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Luigi Mangione appeared in a Manhattan courtroom Friday in the state's case against him for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

As the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics begin, all eyes are on teams from around the globe proudly donning their countries' uniforms for the opening ceremony, including Team USA in outfits designed by Ralph Lauren.

ALICIA PEMBROOKE
Staff Reporter

The Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) chapter at the university wrapped its first action week on Oct. 25 — a coordinated effort with the goal of encouraging administrative support for international students and utilizing democratic student power. Through a phone zap, a debate watch party, an open mic and a public presentation of demands, members said the week could not be ignored. 

The university’s YDSA chapter was revived last year after its last president graduated in 2018. Nithila Christosam, a psychology and sociology double major, happened to meet members of Delaware’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) at a tabling event and decided to reinvigorate the university’s chapter.

“I don’t really know what it was,” Christosam said. “It [was] just an impulsive, ‘Oh, I could do that, easy,’ and so I did.” 

She then began the process of rebuilding the chapter from the bottom up — reestablishing the group’s structure and defining its purpose. Over time, YDSA became a hub for left-leaning students to gather, learn and eventually organize around shared goals.

For Christosam, the work has always been urgent and personal. 

“I’m the daughter of immigrants, and the American dream is something that is very relevant to my life,” Christosam said. “I’ve never been super patriotic, but you grow up on the idea that America is this revolutionary place. And you have the responsibility to speak up for yourselves and for your community.” 

That sense of duty escalated last April, when eight university-sponsored international students had their visas revoked in a controversial move by the U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The incident occurred amongst a national trend of universities’ international students facing sudden visa terminations amid federal immigration crackdowns. 

“It will happen again, and it will, unfortunately, probably be worse,” Jessica Brady, a core organizer in YDSA said.

That urgency set the tone for the start of action week. First up was a phone zap, a strategic action that involved rapid and repeated calls to university administrators. 

“Phone zaps bring attention to staff and administrators and make it hard for them to ignore us,” Xavier Flaiz, another core organizer and junior majoring in biochemistry and sociology, said. “It was good. We always had people manning the phones.” 

But even with constant pressure, the administration remained silent, according to Flaiz. 

“We haven’t really gotten any big response,” Flaiz said.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

For many in YDSA, that silence has become routine. Members say conversations with administrators often happen behind closed doors, with little transparency or accountability. 

“It’s one thing to make people feel safe, it’s another to make sure they actually are,” Brady said, who is also a double major in political science and history. 

Despite this, organizers shifted toward community-building events to maintain momentum. Midweek, YDSA hosted a debate watch party for Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York City. Mamdani’s campaign and openly socialist ideals have become influential among young organizers.

“The turnout was huge,” Flaiz said. “The energy was great. Lots of fun. We were raffling off little handmade Zohrans.”

The plush Mamdani dolls, made by YDSA members ahead of the event, became a symbol of the group’s personality —  politically engaged and creative. They have since been spotted at flea markets as part of YDSA’s fundraising and community outreach goals. 

“Having something fun and hopeful where you can just mingle and talk to a lot of people is really good to bring in new members,” Flaiz said.

The goal of the watch party was to offer a low-pressure entry point for students who might feel intimidated by political spaces or general body meetings. 

“We want to get people excited about YDSA, and we want to give people hope,” Flaiz said. “A lot of people walk around campus, they see these issues, and they hear about students having their visas revoked and they’re like, ‘Wow, that sucks. But what could I ever do about that?’”

For Hope Berg, a junior computer science major, the watch parties offered a counterbalance to the emotional weight of the week. 

“Seeing people turn out gave me hope,” Berg said. “There are people on campus who aren’t just YDSA who actually care about international students.”

The watch party also contributed directly to action week’s momentum by inspiring attendance for the following events. Students who had never been to a YDSA meeting before showed up for the presentation of demands and open mic later in the week, with plans to attend future meetings. 

Action week’s momentum culminated in a public presentation of demands that members described as the most powerful moment.

“We left 450 petitions on the steps of Hullihen so they literally couldn’t ignore us,” Christosam said. 

The event featured speakers from HOLA, the university’s Hispanic/Latinx registered student organization (RSO) and the Delaware Coalition for Immigrant Justice (DCIJ), amplifying stories of affected international students. 

“It was great to see all these community members come together,” Flaiz said. “It showed how well YDSA can organize when everyone takes on a little bit of the burden.”

Following the presentation of demands, the community-building aspect of YDSA continued with the open mic. Much like the Mamdani watch parties, attendees were able to perform, share stories, socialize and fundraise.

Members stressed that the fight is not isolated to one community. 

“It’s about if international students can have their rights taken away, then it means anyone can have their rights taken away.” Berg said.

YDSA organizers also highlighted that the campaign continues. The chapter plans to build on the week’s successes with organizer training, skill-building workshops, outreach events and national conventions.

The group sees these efforts as part of a larger movement to advocate for student rights, democratic participation and campus accountability.

“As long as you’re coming in with good intentions and a will to make a change, we’re here for you, and we hope that you’ll be here for us and all the people we’re trying to protect,” Berg said. 

Action week offered participants a chance to connect with others and explore ways to get involved on campus. 

“If you’ve been feeling hopeless and you as an individual can’t do anything to change the way this campus or nation is headed,” Flaiz said “Then I think it’d be a great chance to do something by joining YDSA.”

Gamers across the world can now recreate drone strikes in Ukraine from the comfort of their own home, with this newly released game.

Sonny Jurgensen's strong arm, keen wit and affable personality made him one of the most beloved figures in Washington football history.

Officials, MPs and other insiders recall a need for clarity and Blair-era frisson before election – even if Sue Gray was wary

• UK politics live – latest updates

A general election was on the horizon and Peter Mandelson was everywhere. “He didn’t have a desk but he would dip in and out on big issues; he was always there for advice,” recalled a former Labour official of the party’s run-up to the campaign in 2024.

“He would be in and out of the Loto [leader of the opposition] office in Westminster, picking people off individually, ‘We need to chat and do this’, sort of thing.”

Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator in Congress, had condemned the racist video; Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer call Trump ‘vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder’

• Trump shares video with racist imagery of Barack and Michelle Obama in late-night posting spree

Top Democrats in Congress have condemned Donald Trump for sharing a racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama that depicts them as apes.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, called the president a “vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder”. He noted that the Obamas were “brilliant, compassionate and patriotic Americans” who “represent the best of this country”.

Properties in London and Wiltshire targeted by officers investigating alleged leaks to late child sex offender

Police are searching two properties connected to Peter Mandelson, as part of an investigation into claims that he passed market-sensitive information to Jeffrey Epstein.

A Metropolitan police statement, which did not name Mandelson, said searches were taking place in north London and Wiltshire. Mandelson has been living in a rented property in Wiltshire since being sacked as ambassador to the US over his links to the late convicted child sex offender.

The police said they were carrying out search warrants at two addresses, one in Wiltshire and another in north London

Nearly 60,000 unauthorised migrants and convicted criminals have been removed or deported from the UK since Labour took office, the Home Office has said.

The announcement came amid claims that the government was promoting “harmful stereotypes” by equating migration with criminality.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute have demonstrated how quantum operations between superconducting qubits can be performed while correcting for bit-flip errors.

Feb. 6, 2026 — Quantum computers hold great promise for exciting applications in the future, but for now they keep presenting physicists and engineers with a series of challenges and conundrums. One of them relates to decoherence and the errors that result from it: bit flips and phase flips. Such errors mean that the logical unit of a quantum computer, the qubit, can suddenly and unpredictably change its state from ‘0’ to ‘1’, or that the relative phase of a superposition state can jump from positive to negative.

Ilya Besedin and Michael Kerschbaum in one of the group’s laboratories at Hönggerberg. Photo credit: Kilian Kessler/D-PHYS/ETH Zurich.

These errors can be held at bay by building a logical qubit out of many physical qubits and constantly applying error correction protocols. This approach takes care of storing the quantum information relatively safely over time. However, at some point it becomes necessary to exit storage mode and do something useful with the qubit – like applying a quantum gate, which is the building block of quantum algorithms.

The research group led by ETH Zurich D-PHYS Professor Andreas Wallraff, in collaboration with the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and the theory team of Professor Markus Müller at RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, has now demonstrated a technique that makes it possible to perform a quantum operation between superconducting logical qubits while correcting for potential errors occurring during the operation. The researchers have just published their results in Nature Physics.

Quantum error correction is very different from classical error correction. For the latter, it’s possible to make several identical copies of a bit and read them out after a while: if a bit flip occurred, a majority vote reveals which bit most likely flipped and its original value can be restored. “With qubits, things are a lot more complicated,” says Dr Ilya Besedin, postdoctoral researcher in Wallraff’s group and co-leading author of the study together with PhD student Michael Kerschbaum. One complication is that quantum information cannot simply be copied or ‘cloned’: instead, one must create entangled states of several qubits. To make things even trickier, phase-flip errors – which do not exist in classical computation – also need to be fixed.

Error Correction with Surface Codes

One way to ensure that bit- and phase-flip errors are corrected is to use so-called surface codes. In these codes, the state of a qubit is stored in several physical data qubits. Error correction is achieved by measuring repeatedly the quantum states of so-called stabilizers, which make up the logical qubit together with data qubits. Stabilizers are measured using extra qubits that are connected to data qubits in such a way that reading them out reveals any changes – in bit value (Z-type stabilizer) or phase (X-type stabilizer) – occurring between measurements, thus enabling their correction. Data qubits, on the other hand, are never read out: they store the error-corrected qubit state.

The situation changes when one wants to perform a quantum logical operation, such as a controlled-NOT gate, between two logical qubits. In particular, one must also correct for any errors occurring during the operation. “Performing a logical operation in this fault-tolerant way would be relatively easy if we could move our qubits around and connect them arbitrarily to each other,” says Kerschbaum. In two-dimensional arrays of superconducting qubits, however, each qubit is fixed in space, and only physical qubits that are spatially close to each other are connected and can interact with one another.

Splitting the Square

“Lattice surgery is a way of dealing with this constraint,” said Kerschbaum. In their experiment, he and his colleagues initially performed error correction on a single logical qubit that was encoded by seventeen physical qubits. The data qubits and the stabilizers were arranged in a roughly square shape. For a few cycles, the researchers read out the stabilizers every 1.66 microseconds, performing bit-flip and phase-flip error correction.

When the time for surgery came, three data qubits along the middle of the square were read out, effectively splitting the surface-code square into two halves. Additionally, the readout of the X-type stabilizers was halted. “The end result of this operation was that we had two logical qubits entangled with each other,” explains Besedin. During the surgery, bit-flip errors were corrected; afterwards, bit-flip error correction could continue on the two resulting halves. This operation isn’t yet a quantum controlled-NOT gate, but it can be turned into one through a series of such splits together with merging operations.

“One could say that the lattice surgery operation is the operation, and all the others can be constructed from it,” said Besedin. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time lattice surgery has been performed on superconducting qubits, and we still have some way to go.”

For instance, 41 physical qubits would be required to make the splitting operation on one logical qubit stable against phase flips too. Nonetheless, this demonstration of lattice surgery on superconducting qubits marks an important step towards the ambitious goal of building useful quantum computers with thousands of qubits.

Reference

Besedin, I., Kerschbaum, M. et al. Realizing lattice surgery on two distance-three repetition codes with superconducting qubits. Nat. Phys. (2026). DOI:10.1038/s41567-025-03090-6

Further reading

Krinner, S. et al. Realizing repeated quantum error correction in a distance-three surface code. Nature 605, 669-674 (2022). DOI:10.1038/s41586-022-04566-8

Links

Press release by Forschungszentrum Jülich: in German and English

Source: Oliver Morsch, ETH 

The post ETH Zurich: Researchers Demonstrate Error-Corrected Quantum Operations Using Lattice Surgery appeared first on HPCwire.

• Milano Cortina Games to be opened on Friday evening
• Schedule | Results | Medal table | Briefing | Email Tanya

Lindsey Vonn inspected the Olympic downhill course with other racers early this morning as she prepared to take part in the opening training session despite tearing the ACL in her left knee a week ago.

The 41-year-old Vonn is planning to compete at the Milan Cortina Games with a large brace covering her injured knee.

An anonymous reader shares a report: KPMG, one of the world's largest auditors of public and private companies, negotiated lower fees from its own accountant by arguing that AI will make it cheaper to do the work, according to people familiar with the matter. The Big Four firm told its auditor, Grant Thornton UK, it should pass on cost savings from the rollout of AI and threatened to find a new accountant if it did not agree to a significant fee reduction, the people said. The discussions last year came amid an industry-wide debate about the impact of new technology on audit firms' business and traditional pricing models. Firms have invested heavily in AI to speed up the planning of audits and automate routine tasks, but it is not yet clear if this will generate savings that are passed on to clients. Grant Thornton is auditor to KPMG International, the UK-based umbrella organisation that co-ordinates the work of KPMG's independent, locally owned partnerships around the world. Talks with Grant Thornton were led by Michaela Peisger, a longtime audit partner and executive from KPMG's German member firm, who became KPMG International's chief financial officer at the beginning of 2025.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The footage is included in a video that promotes false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Mr. Trump.

Trump also demanded Dulles airport be given his name in exchange for funding NY-NJ tunnel and subway extension

Donald Trump has told the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, that he will unfreeze funds for major infrastructure projects in New York City if he supports renaming Dulles international airport and Penn Station after him.

The demand, which was first reported on Thursday by Punchbowl News, comes after the president in October halted $18bn in funding for a major subway line expansion in New York City as well as a new rail tunnel connecting the city to New Jersey. The funding freeze was announced on the first day of a 43-day government shutdown in which Schumer, who represents New York, played a major role.

The company says its 2026 release window remains intact, but final prices and dates are still in flux.

Indirect talks end with agreement to maintain diplomatic path and possible continuation in coming days, officials say

Indirect talks between Iran and the US on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme ended on Friday with a broad agreement to maintain a diplomatic path, possibly with further talks in the coming days, according to statements from Iran and the Omani hosts.

The relieved Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, described the eight hours of meetings as a “good start” conducted in a good atmosphere. He added that the continuance of talks depended on consultations in Washington and Tehran, but said Iran had underlined that any dialogue required refraining from threats.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, recently wrote about her accomplishments as she enters her final year leading the state.

"Our approach has led to some pretty remarkable results," Whitmer wrote in a Feb. 2 Substack entry. "Free pre-K, community college, and school meals for all. Fewer families living in poverty."

Her statement taps into Americans’ concerns about affordability, which could be a key issue for voters in the midterm elections, including a competitive U.S. Senate contest in Michigan. President Donald Trump’s pledge to reduce prices for groceries, cars and other items is Stalled on our MAGA-Meter, which tracks his campaign promises.

Michigan’s poverty rate declined during Whitmer’s tenure. The drop mirrored national trends, and most of the decline began under her predecessor. Whitmer’s spokesperson pointed to anti-poverty measures during her tenure as the reason for the decline. Experts said poverty rates are affected by numerous factors, not only one governor’s policies.

Poverty rate declined in Michigan since 2011

Whitmer was referring to a decline in the state’s poverty rate compared with what she inherited from her predecessor, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, Whitmer’s political strategist told PolitiFact. 

In 2011, when Snyder took office, about 17% of Michigan residents lived in poverty. It peaked at 17.5% in 2012, then fell to 14% during Snyder’s final year in office in 2018, according to U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy think tank. 

During Whitmer’s tenure, which began in 2019, the rate hovered between 13.1% and 13.5% in 2024, the most recent year available. (There is no 2020 data because of the coronavirus pandemic’s significant data collection disruptions.)

The official U.S. Census Bureau poverty measure totals a household's income and compares it with a threshold for the household's size and age composition, Kristin S. Seefeldt, a University of Michigan social work associate professor, said. If the household’s income is below that threshold the household is considered to be living in poverty. Many experts say the threshold is outdated, but it’s still widely used.

The U.S. Census Bureau's nationwide poverty threshold for a family of two adults and one child was $25,249 in 2024.

Rates are often the most useful measure of changes because they take into account population changes. However, in sheer numbers, there were more people living in poverty in Michigan (and the nation) in 2024 than 2019. In Michigan, there were about 1.28 million in poverty in 2019 and 1.34 million in 2024.

However, a comparison of poverty rates under two governors doesn’t provide a full picture. 

Michigan’s declining poverty rate under both Whitmer and Snyder matches a national trend. The national poverty rate was 15.9% in 2011 and declined most years, ending at 12.1% in 2024.

During economic downturns, Michigan tends to get hit harder and experience longer recessions than even neighboring states, mainly because of its transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, said Nicholas Hess and Patrick Schaefer at the Michigan League for Public Policy, a nonprofit policy institute. That typically puts the state’s poverty rate higher than the national average.

There is usually a lag between the end of a recession and a drop in the poverty rate.

"One could argue that due to the Great Recession (of 2008 and 2009) the Snyder administration was at a much different starting point," Seefeldt said. "Or, one might say that Snyder didn't do enough to bring down poverty rates as the economy recovered. But the trend data alone don't let us say either definitively."

Charles L. Ballard, a Michigan State University economics professor emeritus, said poverty measures should be taken with several grains of salt.

"The really big story of the Michigan economy is the longer-term story of Michigan’s economy losing ground relative to the national average," Ballard said. "This is strongly associated with the decline of manufacturing in general, and the auto sector in particular."

Whitmer hasn’t reversed that decline, Ballard said, but neither did her predecessors, Republican or Democrat. 

Whitmer cited anti-poverty measures

Whitmer’s spokesperson pointed to the governor’s actions during her administration to help low-income people, including quintupling the earned income tax credit; expanding pre-K for all; expanding affordable childcare; investing in Rx Kids, a children’s prescription program, in the latest state budget; securing free school breakfast and lunch; and ending state taxes on tips and overtime.  

Many of the actions Whitmer cited stem from bills that passed the legislature from 2023 to 2025.

"I'd argue it's really too soon to see the effect of most of these changes in any dataset," Seefeldt said. "We know that the types of changes she's put in place matter for the well-being of families with low income. But the official poverty numbers by themselves aren't ‘proof’ that the changes have resulted in lower poverty rates during her administration."

The official poverty measure looks only at pre-tax income, which means that impact from some of these measures — such as expanding the earned income tax credit or rolling back the retirement tax — aren’t reflected in the statistic, Seefeldt said. Official measures also don’t consider expenses such as child care.

Another way the Census Bureau seeks to quantify poverty is by using a "supplemental poverty measure," which takes into account additional factors not included in the basic poverty measure,  including government benefits such as food assistance, tax credits and accounts for expenses such as housing and medical costs. 

Michigan’s supplemental poverty measure decreased between 2023 and 2024. That aligns with the expansion of the state’s earned income tax credit, the experts at the Michigan League for Public Policy said.

Our ruling

Whitmer said her tenure as governor has led to "fewer families living in poverty" in Michigan. 

The poverty rate under Whitmer is lower than it was under her predecessor. In 2011, when Snyder took office, about 17% of residents lived in poverty; that fell to 14% in 2018. During Whitmer’s tenure, the rate has ranged from 13.1% to 13.5%.

Whitmer’s statement omits that the drop mirrored national trends; that Michigan’s rate is higher than the national average; and that the sheer number of people living in poverty increased from 2019 to 2024. Poverty rates are influenced by multiple factors, not a governor’s policies alone.

The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important information. We rate it Half True.

Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this fact-check.

• Ice dance duo give US early lead in the team event

• Alysa Liu places second in women’s short program

• Vance and Rubio in attendance for opening session

The United States seized early control of the Olympic figure skating team event after Friday’s opening day on the southern outskirts of Milan, powered by a world’s best score this season from Madison Chock and Evan Bates.

The three-time world champions, together on skates since 2011 and married since 2024, set the marker with 91.06 points for their program to music by The Guess Who and Lenny Kravitz, earning the maximum 10 points for an American team entering the Winter Games on a tailwind of hype.
Chock and Bates, nearly unbeatable since finishing fourth in the individual ice dance event at the Beijing Games four years ago, skated with the precision and polish that have defined their rise to the top of the sport.

Obsbot calls the Tiny 3 and Tiny 3 Lite pan-tilt-zoom webcams "Tiny Titans." It's not wrong.

German newspaper Bild reported in January that some ski jumpers have been injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid ahead of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics -- the theory being that temporarily enlarged genitalia would yield looser-fitting suits when measured by 3D scanners, and those looser suits could act like sails to produce longer jumps. A study published last October in the scientific journal Frontiers found that a 2cm suit change translated to an extra 5.8 metres in jump distance. No specific athletes have been accused. The World Anti-Doping Agency said Thursday it would investigate if presented with evidence, noting its powers extend to banning practices that violate the "spirit of sport." The claims arrive as ski jumping already faces scrutiny -- two Norwegian coaches and an equipment manager received 18-month bans in January for illegally manipulating suit stitching.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A library in rural Alaska needed help providing free Wi-Fi and getting kids to read. A children’s museum in Washington wanted to expand its Little Science Lab. And a World War I museum in Missouri had a raft of historic documents it needed to digitize. They received funding from a little-known federal agency before the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to dismantle it last year.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is now accepting applications for its 2026 grant cycle. But this time, it has unusually specific criteria.

In cover letters accompanying the applications, the institute said it “particularly welcomes” projects that align with President Donald Trump’s vision for America.

These would include those that foster an appreciation for the country “through uplifting and positive narratives,” the agency writes, citing an executive order that attacks the Smithsonian Institution for its “divisive, race-centered ideology.” (Trump has said the museum focused too much on “how bad slavery was.”) The agency also points to an executive order calling for the end of “the anti-Christian weaponization of government” and one titled Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again.

The solicitation marks a stark departure for the agency, whose guidelines were previously apolitical and focused on merit.

Former agency leaders from both political parties, as well as those of library, historical and museum associations, expressed concern that funded projects could encourage a more constrained or distorted view of American history. Some also feared that by accepting grants, institutions would open themselves up to scrutiny and control, like the administration’s wide-ranging audit of Smithsonian exhibits “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

The new guidelines are “chilling,” said Giovanna Urist, who served as a senior program officer at the agency from 2021 to 2023. “I think that we just need to look at what’s happening with the Smithsonian to know that the administration has a very specific goal in mind when it comes to controlling the voice of organizations and museums across the country.”

An agency spokesperson told ProPublica it is not unusual for the institute to publish directors’ letters with grant applications, and that this one informs readers “about this Administration’s thematic emphases in the semi-quincentennial year.” He did not comment on criticisms that those letters insert political themes into a historically nonpartisan program.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, IMLS is working to revitalize our cultural institutions, urging less traditional applicants to consider working with us, and to promote civic pride and a deep sense of belonging among all Americans,” he said, adding that any institution that “meets programmatic requirements and goals” outlined in the funding opportunity “will receive all due consideration and undergo peer review.”

The spokesperson did not say how alignment with Trump’s executive orders would be weighed in the selection process or address concerns about the administration’s intrusion into funded institutions.

Established in 1996, the institute is the only dedicated source of federal support for libraries and one of the primary federal funders of museums and archives. Its long-running grant programs promote community engagement and public access to information, while bolstering institutions’ ability to care for collections and prepare for disasters. One grant, named after former first lady Laura Bush, helps recruit and train library professionals.

Last March, Trump attempted to eliminate the agency through an executive order and fired director Cyndee Landrum, a career library professional. Attorneys general from 21 states and the American Library Association sued the Trump administration to block it from dismantling the agency; the courts have halted the efforts for now.

To head the agency, the administration appointed Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith E. Sonderling, who does not appear to have prior professional experience in museums or libraries. (An institute spokesperson didn’t comment on concerns ProPublica passed along about this.) In a press release announcing his appointment as acting director, Sonderling said, “We will revitalize IMLS and restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations.”

Ten days later, he put nearly all of the agency’s 75 employees on administrative leave, fired the board and rescinded some previously awarded grants.

