billy's son that landed his stepmother in an ICE detention centre. The French foreign ministry is involved and Marie-Thérèse had received a consular visit, her son told French media. He added that his mother was a "fighter" and "holding up well" but that she had heart and back problems.

"Our priority is to get her out of this detention center and repatriate her to France. Given her health, she won't last a month in such conditions of detention," he said. Since the start of Donald Trump's second term in office, ICE has taken a central role in carrying out his administration's mass deportation initiative. ICE, its budget and its mission have been significantly expanded and plays a key role in removing undocumented immigrants from the US.

Marie-Thérèse's son said his story "was like a bad American film. Every morning I wake up and tell myself none of it is true, that it was just a nightmare." The BBC has reached out to the US Department of Homeland Security for comment.

Speaking in a phone interview to New York Post on Friday, he says "we're going to find out in about 24 hours," the paper reports.

"We're loading up the ships with the best weapons ever made, even at a higher level than we use to do a complete decimation.

"And if we don't have a deal, we will be using them and we will be using them very effectively," he adds.

Of the Iranians, he says they are people that you "don't know whether or not they tell the truth".

Talks between the two nations are due to take place on Saturday in Pakistan.

Joey is a botanist, illustrator, and the voice behind Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't. A few years ago, he did something most people only talk about: he acquired a piece of Tamaulipan Thornscrub — one of the rarest ecosystems in North America — and started protecting it.

Less than 1% of this ecosystem is formally protected. Most of what remains sits on private ranch land, unrecognized or actively cleared. We spent a day walking his land to understand what's actually out there, and why it matters.

00:00 — What Most People Miss in South Texas

01:00 — The Tamaulipan Thornscrub

01:45 — Walking the Land with Joey Santore

03:00 — The Goliad Gravels

04:00 — Plants That Wait

06:00 — Peyote and the Plants Worth Protecting

08:30 — Javelinas, Feral Pigs, and Evolutionary History

11:00 — Why This Place Is Worth Paying Attention To

Onboard the Apollo spacecraft, the revolutionary Apollo Guidance Computer helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. One of the first computers to use integrated circuits, the Apollo Guidance Computer was lightweight enough and small enough (70 pounds and under a cubic foot) to fly in space. An unusual feature that contributed to its small size was core rope memory, a technique of physically weaving software into high-density storage. In this blog post, I take a close look at core rope and the circuitry that made it work.

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had very little memory by modern standards: 2048 words of RAM in erasable core memory and 36,864 words of ROM in core rope memory. In the 1960s, most computers (including the AGC) used magnetic core memory for RAM storage, but core ropes were unusual and operated differently. Erasable core memory and core rope both used magnetic cores, small magnetizable rings. But while erasable core memory used one core for each bit, core rope stored an incredible 192 bits per core, achieving much higher density.2 The trick was to put many wires through each core (as shown above), hardwiring the data: a 1 bit was stored by threading a wire through a core, while the wire bypassed the core for a 0 bit. Thus, once a core rope was carefully manufactured, using a half-mile of wire, data was permanently stored in the core rope.

We are restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer shown above. The core rope modules (which we don't have)4 would be installed in the empty space on the left. On the right of the AGC, you can see the two connectors that connected the AGC to other parts of the spacecraft, including the DSKY (Display/Keyboard). By removing the bolts holding the two trays together, we could disassemble the AGC. Pulling the two halves apart takes a surprising amount of force because of the three connectors in the middle that join the two trays. The tray on the left is the "A" tray, which holds the logic and interface modules. The tray on the right is the "B" tray, which holds the memory circuitry, oscillator, and alarm. The six core rope modules go under the metal cover in the upper right. Note that the core ropes took up roughly a quarter of the computer's volume.

How core rope works

At a high level, core rope is simple: sense wires go through cores to indicate 1's, or bypass cores to indicate 0's. By selecting a particular core, the sense wires through that core were activated to provide the desired data bits.

Magnetic cores have a few properties that made core memory work.7 By passing a strong current along a wire through the core, the core becomes magnetized, either clockwise or counterclockwise depending on the direction of the current. Normally the cores were all magnetized in one direction, called the "reset" state, and when a core was magnetized the opposite direction, this is called the "set" state. When a core flips from one state to another, the changing magnetic field induces a small voltage in any sense wires through the core. A sense amplifier detects this signal and produces a binary output.

The key advantage of core rope is that many sense wires pass through a single core, so you can store multiple bits per core and achieve higher-density storage. (In the case of the AGC, each core has 192 sense wires passing through (or around) it5, so each core stored 12 words of data.) This is in contrast to regular read/write core memory, where each core held one bit.

Core rope used an unusual technique to select a particular core to flip and read. Instead of directly selecting the desired core, inhibit lines blocked the flipping of every core except the desired one. In the diagram below, the current on the set line (green) would potentially flip all the cores. However, various inhibit lines (red) have a current in the opposite direction. This cancels out the set current in all the cores except #2, so only core #2 flips.

In the diagram above, only the sense lines (blue) passing through core #2 pick up an induced voltage. Thus, the weaving pattern of the sense lines controls what data is read from core #2. To summarize, the inhibit lines control which core is selected, and the sense wires woven through that core control what data value is read.

The inhibit lines are driven from the address lines and arranged so that all inhibit lines will be inactive for just the desired core. For any other address, at least one inhibit line will be activated, preventing the core from flipping and being read.

[The article continues with a detailed photo breakdown of the Apollo boards]