The grants were reinstated under court order in December, and the agency is now accepting applications for 13 grants whose awards range from $5,000 to $1 million. According to Grants.gov, the agency now expects to award nearly 600 grants totaling more than $78 million.

ProPublica spoke with directors who ran the agency under every previous presidential administration dating back to Barack Obama’s. Though each era brought different priorities, they said, those changes were implemented with input from the field — not by encouraging applicants to align their work with a president’s worldview. With the new guidelines, they said, the administration is signaling a preference for certain types of projects and narratives.

Crosby Kemper III, a lifelong conservative Republican appointed by Trump to lead the agency in 2019, stayed on into President Joe Biden’s term. While he was not a fan of the former president’s emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion and feels that the library and museum fields needed a course correction from their natural lean to the left, he believes that what is coming out of the current Trump administration is not helpful.

“All these Trump executive orders — and I mean all of them — are just extensions of his own animus towards anybody who disagrees with him and his outsized ego,” said Kemper, who called the orders “nonsense” and the grant guidelines “horrific.” “It’s clear the administration wants a whitewashed story, if you’ll pardon the pun there. And that’s wrong.”

Leaders of the American Historical Association, the American Library Association and the American Alliance of Museums warned that changes to the agency’s grant language and recent funding actions have led to uncertainty across the field.

Among questions raised: Would the government revoke grants it had already awarded, as it did last year? Would accepting the money open up institutions to broader investigations, like the 52 universities scrutinized over their DEI practices? The institute spokesperson did not comment on either of those questions. Sarah Weicksel, the American Historical Association’s executive director, said institutions are even worried about how they would be perceived if they took the funds. “They’re wondering, is accepting the grant a sign that they accept the executive orders that have been laid out here?”

Questions also remain about whether enough staff is left to process the applications properly. The agency’s $112 million budget for this year is roughly a third of the funding it has received in recent years. The agency did not answer a question about its current staffing, but in its most recent Congressional Budget Justification document, it requested support for 13 full-time employees. Former agency officials said that number is low, but that they trusted the remaining staffers to choose quality projects and, in the words of Kemper, “do the right thing.”

But staffers are only part of the process. Typically, each grant application is reviewed by volunteer library and museum experts. Susan Hildreth, who led the agency from 2011 to 2015, questions the lack of information about the current process on the agency’s website. “I couldn’t find it anywhere in the documentation,” she said. The institute spokesperson said the grant process remains the same as previous years.

Opinion polls consistently find that libraries and museums are among the most trusted public institutions in the country by Americans across the political spectrum, and Urist said they are trusted because of their independence. “When the federal government puts its thumb on that scale, it threatens the trustworthiness of these community anchors.”

Weicksel said it’s important for the public to know how the administration is aiming to shape institutions essential to the nation’s culture and ability to understand itself and its past. Patty Gerstenblith, distinguished research professor of Law at DePaul University, agreed, saying that the administration’s actions raise serious First Amendment concerns.

“Certainly at a minimum,” Gerstenblith said, “people should know that the government is using its funding as a way of essentially coercing a different presentation of American history.”

The post Grant Guidelines for Libraries and Museums Take “Chilling” Political Turn Under Trump appeared first on ProPublica.

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Hundreds of protesters gathered in Milan on Friday to oppose the presence of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the closure of schools and streets in the city ahead of the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina Winter Games.

Reuters reported that protesters – mostly students with signs reading “ICE out” – assembled in Piazzale Leonardo da Vinci, in front of a building of the Politecnico University in the eastern part of the city.

UK’s research funding body says best scientists are taking posts overseas due to lack of job stability at home

Hundreds of early career researchers have warned the UK will lose a generation of scientists after the announcement of significant cuts to physics projects and research facilities.

Scientists working in particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics have been told their grants will be cut by nearly a third, with project leaders asked to report back on how their research would fare with cuts up to 60%.

Noel Gallagher and Harry Styles lead way, and sales of jeans in general rise faster than wider fashion market

The UK was one of Levi’s fastest-growing markets last year as British trend leaders from Harry Styles to Noel Gallagher and Grime Gran were spotted in the brand’s kit.

Lucia Marcuzzo, the managing director of the European operations at the US company famous for its denim jeans, said the revival of 1990s trends had boosted sales of its classic 501s. New trends such as baggy jeans and cinch styles, which can be adjusted around the waist, had also helped, as denim has found its way back into wardrobes.

The negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear capabilities come against a backdrop of deadly protests inside Iran and a buildup of U.S. military assets in the region.

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It is the first time the US and Iran have sat down for face-to-face negotiations since June last year, when Israel launched attacks on Iran that sparked a war marked by tit-for-tat airstrikes, with the US also joining the fray. It effectively ended the US-Iran talks that were held in the weeks prior to the conflict aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement.

More recently, Donald Trump has been threatening to strike Iran for more than a month and just last week warned that an “armada” of US warships had reached the Persian Gulf. This recent clash began after Trump said he would strike Iran if it killed protesters during mass antigovernment demonstrations that swept the country last month. Human rights groups say thousands of people were killed during the brutal government crackdown on those protests.

A new look for a futuristic foldable PJ.

Deputy director of Russia’s military intelligence agency shot several times in the stairwell of his apartment

A top Russian military official who plays a major role in the country’s intelligence services has been taken to hospital after being shot in Moscow, state media has reported.

Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev was shot several times on the stairwell of his apartment on Friday by an unknown gunman in the north-west of the city and is in critical condition, according to reports.

A crypto startup founded by Trump’s family signed a huge deal with the UAE president’s brother. Where’s the political fallout?

Days before Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an investment firm controlled by a senior member of the United Arab Emirates royal family secretly signed a deal to pay $500m to buy almost half of a cryptocurrency startup founded by the Trump family. Under any other president, such an arrangement, which was revealed this past weekend by the Wall Street Journal, would cause a political earthquake in Washington. There would be demands for an investigation by Congress, televised hearings and months of damage control.

But this latest example of corruption involving Trump and his family business hardly made a blip over the past few days, relegated to a passing headline in a relentless news cycle often dominated by Trump’s actions and statements.

Billie Eilish and Biebers wore ‘ICE out’ pins at the Grammys, as more and more celebrities find their political voices

The red carpet is being used increasingly as a platform for protest – and one accessory in particular has become key: the pin badge.

At Sunday night’s Grammy awards, stars including Hailey and Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish wore black and white pins that read “ICE out”, a condemnation of the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Police investigating whether blast that injured at least 169 at Friday prayers in Islamabad was suicide attack

An explosion has ripped through a Shia mosque on the outskirts of Pakistan’s capital during Friday prayers, killing 31 people and injuring at least 169 others, according to officials. Police said they were investigating whether the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.

There were fears the death toll from the blast at the Khadija al-Kubra mosque in Islamabad could rise as some of the injured were reported to be in a critical condition. Television footage and social media images showed police and residents transporting the injured to nearby hospitals.

Africa Aware: Financing Africa’s development Audio thilton.drupal 6 February 2026

In this episode, guests discuss solutions to Africa’s debt challenges, innovative financing mechanisms, and strategies for ensuring long-term economic sustainability and growth.

The IMF’s economic outlook for Africa in 2026 points to an average GDP growth rate of 4.3 per cent – making it the fastest-growing region globally. In practice, however, per capita growth is far lower and various factors like persistent debt issues and a decline in official development assistance jeopardise this positive outlook. 

In this episode, guests Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi and Admassu Tadesse explore strategies to ensure sustained economic growth matching the promising outlook for the continent. They discuss untapped policy actions to spur economic transformation as well as the role of regional financial institutions to meet the needs of African countries shaping their development agendas. 

About Africa Aware 

Africa Aware is a podcast from the Chatham House Africa Programme bringing together leading international experts to provide in-depth analysis and sharp insights on the political, economic and social issues shaping African countries, their international relations and the continent as a whole. 

You can also listen to Africa Aware on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

GRENOBLE, France and SHERBROOKE, Quebec, Feb. 6, 2026 — Quobly, a French pioneer in silicon-based quantum computing, has announced the opening of its Canadian subsidiary in Sherbrooke, Quebec. This strategic expansion aims to reinforce the company’s research capabilities, technology integration, and industrial partnerships in North America, within a region recognized for its excellence in quantum technologies.

Sherbrooke was chosen for its unique concentration of expertise in silicon spin qubits, advanced manufacturing and packaging technologies, and cryogenic infrastructure, key elements for the industrial-scale deployment of quantum processors.

Quobly will draw on the expertise of the Université de Sherbrooke and its Institut Quantique, particularly in quantum engineering training and research, as well as the infrastructures and technological platforms of the C2MI (Centre de collaboration MiQro Innovation).

The company also joins DistriQ, Quebec’s quantum innovation hub, which fosters synergies between academic research, technological development, and the training of industrial actors and end users.

This expansion will enable Quobly to develop structured collaborations around silicon quantum processor integration, cryo-electronics interfaces, and hardware-software co-design, in connection with Canadian academic, industrial, and applied partners, particularly within Montreal’s software and application ecosystem, recognized for its expertise in advanced computing and quantum technologies.

Accelerating the Execution of Quobly’s Industrial Roadmap

The opening of the Canadian subsidiary is a part of Quobly’s global strategy to industrialize silicon-based quantum computing, leveraging complementary ecosystems to those developed in Europe. It contributes to the company’s 2032 industrial roadmap, aiming to develop a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer with large-scale quantum processors capable of executing circuits of very high complexity.

Presence in North America will also strengthen interactions with high-performance computing (HPC), advanced electronics, and industrial quantum applications, in a context of accelerating hybrid approaches combining classical and quantum computing.

Growing the Team in Canada

Quobly, which currently employs over 80 people in Europe, plans to establish a local team in Canada and recruit around ten engineers and researchers over the next two to three years to support R&D activities, the integration of quantum technologies, and collaborative projects with academic and industrial partners.

“Sherbrooke offers an exceptional scientific and technological environment, perfectly aligned with our approach to silicon-based quantum computing,” said Maud Vinet, CEO and co-founder of Quobly. “This expansion allows us to strengthen our integration capabilities and accelerate the execution of our industrial roadmap in close collaboration with world-class partners.”

“Quobly’s arrival in Sherbrooke confirms the international attractiveness of Quebec’s quantum ecosystem,” said DistriQ CEO Michel Pioro-Ladrière. “It strengthens our positioning in industrial quantum technologies and advanced semiconductors.”

Hubert Bolduc, president of Investissement Quebec International, commented: “Quobly’s establishment in Quebec highlights the attractiveness of the ecosystem and our collective ability to support international companies as they transition from fundamental research to the industrialization of quantum technologies. Through its actions and those of the innovation zones, Investissement Quebec International actively contributes to structuring and promoting Quebec’s quantum ecosystem. The DistriQ innovation zone brings together a critical mass of academic, industrial and entrepreneurial players, and we are delighted to see Quobly’s expertise join this community”.

Strengthening Europe’s Quantum Technology Ecosystem

By combining semiconductor manufacturing expertise with advanced materials analysis, this collaboration contributes to the development of a robust European quantum industrial base. It demonstrates how cross-border partnerships between research organizations and industry leaders can help overcome technical bottlenecks and advance the industrialization of next-generation quantum processors.

More from HPCwire

• Quobly Announces Collaboration with Singapore’s National Quantum Federated Foundry
• Quobly, Inria Partner to Build Sovereign Silicon Quantum Computing Stack
• Quobly Secures €21M Funding Package for Q100T Quantum Tech Project
• CEA and Quobly Report Simultaneous, Microsecond Qubit-Readout Solution with 10x Power-Use Reduction

About Quobly

Quobly is a pioneer in quantum microelectronics, developing silicon-based quantum chips using proven semiconductor manufacturing processes. Founded in 2022 in Grenoble, France, the company builds on over 15 years of collaborative research between world-class institutions CEA-Leti and CNRS, combining expertise in quantum physics and microelectronics. Co-founded by Maud Vinet, Ph.D. in quantum physics, author of 300+ papers and 70+ patents, and Tristan Meunier, a leading expert in semiconductor quantum engineering trained under Nobel laureate Serge Haroche, Quobly bridges science and industry to make quantum computing scalable and manufacturable.

The company has a strategic partnership with STMicroelectronics to accelerate the industrialization of its silicon quantum chips. In 2023, Quobly raised €19 million, a record European seed round for a quantum hardware startup, followed in 2025 by €21 million to advance its Q100T program, a key step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. Quobly has offices in France, Singapore, and Canada.

Source: Quobly

The post Quobly Launches Canadian Subsidiary in Sherbrooke, Strengthening North American Presence appeared first on HPCwire.

Feb. 6, 2026 — The 2nd International Workshop on Energy Efficiency with Sustainable Performance (EESP) will take place on June 26 at the ISC High Performance in Hamburg and is aimed at providing a framework for exchanging practical approaches, ideas, and techniques for energy efficiency when working with artificial intelligence and modern high-performance computer (HPC) setups.

Call for Papers

Anyone interested in the topic of energy efficiency and the event is warmly invited to send in their submissions by the deadline on March 1.

Your ideas will find a diverse and knowledgeable audience of system designers, operators, application developers, and researchers actively shaping energy-aware HPC and AI infrastructures. Submissions will be part of the ISC proceedings in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series and have a chance to win the best paper award, which will also be invited to publish extended versions in the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA).

The workshop is organized by General Chair Ayesha Afzal and her program co-chairs Natalie Bates/EE HPC WG, USA, Hatem Ltaief/KAUST, Saudi Arabia, and Bronis de Supinski/LLNL, USA.

Keynote Speech

The workshop will feature computer scientist Dr. John Gustafson, a pioneer in HPC and the mind behind Gustafson’s Law, as keynote speaker. He will be presenting the topic “Every Bit Counts: Posit Computing for Energy-Efficient HPC and AI,” providing a forward-looking perspective on numerical representations and their role in enabling sustainable exascale and AI systems.

Find out more about the workshop objectives, the submission guidelines, and a full abstract of the keynote speech at the official EESP page.

ISC High Performance 2026, June 22–26

ISC 2026 returns to the Congress Center Hamburg from June 22 – 26 for its 41st edition. Since its inception in 1986, it has been recognized as the world’s oldest and Europe’s most attended event for the HPC community, and increasingly for AI and quantum professionals interested in performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

More from HPCwire

• ISC Forms New Committee to Boost Engagement of Emerging HPC Talent
• ISC 2026 Taps Martin Schulz for Opening Keynote on Post-Moore HPC Architectures
• ISC 2026 Selects Jack Dongarra to Deliver Closing Keynote

Source: Erlangen National High-Performance Computing Center

The post ISC 2026: EESP Workshop Invites Papers on Sustainable AI and HPC Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

Don't miss cauldrons being lit in two different cities as Milan and Cortina are set aglow this year.

From a £149 John Lewis version to LA’s gorpcore take, the ‘good intention’ bag is intended to look good but hold more

It’s not a multi-thousand pound handbag from Hermès that best captures the new era of It bags, but a £149 tote from John Lewis.

Launched this season, it’s deeper (45cm) and taller (33cm) than your average handbag, and comes loaded with good intentions. It’s able to hold your packed lunch, flask and book, as well – at a push – as your gym kit. The high street retailer is calling it the Intentional tote bag.

Disappearance of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie from her home in Arizona is being investigated as kidnapping

The search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC’s Today show anchor Savannah Guthrie entered its sixth day on Friday in Arizona, as authorities said they believe that she is still alive.

“She’s out there, we’re gonna find her, we have to,” said Chris Nanos, Arizona’s Pima county sheriff, in an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America show on Friday morning. “Pray – just pray,” he said.

After weeks of breakup talk, the Bucks and their superstar stayed together. The Knicks and Timberwolves, meanwhile, made smart additions

It’s hard to match the absolute insanity that was the 2024-25 NBA trade deadline, and to the majority of the league’s credit, teams didn’t really try. But there was still some notable movement ahead of Thursday’s 3pm EST deadline – to varying degrees of success. Let’s do the early assessment of who came out on top, and who left us scratching our heads.

TikTok's endless scroll of irresistible content, tailored for each person's tastes by a well-honed algorithm, has helped the service become one of the world's most popular apps. Now European Union regulators say those same features that made TikTok so successful are likely illegal. From a report: On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok's infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an "addictive design" that violated European Union laws for online safety. The service poses potential harm to the "physical and mental well-being" of users, including minors and vulnerable adults, the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc's executive branch, said in a statement. The findings suggest TikTok must overhaul the core features that made it a global phenomenon, or risk major fines. European officials said it was the first time that a legal standard for social media addictiveness had been applied anywhere in the world. "TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service," the European Commission said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo’s monster-collecting franchise was pilloried as a ‘pestilential Ponzi scheme’ in the 90s. But as its celebrates its 30th birthday, it now stands as a powerful example of video games’ ability to connect people

When I was 11, it was my dream to compete in the Pokémon World Championships, held in Sydney in 2000. I’d come across it in a magazine, and then earnestly set about training teams of creatures, transferring them between my Pokémon Red Game Boy cartridge and the 3D arenas of Pokémon Stadium on the Nintendo 64. I never made it as a player but I did finally achieve this dream on my 26th birthday, when I went to Washington DC to cover the world championships as a journalist. I was deeply moved. Presided over by a giant inflatable Pikachu hanging from the ceiling, the competitors and spectators were united in an unselfconscious love for these games, with their colourful menageries and heartfelt messaging about trust, friendship and hard work.

It is emotional to see the winners lift their trophies after a tense final round of battles, as overwhelmed by their success as any sportsperson. But it’s the pride that the smaller competitors’ parents show in their mini champions that really gets to me. During the first wave of Pokémania in the late 90s, Pokémon was viewed with suspicion by most adults. Now that the first generation of Pokémaniacs have grown up, even becoming parents ourselves, we see it for what it is: an imaginative, challenging and really rather wholesome series of games that rewards every hour that children devote to it.

In clip amplifying false claim that Trump won 2020 election, the Obamas’ faces are superimposed on bodies of apes

• US politics live – latest updates

Fury erupted early on Friday after Donald Trump posted a racist video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

The clip appeared during one of the 79-year-old US president’s increasingly frequent late-night posting sprees to his Truth Social account, and shows the laughing faces of the former president and first lady superimposed on the bodies of primates in a jungle setting, bobbing to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

PC; Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel
This mischievous roguelike escapade featuring utterly fiendish felines is compelling, and impressively tasteless

You know that old saying about cats having nine lives? Well, as far as Mewgenics is concerned, you can forget it – and you can also forget the idea that a game about cats has to be in any way cute. These kitties are red in tooth and claw, prone to strange mutations, and strictly limited to just the one life, which often ends swiftly and brutally.

Such is the nature of roguelike, a format that has spawned some of the biggest indie hits of the past 20 years. In these games, failure is permanent; dying sends you back not to the last checkpoint but back to the beginning, the game reshuffling its elements into a new shape for your next run. And so it goes in Mewgenics. You gather a party of four felines and send them out on a questing journey, from which they return victorious or not at all.

Feb. 6, 2026 — Boris Kiefer, New Mexico State University physics professor, is a co-principal investigator on a project to turn fundamental quantum science into practical technologies that could potentially enable new kinds of computing for certain problems and reduce the high energy costs associated with other quantum hardware systems.

Boris Kiefer, NMSU physics professor, and Melissa Coronado Arrieta, physics master’s student, are working on a Quantum Computing Applications of Photonics project to turn fundamental quantum science into practical tech. The project, led out of the University of New Mexico, was selected by the NSF National Quantum Virtual Laboratory to receive a two-year, $4 million grant. Photo credit: Sarah Kimmerly, NMSU.

The project led by the University of New Mexico is called “Quantum Computing Applications of Photonics (QCAP).” It is among four selected by the National Science Foundation National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NSF NQVL) to receive a two-year, $4 million grant.

“The QCAP has tremendous potential,” Kiefer said. “I’m happy we were selected and that I’m part of a team that wants to make these transformations. Hopefully we get to a place where New Mexico can make a real difference in the quantum field.”

“This project will lead to innovation and the advancement of technology, which I am thrilled to be a part of,” said Melissa Coronado Arrieta, a physics master’s student working with Kiefer. “It has the potential to completely revolutionize computing as we know it and I’m excited to witness it.”

The collaboration brings together universities, national laboratories and the private sector. In addition to NMSU and UNM, the quantum photonics group includes the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, with additional technical expertise from Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and National Institute of Standards and Technology. Together, they’ll use the design phase of the program to define requirements for the quantum computing system, validate key components and map out ideas and targets for early applications of this technology.

“Because of the strangeness of the quantum rules, we might be able to do certain types of problems faster than with any classical computer,” said Kiefer, who is also one of two theoreticians on the project. “We’re talking about transformational changes. It is a fascinating journey to think about what light can do.”

Coronado Arrieta is working to bridge the algorithms and hardware on the project. She connects computing needs to engineering specifications, helping identify algorithms that can reliably run on QCAP-designed devices.

“My experience working on this project has been challenging, rewarding and exciting,” Coronado Arrieta said. “It pushes me to be better both personally and academically, since the topic is complex and counterintuitive at times. The potential this project has makes me excited for the future of science and my career.”

In many of today’s quantum computing platforms, the processor chip may be small, but the surrounding cryogenic infrastructure is not. Systems based on superconducting qubits, for example, typically operate at millikelvin temperatures inside dilution refrigerators, alongside extensive control and readout hardware.

“In many cryogenic quantum platforms, a large fraction of the operating cost is refrigeration,” Kiefer said. “This is where photons have a significant advantage.”

Because photonic qubits can be generated and manipulated without millikelvin cooling, the project can redirect effort from maintaining extreme cryogenic conditions toward tighter integration, higher stability, and better-performing hardware, while refining the algorithms and control software that run the system.

Beyond computing, photonic quantum technologies can also deliver near-term tools that plug into today’s security infrastructure. One such application is the ability to generate quantum random numbers.

“If you can generate random numbers that are truly unpredictable, it dramatically strengthens security,” Kiefer said.

Quantum random number generation relies on the inherently probabilistic nature of quantum measurements to produce high-quality random numbers. Implementing this capability into current systems could strengthen cryptographic key generation, providing more resilient security for financial transactions, satellite communications and other critical infrastructure.

More from HPCwire

• NSF Awards UNM-led Team $4M to Design Photonic Quantum Computer
• NSF Starts Ramping Up the National Quantum Virtual Laboratory
• New Mexico Launches $25M Quantum Venture Studio
• Qunnect and Roadrunner Venture Studios Launch ABQ-Net, New Mexico’s First Quantum Network
• Quantum Learning Lab Launches to Train New Mexico’s Quantum Future
• QuEra Partners with Roadrunner Venture Studios on $4M Quantum Testbed in New Mexico
• Mesa Quantum Wins First-Ever New Mexico Quantum Tech Grant
• NSF Awards $1M Grant to New Mexico Universities for Quantum Photonics Computer Research [2024]
• Quantum New Mexico Coalition Aims to Establish State as National Hub [2022]

Source: New Mexico State University

The post NMSU Participates in NSF-Backed Quantum Photonics Project Led by University of New Mexico appeared first on HPCwire.

Portugal’s far-right Chega party has said vote should be delayed as state of calamity declared in 69 areas

• Europe live – latest updates

Heavy rains and strong winds continued to batter parts of Spain and Portugal on Friday, causing at least two deaths, forcing the evacuation of more than 7,000 people and prompting calls to postpone the second-round of Portugal’s presidential election.

Storm Leonardo, which has lashed the Iberian peninsula this week, has led the Portuguese government to extend the current state of calamity in 69 municipalities until the middle of February.

Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, the deputy head of the GRU, Russia’s main foreign military intelligence agency, was targeted at his home in Moscow, officials said.

Feb. 6, 2026 — The Dark Energy Survey (DES) recently published results that combine all six years of data collected from weak lensing and galaxy clustering probes – a first for the international collaboration that is mapping hundreds of millions of galaxies, detecting thousands of supernovae and analyzing patterns of cosmic structure that could reveal what is accelerating the expansion of the universe.

DES scientists surveyed a wide area of the sky from 2013 to 2019 using an extremely sensitive 570-megapixel digital camera built at Fermilab, the DECam. Credit: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab.

The Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) led end-to-end data processing and archival for DES using the DES Data Management System at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NCSA operated the data management and computing infrastructure that processed, quality-controlled and served the full DES imaging and catalog data set, enabling the creation of science-ready sky maps and cosmological measurements.

“Dark energy and the universe’s accelerating expansion sit at the boundary between what we can measure precisely and what we can explain,” said CAPS Director Joaquin Vieira. “Pinning down what is driving that acceleration would reshape our understanding of the universe’s fate and force revisions to the deepest laws that describe space, time and matter.

“The latest results from the Dark Energy Survey were enabled by CAPS leadership and NCSA’s data management and computing backbone.”

This new analysis from DES narrows the controls in modeling the behavior of the universe thanks to combining the data from four different probes: baryon acoustic oscillations, type-Ia supernovae, galaxy clusters and weak gravitational lensing. Scientists hope to use this research to explore various other models for phenomena in the universe, including dark energy and alternative gravity.

“The latest DES release emphasizes that the new constraints are tighter than prior DES analyses while remaining broadly consistent with earlier DES results,” Vieira said. “It frames the methodology as a template for next-generation surveys such as the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time.”

CAPS connects data infrastructure expertise at NCSA to astrophysics teams at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and supports the people and workflows that turn survey-scale data into science results. NCSA is a founding partner of the DES project, along with Fermilab and NOIRLab.

Find out more about the DES news in the announcement from Fermilab.

Source: Andrew Helregel, NCSA

The post NCSA, CAPS Power Dark Energy Survey’s Most Comprehensive Expansion History Analysis appeared first on HPCwire.

Experts identify potentially serious breaches over treatment of people and call for ‘one in, one out’ scheme to end

The UN has called on the UK and France to halt the controversial “one in, one out” asylum system, warning there could be “serious violations of international human rights law”.

Nine experts, including seven special rapporteurs, wrote a 20-page letter to Downing Street and Paris on 8 December 2025 outlining detailed concerns about potential breaches of human rights they had identified in the scheme. They gave the two governments 60 days to respond and on Friday published their letter.

The launch of the next $600 iPhone might not follow last year's playbook.

Rodney Esser, 86, spent most of his life on or near the Wisconsin land where the school sits. He got his job as a part of the land sale in 1964.

Spain and Portugal hit with torrential rain while flash floods in Morocco force more than 100,000 people to evacuate

The Iberian peninsula has been placed under severe weather alerts as Storm Leonardo continues to batter parts of Spain and Portugal with torrential rain and strong winds.

Since Tuesday, the slow-moving system has brought widespread disruption, flooding and evacuations. In Grazalema, in southern Spain, more than 700mm of rain has fallen since Wednesday, roughly equivalent to the country’s average annual rainfall.

Turning Point USA is plotting its own half-time show in defiance of Bad Bunny – but one of TV’s Blackest programs already perfected the alt-cast in 1992

When the NFL announced Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny as this year’s Super Bowl half-time show headliner, it walked right into a culture war. Right-wing critics raged over the musician’s gender-nonconforming style, Spanish-language music and anti-Maga politics. Donald Trump, after saying he had never heard of Bad Bunny, called the headlining choice “absolutely ridiculous”.

In response, Erika Kirk and her Turning Point USA conservative advocacy group turned the controversy into its own counter-programming event: the All-American Halftime Show. After its Nashville-heavy lineup, led by Kid Rock, was announced on Monday, vice-president JD Vance was first among conservatives to enthusiastically spread the word.

The Barbz have built a parasocial relationship with the rapper – in some cases to their own detriment

Nicki Minaj is back doing PR for Donald Trump, and it’s messier than ever. Last week, she appeared at a treasury department summit in Washington DC to show support for Trump accounts, a new kind of investment account designed to “provide eligible American children with tax-advantaged investment accounts courtesy of President Donald J. Trump”, according to a government website.

The most disappointing part of the rapper’s recent turn toward Maga, though, is how her stans – a significant portion of whom are Black and queer – are responding. After the summit, Minaj’s followers defended her online and even helped push Trump’s agenda. “In a society full of hate and division, supporting Nicki Minaj is reminding people to see past political differences and see the human in one another,” one supporter wrote. Oh brother. Minaj is a perfect example of the cult of celebrity, the dangers of modern fan culture and how celebrity worship can intersect with politics in truly dangerous ways.

Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist

Using a VPN on your Android device can help you keep your online activity private, stream geo-restricted content and bypass throttling from anywhere.

Commentary: I know exactly what Samsung needs to do to make its next Ultra phone better than ever.

A simple factory error in China has created a viral sensation, with millions in Asia welcoming the Year of the Horse with a frown.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Ukraine of trying to "disrupt the negotiation process" searching for an end to the war.

Ben Wegg-Prosser resigns from Global Counsel as emails show Epstein’s help was sought in setting up the company

• UK politics live – latest updates

A former No 10 aide has quit as chief executive of the influential lobbying firm he co-founded with Peter Mandelson following revelations from the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Ben Wegg-Prosser stepped down on Friday as the head of Global Counsel after emails revealed the extent to which he and Mandselson had involved the convicted child sex offender when they were setting up the company in 2010.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• Only seven new petrol-powered cars sold in Norway in January

Silver is also looking very volatile.

The spot price of silver tumbled by 19% yesterday, hot on the heels of its 27% plunge on 30 January.

We want to hear how the fall in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and ether are impacting people

Bitcoin sank to its lowest value in more than a year this week, faling to $63,000 on Thursday, about half its all-time peak of $126,000 in October 2025

It’s part of a wider shock to crypto prices. The second-largest cryptocurrency, ether, has faced losses of more than 30% this year alone.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a sweeping plan to shore up the country's auto industry and accelerate its electric vehicle transition, the latest in a series of moves to reduce Canada's deep economic dependence on the United States as American tariffs continue to batter the sector. The plan includes financial incentives for carmakers to invest in Canada, a new tariff credit scheme for manufacturers like General Motors and Toyota, and the reintroduction of EV buyer rebates. Canada will also enact stricter vehicle emissions standards and has set a goal of EVs comprising 90% of car sales by 2040. Carney at the same time scrapped a 2023 EV sales mandate introduced by former PM Justin Trudeau that automakers had called too costly. The announcements follow a deal last month with China to ease tariffs on Chinese EVs and an agreement with South Korea to encourage Korean car manufacturing in Canada. Roughly 90% of Canadian-made vehicles are exported to the US, and thousands of auto workers have lost their jobs since Trump imposed 25% tariffs on Canadian cars and parts last year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Officials say a suicide bomber blew himself up at the gates of a Shiite mosque in Islamabad, killing dozens of people during Friday prayers.

Team USA star skier Lindsey Vonn takes part in her first training session at the Winter Olympics, battling a serious injury two days before her first event.

Charles "Sonny" Burton was convicted as an accomplice in the shooting death of Doug Battle, a customer who was killed during a robbery of an auto parts store.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Last month, Gov. Matt Meyer proposed a nearly $7 billion dollar package for the 2027 fiscal year that included fee increases on businesses that make up the state lucrative corporate franchise. While it remains to be seen just how much of Meyer’s proposal will be kept intact by the legislature, lawmakers on Wednesday appeared supportive of the measures which help to defray taxes for residents.

Delaware’s golden goose will likely become even more lucrative later this year. 

Gov. Matt Meyer’s proposed budget includes increases in the annual fees paid by limited liability companies and other types of Delaware businesses that are not corporations. It also calls for an increase in the fees to other businesses that seek expedited services from the state.

The increases would result in an extra $81 million to the state’s General Fund during the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. The $2 billion corporate franchise system in Delaware, which largely serves out-of-state businesses with legal services, is a major driver for the state’s lower cumulative tax burden on residents.

During a budget hearing with lawmakers Wednesday, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez said the annual fee increases are targeted at “alternative entities,” such as LLCs, general partnerships, and limited partnerships. Those businesses typically account for more than 75% of the more than two million Delaware companies that exist. 

Currently, owners of LLCs pay $300 a year to keep the entity active within Delaware’s system – a fee that hasn’t changed in a decade. The Meyer administration is proposing to increase the fee by about $50.

Fees paid by such businesses contribute to an outsized amount of money that the Delaware Division of Corporation sends each year to the state’s General Fund, which pays for everyday government operations, such as schools.

Last year, that figure was a hefty $2.1 billion, Patibanda-Sanchez told lawmakers on Wedensday. 

“I am really happy to report, after one year, we still are the corporate capital of the world,” she said. 

The secretary of state’s comments come a year after Tesla CEO Elon Musk led a vocal campaign that called on business leaders to reincorporate their companies out of Delaware. While several high-profile companies, such as Coinbase and Dropbox, followed the call, others that threatened to, such as Meta, have remained in the state. 

Most of the millions of companies that are domiciled in Delaware — from Meta to shell LLCs — do not have a physical presence in the state. Instead, they maintain a legal presence, through a third-party registered agent, that subjects them to Delaware ‘s corporate laws.

Asked by State Sen. Eric Buckson (D-Dover South) whether Delaware suffered a loss last year of “big fish” companies, Patibanda-Sanchez said there are now more large corporations that pay a hefty franchise tax of $250,000 to Delaware, than there were last year.

Later in the budget hearing, State Sen. Darius Brown (D-Wilmington) asked Patibanda-Sanchez whether Delaware should increase business fees even more. In response, the secretary of state said she did not want to increase costs on LLCs, noting that it is the entity type that several small business owners chose to operate under.

“The other fees absolutely we can discuss more,” she said during the hearing. “Again, we don’t like to shock our customers. We have 2.2 million of them.”

The fee increases for LLCs and other smaller companies are part of Meyer’s $6.9 billion budget proposal. During a press conference to unveil the proposal last month, Meyer and his staff said the budget includes what he called “targeted” cuts that would dig the state out of a roughly $500 million deficit caused by the inflationary pressures from health care spending and employee salaries.  

Meyer’s budget also includes a handful of revenue increases, such as upward bumps in the state’s cigarette tax and in the business fees.

The post Delaware could increase fees on its $2B corporate franchise appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

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What Nouri al-Maliki’s prime minister bid tells us about Iraq Expert comment thilton.drupal 6 February 2026

The surprise return of the controversial former leader has revealed that Iraq is still a US–Iran battleground.

On 27 January, US President Donald Trump surprised many with a blunt warning on social media: if Iraq reinstated the veteran politician Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister, the US would withdraw its support. 

The public threat exposed a reality of foreign influence in Iraq that the country’s leaders insist they have left behind. Despite their claims of renewed sovereignty, marked by the end of the US troop presence and the UN mission last year, Iraq remains a battleground for US–Iran rivalry. 

When that contest intensifies, Iraq’s fragility is quickly exposed. This time, even as Tehran grappled with mounting domestic and regional pressures, it showed little sign of strategic fatigue, reacting swiftly to promote its preferred candidate in Baghdad.

Meanwhile Washington, which had appeared to be distracted on Iraq under a president prone to spectacle over strategy, has since scrambled to oppose al-Maliki and Iran’s influence. 

The return of al-Maliki? 

Al-Maliki’s re-emergence as a prime-ministerial candidate caught almost all Iraqi political actors off guard. He served as prime minister from 2006 to 2014, but had not since been seen as a viable candidate to return. Yet despite holding no formal office for more than a decade, al-Maliki has remained one of Iraq’s most influential political brokers, in a system where power is often exercised informally rather than through official institutions.

Al-Maliki was in office when Iraq lost nearly a third of its territory to the Islamic State in 2014, a collapse that ultimately forced his resignation. Many Iraqi and international observers trace ISIS’s rise to the sectarian policies his government was accused of pursuing against Sunni Arab communities in north-western Iraq. At the time, opposition to his return was underscored by a letter from Iraq’s Shia highest clerical authority in Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. 

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Since regime change, Iraq’s elites have often favoured prime minister candidates who are weak, consensus figures, acceptable to all sides because they pose little threat to any of them. 

Following the November 2025 Iraqi elections, this was the expected outcome of the country’s long post-election government formation process. But in a sudden and unexpected turn in January 2026, al-Maliki emerged as a frontrunner after being endorsed by parts (but not all) of the ruling Shia Coordination Framework, within which al-Maliki divides opinion. While his candidacy remains unlikely to succeed, it threatens to upend convention and mark the return of a strong partisan prime minister. 

Tehran’s enduring hand 

Al-Maliki’s potential return also reflects Iran’s enduring influence in Iraq, even as Tehran faces mounting pressures at home and across the region. 

Since leaving office, al-Maliki has kept close relations with Iran. Among his final acts as prime minister in 2014 was the formalization of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization of armed groups. Several of these groups, including Kataeb Hezbollah, maintain strong ties to Tehran. 

The proliferation of these armed groups has made someone like al-Maliki particularly valuable to Iran as it seeks to exert influence over a fragmented security landscape in Iraq. This is especially the case since the 2020 US assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and PMF leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Baghdad, which removed two key power brokers who had attempted to maintain cohesion over the growing constellation of armed groups. 

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For Tehran, Iraq is the most strategically valuable of the various conflict arenas where its influence and allied networks have eroded since 7 October 2023.  Iraq, which shares a long border with Iran, serves as a critical security buffer closely entwined with Iran’s own domestic stability. At a time when Tehran is battered by sanctions, Iraq also functions as an economic lifeline, offering access to trade, hard currency and channels through which sanctioned goods can still circulate. 

For these reasons, Iran cannot tolerate prolonged uncertainty or instability in Baghdad. This explains Tehran’s backing of al-Maliki. He is a trusted figure able to impose order on a system that Iran can no longer afford to leave in the hands of a weak, transitional leader who would need to learn the ropes. 

US caught off-guard?

Washington, by contrast, had largely allowed Iraq slip down its list of priorities. Working through the US Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration directed its efforts on other areas including Israel-Palestine, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. 

Amid a reduced focus on Iraq, in October 2025 the Trump administration appointed a close ally of President Trump, Mark Savaya, to serve as the US envoy to Baghdad. Savaya was still being orientated into the role and had not yet visited Baghdad since being appointed, leaving a vacuum of US presence, both during and after the November elections. 

Once it emerged that al-Maliki was a frontrunner to return as prime minister in the post-election government formation talks, Washington moved to re-engage. According to Reuters reports citing unnamed sources, Savaya was sidelined (reports that he initially denied) and Tom Barrack, the US Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy for Syria, added Iraq to his portfolio. Barrack and other US officials made a flurry of calls to senior Iraqi leaders to reiterate their opposition to ‘a government installed by Iran’, in reference to al-Maliki’s candidacy. 

A sobering reality

This episode has underscored a sobering reality for many Iraqis. The country has enjoyed relative calm in comparison to neighbouring states engulfed in conflict since 7 October. But this stability remains precarious. It rests on fragile foundations and a political system that is still fragmented and exposed to external influences.

Iran, for its part, has shown it retains the capacity to react quickly and shape outcomes in Iraq. As one senior Iraqi official told me: ‘Iran is not just one person – the supreme leader. It is a state of institutions. And those institutions are present in Iraq, as if nothing has changed.’

Washington, too, revealed the persistence of its leverage. For many Iraqis, the fact that a single social media post by a US president could recalibrate the political process was a stark reminder that their country lacks full sovereignty, notwithstanding official claims to the contrary.

What next?

Al-Maliki’s candidacy now appears unlikely to survive this convergence of internal and foreign pressures. Yet for Iraq’s fragile stability to endure, the government formation process must move swiftly, avoiding another year-long paralysis that followed previous elections. 

The next government will also have to confront its lack of full sovereignty, while continuing to keep Iraq insulated from the regional wars still raging around it. Failure to do so would expose the country to a series of mounting crises. 

Most prominent is the fallout from a renewed US–Iran confrontation. Any existential threat to the Islamic Republic would inevitably reverberate across Iraq, overwhelming a political system ill-equipped to manage the fallout. 

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Good morning.

Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were deported to the West Bank on a private jet owned by an ally of Donald Trump, a Guardian investigation revealed on Thursday.

Has Dezer’s jet been used for deportations before? Yes. According to Human Rights First, it made four “removal flights”, to Kenya, Liberia, Guinea and Eswatini, starting last October.

How has he responded? In an email, Dezer told the Guardian he was “never privy to the names” of those who travelled on his jet when it was privately chartered by Journey, or the purpose of the flight. “The only thing I’m notified about is the dates of use,” he said.

What does each side want? Washington wants to expand the negotiations to cover Iran’s ballistic missiles, support for the region’s armed groups and “treatment of their own people”, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said. Tehran is seeking assurances that the US is not using the talks as a smokescreen to impose regime change.

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The word “terrorist” wasn’t coined on September 11, 2001, but the defining event of the early 21st century ushered it in as the United States’ go-to term for demonizing outsiders and dissenters alike. The so-called “war on terror” transformed the way the U.S. wields power at home and abroad, enabling mass surveillance and a crackdown on the right to free speech. It became reflexive for the U.S. to disparage immigrants and protesters as supporters of terrorism.

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President Donald Trump has embraced this model and manipulated it for his own ends, as author Spencer Ackerman points out. The Trump administration often peddles spurious accusations of terrorism against the targets of its immigration raids.

“There’s nothing about any of their action that’s remotely anything at all like terrorism,” Ackerman says. “But that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA.”

This week on the Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Ackerman, a leading expert on the concept of terrorism and its weaponization by the state. Ackerman’s 2021 book, “Reign of Terror, How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years, and how the boomerang has come back home.

“Before 9/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn’t really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were serious criminals, traffickers, and so on,” says Ackerman. Now, he says, the contemporary terrorism paradigm has transformed immigration enforcement into something “operating like a death squad.”

“What we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time,” he says. “And now we’re seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE.” With the recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, “I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.”

As Democrats in Congress struggle to leverage DHS funding for changes to ICE policy — like a ban on face masks for ICE agents, an idea on which they’ve already softened — Ackerman says the parallels with the early 2000s are clear.

“We can’t move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans,” advises Ackerman. “Reformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript 

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl. 

If you didn’t recognize the voices, 2026 might not sound so different from the years following 2001. 

George W. Bush: We are on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.

Donald Trump: These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators. 

Dick Cheney: Terrorists remain determined and dangerous.

Kristi Noem: It was an act of domestic terrorism.

JD Vance: We’re not going to give in to terrorism on this. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

John Ashcroft: America has grown stronger and safer in the face of terrorism.

JU: In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the so-called war on terror transformed the way the United States enforced its laws and its priorities, both at home and abroad. The label “terrorist” became a catchall for a wide range of actors, and dissent against the Bush administration was often disparaged as support for terrorism. The USA PATRIOT Act codified a reduction in civil liberties in the name of protecting freedom.

Bush: As of today, we’re changing the laws governing information sharing. And as importantly, we’re changing the culture of our various agencies that fight terrorism. Countering and investigating terrorist activity is the number one priority for both law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

JU: The day he put his signature on the Patriot Act, President George W. Bush laid out how those new priorities would include a focus on immigrants. 

Bush: The government will have wider latitude in deporting known terrorists and their supporters.

JU: It was largely an era of political consensus. Both major parties lined up to support the Patriot Act and other legislation giving greater legal latitude to the government, from local police all the way up to the president. But even then, there were plenty of warnings that these powers would be abused and stretched far beyond their intended goals.

Supporters argued that there were backstops, like congressional oversight and international law, basic human decency and strategic restraint. But President Trump ignored and shattered so many of those long-standing norms. A glaring example is on display in the streets of U.S. cities right now.

ICE was a post-9/11 creation as part of the new Department of Homeland Security. In his book “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” author Spencer Ackerman traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years and how the boomerang has come back home.

Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, and many U.S. bases. He’s won a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award, and currently writes for Zeteo and his own website, Forever Wars. Spencer, welcome to the Intercept Briefing. 

Spencer Ackerman: Thanks for having me back, Jordan. 

JU: So we’re talking 25 years now since 9/11. Many of our listeners — as well as working journalists, and even many people working on Capitol Hill right now — don’t have any living memory of that time. So can you start off by bringing us back to the days and weeks after September 11? President George W. Bush essentially had carte blanche to pass laws and change policy based on the notion that he was making Americans safer; that we had to clamp down and, in some cases, give up some of our freedoms to ensure security. With hindsight, what were the most significant aspects of the newly born war on terror that have a clear through line to today?

SA: Well, one that we saw just this week really take prominence is the Patriot Act, which among other things, enabled law enforcement to more seamlessly get “third-party records,” as they’re called — basically, customer accounts of records kept by some kind of service provider, financial records, internet records, and so on — without a judge’s signature or a finding of probable cause. It occurs instead through something called an administrative subpoena that the Patriot Act supercharged.

And we’re seeing just this week, there was a very good piece in the Washington Post laying out the exponential growth in administrative subpoenas being used by DHS in order to get records that would otherwise require a court order to collect.

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Now, when the Patriot Act passed, the idea was that this would be the FBI surreptitiously collecting information that would prevent terrorism and uncover active links to terror networks and so forth. There’s not really much of a record of it having done that — certainly not a public one. But it definitely didn’t envision what DHS is doing, which is harassing critics of ICE. 

Now, a ton of critics at the time, when the war on terror was coalescing, recognized and stated that this was going to be where the war on terror led. That it was going to become a war on dissent, that it was going to criminalize a tremendous amount of both politics in general but also resistance to itself — that we’re really seeing coalesce. 

For the purposes of what we’re tracking, what we also saw after 9/11, is a complete sea change in how America conducted its immigration affairs. Something that I think people probably don’t remember is that before 9/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn’t really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were like serious criminals, traffickers, and so on.

The Department of Homeland Security gets created after Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, pretty much takes over immigration enforcement because ICE’s predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services, https://theintercept.com/2026/01/16/trump-abolish-ice-renee-good-jonathan-ross/is under his purview. And what he starts doing is using it to round up immigrants — not just Muslim immigrants, although there was an immediate outcry for a clamp-down on Muslim immigration, certainly. But it was a way of shoe-horning a gestating border hysteria on the far right that 9/11 gave a kind of new security context and accordingly opportunity to pursue.

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Even then, the Bush administration did not wish to create a kind of agglutination agency that would kind of stick together all sorts of domestic security functions. That took the active intervention of moderate Democrats and some moderate Republicans, who were able to basically checkmate Bush over his concerns about such an agency being kind of too large for, you know, extent conservative perceptions of government using his own logic of counterterrorism. And there is really no way for Bush to argue himself out of that. So instead he accommodated himself to it.

But even then, ICE, when it starts, has only 2,700 agents. By 2008, that becomes 5,000. ICE’s budget until in something like 2016 was $6 billion. For a while in the intervening decade, it’s hovered around $10 billion. Trump has now made it $85 billion. 

This is an enterprise that operated fundamentally — well, I shouldn’t say fundamentally different. I don’t want to suggest that the INS was a benign agency, or that immigrant Americans didn’t fear INS, much as they would come to fear ICE. Just that there were constraints, both legal, budgetary, and from a political perspective, cultural, that constrained interior immigration enforcement. That doesn’t exist anymore. We have seen instead — to finish answering your question in a very long-winded way — a counterterrorism context transforms, in ways both direct and structural, the apparatus of American immigration to something that today is coalescing into something that I think we can see fairly clearly is on its way, if it’s not there already, into operating like a death squad.

JU: One thing we saw right away post-9/11 was the demonization of Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, or anyone remotely resembling any of those categories. What kind of connection can we make between the rhetoric and actions of that era with how otherization and fear is being wielded these days against immigrants and other populations?

SA: I see it as a rather straight line. The early years of the war on terror proved something that politicians, particularly in the Republican Party, but also in the Democratic Party, have been sort of chasing ever since to recover its potency — like chasing a high. And that’s that the politics of counterterrorism in the early 2000s — really persistent throughout, but especially in the early 2000s — completely deterred opposition, silenced dissent, and intimidated resistance. And it worked. It worked for a really long time. Eventually, it ceased working as well. But the fact that it worked can’t be overstated. Because politicians afterward, particularly when there has been no criminal liability or even significant political liability for the atrocities that result, accordingly seek to do what works. And this works extremely well.

In a broad sense, one of the things that the war on terror did in particular to Muslims in this country was redefine terrorism away from being something that people throughout history have done across cultures, into “terrorism” is something that a certain kind of people are, and usually only them. That when people who do not look or worship like Muslims utilize violence for political purposes — that becomes defined as “counterterrorism.”

So there is a really, really firm connection in how we have seen not only the targets of ICE’s raids, since the Trump administration returned to power, be described as terrorists. But now people like Marimar Martinez in Chicago, Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, when they’re shot — and in the case of Good and Pretti, killed — by ICE, ICE and the broader political structure calls them terrorists.

They have the first-mover communication choice of basically daring journalists, politicians, whomever to prove that they weren’t in fact terrorists. There’s nothing about any of their action that’s remotely anything at all like terrorism. But that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA.

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JU: As you wrote in your book, “Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: The terrorists were whomever you say they were.” And I’m curious about this seemingly expansive scope of this label. You’ve written about how the “terrorist” label has predominantly been used against people of color, while white people like Timothy McVeigh get different treatment, both linguistically and legally.

Do you think what we’re seeing in the Twin Cities is a significant development — the government calling white activists “terrorists” —and these are white people who present as average middle class, not so-called anarchists or “antifa.” Is this, in your mind, a significant shift in how the term “terrorist” is wielded and will be wielded? 

SA: Yes, absolutely. Minnesota is kind of the next stanza in the [Martin] Niemöller poem. The poem about, “First they came for…”

ICE and CBP have a very long history of acting lawlessly. The conditions of ICE prisons, many of which are operated as for-profit enterprises with detainees being paid a dollar a day, have often been shown to be both violent and deeply neglectful. I have a friend who contracted Covid at the ICE detention center in Batavia, New York, for instance.

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So what we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time. What we saw in places like Portland in 2020, where, certainly in Portland, CBP tactical units, known as BORTAC, opened fire with less-lethal rounds on protesters outside the Hatfield building. That was what they were willing to do — similarly, lawlessly stuffing people into unmarked vans for detention and so forth — to people deemed enemies of the Trump administration.

And now we’re seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE. In Renee Good’s case, for possibly, slightly inconveniencing ICE vehicularly. And then, trying to comply with a contradictory order to get out of the way and then stay put, get outta the car, you know? And then with Alex Pretti — helping a woman up.

What we’re seeing is something we can’t turn away from, and I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.

[Break]

JU: In some cities, we see different relationships between local law enforcement and federal agencies, and that’s been a contentious issue going back to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces enlisted during the height of the so-called war on terror. Now we hear more about the 287(g) agreements that are focused on giving immigration enforcement powers to local officers. Collaboration by city and county law enforcement agencies often depends on who’s in charge and sometimes local community influence. How has this idea transformed local law enforcement over the past 25 years — situating local police and sheriffs as partners in fighting a war, essentially? 

SA: First, in the literal sense, it deputizes local police into an immigration function. And the implications of that are both profound and subtle. Being undocumented in this country is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. And it’s a misdemeanor, it’s not a felony. So being undocumented in this country now all of a sudden becomes “law enforcement-related.” It becomes a matter that is quickly understood in a kind of everyday person’s sense of association as something that is being done by cops.

And so cops are going after criminals. They’re not going after someone who overstayed a work visa. The person who overstayed a work visa is presumed to have done so because they’re criminal. That is a profound shift that nativists 30 years ago could only have as the apple of their eye. That’s now normal in this country. 

Beyond that, beyond the kind of mimetic and cultural functions there, what the Department of Homeland Security’s relationship with local police over the vast majority of DHS’s existence was a patron-client relationship. There’s always been a lot of focus, and not inappropriately, on the [1033] Pentagon program that takes decommissioned military equipment and gives them to law enforcement. Appropriately so. 

DHS’s grant programs to local law enforcement have always dwarfed them, in terms of budgetary capability. There is not very much terrorism in the United States of America of the sort that DHS was created to redress. However, DHS had a budget to give out to local law enforcement, you know, cop shops, that applied for grant money that it would have to disperse.

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The overall point is not only was DHS for such a long time a supplier of equipment that cops did not need for terrorism, but could find a whole lot of value out of when using against their existing tasks — which means, in a lot of cases, against the people it polices. But also, it accustomed police shops to look at DHS as a source of support that didn’t have to go through existing and potentially contentious budgetary processes locally that municipal, small-d democratic functions have power to effect. It’s not the most potent power. I’m telling you this from New York City where the NYPD has for a very long time been considered pretty much untouchable. But nevertheless, this is a more friction-free funding path than troublesome city councils. 

JU: And to continue this line of thought on weaponry, it’s one thing to have a heavily armed Border Patrol if they legitimately believe they may encounter a “violent drug cartel.” But the images we’re seeing of immigration agents in residential U.S. neighborhoods with body armor and advanced weaponry brings to mind the militarization of local police and federal agencies that’s taken place since 9/11.

You talked about the equipment, you’ve talked about the vehicles. There are local police departments with MRAPs. Across the board, top-down from federal agencies down to local, it feels like a war that’s literally everywhere. What’s been the arc of that evolution? 

SA: Markets for advanced military technology get spurred on by overseas war. Eventually, those wars draw down beyond the funding capabilities of those different technological production lines. Those different technological production lines will seek out derivative markets that they can use to keep making money. That has been local law enforcement, but before that, it’s been DHS.

Starting around the first Obama administration, DHS, particularly for the border, starts buying up a drone fleet. Then it starts buying up really powerful military-grade camera suites that had previously been developed for protecting U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. DHS buys this stuff. It provides funding for — as we were just talking about — local police agencies to eventually start buying other stuff that DHS has.

There’s no Gray Eagle-sized drone in police custody in the country yet. But we’ll talk in 10 more years, and we’ll see about that. DHS provides funding to get similar technologies, related technologies, and then it pushes what it currently has beyond the border into the interior of the country.

We should also mention that the border after 9/11 changes in important ways, where DHS — this is for the last 15 years at least been policy at CBP — the border is anywhere within 100 miles of a port of entry or exit. So if you’ve wondered, why is the Border Patrol in, you know, Charlotte, North Carolina, or Chicago or Minneapolis — that’s why. Because your sense of the border intuitively is not the U.S. government’s definition of the border.

Eventually we see this stuff move into the interior of the United States. The roundups, which had been there since at least 2005, become more ambitious, and they become, with the 287(g) program, involving local law enforcement as well as the Department of Homeland Security — and now increasingly toward critics of DHS itself.

I want to say one more thing about this. When we look at what ICE and CBP deploy with, in all of the cities that we’ve seen them invest since the second Trump administration — a common denominator has been they’re all wearing plate carriers. The stuff that says like police, ICE, and so forth, you know, the ballistic chest protection that they wear around them.

Marimar Martinez legally had a gun. She didn’t draw it; she kept it holstered in her car. They called her a domestic terrorist. Her hands were on the steering wheel when ICE shot her.

Alex Pretti famously had a gun, not that he drew it on CBP. When they shot him, six of them shot this man who is completely not in any position to be threatening them. ICE and CBP are posturing as if they are the ones under the threat, not that they are the threat themselves.

All of this social media footage-ready imagery that they’ve been collecting and disseminating is what we should understand as a psy-op on the American people to make it think that these are a valorous Praetorian Guard that puts itself in danger constantly. Instead, they are the ones inflicting the danger on Americans, undocumented or citizens.

JU: Now we talked about this evolution — part of that is an expansive or unchecked legal infrastructure and framework that allows this. Over the past two decades-plus, were there moments when that infrastructure could have been dialed back or unraveled? Times when Trump wasn’t president? Did that happen to any extent? And if not, why not?

SA: There are many reasons to be deeply upset at the way the Obama and Biden administrations treated the institutions of the war on terror that they inherited. But really chief among them is the way that they embraced the existing structures of homeland security for use against immigrants.

Obama — famously the deporter in chief, always under pressure from his right to deport more. Obama famously makes the massive miscalculation that if he can just, you know, bolster resources for border protection, then he can buy goodwill on the right. This was just an epic political miscalculation that really everyone could have seen coming, and many did.

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Biden — 4.4 million deportations on his watch; Trump left office the first time at 1.5 million. After everything that we saw the Trump administration do the first time around, in particular with child separation, with raising the number of people in ICE custody to something like 50,000 a day — I don’t know if they’ve gotten back to that, if they’ve exceeded that by now or not. But I remember reporting on it at the time that it was in 2020, it had gotten up to, maybe a little before the pandemic, something like 50,000 a day. It was really astonishing.

But Biden famously tells his donors ahead of the election that they’re not gonna seek fundamental change. And I think that by the time the Biden administration takes office, the Democratic Party had successfully marginalized the voices that were calling, not just for pursuing once again, comprehensive immigration reform — which of course is stifled by the Republicans again and again and again — but to abolish ICE.

I think right now we are at, you know, years before a Democrat could theoretically take power. But we’re starting to see Democratic politicians go down the same very dangerous road along the politics of security that they’ve played not just during the Biden administration or the first Trump administration, but throughout the war on terror.

And they’re doing it with ICE now, which is we’re starting to hear people say things like, “This is not immigration enforcement.” It’s true. This is not what I think many people think of as immigration enforcement. But immigration enforcement is how we got to this point. And unless the nativist concept of the need for an interior deportation force is confronted root and branch, we are going to continue to see exactly what we are seeing. Not as a form of stasis, but as a form of ICE and CBP completing their transformation into a death squad.

And I use a very scary term because this is a very scary moment. But we also need to be really clear about what we are seeing ICE do and behave as. You mentioned it’s unwillingness to follow the law. In Minnesota, a judge found just before January of 2026 expired, around 100 violations of court orders about immigration and how ICE needed to behave, in just that month. How many gleeful videos do we have to see on our phone of ICE people telling Minnesotans to “fuck around and find out”? Beyond even just the actual murders and shootings — but the way that the CBP officers applauded after shooting Alex Pretti? The way Jonathan Ross, who murdered Renee Good, called her a “fucking bitch” after doing so? This is not something that can be reformed. The best time to abolish ICE was 2003. The second best time is today.

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Every single moment that we refrain from doing this, that Democratic politicians as well as Republican ones try and push it back to the margins of political discourse, is another day closer to the time that they’re going to shoot you, that they’re going to deport someone you love, and on and on and on.

JU: There’s a sinister delight that we see time and time again from federal agents beyond the comments or behavior after both of those Minnesotans were killed. But we’ve seen many other videos of them wielding those incidents to other observers as threats. And to your point, that’s not something that you can fix with a sensitivity training. That is something ingrained in the culture. And I’m curious what could be done? It doesn’t seem like there’s a critical mass of Democrats willing to do that. Maybe there is and or maybe we might get to one, but that’s down the road. And you of course have the challenge of the current Supreme Court composition not wanting to challenge anything that Trump is doing meaningfully. So realistically, what can people hope for or work towards in terms of turning this imperial boomerang around? 

SA: First, the answer to how you stop the war on terror is not easy, but it is simple. And that’s organize. Force your politicians in an abolitionist direction; oust them when they won’t go in that direction. Organize so you can build power amongst like-minded people in your area, in order to produce that function. It’s awful that that’s where we kind of have to start from, but our leaders will not do this on their own.

Outside of that I would look to efforts that the Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is building toward, in which he’s been talking about, however long it takes, prosecuting ICE and CBP agents for violating relevant local laws. And one of the main lessons of the war on terror is that without legal consequence for one era’s atrocity, the next is foreordained.

So until ICE killers and CBP kidnappers alike go to prison, we can expect them to continue their behavior. This is why JD Vance and Stephen Miller have started deceitfully talking about absolute immunity for ICE after they killed Renee Good.

Krasner has been hinting that there is a kind of impromptu coalition of like-minded district attorneys and perhaps state attorneys general that are seeking to go in this direction. That will either act as a deterrent, or it won’t. Here in New York, the attorney general, Letitia James, announced that she’s going to start sending observers from her office out on ICE-related operations in and around the state. That carries with it a suggestion of prosecutorial intervention. I think that’s going to be a crucial step. But it’s a step that is going to have to come in supplement, with people finding political outlets for an explosion in popularity — justifiably so, in my opinion — for abolishing ICE. 

We can’t move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans. This is something that has to be uprooted and replaced, or just simply not replaced at all, if we don’t think certain functions that they perform are legitimate functions, which I think is a very, you know, reasonable conclusion. Reformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you.

JU: My final question for you, Spencer, is where does this go over the next three years if nothing happens? If there is no restraint, if there is no change, if there is no reform. That is certainly an uphill fight. Nothing could potentially happen until at least after midterms, but we’ve seen Trump’s priorities laid out in places like Project 2025, and I can’t imagine this is their end game. So if left untouched, where does this go over the next three years? 

SA: We’ve been seeing reporting from Ken Klippenstein and others about how ICE is accessing existing, widely revealing, databases of Americans’ information, building others. We saw in the beginning of the Trump administration, the massive data-snatching grabs involving DOGE that have also accumulated a tremendous amount of revealing information on Americans. This is also, I would suggest, the predictable course of the surveillance state after 9/11. These massive and revealing data sets will go into ICE custody, probably through tools purchased from Palantir, to get an ever more refined picture of terrorism in the United States. Except by terrorism, they mean you and me. They will mean people that they can consider internal dissenters, critics, obstacles to the continued operations of ICE, and like-minded allied federal agencies.

This, I think, is probably coming sooner than three years. Not to sound alarmist, but the current trajectory of this is really, really ominous. And that is an extremely realistic possibility. Your friend and mine, Derek Davison of the American Prestige podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-prestige/id1574741668a couple months ago, was predicting that it might not be long before we see a drone strike in an American city. And I can’t stop thinking about that. And I wish I could say I found that an outlandish possibility. But the crucial framework for that was laid when the Obama administration decided that they could execute an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without any kind of criminal process, let alone a conviction, because it would be too inconvenient to send a team of CIA operatives to kidnap him.

It won’t be long, I think — as long as that Chekov’s president remains blessed by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice — before we start seeing that applied on American soil. And those are some places that I think are realistic possibilities for what we might see unless this apparatus is aggressively dismantled.

JU: That is absolutely chilling. And in some way, I’m at a loss for words, just something that I never thought we might encounter. But that is a situation we seem to be finding ourselves in. Spencer, as always, I appreciate your insight, your analysis, and thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

SA: Thank you, Jordan.

JU: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Andrew Stelzer. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jordan Uhl. 

The post “Terrorist”: How ICE Weaponized 9/11’s Scarlet Letter appeared first on The Intercept.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has criticized landlords and vowed to freeze what tenants in rent-stabilized apartments pay monthly.

Pressure is mounting on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over his decision to appoint Epstein associate Peter Mandelson as U.K. ambassador in Washington.

Bitcoin has fallen roughly 44% from its October peak, and while the drawdown isn't crypto's deepest ever on a percentage basis, Bloomberg's Odd Lots newsletter lays out a case that this is the industry's worst winter yet. The macro backdrop was supposed to favor Bitcoin: public confidence in the dollar is shaky, the Trump administration has been crypto-friendly, and fiat currencies are under perceived stress globally. Yet gold, not Bitcoin, has been the safe haven of choice. The "we're so early" narrative is dead -- crypto ETFs exist, barriers to entry are zero, and the online community that once rallied holders through downturns has largely hollowed out. Institutional adoption arrived but hasn't lifted existing tokens like ETH or SOL; Wall Street cares about stablecoins and tokenization, not the coins themselves. AI is pulling both talent and miners toward data centers. Quantum computing advances threaten Bitcoin's encryption. And MicroStrategy and other Bitcoin treasury companies, once steady buyers during the bull run, are now large holders who may eventually become forced sellers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Data shows 29 hybrid and 98 diesel cars also sold, while the figure for battery electric vehicles was more than 2,000

Just seven new petrol cars were sold in Norway last month, data shows.

The country, which is the frontrunner in the uptake of electric vehicles, shifted a record low number of new fossil-fuel cars in January, information from the Norwegian Road Traffic Information Council (OFV) reveals.

The Department of Defense has quietly signed a $210 million deal to buy advanced cluster shells from one of Israel’s state-owned arms companies, marking unusually large new commitments to a class of weapons and an Israeli defense establishment both widely condemned for their indiscriminate killing of civilians.

The deal, signed in September and not previously reported, is the department’s largest contract to purchase weapons from an Israeli company in available records, according to an online federal database that covers the last 18 years. In a reversal of the more commonly seen direction for weapons transfers between the countries — in which the U.S. sends its weapons to Israel — the U.S. will pay the Israeli weapons firm Tomer over a period of three years to produce a new 155mm munition. The shells are designed to replace decades-old and often defective cluster shells that left live explosives scattered across Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and other nations.

The terror of cluster weapons persists long after the guns that fired them have quieted, as civilians return to fields, forests, and settlements laced with bomblets that can explode years later without warning.

“The footprint of the injuries of these weapons is so horrifying,” said Alma Taslidžan, advocacy manager for the aid organization Humanity & Inclusion, which pushes to ban cluster munitions. She recalled speaking with a 17-year-old boy who found an unexploded cluster bomblet in his neighbor’s garden in the aftermath of the Bosnian War.

“He said he played with it for quite a while. Suddenly it exploded. It blew up both of his hands; it blew away part of his face as well,” she said.

Known as the XM1208 munition, America’s new cluster shells are designed to have a dud rate — or risk of failure to explode — of less than 1 percent. They rely on more complex fuses and self-destruct features to reduce long-term danger to civilians, according to army procurement documents and weapons experts. But researchers say those low failure rates in testing do not reflect real-world performance, and advocates argue that cluster weapons’ battlefield effectiveness cannot justify their humanitarian costs.

“They are inherently indiscriminate,” said Brian Castner, an Amnesty International weapons investigator and former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer. “There’s not a way to use them responsibly, in that you can’t control where they land, and with this high dud rate you can’t control the effect on the civilian population afterwards.”

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The Cluster Munition Monitor has documented more than 24,800 cluster munition injuries and deaths since the 1960s, three-quarters from unexploded remnants. In 2024, cluster munitions killed at least 314 civilians, the majority of them in Ukraine.

Both the XM1208 and the deal to buy them are atypical. The DOD awarded the contract without public competition under a “public interest” exception to federal contracting law, using recent amendments that loosened rules for awarding no-bid defense contracts involving Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.

“I found this to be rather unusual,” said Julia Gledhill, a military contracting researcher for the Stimson Center, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank. “I have not seen something like this before — a sole source contract to a foreign military contractor for $200 million.”

Federal agencies are legally required to create a “determination and findings” document justifying the award of a no-bid contract, which can be requested from the agencies under public records law. The Army has not yet responded to a Freedom of Information Act request for that documentation.

Tomer did not respond to a request for comment. Asked about the new munition’s failure rate, U.S. Army public affairs officer Shahin Uddin wrote it has “has undergone all required testing to ensure it meets all performance requirements, including compliance with the DoD Cluster Munition Policy.”

A Weapon for the Next War

The Pentagon’s efforts to field the XM1208 comes against the backdrop of the Russia–Ukraine war, where both sides have blanketed battlefields with older cluster munitions — including some given to Ukraine by the Biden administration. Some Eastern European countries have considered withdrawing from the Convention on Cluster Munitions amid fears of conflict with Russia, and in 2024, Lithuania became the first country to abandon the treaty.

As a result, Castner said, “Both the cluster munitions convention and the anti-personnel land mine convention are under threat.” 

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But major military powers — like Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the United States — have never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans its 112 member states from using or producing those weapons. Rather than sign the 2008 pact, the U.S. enacted a policy that year to stop using its old, failure-prone cluster munitions by 2019 and develop new weapons with a dud rate of less than 1 percent. 

Progress was slow, and in 2017, the U.S. weakened its policy to allow continued use of older cluster bombs until it had sufficient stockpiles of safer models. That year, the U.S. military began testing the M999 cluster munition: a new shell developed by another state-owned Israeli arms company, IMI Systems.

“The U.S. wants all options,” said William Hartung, an arms industry researcher with the Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft. “One of their arguments was it’s good if you’re in a close-packed artillery situation — a ground war. It clears more of an area.”

During its 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel drew international criticism for using cluster bombs, and IMI promised a new weapon that would lower collateral damage — both to civilians and Israel’s flagging global reputation. In 2018, IMI Systems was acquired by Elbit Systems, a privately owned Israeli defense contractor which has faced recent boycotts for arming Israel’s forces in Gaza and the West Bank.

After backlash from investors in countries that had signed the convention, Elbit canceled production of the M999 and pledged not to build any cluster weapons.

But the M999 program did not stay dead. The Israeli government established a new state-owned arms company, Tomer, in 2018, with no limitations on cluster weapon production. The U.S. Army then adopted the M999 as its new cluster shell for artillery, renaming it the XM1208. According to a 2024 army munitions publication, the XM1208 is designed to release nine bomblets which then detonate in the air, each containing 1,200 pieces of tungsten shrapnel.

That same document lists Elbit as a production partner for the XM1208, despite the company’s pledge to abide by the cluster convention. Elbit did not immediately return a request for comment, and the Army did not respond to an inquiry about whether Elbit was working on the munition.

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Business at Tomer has been booming, due to both the genocide in Gaza and foreign arms sales, according to the Israeli tech news site Calcalist. It recorded $173 million in sales last year, making the DOD’s $210 million contract a massive windfall compared to its historical revenue. Tomer pays the Israeli government a 50 percent dividend on its profit, Calcalist reported.

The XM1208 is designed with multiple fail-safe fuses to reduce dud rates, according to U.S. Army documents published online. But little is known about how it actually performs in the field. Last year, The Guardian published photos showing an expended M999 shell in Lebanon, suggesting Israel had used the weapon in its recent attacks on Hezbollah. But there is currently no public data on its real-world failure rate, said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of the munitions analysis firm Armament Research Services.

Real-world dud rates are generally much higher than those found in controlled testing, which does not account for battlefield conditions like soft soil or older, degraded fuses, said Taslidžan, of Humanity & Inclusion. The manufacturer of Israel’s M85 cluster munition, which includes a self-destruct feature to reduce long-term risk to civilians, touted a “hazardous dud” rate of less than 0.1 percent. But researchers with Norwegian People’s Aid who analyzed the aftermath of M85 strikes from the 2006 war in Lebanon found that about 10 percent failed to explode.

And even if the XM1208 meets its 1 percent failure rate target, it would still be inhumane, said Taslidžan, leaving large numbers of lethal duds behind.

“That’s why the Convention on Cluster Munitions bans these weapons as a class,” she said. “The area effects and residual contamination are fundamentally incompatible with protecting civilians.”

The post Pentagon Makes Largest Known Arms Purchase from Israel — For Banned Cluster Weapons appeared first on The Intercept.

Labour Together allegedly hired company to look at Sunday Times and Guardian reporters after article about donations

• UK politics live – latest updates

A thinktank previously run by a Labour minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff is alleged to have paid a PR firm to investigate journalists who were looking into its funding.

Labour Together, once run by Morgan McSweeney and then by Josh Simons, now a Cabinet Office minister, hired APCO Worldwide to investigate journalists from the Guardian, the Sunday Times and other outlets and to identify their sources, according to claims in the Substack publication Democracy for Sale.

Puerto Rican rapper to follow Grammy victory and anti-ICE speech with show on most-watched US TV event of the year

Just a week after receiving the Grammy award for Album of the Year, the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny will take on the US’s most watched concert of the year when he performs at the Super Bowl this Sunday.

The artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio took home the music academy’s top honor for 2025’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a politically minded record infused with Puerto Rican music and culture. The album became the first Spanish-language work to take home the prize, beating out competition from Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.

No more eyeballing your espresso shots. Here's what an expert suggests for making the perfect puck.

A Houston doctor has been indicted on charges of falsifying medical records for five patients, making them ineligible to receive a liver transplant, federal prosecutors say.

Macmillan announces new instalment of popular Julia Donaldson tale featuring illustrations by Axel Scheffler

The Gruffalo family is to expand after the publisher of the popular children’s stories announced a long-awaited third book about the beloved monster.

The new tale, Gruffalo Granny, will be published on 10 September, Macmillan announced.

Cubans, once fast-tracked to US residency, now find themselves targets of Trump’s immigration crackdown

When Rosaly Estévez “self-deported” from Miami to Havana last November, US immigration officers bid farewell by removing her ankle monitor. The 32-year-old had been told she was about to be detained, so she left with her three-year-old son, Dylan, a US citizen.

Heidy Sánchez, 43, wasn’t given a choice. She was forcibly removed from Florida last April but, worrying about Cuba’s failing healthcare system, she left her two-year-old daughter, Kaylin, behind with her American husband, Carlos.

Senators introduced legislation on Thursday that would require prescription drug labels to identify where the medication was made, adding momentum to a yearslong campaign to bring more transparency to the often elusive generic drug industry.

At a hearing last week, members of the Senate Special Committee on Aging criticized manufacturers for routinely concealing the locations of their drugmaking plants as well as the suppliers that provide key ingredients. ProPublica described this lack of transparency — and how it was enabled by the Food and Drug Administration — in a series of stories that found the agency had quietly allowed troubled foreign drugmakers to continue selling generic medication to unsuspecting Americans.

The Clear Labels Act, introduced by committee chair Rick Scott, R-Fla., and ranking member Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is meant to help patients, doctors and pharmacists know more about the drugs they use and prescribe. Current labels often list only a distributor or repackager of a medication and sometimes provide no information at all. The proposal calls for labels to disclose the original manufacturer as well as the suppliers that produced their key ingredients. Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and Katie Britt, R-Ala., also signed on to the proposed legislation.

“Every American deserves honesty and transparency about what they are putting into their bodies,” Scott said. “It is wholly irresponsible that we’re living in the dark when it comes to where our medicines are made.”

ProPublica had to file public records requests and sue the FDA in federal court to obtain information about where generic drugs are made and whether government inspectors had flagged those factories for safety or quality concerns. ProPublica ultimately created a first-of-its-kind tool that empowers consumers to find the information themselves.

Ninety percent of the prescriptions in the United States are for generics, many of them manufactured overseas. For patients and their doctors, identifying where medication was made and the safety records of those factories had been nearly impossible until now.

Rx Inspector, the tool ProPublica introduced late last year, includes factory location information and inspection histories when available for nearly 40,000 generic drug products. Doctors, patients and researchers say they are already using it to better understand where medication comes from and to find more information when a generic causes unexplained health problems.

The Clear Labels Act would require manufacturing location information on packaging for brand-name drugs as well as generics.

Ohio State University professor John Gray, who testified at the hearing, suggested that packaging could include a QR code linking to the data on a website. Gray is working to assign quality scores to specific versions of generic drugs and said the code would allow patients and doctors to easily find those scores while researching medication and their manufacturers.

“Low-quality drugs have human consequences,” Gray said.

Gray said he is using Rx Inspector to fuel his work, which is funded by the Department of Defense. The tool, he said, “allows you to find out where … your drug is made easily.”

The push for more transparency comes on the heels of a bipartisan investigative report that Scott and Gillibrand released last year, calling for sweeping changes in the FDA’s oversight of the generic drug industry. Among other things, the senators asked the FDA to alert hospitals and other group purchasers when foreign drugmakers with serious safety and quality failures are given a special pass to send their products to the United States.

Since 2013, ProPublica found, the FDA allowed more than 20 troubled overseas factories, mostly in India, to continue to send certain medications to the U.S. even after those facilities were banned because of concerns about contamination and other breaches. The agency didn’t actively track whether the imported drugs were harming users and kept the practice largely hidden from the public and Congress.

The lawmakers also called on the FDA to conduct more drug testing. The agency doesn’t routinely assess generic drugs once they are on the market, even if they come from factories with quality and safety violations. ProPublica recently tested several versions of three of the most widely prescribed generics in the United States and found that two had irregularities that could risk the health of consumers.

At the hearing last week, the committee’s fourth on generic drugs in recent months, lawmakers and witnesses said knowing more about where drugs are made is an essential first step to improving drug quality. For years, pharmacists and members of Congress have pushed for more transparency to help patients and doctors make informed decisions about health care.

“Everyone deserves to know where their medications are coming from,” said University of Utah Hospital pharmacist Erin Fox, who has advocated for more information.

Fox and others also said they support a drug-quality rating system, which would allow hospitals and government agencies to assess generic drugs based on quality and not just price.

“You never go to the supermarket and buy the lowest price, most bruised fruit or go on Amazon and buy the one-star product because it’s cheaper,” said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University. “And yet that’s the generic drug market, and that’s 90% of the prescriptions that we write as physicians. And that’s just not tolerable.”

A spokesperson for the trade group for brand-name drugmakers said in a statement to ProPublica that the industry would “welcome conversations about how to strengthen the biopharmaceutical supply chain.” The generic drug lobbying group said that additional labeling requirements would impose “significant costs in exchange for limited returns,” and that drug manufacturers already disclose country of origin information under U.S. Customs and Border Protection rules.

The post The Clear Labels Act Would Change What You Know About Your Prescription Medication appeared first on ProPublica.

Cute fluffy AI-powered “pets” are providing emotional companionship to an increasing number of lonely, tired Chinese — and a digital ear for tech giants.

Justice Department files show that Jeffrey Epstein sought help from a Russian official after claiming a woman from Moscow was blackmailing “powerful businessmen” in New York.

Scores of claims are expected to arise out of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Experts say suing the government will be tough.

Their ‘pro-family’ rhetoric is a cynical and hollow sham

Of the 3,800 children and infants taken into immigration custody between January and October of 2025, a majority – 2,600 – were detained by ICE officers. That means that the children, as young as one or two years old, were not arrested at the border or legal ports of entry, where asylum seekers frequently present themselves to border officers, but inside the country.

That means that those children were not new arrivals seeking help; they were kids going about their daily lives in the US, often with legal status. They were children like Liam Conejo Ramos, aged five, who was snatched from his driveway after school by immigration agents while wearing a blue bunny hat to keep him warm in the Minnesota cold. They are children like one student, a 17-year-old from Liam’s school district in Minnesota, who was taken from their car, or the other child, a 10-year-old girl in the fourth grade, who was taken alongside her mother; or the two other boys, brothers in the second and fifth grades, who were delivered by school officials to an ICE detention center after their mother was arrested and taken there. She had called the school to ask them to bring her boys to her in the prison; there was no one else to take care of them.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
The Trump administration is suing Delaware in an attempt to obtain the addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers for thousands of Delawareans. Delaware is one of more than 20 states being sued by the Trump administration for voter data, which advocates say represents a federal overreach that may dissuade Delawareans from voting.  

Delaware immigrant advocacy groups asked a judge to dismiss a federal lawsuit brought forth by the Trump administration demanding state election officials turn over sensitive voter information to the federal government. 

The organizations filed motions to intervene and to dismiss the ongoing case between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Delaware Department of Elections on Wednesday. The American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, La Esperanza, the Latin American Community Center and the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence all asked to join the case and dismiss the lawsuit. 

“Immigrant citizens are at risk of wrongful targeting for immigration enforcement when the federal government has their data,” said Maria Matos, president and CEO of the Latin American Community Center, in a written statement to the court. 

The U.S. Department of Justice first filed the lawsuit against Delaware Elections Commissioner Anthony Albence in December as the administration sought to obtain sensitive voter information, such as driver’s license numbers, residential addresses and partial Social Security numbers, for thousands of Delaware residents. 

The organizations’ leaders argued in court filings that sharing the sensitive information would deter eligible Latino and immigrant residents from voting and heighten anxieties about how their information is being shared with other federal agencies. 

Disclosure of the information also would be “disastrous” for domestic violence survivor safety, privacy and confidence, Sue Ryan, executive director of the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said in a written statement to the court. 

The Department of Justice has argued that it needs the detailed information to ensure that ineligible people are kept off voter rolls and that only U.S. citizens are voting. The request for voters’ information comes amid President Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud. 

“Accurate voter rolls are the cornerstone of fair and free elections, and too many states have fallen into a pattern of noncompliance with basic voter roll maintenance,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi in a written news release when the DOJ announced Delaware’s lawsuit. 

When reached for comment, the DOJ referred Spotlight Delaware to Bondi’s written comments made in December. 

Since last May, the DOJ has demanded that nearly every state hand over detailed voter information. The agency has sued over 20 states and Washington, D.C., for not complying with its demands. 

At least 11 states – mostly Republican-led – have provided or agreed to pass along their full statewide voter registration lists, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School, an organization tracking the requests. 

Delaware Elections Commissioner Anthony Albence declined to comment on the lawsuit, as the department does not comment on any pending litigation, a spokesperson said.

Red Clay School Board member Jose Matthews also joined the organizations’ petition to join the case and dismiss the lawsuit. Two other Delaware residents, including a Widener University law school professor, previously joined the lawsuit due to worries that the Trump administration would retaliate against them for their views if their private voter information was shared. 

Letters lead to lawsuit 

The December lawsuit stemmed from back-and-forth letters between the U.S. Department of Justice’s Voting Rights Division and the Delaware Department of Elections, arguing over how much information to share. 

The DOJ sent the first letter to Albence in July 2025, asking for voter data that included names, birth dates, addresses, political party affiliations, voting history and legislative district information. 

The federal government also requested driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers alongside all information pertaining to non-citizens and convicted felons who have been ruled ineligible to vote since November 2022.

In September, Albence formally refused to provide the detailed voter information to the DOJ, according to court records. To date, Delaware has only provided data that excludes the more sensitive, non-public information.

“Absent appropriate protections, Delawareans’ information could be compromised or misused, or Delawareans could be deterred from exercising their First Amendment rights to register to vote, to affiliate with a party, and to vote,” Albence wrote in a September letter.

In his denial, Albence cited Delaware state law that protects private information as an impediment to the federal government’s wishes, noting that he is prohibited from sharing it even within the state government.

On Wednesday, the federal judge overseeing the case granted the organizations’ motion to intervene in the case. The judge has made no ruling on the motion to dismiss.

The post Immigrant advocates move to dismiss Trump’s voter data lawsuit appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Draghi wants real decision-making power in Europe, not a federal Big Bang Expert comment sfarrell.drupa… 6 February 2026

Competitiveness is not enough. The former president of the European Central Bank’s call for ‘pragmatic federalism’ would require Europe to strengthen its decision-making process if it wants to weigh in as a fully-fledged power. This will need bolder coalitions of the willing.

The metaphor remains painfully true: Europe is an economic giant but a political dwarf.

Mario Draghi stressed how this imbalance has become unbearable in a short but sharp speech delivered at the Catholic University of Leuven on 2 February. The Italian economist and politician did not mince his words in pointing out the only path that, in his view, would enable Europe to grow politically: that of ‘pragmatic federalism.’

With this formula –  which he had laid out in an earlier speech on 24 October last year in Oviedo, Spain – Draghi adds an institutional dimension to his much- vaunted 2024 report on European competitiveness.

It is not enough for Europe to catch up with its Chinese and American rivals in terms of productivity and technology, he says. It must also strengthen its institutional framework to be considered a world power.

Where it has stuck to loose, classic intergovernmental cooperation, such as in defence and diplomacy, it hardly impresses Washington or Beijing. 

‘This model does not produce power,’ Draghi laments: ‘A group of states that coordinates remains a group of states, each with a veto, each with a separate calculus.’

According to the former Italian prime minister, the power games at play in today’s world require Europe to make a qualitative leap in integration. A federal leap is what it takes.

Would the European bloc be ready for such a bold move? Draghi is right to raise the issue of the EU’s governance and to call for renewed integration to face a more chaotic and brutal world order.

But using the controversial word federalism is always sensitive in European politics. His statement in favour of ‘moving from a confederation to a federation’ risks just nurturing a quasi-theological debate on the very nature of the European Union.

The F word

Many EU member states, such as Italy, Germany, Spain or Belgium, are federal in their own ways. But letting Europe itself become federal is another story. In a centralized state such as France, any federalist terminology is even taboo. The far right rejects it completely. President Emmanuel Macron has always been careful not to refer to federalism when visioning Europe.

It is worth, though, not reducing Draghi’s speech to this F word. Just as the term ‘constitution’ in 2005 diverted attention from the purpose of a treaty that was essentially codifying existing European legal texts, the term ‘federalism’ can unnecessarily inflame, divide, and polarize, when its ‘pragmatic’ nature should draw just as much attention.

As former president of the European Central Bank, the euro is the best example of the kind of ‘pragmatic federalism’ that Draghi aims for. ‘Those who were willing to do so took the lead, set up common institutions with real authority and, thanks to this joint commitment, forged a solidarity deeper than any treaty could have prescribed,’ he said of the single currency in his speech in Leuven. Through its exclusive competence, its unquestioned independence and the respect it commands, the ECB acts de facto as a federal body but without being explicitly designated as such – unlike its American counterpart, the Fed.

The same federal understatement could apply to all areas where the EU has exclusive competence, as on international trade or on fisheries. Europe has always built itself in this constructive ambiguity. Former Commission President Jacques Delors coined the term ‘federation of nation states’ to define the EU, like an oxymoron.

At a time when radical right movements are surging, European leaders are wary about tackling institutional issues head-on and embarking on any deep reform of the EU. Since the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, the task has been deemed too laborious and uncertain to be taken up politically. In the wake of the successive serious crises that have shaken the Union (debt crisis, migration crisis, Brexit, Covid), the bloc has preferred to react with emergency measures rather than come up with an overall plan.

That is not what Mario Draghi is proposing. He suggests no grand institutional overhaul. His plan is no federal Big Bang, as he acknowledged in his speech in Oviedo: ‘A true federation would require political conditions that do not exist today.’ 

Pragmatic

Instead, he aims pragmatically at some immediate initiatives for true integration in areas such as defence, industrial policy, taxation or foreign affairs, for states willing to do so. If necessary outside the Union, and without other members preventing them from doing so, but leaving them the choice of joining later.

Draghi’s federalistic approach comes down to the kind experienced through the Schengen Agreement on free movement, which started among five countries in 1985 and was first legally established outside the EU. Yet this time, it is about competences as stark as defence.

Besides its federal wording, Draghi’s proposal is welcome for three reasons. First, because in Europe’s attempt to move from a peace project to a power project, it cannot avoid further deepening in strategic areas, let alone defence.

Another Labour MP says Morgan McSweeney should go as Harriet Harman says PM left looking ‘weak, naive and gullible’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer was facing renewed calls to sack his most senior adviser on Friday as Downing Street braced itself for another round of leadership speculation when the files relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador are published.

The Labour MP for Stroud, Simon Opher, added his voice to those calling for the departure of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who was instrumental in the decision to appoint Mandelson despite concerns about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

In honor of American Heart Month, now is a good time to schedule your next doctor's appointment for a heart disease screening.

The CIA has shut down The World Factbook, one of its oldest and most recognizable public-facing intelligence publications, ending a run that began as a classified reference document in 1962 and evolved into a freely accessible digital resource that drew millions of views each year. The agency offered no explanation for the decision. Originally titled The National Basic Intelligence Factbook, the publication first went unclassified in 1971, was renamed a decade later, and moved online at CIA.gov in 1997. It served researchers, news organizations, teachers, students and international travelers. The site hosted more than 5,000 copyright-free photographs, some donated by CIA officers from their personal travel. Every page now redirects to a farewell announcement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI content for scams can be targeted at individuals and ‘produced by pretty much anybody’, researchers say

Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial”, an analysis published by AI experts has said.

Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams – leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus – are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.

A Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson said the crash at a 99 Ranch Market in Westwood is currently being investigated as an accident.

Files suggest David Stern was Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘man in the palace’, passing messages to the former prince until 2019

Jeffrey Epstein wanted his 26-year-old Belarusian girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, and her friend, Jen, to have a good time in London – and he knew just who to ask.

“Karyna – my girlfriend, and Jen, the tall girl who you’ve met will be London Tues and Wed,” the 63-year-old disgraced financier apparently wrote in April 2016 to an aide to the then Prince Andrew. “They have never been there before. If you are around, I’d appreciate any help you can give them.”

A wartime boom in Russia has given way to sluggish growth, tax hikes and squeezed public services. Will it affect the conflict in Ukraine?

Western leaders were bullish when they imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half,” said the then US president, Joe Biden, in March, a month into the war.

Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford was named the NFL MVP, just edging out four other candidates that included New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye and Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, last year's MVP.

Google's Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability, which has been exclusive to the Pixel 10 series since its surprise launch last year, is headed to a much broader set of Android devices in 2026. Eric Kay, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android platform, confirmed the expansion during a press briefing at the company's Taipei office, saying Google is "working with our partners to expand it into the rest of the ecosystem" and that announcements are coming "very soon." Nothing is the only OEM to have publicly confirmed it's working on support, though Qualcomm has also hinted at enabling the feature on Snapdragon-powered phones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The perils of German power.

Regional rivalry will raise tensions far beyond the Gulf.

In wake of Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to ‘take over’ voting, senator Ruben Gallego urges citizens to take a stand and give the ‘ultimate response’

The Democratic senator Ruben Gallego has proposed that, should Donald Trump try to sabotage the midterm elections, Americans should respond with a general strike that would “grind the country to a halt”.

Earlier this week the US president called for Republicans to “take over” and “nationalise” voting in at least 15 unspecified locations, repeating his false claims that elections are plagued by widespread fraud.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 6

Death toll from Washington’s campaign on alleged drug traffickers now at least 128

The US military on Thursday said it killed two alleged drug traffickers in a strike on a boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the death toll from Washington’s campaign to at least 128.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” the US Southern Command said in a post on X. It said “no US military forces were harmed” in the operation.

Residents of New Zealand capital advised not to enter the water, collect seafood or walk their dogs on local beaches after wastewater plant failure

A sewage leak in New Zealand’s capital Wellington has been described by local authorities as an “environmental disaster,” with repairs to the city’s wastewater treatment plant expected to take months.

Residents of Wellington have been advised not to enter the water, collect seafood or even walk their dogs on local beaches.

Dozens of people have died, including two Australians, as record-breaking snowfall blankets the north

Dozens of people have died in Japan after record-breaking snowfall blanketed northern regions of the country, while officials warned that warmer temperatures could trigger a new wave of accidents.

Authorities said 35 people had died in snow-related incidents across Japan since 20 January, with almost 400 injured, 126 of them seriously. Most of the deaths were among people who fell while trying to clear snow from their roofs or around their homes.

The U.S. military struck an alleged drug-carrying boat in the Pacific on Thursday, marking the 38th vessel to be struck over the last five months and the second this year.

In a video posted on social media, he further implored the people holding Nancy Guthrie to send proof they had her

TV host Savannah Guthrie’s brother on Thursday renewed the family’s plea for their mother’s kidnapper to contact them, hours after an Arizona sheriff said investigators don’t have proof Nancy Guthrie is alive, but believe “she’s still out there”.

“Whoever is out there holding our mother, we want to hear from you. We haven’t heard anything directly,” Camron Guthrie said in a video statement posted on Instagram.

This live blog is now closed.

• Trump news at a glance: ICE chartered Palestinian deportation flights on Trump family friend’s jet

Amid the various winding comments throughout Trump’s speech today, he said that the Department of Education will officially issue its new guidance to protect the right to prayer in public schools today.

“Now the Democrats will sue us, but we’ll win it,” Trump said, eliciting some laughs from the audience at the National Prayer Breakfast. “They’ll sue us. They sue us for everything. I’m the most sued human being in history.”

When marine biologist Océane Attlan saw the tiny Braun’s wrasse, it was like ‘recognising a familiar face, but you can’t put a name on it’

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The chances of encountering the rare reef fish were so far-fetched, it took marine biologist Océane Attlan a few seconds to clock what she was seeing.

“All of a sudden I saw this fish. You know when you recognise a familiar face, but you can’t put a name on it. That’s the feeling I had,” she said.

Verdict could influence more than 3,000 similar cases against ride-hailing company

A federal jury in Phoenix ordered Uber on Thursday to pay $8.5m after finding the company liable in a lawsuit brought by a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by a driver. The verdict could influence thousands of similar cases against the ride-hailing company.

The case, brought by plaintiff Jaylynn Dean, was the first trial of more than 3,000 similar lawsuits against Uber that have been consolidated in US federal court. So-called bellwether trials are used to test legal theories and help gauge the value of claims for possible settlements. The jury found that the driver was an agent of Uber, holding the company responsible for his actions. They awarded Dean $8.5m in compensatory damages but declined to award punitive damages. Attorneys for Dean had sought more than $140m in damages.

The country’s first female PM is the object of a personality cult revolving around everything from her outfits and snacks to her favourite pink pen

Just eight months ago, Japan’s ruling party appeared to have reached the edge of the electoral abyss. It had lost a parliamentary majority for the second time in 15 months; its MPs were implicated in a long-running slush fund scandal; the then prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, was the target of factional plotting.

But as voters prepare to brave freezing temperatures in this Sunday’s lower house elections, the Liberal Democratic party (LDP) is expected to pull off a momentous victory. And the party’s recovery from the disappointment of last year is largely down to one woman.

The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams. Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission's size, it said. The Matrix-based solution could also eventually connect the Commission to other EU bodies like the Parliament.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Savannah Guthrie's brother, Camron Guthrie, issued a plea Thursday for the return of their mother, Nancy Guthrie, saying in a video to the possible abductor, "We want to talk to you."

Bad Bunny says he wants to bring his culture to his 2026 Super Bowl halftime show Sunday.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 6, No. 705.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 6, No. 971.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 6, No. 501.

The Trump administration launched its new TrumpRx direct-to-consumer prescription drug listing site late Thursday, part of a push to offer medication at steep discounts.

Starlink says it may also share personal data with partners to help it "develop AI-enabled tools that improve your customer experience.”

Emails appear to show Mountbatten-Windsor attempting to introduce Epstein to UAE crown prince via foreign affairs minister

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor vouched for Jeffrey Epstein during a UK state visit to the United Arab Emirates with Queen Elizabeth II in 2010, according to newly released emails.

The email was sent from “The Duke” to Epstein on 24 November of that year, with the subject listed as “Abdullah” – an apparent reference to the UAE foreign affairs minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Some spouses obtained military identification cards for Chinese nationals, court documents alleged.

Authorities respond to reports of crash at 99 Ranch Market after victims, some trapped under vehicle, die at scene

Three people were killed and six others were hurt after a car driver collided with a bicyclist and then slammed into a grocery store on Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, authorities said.

The crash was reported shortly after noon at a 99 Ranch Market in the city’s Westwood neighborhood, according Los Angeles fire department spokesperson Lyndsey Lantz.

In a video message, Savannah Guthrie and her siblings sought to tell their mother's possible abductor – or abductors – that they are "ready to talk."

Tech giant reports $213bn in revenue after its founder, who owns the Post, lays off a third of newspaper’s employees

Amazon announced plans to spend $200bn on artificial intelligence and robotics this year, the latest tech giant to vow fresh enormous investments in the artificial intelligence arms race.

The news of the investment comes one day after the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced it was cutting approximately a third of employees.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 6, No. 1,693.

While labels list dozens of possible risks only four are supported by evidence, say researchers

Almost all side-effects listed for statins are not caused by the drugs, according to the world’s most comprehensive review of evidence.

Other than the well-known risks around muscle pain and diabetes, only four of 66 other statin side-effects listed on labels – liver test changes, minor liver abnormalities, urine changes and tissue swelling – are supported by evidence. And the risks are very small, according to the systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Lancet.

A federal court in California has ruled that YouTube creators who use stream-ripping tools to download clips for reaction and commentary videos may face liability under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions -- a decision that could reshape how one of the platform's most popular content genres operates. U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi of the Northern District of California denied a motion to dismiss in Cordova v. Huneault, a creator-versus-creator dispute, finding that YouTube's "rolling cipher" technology qualifies as an access control measure under section 1201(a) even though the underlying videos are freely viewable by the public. The distinction matters because it separates the act of watching a video from the act of downloading it. The defense had argued that no ripping tools were actually used and that screen recording could account for the copied footage. Judge DeMarchi allowed the claim to proceed to discovery regardless, noting that the plaintiff had adequately pled the circumvention allegation. The ruling opens a legal avenue beyond standard copyright infringement for creators who want to go after rivals. Reaction channels have long leaned on fair use as a blanket defense, but plaintiff's attorney Randall S. Newman told TorrentFreak that circumventing copy protections under section 1201 is a separate violation unaffected by any fair use finding.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've tested dozens of iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air cases. Here are my current top picks, complete with mini reviews of each case.

Colin Demarco was arrested in January, months after he was seen in a Ring camera image at Vought's door, wearing a surgical mask and gloves.

Stop letting that box of tangled charging cables and ancient flip phones from 2012 live rent-free in your closet.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants is among the available new titles.

Severe lack of public defenders has meant people charged with crimes have been routinely unable to fight their cases

The Oregon supreme court has ruled that a large number of criminal cases across the state must be dismissed due to a severe shortage of public defenders, a major decision that attorneys say will impact more than 1,400 pending cases.

The problem has been years in the making and has become a significant constitutional crisis, as people charged with crimes are routinely unable to fight their cases as they wait weeks, months or sometimes years for the state to appoint them lawyers. The attorney shortage – due in part to the increasing difficulty of recruiting attorneys for the low-salary, high-caseload jobs – has meant that people have had cases hanging over them for extended periods of time, impacting their housing, employment and families, advocates say.

Three collaborative projects aim to streamline AI deployment in nuclear facilities.

Feb. 5, 2026 — Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming industries. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is using this technology to improve nuclear safety and efficiency.

The Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop (METL) facility where Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis (PRO-AID) was successfully tested. Image credit: Jason Creps/ANL.

To ensure AI systems can be properly deployed in regulated environments, Argonne is advancing projects that are reshaping how regulation addresses cutting-edge technologies.

Three main projects are advancing this work:

• Developing and testing AI applications to improve efficiency of plant operations while maintaining the gold standard for safety.
• Creating a framework to speed up reactor licensing.
• Developing a tool to detect plant faults early.

These efforts emphasize both the innovative technologies under development and the broader impact on regulatory frameworks and safety measures.

Simulating AI Safety for Nuclear Regulation

Argonne researchers are working with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to explore how AI can be used in the nuclear industry. These AI tools have the potential to make operations more efficient, lower costs and improve safety. For example, AI could help predict when equipment needs maintenance, create better models for complex systems and optimize how facilities operate.

The researchers are testing an AI system at an experimental facility and putting it through a full regulatory review to see how it measures up to safety standards. This project helps connect the fast pace of AI development with the rules and safeguards needed to make sure these technologies can be used safely and securely in critical areas like the nuclear industry.

By developing tools and knowledge needed to evaluate and regulate AI technologies, Argonne is preparing the industry for the future.

Automating Licensing with AI-driven Protocols

Through a partnership with DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Argonne is creating the Regulatory Context Protocol (RCP) to streamline the licensing process for advanced nuclear reactors. It automates applicant-regulator communication using AI agents that represent both the nuclear facility and the regulator. The RCP is designed to reduce delays in regulatory workflows, improve information quality and ensure compliance with NRC standards.

“The traditional licensing process can be a significant bottleneck for deploying advanced nuclear technology,” said Akshay Dave, manager of intelligent systems group and project lead. ​“With the RCP, we’re essentially creating a digital express lane for regulatory communication. By using AI to structure and automate this dialogue, we can dramatically reduce timelines and get nuclear energy onto the grid faster.”

By reducing delays in regulatory communication, the RCP will help meet accelerated licensing timelines. This ensures that advanced nuclear reactors can be deployed more quickly.

Advancing Fault Detection with Physics-Based AI

Argonne has also developed Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis (PRO-AID). PRO-AID is a physics-based AI tool that uses ​“digital twins” or virtual copies of nuclear power plant systems to identify unusual behavior in real-time. By integrating physical principles rather than relying on data alone, PRO-AID can spot faults such as sensor bias and cooling failures early.

PRO-AID was successfully tested in Argonne’s Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop (METL) facility. The tool’s real-time monitoring allows operators to fix issues before they cause downtime. These initiatives are vital steps toward ensuring that AI technologies can be successfully and safely integrated into the nuclear industry.

Impact on the Nuclear Industry

“By proactively identifying the relevant regulatory frameworks, we are advancing innovation while reinforcing public trust in the safety and reliability of these technologies,” said Rick Vilim, Argonne senior nuclear engineer.

Argonne’s work represents a critical intersection of innovation and regulation. Elements from these projects will help the nuclear industry embrace the potential of AI. These efforts are paving the way for safer, smarter and more cost-effective nuclear technologies.

From streamlining regulatory processes with the RCP to enhancing fault diagnostics with PRO-AID, Argonne is setting a standard for how emerging technologies can be responsibly integrated into high-stakes industries.

Source: Marguerite Huber, Argonne National Laboratory

The post Argonne Helps Nuclear Industry Embrace AI to Speed Up Licensing and Reduce Delays appeared first on HPCwire.

Super Bowl LX will feature an ad to promote Trump Accounts, a new investment plan to help eligible families save money for their kids.

Feb. 5, 2026 — Satellites and spacecraft in the vast region between the earth and moon and just beyond — called cislunar space — are crucial for space exploration, scientific advancement and national security. But figuring out where exactly to put them into a stable orbit can be a huge, computationally expensive challenge.

One of one million cislunar orbits calculated by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The moon’s orbit is shown in light gray. The spacecraft follows the colored path over the six-year simulation period. (Graphic: Dan Herchek, note moon and earth not to scale.)

In an open-access database and with publicly available code, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have simulated and published one million orbits in cislunar space. The effort, enabled by supercomputing resources at the Laboratory, provides valuable data that can be used to plan missions, predict how small perturbations might change orbits and monitor space traffic.

To begin, the Space Situational Awareness Python package takes in a range of initial conditions for an orbit, like how elliptical and tilted the orbit is and how far it gets from the earth.

“The point of it was to not assume anything about what types of orbits we want,” said author and LLNL scientist Travis Yeager. “We tried to go into it pretending we knew nothing about this space.”

From each starting point with a set position and velocity, the simulation steps forward in time in discrete chunks. Because this is an N-body problem involving the earth, moon, sun, radiative forces and the spacecraft, the complex interactions among all components mean there is no exact solution for the system’s evolution.

“If you want to know where a satellite is in a week, there’s no equation that can actually tell you where it’s going to be,” said Yeager. “You have to step forward a little bit at a time.”

When considering the gravitational forces from the earth and moon, the authors also accounted for differences across each body.

“The Earth is not a point source. It is actually blobby. There is lower gravity over Canada than there is over the Atlantic Ocean,” said Yeager. “If we didn’t account for blobbiness within the earth for GPS satellites, we couldn’t have GPS down to a meter level. You wouldn’t even know what road you’re driving on.”

To generate all one million orbits with six-year lifetimes, it took 1.6 million CPU hours — equivalent to more than 182 years on a single computer. Once they worked through the process, the team ran their simulations in just three days on LLNL’s Quartz and Ruby supercomputers.

“The interesting thing about our code is that it is parallelizable, whereas other commercial codes are not,” said author and LLNL scientist Denvir Higgins. “We can spread jobs across nodes.”

Of the resulting orbits, 54% remained stable for at least one year and 9.7% for six years. But even the unstable orbits in this open database can provide valuable information.

“From a data-science point of view, this is an interesting data set. When you have a million orbits, you can get a really rich analysis using machine learning applications,” said Higgins. “You can try to predict the lifetime of the orbit, try to predict stability or try to do anomaly detection to see if an orbit is moving in a strange way.”

By analyzing the orbital data, researchers may be able to identify the “busiest intersections,” or the most useful positions for a satellite to monitor and direct traffic. This could be especially useful as countries continue to launch satellites without world-wide coordination.

The team aims to tackle some of these questions themselves, but they emphasized that the publicly available code and data allow others to launch in alongside them.

This data was created under work funded by a Laboratory Directed Research and Development project.

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL: Simulations and Supercomputing Calculate 1M Orbits in Cislunar Space appeared first on HPCwire.

World’s most prominent cryptocurrency peaked at $126,000 in October 2025, only to see its value slump steeply

Bitcoin’s price sank to $63,000 on Thursday, its lowest level in more than a year, and half its all-time peak of $126,000, reached in October 2025. A months-long dip in cryptocurrency prices has tanked shares of companies that have increasingly invested in bitcoin, exacerbating broader stock market jitters.

Bitcoin rode a high during Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2024 and throughout 2025; its price steadily increased as the president made one industry-friendly move after another. Crypto’s largest currency hit $100,000 for the first time in December 2024 and even rose to a record high of $126,210.50 on 6 October, according to Coinbase. But bitcoin’s valuation has dipped over the last few months, falling especially hard in January and the start of February.

Featuring an unlikely animal friendship, the commercial boasts enough patriotic iconography to verge on self-parody

Three years after its sister brand, Bud Light, faced a rightwing boycott over a transgender spokesperson, Budweiser’s new Super Bowl ad, American Icons, contains absolutely nothing that could be mistaken for social progress. Instead, it features an unlikely friendship between two animals whose blood runs red, white and blue: a bald eagle and a Clydesdale horse, the Budweiser icon. An adorable foal trots out of a barn, and the viewer is injected with a single minute of American iconography so pure that it would make Lee Greenwood nauseous.

The horse meets a struggling baby bird who gets caught in the rain, prompting the horse to stand over the bird as a roof. The pair become pals and grow up together, the bird riding on the horse’s back as it grows larger. It falls off a few times, but, like George Washington at Valley Forge, it never gives up. Finally, the horse jumps over a log while the bird spreads its wings above, and we get a slow-motion image of something like Pegasus. We realize the bird, now fully grown, is a majestic bald eagle, taking to the sky as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird reaches its climax. Two farmers look on while drinking Budweiser, as the words “Made of America” appear on the screen. “You crying?” one asks. “The sun’s in my eyes,” says the other.

A U.S. official called the deal a by-product of ongoing efforts to end the Ukraine war. It came as a key nuclear treaty between Washington and Moscow expired.

Nearly two weeks after a catastrophic ice storm rocked northeast Mississippi, still 25,000 customers are without power as of Thursday.

Q: Is it true that ICE agents are financially rewarded for the number of people taken into custody?

A: The Department of Homeland Security has said there is no such policy, and an immigration think tank told us it is unaware of any payments per arrest. The Wall Street Journal reported that agents “are rewarded for making arrests” but didn’t say how they are rewarded. Immigration and Customs Enforcement quickly scrapped a proposed program to pay bonuses to speed up deportations.

FULL ANSWER

We’ve received several questions from readers about whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents get a bonus for each person they arrest. One reader asked if agents are paid $1,500 for each immigrant they arrest. Versions of this claim have circulated on social media, with some posts pointing to a Wall Street Journal article that said ICE officers were “under pressure” to meet a daily nationwide arrest goal and were “rewarded for making arrests.” Some have interpreted this to mean a financial bonus.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE didn’t respond to our multiple inquiries asking whether agents receive a bonus payment for each arrest. However, a DHS spokesperson told Snopes, which wrote about these claims, that “this policy has never and never was in effect.”

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, also told us it wasn’t aware of any per-arrest bonus structure. Michelle Mittelstadt, MPI’s director of communications and public affairs, said, “We do not believe these claims regarding bonuses for arrests are accurate. ICE and its parent agency, DHS, have never indicated that they would set up a bonus payment structure rewarding personnel per arrest.”

In August, the New York Times reported on an ICE proposal to pay bonuses for quicker deportations — but it was canceled before it started and didn’t pertain to arrests. According to the Times, an internal ICE email proposed “cash bonuses to agents for deporting people quickly, an incentive meant to motivate the staff to speed up President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Less than four hours later, the agency abruptly canceled what was supposed to be a 30-day pilot program.”

The Times reported that documents it reviewed called for $100 and $200 bonuses for each immigrant deported within one or two weeks of arrest. But a subsequent email to ICE field offices from Liana J. Castano, an ICE field operations official, told staff to “PLEASE DISREGARD” the program, the newspaper reported. 

As we said, some social media posts about arrest bonuses have pointed to a Jan. 17 Wall Street Journal article. The article about immigration enforcement in Minneapolis said that “officers here and elsewhere are under pressure from daily arrest quotas that leadership has set at 3,000 a day across the country—the number it would take to reach one million arrests in a year, according to ICE officials familiar with the matter. Though ICE has never come close to meeting that daily goal, officers are rewarded for making arrests, even if the immigrants they take in are later released.”

The administration has publicly acknowledged the 3,000 arrest goal. In May, senior White House adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News that the administration was “looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day.”

It’s unclear from the Wall Street Journal article how officers are “rewarded for making arrests”; the story says nothing about financial payments and doesn’t offer any more explanation about these rewards. We reached out to the Journal reporters for clarification, but we did not receive a response.

We also didn’t get a response from DHS or ICE when we asked for comment on the Journal’s article.

Some, including Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, posted that ICE was “rewarding” agents, an accurate summary of that article. Others interpreted this as a “bonus.” For instance, David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, posted part of the article on X and said, “ICE agents get bonuses when they make wrongful arrests of US citizens.” Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, of Arizona, shared Bier’s post and said, “Mistakenly arrest a US citizen? You get a big fat bonus.”

Beyond these interpretations of the Journal’s article, we were unable to find evidence regarding claims about per-arrest bonuses. Bier told us the Journal story was the only information he had. Gallego’s office hasn’t responded to our inquiry.

Snopes reported that some of its readers appeared to misconstrue the daily 3,000 arrest goal with a “$3,000 bonus for each arrest,” as some readers asked about.

According to DHS press releases, there is a signing bonus of up to $50,000 for new ICE hires. But that’s a recruitment and retention incentive, and there’s no indication it is tied to the number of arrests, or deportations for that matter, that an agent performs.

The Republicans’ 2025 budget bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, provided $858 million for the signing bonuses, which, the legislation says, would be for new agents, officers or attorneys who agree to serve for five years or those already working for ICE who agree to stay with the agency for two more years.

Last year, DHS announced incentive funding to state and local law enforcement agencies that partner with ICE to arrest immigrants living in the country illegally. Beginning Oct. 1, DHS said that participating agencies would receive reimbursement for trained officers’ salaries and benefits along with quarterly performance-based bonuses. These monetary awards range from $500 to $1,000 per “eligible task force officer,” depending on “the successful location of illegal aliens provided by ICE and overall assistance to further ICE’s mission to Defend the Homeland.”

But that quarterly bonus program is for state and local police that cooperate with ICE, not a payment per arrest for ICE officers.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post ICE Officers and Bonuses appeared first on FactCheck.org.

U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell admonished the Trump administration for what he said was a failure to comply with judicial orders, warning it is "not above the law."

Millions of Americans lack access to any type of retirement plan, hampering their ability to save for old age.

Democratic leaders in Congress requested Department of Homeland Security reforms on Wednesday that would leave the agency’s budget untouched — and were immediately rebuffed by the GOP.

The requests, in a joint letter from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, do not attempt to claw back funding for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the two agencies at the heart of the political firestorm over their violent deployments to American cities.

Instead of cutting funding, Democrats focused on measures such as prohibiting ICE agents from wearing masks or entering homes without a warrant. Sen. Brian Schatz, D- Hawaii, the Democratic deputy whip, on Wednesday described the requests as “reasonable reforms that are 70-30 propositions with the public.”

That did not win them any points with congressional Republicans, who dismissed the reforms out of hand.

Progressives in the Senate, meanwhile, had not only become more strident in their rhetoric about ICE, they also called for clawing back increased ICE spending passed as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Though some of these Democrats are sticking by their more robust demands, they nonetheless avoided criticizing their party leadership over the request for more limited reforms.

“The urgency of the moment is about stopping the violence,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told The Intercept. “If it were up to me, we would be rewriting the whole immigration laws and policies. But right now, we’ve got to get some constraints in place so that roving bands of ICE agents stop terrorizing American communities. That is our first priority.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the ranking member on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, took a similar line, setting aside his stronger demands of ICE.

“I have a much longer list of things that I want to change in the Department of Homeland Security,” he said, “but we are trying to put a targeted list of reforms that will end the abuse on the table so that we can get something done.”

10 Demands

Schumer and Jeffries’s demand list has significant overlap with previous calls from progressive members of Congress such as Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The progressives made their demands soon after the January 24 killing of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which derailed a full-year funding bill for DHS and led to a brief shutdown of several government departments. The House voted to end the shutdown Tuesday by approving full-year appropriations for other departments while temporarily funding DHS through a new February 13 deadline.

The Democratic leaders unveiled their official list of demands ahead of the deadline on Wednesday, calling for ending indiscriminate arrests, prohibiting masking, requiring ICE and CBP officer identification, protecting sensitive locations such as churches and schools, halting racial profiling, upholding use of force standards, preserving the ability of states and cities to prosecute DHS misconduct, and requiring the use of body cameras when interacting with the public. (Schumer and Jeffries immediately began watering down one of their clearest demands, suggesting in public comments that they might allow agents to wear masks in some circumstances.)

The biggest split between what Schumer and Jeffries proposed and what more progressive Democrats requested was a reduction of spending on ICE and CBP.

Those agencies received $75 billion and $64 billion, respectively, in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to be spent through 2029. That money came on top of the amounts already available to the agencies through their annual appropriations.

Related

It’s Time for Concrete Action on ICE. Sadly, We Have the Democrats.

Clawing that money back has been a top priority for advocates, who note that it has been used to supercharge hiring and spending on surveillance technology.

“These demands MUST include cuts in funding,” Heidi Altman, the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said in an email last week. “The money pays for the violence. It has to stop.”

Last month, Sanders proposed an amendment to the DHS appropriations bill that would have redirected the additional ICE funding to Medicaid, which he estimated would prevent 700,000 Americans from losing their health care.

Sanders’s amendment drew the support of every Senate Democrat and two Republicans, but it failed on a 49–51 vote.

In negotiations with the White House, Schumer is likely to be able to offer the potential support of only a fraction of his caucus for a full-year appropriations bill for DHS.

Some Democrats in Congress have already ruled out the idea that they will vote for any more funding.

“When you have a reckless and out of control agency that is unwilling to follow the law, passing new laws is no assurance to me whatsoever that they are not going to continue this lawlessness,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told The Intercept.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., have shown no willingness to negotiate on key Democratic requests, Booker said.

“There’s a lot of things I know my caucus would support, but clearly the speaker and the leader are not even interested in having those kinds of conversations,” he said, “even though most of their base thinks what’s happening with this agency is unacceptable.”

DOA With GOP

Democratic leadership figures like Schatz have described the latest demands as an attempt at reaching consensus.

“They are not a Democratic wish list. We are simply asking that ICE not be held to a different standard than every other law enforcement organization in the country — state, county, and federal,” he told reporters Wednesday.

The requests fell with a thud with Republican leaders, however. Johnson has already ruled out banning masks and requiring warrants.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., the lead GOP negotiator, called the demands “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands for the press.”

Republicans have already floated the idea of another short-term extension of DHS funding to allow further negotiations.

The post Senate Dems Who Pushed Meatier ICE Reform Shy Away From Criticizing Schumer’s Softer Package appeared first on The Intercept.

Shabana Mahmood insists deportations will rise, as Labour government is accused of promoting ‘harmful stereotypes’ of migrants

Nearly 60,000 unauthorised migrants and convicted criminals have been removed or deported from the UK since Labour took office, the Home Office has said.

The announcement came amid claims that the government was promoting “harmful stereotypes” by equating migration with criminality.

Anonymous insider alleges director of national intelligence withheld classified information for political reasons

The Republican leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees have rejected a top-secret complaint from an anonymous government insider alleging that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, withheld classified information for political reasons.

The responses this week from Senator Tom Cotton and Congressman Rick Crawford mean the complaint is unlikely to proceed further, though Democratic lawmakers who also have seen the document said they continue to question why it took Gabbard’s office eight months to refer the complaint to Congress as required by law.

I nominate this for the “Most Expected News Of The Decade” award.

Today, The Tech Oversight Project published a new report spotlighting newly unsealed documents in the 2026 social media addiction trials. The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents.

↫ The Tech Oversight Project

Modern social media companies are not entirely different from tobacco companies. They and everyone else know full well just how dangerous social media is, and how being addicted to it has disastrous consequences for the people involved. Tobacco companies, too, knew how dangerous smoking was decades before the general population was aware, and yet they kept pushing cigarettes, even to kids, deaths be damned. In fact, they’re still doing the same thing today with “vapes”, and we’re kind of letting it happen all over again.

Social media is directly responsible for genocides, extreme polarisation, the spread of endless amounts of lies causing parents to harm their children, mass generation of child pornography, and much, much more. All of this is not a coincidence, mere side-effects, unintended consequences – social media are designed and optimised specifically to achieve these goals, like cigarettes and now “vapes” are designed specifically to be as addictive as possible. The people responsible – social media companies, their executives, their employees – need to face justice, answer for what they’ve done, and face the legal consequences.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. Billionaires and their megacorporations are untouchable, too big to fail, too closely tied to especially the current regime in the US. I don’t think social media bans for people under 16 are the answer, since they tend to come with onerous and invasive online identity checks and because they cut vulnerable people off from their support networks, but it’s clear we need to do something.

Mark Francis Ford has been held without bail for five months after authorities arrested him in Indiana

A man accused of molesting a disabled boy whom he met while working as a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans has been indicted on child rape charges, according to authorities.

Grand jurors seated in New Orleans’ state criminal courthouse on Thursday handed up a nine-count indictment against Mark Francis Ford, nearly five months after authorities arrested him and jailed him without bail. The document charges Ford, 64, with aggravated rape of a child; raping a person suffering from a physical disability preventing resistance; two counts of molesting a juvenile; another three of indecent behavior with a minor; and kidnapping.

Intel announced this week that it’s working with SoftBank subsidiary SAIMEMORY to commercialize Z-Angle Memory (ZAM), an advanced type of DRAM that stacks memory modules vertically. While ZAM chips aren’t expected to become available for at least three years, they could eventually replace the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that is in such high demand today thanks to the AI boom.

Memory bandwidth is currently a major bottleneck in AI processing, as organizations seek to move ever greater chunks of data from memory into GPUs and back into memory. Chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD are putting hundreds of gigabytes worth of HBM on their GPU dies to help alleviate that bottleneck. However, surging HBM demand has led to a global shortage in NAND stocks, pushing up the price of RAM modules and NVMe storage and leading to supply chain shortages.

ZAM is a new memory technology that could potentially rewrite the rules of DRAM. Like HBM, ZAM memory technology utilizes vertical stacking along the Z-axis (hence the name Z-Angle). However, it promises 2x to 3x the capacity of HBM and higher bandwidths at a fraction of the energy and cost.

Intel’s agreement with SAIMEMORY calls for the two companies to leverage the foundational technology and expertise that Intel developed as part of the Next Generation DRAM Bonding (NGDB) program.

A cross-section of an NGDB test assembly showing the novel architecture of Intel’s ZAM technology (Image courtesy Intel)

The NGDB program is part of the Advanced Memory Technology (AMT) project, the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) initiative that brought vendors like Intel, SK Hynix, and SoftBank together with DOE government labs to develop new memory technologies, including ZAM, HBM, Compute Express Link (CXL), and non-volatile memory, like magnetic random access memory (MRAM).

The NGDB program is currently in its third year with Intel and the “Tri-Lab,” or Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Years one and two were dedicated to research and development, while the third year will focus on productization.

In January, Sandia shared the progress that the Tri-Lab has made with a “novel stacking approach” as part of the NGBD project. Specifically, the lab showed how it vertically bonded eight memory wafers to a base wafer using an alternative “via-in-one” construct.

“Intel’s Next-Generation DRAM Bonding initiative has demonstrated a novel memory architecture and revolutionary assembly methodology that significantly increases DRAM performance, reduces power consumption, and optimizes memory costs,” Joshua Fryman, CTO of Intel Government Technologies, stated in the Sandia progress update. “Standard memory architectures aren’t meeting AI needs, so NGDB defined a whole new approach to accelerate us through the next decade.”

Gwen Voskuilen, principal member of technical staff at Sandia, said the Intel breakthrough is “an exciting technology that we anticipate will lead to a wider adoption of higher bandwidth memories in systems that are currently unable to take advantage of high bandwidth memory due to its limited capacity and power constraints.”

A memory tester probe card as part of Intel’s NGDB R&D program (Image courtesy Intel)

“The demonstration confirms that the NGDB technologies can be combined to yield a highly performant memory with high-volume manufacturing,” he added.

SoftBank reportedly is investing ¥3 billion (about $19 million at current exchange rates) in SAIMEMORY to develop ZAM with Intel. SAIMEMORY has reportedly said that it expects to create a ZAM prototype by 2027, with commercialization in 2029.

If that timeline plays out, it will be a boon for next-generation AI systems. However, it won’t come soon enough to relieve the current supply chain crunch due to surging HBM demand, which isn’t expected to abate for years.

Meanwhile, the ZAM program further strengthens the strategic technology partnership between the US and Japan. Last week, DOE Under Secretary for Science Dario Gil travelled to the SCA/HPCAsia 2026 conference in Osaka, Japan, to cement the expanded partnership between Argonne National Lab, Nvidia, RIKEN, and Fujitsu. Gil is in charge of Genesis Mission, the DOE’s initiative to accelerate progress in scientific discovery and engineering through AI.

Developing new memory technologies, such as ZAM, to replace or augment existing HBM aligns closely with Genesis Mission goals.

“The transition from AMT to ZAM strengthens trusted U.S. and Japan technology partnerships and accelerates the path from national laboratory research to global deployment,” Intel’s Sanam Masroor, the director of global strategic partnerships, wrote in a February 2 blog post.

The post What is Z-Angle Memory and Why Is Intel Developing It? appeared first on HPCwire.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has announced that astronauts on the upcoming Crew-12 and Artemis II missions will be allowed to carry iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and to the Moon -- a reversal of long-standing agency rules that had left crews relying on a 2016 Nikon DSLR and decade-old GoPros for the historic lunar flyby. Isaacman framed the move as part of a broader push to challenge what he called bloated qualification requirements, where hardware approvals get mired in radiation characterization, battery thermal tests, outgassing reviews and vibration testing. "That operational urgency will serve NASA well as we pursue the highest-value science and research in orbit and on the lunar surface," he wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One jewelry company is looking to offset surging silver prices by plating its pieces with an even more precious metal.

LOUISVILLE, Colo., Feb. 5, 2026 — Infleqtion, a global leader in quantum sensing and quantum computing powered by neutral-atom technology, announced that its quantum software team, together with collaborators at the University of Chicago (UChicago) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been selected to advance to Phase 3 of the Wellcome Leap Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) Challenge, a global program focused on demonstrating quantum-enabled solutions for human health. The news comes as Infleqtion prepares to go public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp X.

“Phase 3 allows us to test quantum-enabled biomarker discovery end to end,” said Pranav Gokhale, CTO, Infleqtion. “We’re applying our hybrid quantum–classical workflow to real oncology data and evaluating whether quantum methods can improve feature selection on today’s hardware, not in simulations.”

Biomarker discovery, identifying molecular, genetic, or image-based features that help diagnose cancer, guide treatment, or predict patient response, requires analyzing high-dimensional, multimodal clinical datasets. Traditional tools often struggle to capture subtle or higher-order interactions across these data types. The Wellcome Leap Q4Bio program targets this challenge directly, supporting teams working to demonstrate quantum-enabled methods for human health within the next five years.

“This project only works because clinicians, biologists, and quantum scientists are designing the solution together,” added Gokhale. “That collaboration ensures the algorithms address genuine clinical needs while remaining implementable on near-term quantum hardware.”

Across Phases 1 and 2, the Infleqtion-led team built a hybrid quantum–classical workflow designed to handle the complexity of modern biomedical data. The approach combines organized preprocessing of DNA, RNA, and pathology image features with a higher-order optimization method that can capture interactions often missed by traditional techniques. The team also developed Hyper-RQAOA, a quantum routine tailored to current and near-term hardware that leverages parameter transfer techniques to greatly improve efficiency. Together, these components provide a practical way to test quantum-enabled feature selection on datasets that matter in real clinical settings.

Phase 3 transitions the effort from controlled simulations to experiments on real quantum processors. To succeed, teams must show meaningful performance on current devices and demonstrate how their methods will scale to the next generation of quantum systems. Infleqtion’s team will use this stage to tackle a more complex clinical question: forecasting treatment response in head-and-neck cancer using a curated cohort from UChicago. The goal is to determine whether quantum-in-the-loop analysis can reveal small, clinically useful biomarker sets that support precision oncology decisions.

Today’s announcement follows the release of the team’s flagship research paper, Toward Quantum-Enabled Biomarker Discovery: An Outlook from Q4Bio, now available on arXiv.

For more information, including technical details, publications, and collaboration opportunities, visit Infleqtion.com.

About Infleqtion

Infleqtion is a global leader in quantum sensing and quantum computing, powered by neutral-atom technology. Infleqtion designs and builds quantum computers, precision sensors, and quantum software for governments, enterprises, and research institutions. Infleqtion’s commercial portfolio includes quantum computers as well as quantum RF systems, quantum clocks, and inertial navigation solutions. Infleqtion is the partner of choice for governments and commercial customers seeking cutting-edge quantum capabilities. Infleqtion announced in September 2025 it plans to go public via a merger with Churchill X (NASDAQ: CCCX).

The post Infleqtion Accelerates Quantum for Oncology as Q4Bio Challenge Enters Phase 3 appeared first on HPCwire.

While last year's Pixel 9A went on sale in April, the latest in Google's cheaper A series will be coming this month.

Investigators have no proof that the missing mother of "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie is still alive but are holding out hope she is "still out there," the sheriff said.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he hoped to replace New START with a modernized treaty that could “last long into the future.”

SAN FRANCISCO and LONDON, Feb. 5, 2026 — Armada and Nscale have signed a letter of intent (LOI) to deliver both large-scale and edge AI infrastructure for public sector and enterprise customers worldwide. Nscale is a European-headquartered AI infrastructure builder bringing online some of the largest supercomputer clusters globally – with a full-stack platform spanning power, data centers, compute, and software. San Francisco-based Armada delivers real-time distributed intelligence through its leading modular data centers (Galleons) and proprietary Armada Edge Platform (AEP). Together they can deliver sovereign solutions, both at scale and at the edge.

This collaboration aims to bring full-stack edge AI technology offerings directly to multiple sites around the globe. With access to land and power at these sites, Armada and Nscale intend to deliver solutions that include modular data center infrastructure, GPU compute capacity, application software, and customer support to end customers in the private and public sectors.

Nscale and Armada together combine rapidly deployable, turnkey infrastructure with large-scale sovereign cloud deployments, empowering customers to maintain sovereign compute environments anywhere in the world. Enterprises and governments can now establish secure, compliant AI infrastructure in locations where existing infrastructure doesn’t exist, and far faster than full data center builds.

The solution enables a hub-and-spoke model. Large-scale data centers from Nscale provide superior unit economics and foundational capacity. Armada’s turnkey deployments, like Leviathan, its megawatt Galleon, extend sovereign capabilities to new geographies at the edge.

“There is increasing demand from enterprises and governments for operational AI, and meeting that need requires infrastructure that is scalable, distributed, and ultimately sovereign,” said Josh Payne, Founder and CEO of Nscale. “By working with Armada, we will be able to offer customers a flexible foundation for deploying advanced AI workloads wherever they need to operate, without compromising performance, security, or control.”

“As AI adoption accelerates, organizations need infrastructure that can reach beyond centralized clusters, on Earth and even beyond,” said Dan Wright, Co-Founder and CEO of Armada. “One of Armada’s key differentiators is that we enable sovereign AI, with speed and scale. Partnering with Nscale allows us to extend our modular AI infrastructure into new global markets, supporting customers who require sovereign, high-performance compute.”

Together, Armada and Nscale intend to establish a repeatable model for deploying AI infrastructure globally. By uniting large-scale sovereign cloud services, modular compute, and distributed operations, this will enable organizations to accelerate AI adoption while maintaining security, compliance, and performance at scale.

More from HPCwire

• Nscale and VAST Data Unite to Build the Global Fabric for AI Accelerated by NVIDIA
• Nscale Announces $433M Pre-Series C SAFE, Building on $1.1B Series B Momentum
• Nscale, Aker, and OpenAI Launch Norwegian AI Project Targeting 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs

About Armada

Armada is a full-stack edge infrastructure company delivering compute, storage, connectivity, and AI/ML capabilities to the most remote and rugged industrial environments on Earth. From energy to defense, Armada enables organizations to operate at the edge—without compromise.

About Nscale

Nscale is building the global hyperscaler engineered for AI infrastructure. Through vertically integrated AI solutions and modular, first-principles data center design across Europe and North America, Nscale delivers the compute foundation for enterprise AI training, fine-tuning, and inference at scale.

Source: Armada

The post Armada and Nscale Outline Plans for Global Sovereign AI Data Center Network appeared first on HPCwire.

The carrier is positioning the Better Value plan for families, but this limited time deal has some strings attached.

The owner of a bowling alley in a small South Carolina city refused to integrate in the 1960s. It spurred peaceful protests until tensions erupted into what's now known as the "Orangeburg Massacre."

Umar Bio Salihu, 53, the local head of Woro in Kwara state, says gunmen ‘just came in and started shooting’

The traditional chief of a village in western Nigeria where jihadists massacred residents earlier this week has recounted a night of terror during which the attackers killed two of his sons and kidnapped his wife and three daughters.

Umar Bio Salihu, the 53-year-old chief of Woro, a small, Muslim-majority village in Kwara state, said that at about 5pm on Tuesday the gunmen “just came in and started shooting”.

Feb. 5, 2026 — Great things can come from failure when it comes to geology.

The Midcontinent rift formed about 1.1 billion years ago and runs smack in the middle of the United States at the Great Lakes. The rift failed to completely rupture, and had it succeeded it would have torn North America apart. Under immense pressure from receding tectonic plates, the weakened lithosphere instead created a basin in the crust eventually filled by Lake Superior, and it also exposed a 3000-km-long band of deeply buried igneous and sedimentary rocks.

Supercomputer simulations by University of Memphis scientists are revealing new details about geological rift failure — insights that could inform geothermal energy, rare earth mineral exploration, and more. Image of the Great Crack and surrounding lava flows along Kīlaueaʻs lower SW Rift Zone. Courtesy of the USGS.

Long a mystery, the details of rift failure are becoming clearer thanks to U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS-allocated supercomputer simulations on the Texas Advanced Computer Center’s (TACC) Stampede3 system by a pair of University of Memphis scientists. Their findings could help understand rift failure in other parts of the world with applications in renewable geothermal energy, rare earth minerals, and more.

“Our main finding is that we can understand the rift systems losing driving forces in terms of three parameters: how much the driving force is reduced, how fast it is reduced, and how mature the rift is when it starts losing its driving force,” said Kuruvitage Chameera Silva, a PhD student at The University of Memphis. He co-published a study in Nature Scientific Reports (October 2025) with his advisor Eunseo Choi, who leads the Geodynamics Research Group at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information.

“By running numerous numerical models while varying those three parameters, we could map out exactly when continental extension continues to full breakup, and when it fails,” Choi added.

“The NSF ACCESS program plays a vital role in making supercomputing resources broadly available to researchers across the United States,” Silva said. “These supercomputer allocations provided me, as a student researcher, with the high performance computing resources necessary to conduct the high-resolution continental rifting simulations central to this study, work that would have been impossible on local machines.”

Figure (a) Designed time dependent boundary traction depth integrated tractions for model. (b) Modeled slab dynamics. (c) Half extensional velocities for two models; CT model accelerates towards continental breakup (CB). (d) Model evolution at different time stamps. Credit: DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-19691-3.

Supercomputing Continental Rifts

The scientists used TACC’s Stampede3 supercomputer to simulate what happens when a tectonic plate is pulled from the sides. Rather than prescribing a fixed velocity, they applied more realistic force boundary conditions that evolve over the millions of years modeled. They also used HPC resources at The University of Memphis Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics.

The numerical models were made using the geodynamic code ASPECT that accounted for both the driving forces of the pulling that stretches the rift zone and the gravitational energy gradient; and the resisting forces of lithospheric cooling, rift strength, and mantle drag.

“This is the first study that successfully implemented the force boundary driven continental extension models in the ASPECT code,” Silva said.

ASPECT developers helped the team simulate the tensional tectonic settings, where each 2D model needed 128 cores or about three nodes to run over a period of two days to get a model simulation time of 20 million years. The published manuscript has 23 models.

“The Stampede3 supercomputer proved to be an excellent platform for this work, and ASPECT is well tested on its architecture. The installation was straightforward, and the system delivered strong parallel performance with reasonable queue times,” Silva said. “This allowed me to run model suites, parameter sweeps, and complex rheology efficiently, greatly accelerating the pace of the research.”

Beyond raw computing power, the NSF ACCESS initiative also helped Silva develop essential HPC skills including writing SLURM scripts, managing parallel workloads, and optimizing large-scale simulations. “The clear documentation and user support ensured I could focus on scientific objectives rather than technical obstacles,” he added.

Below the Surface

As a tectonic plate stretches, it becomes thinner and weaker. If the driving force is not enough to stretch the lithosphere, it cools and thickens. Whether a rift keeps spreading eventually splitting a continent apart or stops in the middle of making one main valley depends on the competition between the weakening forces and strengthening forces. The rift’s fate is determined by how quickly the plate weakens compared to how strongly it’s still being pulled apart.

A significant reduction in driving force stops rifting and results in no continental breakup; and with a small reduction, rifting is affected little, proceeding to continental breakup. A surprise in the study results, however, was that when the driving force decreases very slowly, it will have enough time to mature the rift, promoting continental breakup. Also, the more mature a rift gets, the weaker it becomes. Thus, a continental rift is more likely to complete breakup if it starts losing the driving force at a sufficiently late stage of shifting.

This new research helps the larger scientific community by connecting deep Earth dynamics with surface evolution in a quantitative, testable way. It shows how changes in stress, heat, and lithospheric structure lead to the diverse rift behaviors we see around the world — from successful ocean-forming rifts to long-lived failed rifts.

“Supercomputers let us ‘see’ processes inside the Earth that we can never observe directly, deep underground and over millions of years,” Silva said. “By recreating them in high-resolution simulations, we can test ideas, explore what-if scenarios, and better understand natural hazards and how continents evolve.”

Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC

The post TACC Simulations Shed New Light on Why Continental Rifts Fail appeared first on HPCwire.

Amid officials’ concern about vocal crowd reactions against the US, the vice-president’s visit to a hockey game felt closer to theater than geopolitics

Several thousand spectators who turned up for a Thursday afternoon hockey game in Milan’s western suburbs may have gotten a sneak preview of the 2028 Republican ticket when US vice-president JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio attended the United States women’s Olympic opener. With one hockey game already postponed because of norovirus, Olympic organizers could have been forgiven for hoping to avoid any other sudden waves of nausea inside the secondary rink across town.

Vance is in Italy to lead the official US delegation at Friday’s opening ceremony, joined by second lady Usha Vance, Rubio and billionaire Tilman Fertitta, the US ambassador to Italy and owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. The group watched Thursday’s game from the second and third rows at center ice behind the scorer’s table alongside Olympic gold medal-winning hockey sisters Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson and Monique Lamoureux-Morando.

Interest rates on money market accounts remain competitive. Here's how much a $40,000 account can earn in 2026.

Freaky robots get their drink on, a furniture designer turns to AI for a website, and more.

Feb. 5, 2026 — As part of its Quantum Computing Access at NERSC (QCAN) program, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) is seeking project proposals to conduct research using neutral atom quantum processors from QuEra Computing, including Aquila (analog) and Gemini (gate-based) systems. (Detailed specifications can be found at the bottom of each platform’s web page.)

Gemini gate-based neutral-atom computer at the AIST G-QuAT facility in Japan. Image credit: QuEra Computing.

Quantum computing platforms offer unique advantages for challenging problems critical to DOE’s mission in energy systems, materials science, and fundamental physics research. By providing researchers with access to this emerging technology, NERSC aims to accelerate scientific discovery in this space.

Awards

Up to six projects will be chosen between the Aquila and Gemini platforms. Work is expected to commence in April 2026, with a preliminary, three-month Stage A aimed at demonstrating the potential for quantum hardware runs. To complete this preliminary stage, Aquila teams will receive up to 12.5 QPU-hours of initial hardware access, while Gemini teams will focus on simulation and workflow development without hardware access.

Teams that successfully demonstrate potential for quantum hardware runs during Stage A will proceed to Stage B of the program and will receive their full allocation to complete their research projects. In the unlikely case that a team does not advance to Stage B, surplus hours will be redistributed to advancing teams.

During Stage B, Aquila teams are eligible for up to an additional 25 QPU-hours each, and Gemini teams up to 10 QPU-hours each. (Aquila is typically capable of 3 shots/sec, while Gemini is typically capable of 1 shot/sec.)

All projects will be completed by the end of 2026.

Eligibility

This is an open call. Proposals from all areas of quantum information science are welcome. Applicants do not have to be current NERSC users. However, because NERSC is a Department of Energy Office of Science national user facility for open scientific research, all research results must be published in open scientific journals or presented in open forums.

Requirements

To be successful, a project must have a clearly defined scope aligned with the DOE Office of Science mission. Topics encouraged include, but are not limited to, materials science, chemistry, high-energy physics, scientific simulation, and computational workflows relevant to HPC-integrated quantum computing. Successful applications will demonstrate the ability to commit sufficient worker hours to complete the project, ideally the equivalent of at least one full-time employee (FTE).

Selected projects must target one quantum processor, either Aquila or Gemini, and team members must complete the mandatory training before starting their project.

Additionally, teams will be required to plan their work according to the following schedule:

• January 30–February 28, Proposals accepted by NERSC.
• March 1–March 31, Review and approval process. Winners will be announced by the end of this period.
• April 1–June 30, Stage A: Application development, numerical simulations, and possible initial hardware runs for teams running on Aquila.
• July 1–December 31, Stage B: Full hardware runs on Aquila and Gemini, data processing, and reporting.

Selected teams must complete QuEra’s qbook training course to confirm participation. Selected teams that fail to fulfill the training requirement in a timely manner will be placed on a waitlist.

Teams are expected to actively participate in office hours and provide regular project status updates.

Export Controls

Proposed work must be open and fundamental research intended for publication. The use of NERSC and Berkeley Lab resources to store, manipulate, or remotely access information, software, or data that may affect the legal or security status of NERSC or Berkeley Lab or that requires additional controls require prior written approval from Berkeley Lab, which may be withheld at Berkeley Lab’s sole discretion. Such materials include, but are not limited to, export-controlled software or technical data, e.g. under EAR (Export Administration Regulations) or ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), personally identifiable information or health information (including data covered by HIPAA, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act), and information subject to “Controlled Unclassified Information” (CUI) designation or similar governmental restrictions.

Selection Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated on the following criteria:

• Prior Experience: Teams with hands-on experience using quantum hardware—especially in statistical analysis—require less onboarding and are more likely to succeed.
• Accountability: Projects led by postdoctoral researchers or senior personnel, and with significant FTE commitment, demonstrate stronger ownership and alignment with objectives.
• Defined Scope: Proposals with clearly articulated goals, success metrics, and resource requirements enable better planning and time management.
• Relevance to research areas supported by the DOE Office of Science.
• Technical feasibility.

Online applications are currently being accepted through February 28, 2026. Apply here.

More from HPCwire

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• NERSC Opens Call for QIS Research Using the Perlmutter Supercomputer

Source: NERSC

The post NERSC Issues 2026 Call for Proposals for Neutral Atom-Based Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

Amid warnings McSweeney’s survival would leave his position ‘untenable’, PM apologises to Epstein’s victims for appointing Mandelson as US ambassador

Downing Street has defied calls to remove Keir Starmer’s most senior aide, insisting Morgan McSweeney retains the prime minister’s confidence, as frustration grows over a wait for documents on Peter Mandelson, which some fear could last for weeks.

Amid warnings from Labour backbenchers that McSweeney’s survival would leave Starmer’s position “untenable”, Starmer apologised to victims of Jeffrey Epstein for appointing Mandelson, a close friend of the convicted child sex offender, as US ambassador.

Hannah and Daniel Neeleman's Ballerina Farm has stopped selling raw milk produced by its Utah farm.

Shifting explanations of Gabbard’s presence at election center intensifies scrutiny of role she played in operation

Donald Trump on Thursday offered a new and shifting account of why Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present last week at an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia, saying she went at the urging of the attorney general Pam Bondi.

“She took a lot of heat two days ago because she went in at Pam’s insistence,” the US president said at the National Prayer Breakfast, a high-profile event of political and religious leaders. “She went in and she looked at votes that wanted to be checked out from Georgia.”

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the many gadgets and systems powering the big game.

Employers cut more than 108,000 jobs in January, the highest total for that month since 2009, new data shows.

Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity supply: chip output is growing exponentially, and electrical output outside China is essentially flat. Solar panels in orbit generate roughly five times the power they do on the ground because there is no day-night cycle, no cloud cover, no atmospheric loss, and no atmosphere-related energy reduction. The system economics are even more favorable because space-based operations eliminate the need for batteries entirely, making the effective cost roughly 10 times cheaper than terrestrial solar, Musk said. The terrestrial bottleneck is already real. Musk said powering 330,000 Nvidia GB300 chips -- once you account for networking hardware, storage, peak cooling on the hottest day of the year, and reserve margin for generator servicing -- requires roughly a gigawatt at the generation level. Gas turbines are sold out through 2030, and the limiting factor is the casting of turbine vanes and blades, a process handled by just three companies worldwide. Five years from now, Musk predicted, SpaceX will launch and operate more AI compute annually than the cumulative total on Earth, expecting at least a few hundred gigawatts per year in space. Patel estimated that 100 gigawatts alone would require on the order of 10,000 Starship launches per year, a figure Musk affirmed. SpaceX is gearing up for 10,000 launches a year, Musk said, and possibly 20,000 to 30,000.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In ski jumping, a small difference in suit size can make a significant difference in an athlete's performance.

President Trump told NBC News he didn't know why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was at the search of the Georgia county's elections office.

US president says deal, which he previously described as act of ‘great stupidity’, was ‘best’ PM could make

Donald Trump has watered down his criticism of the UK’s plan to hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius, saying the deal was the “best” Keir Starmer could make.

The US president had described ceding sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory, which includes the Diego Garcia military base, as an “act of great stupidity” only last month. He also claimed the deal was one of many “national security reasons” why the US should acquire Greenland.

Square Enix revisits another Dragon Quest game with a remake that improves graphics, quickens the pace and adds plenty of quality-of-life upgrades.

Vodafone also reviewing its contract with Global Counsel after revelations of former minister’s links to Jeffrey Epstein

Barclays has reportedly cut ties with the lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson, after intense scrutiny of the founders’ dealings with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Vodafone has also said it is reviewing its contract for public affairs services with Global Counsel, which Mandelson co-founded in 2010 after Labour lost the general election.

Party says it will not back funding bill without reforms on – among other things – masks, ID and judicial warrants

Following the fatal shootings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis last month, Democrats have refused to support long-term funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unless Republicans agree to reforms on the tactics of federal agents carrying out Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

“The American people rightfully expect their elected representatives to take action to rein in ICE and ensure no more lives are lost,” the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and his House counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries, wrote on Wednesday night in a letter issuing 10 formal demands to GOP leadership in order to avert a 13 February lapse in funding for the department, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Border Patrol.

Anger at former US ambassador Peter Mandelson’s relations with the child sex offender threatens to topple the prime minister

It was the one scandal that Donald Trump seemed unable to shake. No matter his best efforts to convince his supporter base that there was nothing to see here, the demands for the administration to release every document it had on the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein only grew.

Yet even after the most shocking revelations in the latest drop about Trump’s inner circle – involving everyone from Elon Musk to the Maga honcho Steve Bannon to the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, not to mention Trump himself – so far, it seems, the administration has escaped largely unscathed. Nobody has resigned, nobody has been fired, and certainly there is no sign that the US president is going anywhere.

Trump might not embody Christian values yet is the religious right’s chosen instrument to turn the tide against liberal, godless America

• US politics live – latest updates

They had come to say a prayer for the father, the son and the holy ghost.

The father was Donald Trump, who, despite sending federal militias to roam Minneapolis, threatening to invade Greenland and telling lies by the dozen, remains the lord and saviour of the religious right.

While the US president’s many mentions in the Esptein files seem to have no consequences, in the UK Starmer could be the first world leader to fall

All around Europe, the political and business elite are facing an inquest on what blinded so many to think it was permissible to consort with a known child sex offender. As the 3m emails and 1,800 photos released on Friday by the US Department of Justice start to percolate across the continent and through to national media, questions about the moral fibre of this elite are starting to be asked at markedly different levels of intensity.

Squirming businessmen, bankers, politicians, royals, academics, tech bros and partners in law firms have become entangled in Jeffrey Epstein’s interlocking circles of money, power and sex. It seems there was no one in a position of power that Epstein was not in email contact with, and that there was little limit to what this networking elite was prepared to do in return for a gift, a contact or an invite to a sexually charged party. Elon Musk was right when in July 2025 he tweeted – only to quickly delete it – that “so many powerful people want that list suppressed”.

Opposition MPs urge Labour to pause public contracts with the US tech firm after attempts to examine deals blocked

Labour should halt public contracts with the US tech company Palantir, opposition politicians have said, amid growing concern at the lack of government transparency over dealings with the company and Peter Mandelson.

Since 2023, Palantir has secured more than £500m in contracts with the NHS and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), while it employed Global Counsel, the lobbying firm founded by Mandelson. Emails released by the US Department of Justice show Mandelson sought help from Jeffrey Epstein to find “rich individuals” as clients.

Although weakened by airstrikes, sanctions and domestic unrest, Tehran is surprisingly bullish before talks with US

When it comes to Iran and Donald Trump, there is so much bluff, backed by military hardware, that the truth rarely makes an appearance.

It appears that a bullish Iran is going into negotiations with the US on Friday adopting maximalist positions that do not seem greatly different to those it adopted in the five rounds of talks before the negotiations were abruptly halted by the surprise Israeli attack on Iran last June.

Lester’s 1990 classic about the wonders of nature wins Guardian Australia poll ahead of Possum Magic in second place

• Alison Lester interview: ‘Everything I do looks a bit like a stuffed toy’

• Children on their favourite picture book: ‘I also like that the dad cries’

Magic Beach by Alison Lester has won Guardian Australia’s poll to find Australia’s best children’s picture book of all time.

More than 100,000 votes were cast after polling opened on 27 January. Aside from the first day, when Possum Magic by Mem Fox and illustrator Julie Vivas took an early lead, Magic Beach was the most voted for book every other day of the count.

Automattic and the Internet Archive have released a free, open-source WordPress plugin that automatically detects broken outbound links on a site and redirects visitors to archived Wayback Machine copies instead of serving them a 404 error. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, which launched last fall and is available on WordPress.org, runs in the background scanning posts for dead links, checking for existing archived versions, and requesting new snapshots when none exist. It also archives a site's own posts whenever they are updated. If the original link comes back online, the plugin stops redirecting. Pew Research has found that 38% of the web has disappeared over the past decade, and WordPress powers more than 40% of websites online.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newly released documents from the Epstein files raise more questions about activity seen on video from the jail the night he died.

Super Bowl LX is three days away, and this is a guide to catch all the action, commercials and Bad Bunny's halftime show.

New rule would strip job safeguards for 50,000 federal employees and change how whistleblowers are protected

The Trump administration is seeking to finalize its overhaul of the federal government’s civil service system through a rule issued this week by the office of personnel management (OPM) to strip job protections from 50,000 civil service employees.

Under the rule, the president would have the authority to fire and hire an estimated 50,000 career federal employees.

Newly unsealed files claim the banker, who has denied any wrongdoing, forced a woman to touch his genitals during a massage before raping her

US prosecutors reviewed allegations of rape and bodily harm against the former Barclays boss and former JP Morgan banker Jes Staley, according to newly unsealed files linked to the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Multiple documents in the Epstein files cite serious allegations of sexual misconduct against Staley, including that he forced a woman to touch his genitals during a massage before raping her, and left “bloody marks” on the arms of a woman he called “tinkerbell”.

Miguel Díaz‑Canel says Cuba is willing to engage Washington amid the island’s deepening economic crisis

After months of threats from Donald Trump, the president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has said that his government is willing to talk to the United States, just so long as it is “without pressure”.

Standing in front of a life-sized photograph of Fidel Castro carrying a rifle during the 1959 revolution, Díaz-Canel, the 65-year-old president, said on Thursday that his island nation had been subject to an “intense media campaigns of slander, hatred and psychological warfare”.

Cryptocurrency-based prediction market announced it would open store in apparent nod to mayor’s signature policy

Zohran Mamdani made city-operated grocery stores a key pledge of his campaign for mayor of New York City. So when one company seemed to muscle in on the idea this week, apparently as a PR stunt, Mamdani was quick to reply.

Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction market, announced on Tuesday it would be opening “New York City’s first free grocery store,” seemingly a nod to the mayor’s signature policy. In a statement the firm said it hoped to “empower every New Yorker to achieve food security for good”, and that it had donated $1m to the Food Bank for NYC.

The killing of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is the end of a political era in Libya Expert comment jon.wallace 5 February 2026

Saif al-Islam wielded little influence over the current running of the state. But his presence was still a political and potentially military threat to his rivals.

On Tuesday 3 February, news broke of the killing of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. Four assailants reportedly entered his compound in the city of Zintan and shot him dead. The events resemble a murder mystery drama. 

Rumours abound over the perpetrators of the killing and their motivations. Where does this fit politically – is it connected to negotiations over a new government? Or a dispute over national reconciliation talks? Is this the result of a local feud within the city of Zintan? Or could national players have been involved? 

Both the Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid al-Dabaiba, and the family of Khalifa Haftar, which dominates the east and south of the country, stand to benefit from Saif’s death. But no one has claimed responsibility for the act: doing so could result in potential retribution. So what does the killing say about Libya in 2026? And what are the implications?

A symbol of an alternative path for Libya

Saif al-Islam was the heir apparent of his father, longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He had been at the centre of Libyan politics since the 2000s, when he spearheaded a reform movement to liberalize the Libyan state. That effort was seen as counter to his father’s political philosophy by many of the true believers in the so-called ‘Green’ camp. Some believed that Saif’s programme had undermined the regime and contributed to its demise.

The pivotal moment came for Saif in 2011 when he addressed the nation as the uprising against his father’s rule gathered momentum. Faced with the choice of advocating de-escalation or a call to arms, Saif chose the latter. His words that day have nonetheless reverberated in the minds of Libyans. He predicted a collapse of the Libyan economy, foreign occupation and ‘rivers of blood’. 

Even for supporters of the revolution, many elements of Saif’s prophecy have come to pass. Dissatisfaction with the parlous state of the country has led some, who wouldn’t consider themselves supporters of the regime, to sympathize with his plight and to ask: were the choices made in 2011 the right ones? 

Reactions to his death ranged, from celebration for the death of a tyrant, to anger that a future national leader had been killed. In this sense, Saif personified the lack of confidence and anxiety Libyans feel for their own futures. 

There are also more practical implications emerging from Saif’s death.

The end of the ‘Greens’ as a collective

Saif al-Islam was the only figure who could coalesce the ‘Green’ constituency – a range of actors from broad pro-Gaddafi communities in cities such as Sirte, Bani Walid and Sebha to former regime-aligned elites in security and government. Their significance as a political force has been a regular source of debate. But there is little dispute that Saif al-Islam is the only figure that could have united them.

With their forces defeated on the ground, Gaddafi’s ‘men of the tent’ went into exile, were imprisoned, or forged new alliances. Both Tripoli and Benghazi-based authorities have long sought to re-integrate former regime political and intelligence figures to court the elite Green constituency. The death of Saif does not really shift these dynamics.

The Greens have continued to undertake some collective action in discussions, most notably over internationally mediated reconciliation efforts. But these are sporadic and have no clear tangible results. 

The removal of a political obstacle

Saif al-Islam’s real threat to his opponents came in the form of his potential to influence, rather than his current influence. After all, at the time of his death he was largely confined to a house in Zintan. In the end, he was not safe even there.  

But things were very different in 2021, when Saif’s return to the political scene caused a political earthquake. Rivals feared that Saif could win elections, or at the very least exert meaningful influence over any new government as a kingmaker. His entry into the presidential elections that year was one of the reasons those elections never took place.

Since then, Saif has played no meaningful role in Libyan political life. He had no political infrastructure, nor has he been active in seeking to forge political alliances.

But there was nonetheless a sense that should elections be announced, Saif would re-emerge from the shadows and present a renewed threat. Political opponents would have worried that he might take votes not only from supporters of the former regime, but also those fed up with the current state of affairs. His removal lessens those fears.

A future threat to the Haftars

A decade ago, the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), led by Khalifa Haftar, began outreach to military commanders that fought under the former regime. That was part of a strategy to consolidate control over central and southern Libya.

Related work

Escaping the cycle of conflict in Libya

Pro-Gaddafi constituencies have formed a key part of the LAAF ever since and have been critical to its control of territory. Yet, since the political return of Saif al-Islam in 2021, the Haftars have become fearful that these elements could break away and align with Saif should the opportunity arise. 

That threat would likely grow when Khalifa Haftar, the octogenarian family patriarch, dies. His likely successor, son Saddam, may have struggled to compete for loyalty in the face of a challenge from Saif al-Islam.

The LAAF has been reorganizing its forces to place them under the direct control of the Haftar family: a key example is the breakup of the 128 Brigade headed by a pro-Gaddafi family, the Zadmas. The killing of Saif will ease these efforts and likely leave pro-Gaddafi constituencies with a choice of remaining aligned with the Haftars or switching allegiance to the GNU.

Prospects

Ultimately, Saif’s killing is likely to stoke some retribution from his supporters, particularly if the perpetrators (and their sponsors) are revealed. But this is not likely to shift the balance nationally. Rather it seems like it further entrenches the pattern of consolidation of power within Libya.

It’s no surprise that modern particle detectors create huge amounts of data. Working through all the data is challenging – to say the least. More time, more storage, more computing power.

At DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, researchers are trying a different approach. They are using artificial intelligence to make sense of the data flood as it arrives.

For a long time, experiments followed a basic pattern. Store data in batches, and analyze later. That worked when data volumes were smaller. Now, with today’s particle detectors, that old model is starting to break down. This is why Brookhaven researchers are now using AI and machine learning (ML) to filter and compress signals while experiments are still running.

This is a reminder that the world of physics is gradually moving away from batch analysis and closer to real-time monitoring and analysis. Detectors today produce data torrents. It’s simply no longer feasible to write every data point to storage. Something has to be done. Brookhaven chose to develop and use greater intelligence.

“Our goal is to improve the scientific capability of particle detectors like sPHENIX at RHIC and detectors at future colliders, including the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC),” said Jin Huang, the principal investigator on the project.

Brookhaven’s sPHENIX particle accelerator (Image courtesy Brookhaven National Lab)

“Right now, RHIC is producing more collision events than we can record in our experiments,” Huang said. “To maximize the physics output from the facility, we need a reliable and innovative way to pack more information into each byte of data recorded so we can eliminate the need for an event selection bias and record more and more collision events.”

What about the architecture behind this? Well, Brookhaven is pushing AI directly into the acquisition pipeline. It’s not relying on traditional triggers that preselect which events to keep. The system applies ML inline to help decide what matters while measurements are still in motion.

This looks remarkably similar to modern streaming data stack. Detectors are like a massive collection of sensor networks. Collisions come in as continuous events, and the neural network inference as inline compression. So the storage gets selective in this way. Compute moves closer to the source. The experiments start to look more like distributed data platforms than traditional lab setups.

A key technical insight comes from sparsity. Not all the data detectors generate are actually particle tracks. Brookhaven’s algorithm exploits this asymmetry.

“Our algorithm can zoom in on the meaningful parts of the picture — the few voxels filled by particle tracks — and do computation only on these values,” said Yi Huang, a computational scientist at Brookhaven and lead author on the paper.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is located in Upton, New York (Image courtesy Brookhaven National Laboratory)

“In this way, sparsity becomes an advantage for us,” she said. “The fewer voxels with meaningful values, the less computation our algorithm needs to do, resulting in faster data processing.”

This development goes beyond just data compression. It is where AI now sits in the scientific stack. The Brookhaven researchers don’t view it as operating downstream as an analytics layer. They consider this as intelligence that has moved upstream into data acquisition itself. You get continuous discovery. Feedback loops and not one-off runs.

This shift forces infrastructure to evolve. Accelerators need tighter integration with instruments. Networks must sustain high-throughput streams. Storage systems must support intentional capture instead of raw retention. Orchestration frameworks increasingly treat experiments like always-on services. The research facilities start to look like AI-native data centers built for continuous operation. This is where hardware and software co-design shapes what is possible.

The implications extend well beyond particle physics. Think of materials science, climate modeling, biological imaging, genomics. They all face similar pressures as sensors grow more powerful and data volumes explode. Brookhaven’s approach is a blueprint for AI-native science, where algorithms help guide what gets stored and studied.

There is also a strategic tradeoff underway – scientists are choosing intelligent loss over raw completeness. AI becomes a gatekeeper of future discovery. This shifts bias from hand-designed triggers to learned models. That introduces new challenges around transparency and validation, but it also unlocks a scale of experimentation that would otherwise be impossible.

The key takeaway from this is that science labs are evolving into continuous discovery platforms. Software architecture still matters as much as hardware design. But what Brookhaven’s work shows is what happens when science embraces real-time data engineering – and we might be seeing more of this from others.

This article first appeared in BigDATAwire. The feature image at the top shows Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) (Image courtesy Brookhaven National Laboratory) 

The post Brookhaven Embeds AI Directly Into Particle Accelerator Data Pipelines appeared first on HPCwire.

Bezalel Zini accused of role in taking goods into the occupied Palestinian territory during an Israeli blockade

The brother of Israel’s internal security chief has been charged with “assisting the enemy in wartime” for his alleged role in a smuggling network taking cigarettes and other goods into Gaza during an Israeli blockade of the occupied Palestinian territory.

Bezalel Zini was one of more than 10 people charged in relation to the alleged network. His brother, David Zini, is the head of the Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency. He was appointed by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last May and began the job in October.

You may soon be able to access every family member's health data in one place.

The AI company's models and apps are already upsetting the software industry. Now here comes Opus 4.6.

Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company's AI tools have already spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors. The new model improves on Opus 4.5's coding abilities, the company said -- it plans more carefully, sustains longer agentic tasks, handles larger codebases more reliably, and catches its own mistakes through better debugging. It is also the first Opus-class model to feature a 1M token context window, currently in beta. On GDPval-AA, an independent benchmark measuring performance on knowledge-work tasks in finance, legal and other domains, Opus 4.6 outperformed OpenAI's GPT-5.2 by roughly 144 Elo points. Anthropic also introduced agent teams in Claude Code, allowing multiple agents to work in parallel on tasks like codebase reviews. Pricing remains at $5/$25 per million input/output tokens.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President condemns ‘environmental and health crime’ as critics say Israel seeks to make southern Lebanon uninhabitable

Lebanon has accused Israel of spraying a herbicide linked to cancer on farmland in the south of the country as a “health crime” that would threaten food security and farmers’ livelihoods.

The country’s president, Joseph Aoun, condemned what he called “an environmental and health crime” and a violation of Lebanese sovereignty, and he vowed to take “all necessary legal and diplomatic measures to confront this aggression”.

The U.S. on Thursday announced the resumption of dialogue with Russia's military, which had been suspended since 2021.

Investigation exposes ‘corrosive’ reach of organized crime in Canada, with links to bribes, drug trade and a murder plot

At least eight current and former Toronto police officers have been arrested following a sweeping investigation that officials say exposed the “corrosive” reach of organized crime into Canada’s largest municipal police service.

Police allege fellow officers accepted bribes, aided drug traffickers, leaked personal information to criminals who then carried out shootings and helped members of organized crime in a plot to murder a corrections officer.

Python will be the fourth officially-supported language in the OpenMP API

BEAVERTON, Ore., Feb. 5, 2026 — The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) today announced the formation of an OpenMP Python Language Subcommittee to add Python support to version 7.0 of the OpenMP API specification. At the same time, Anaconda, a key contributor to Python’s infrastructure and tooling ecosystem, has joined the OpenMP ARB and will play an important role in the Python integration effort.

Python is one of the most popular programming languages, widely used in application programming across many ecosystems, and the OpenMP API is one of the most used APIs in high-performance computing, embedded systems, and more. Adding Python support to the OpenMP standard will provide Python developers with a new way to express parallelism portably and accelerate Python applications running on CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. Technical reports will detail the preliminary integration along the way, with the 7.0 release planned for 2029.

Anaconda brings deep expertise in Python performance optimization and has been instrumental in developing critical infrastructure used throughout the Python community. Trusted by 50 million users and 95% of the Fortune 500, Anaconda provides the foundation for intelligent systems that solve complex, high-value problems. As an OpenMP ARB member, Anaconda will contribute technical leadership and help to ensure that the Python implementation meets the needs of the broader ecosystem.

“Joining the OpenMP ARB lets us bring parallel computing capabilities directly to developers,” said Stanley Seibert, Senior Director of Community Innovation at Anaconda. “By combining OpenMP’s proven standard for high-performance parallel computing with Anaconda’s decade-plus experience in Python performance engineering and compiler technology, we’re committed to ensuring this integration will serve teams building compute-intensive AI and data applications at scale.”

“I’m excited to lead the effort to expand OpenMP support to Python,” said Giorgis Georgakoudis, Chair of the OpenMP Python Language Subcommittee. “I believe the Python community will greatly benefit from OpenMP’s open, portable programming abstractions for performance acceleration. Anaconda’s participation brings invaluable real-world Python experience that will be crucial to our success.”

“Adding Python as a base language to the OpenMP API is a major undertaking,” said Bronis R. de Supinski, Chair of the OpenMP Language Committee. “This exciting direction has already met with enthusiasm from the Python community, and Anaconda’s membership reinforces our commitment to getting this right.”

“Python is a cornerstone of both HPC and AI, offering unmatched productivity and flexibility,” said Michael Klemm, CEO of the OpenMP ARB. “Adding support for Python to the OpenMP API will strengthen this advantage by enabling efficient, portable parallelism across heterogeneous architectures. We’re delighted to welcome Anaconda and look forward to their contributions.”

Companies wishing to participate in our effort are invited to become OpenMP members and join in the ongoing conversation. See information about OpenMP membership at https://www.openmp.org/join.

About OpenMP

The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) standardizes high-level, directive-based, multi-language parallelism that is performant, productive, and portable. Jointly defined by a group of major hardware and software vendors and research organizations, the OpenMP API is a portable, scalable model that gives programmers an interface for developing parallel applications for platforms including embedded systems, accelerator devices, multicore and shared-memory systems, artificial intelligence systems, and more. For more information, see https://www.openmp.org.

Source: OpenMP

The post OpenMP ARB Launches Python Subcommittee, Welcomes Anaconda as Newest Member appeared first on HPCwire.

Senate Republicans criticized Democrats' list of demands to rein in ICE, further reducing the odds of reaching a deal on DHS funding.

Prosecutors allege that Kyle Wagner, 37, shared social media posts threatening ICE agents.

Lawmakers are warning Americans to beware the many financial scams linked to Super Bowl LX, from fake betting sites to counterfeit tickets.

If you own last year's Apple Watch, is it worth upgrading to the latest model? We compare all the features.

Since 2026 TV models won't come out until spring, now's a good time to save on last year's models.

There will be performances happening throughout the evening.

Some backbenchers blame Pm’s chief of staff for Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador

After the release of a vast tranche of documents and emails that shed further light on the close relationship between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, the government has come under intense pressure to release details about its vetting process before Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador in December 2024.

Below, we look at how much Keir Starmer knew about Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein, and what vetting process the former peer went through for the top diplomatic job in Washington.

Data from November 2025 was also revised lower amid a softening in labor market conditions at the end of the year

US job openings dropped to the lowest level in more than five years in December and data for the prior month was revised lower amid a softening in labor market conditions at the end of 2025.

Job openings, a measure of labor demand, decreased by 386,000 to 6.542m by the last day of December, the lowest level since September 2020, the labor department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or Jolts report, on Thursday.

Back taxes won't automatically disqualify you from a refund, but that doesn't mean you'll see the money, either.

Man misidentified by London supermarket using Facewatch system says: ‘I shouldn’t have to prove I am not a criminal’

A man was ordered to leave a supermarket in London after staff misidentified him using controversial new facial recognition technology.

Warren Rajah was told to abandon his shopping and leave the local store he has been using for a number of years after an “Orwellian” error in a Sainsbury’s in Elephant and Castle, London.

KINGSTON, R.I., Feb. 5, 2026 — Using advanced computer simulations, researchers from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO) have concluded how and why strong ocean currents modify surface waves.

Using a high-performance computer, the research team generated models to show how storm-driven currents affect wave height and dominant wave period. (URI images courtesy of Isaac Ginis)

“Our primary finding is that hurricane-generated ocean currents can substantially reduce both the height and the dominant period of hurricane waves,” said Isaac Ginis, URI professor of oceanography. “The magnitude of wave reduction depends strongly on how accurately ocean currents are predicted. This highlights the importance of using fully coupled wave-ocean models when forecasting hurricane waves.”

Ginis conducted the research with URI Professor Tetsu Hara and Angelos Papandreou, who earned his Ph.D. in oceanography from URI in December 2025. Their results were published in a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Physical Oceanography in January 2026.

According to Ginis, waves are most strongly reduced by currents on the front right of the storm, where winds, waves and currents are typically strongest.

“On the front-right side of a hurricane, storm-driven currents move in the same direction as the waves,” said Ginis. “This causes the waves to travel more quickly through the high-wind region. Because the waves spend less time being energized by the wind, they do not grow as large as they otherwise would.”

The team’s computer simulations included hurricanes of different sizes, strengths, and forward speeds. Depending on the hurricane characteristics, the simulations revealed that the maximum significant wave height—the average height of the highest one-third of waves—can be reduced by 0.4-2.2 meters, or roughly 1-7 feet, and the dominant wave period can be shortened by about 0.3-1.5 seconds.

Researchers produced models to show how currents of varying strengths, moving in different directions impact surface waves.

“While wave height often gets the most attention, wave period is also a key factor in determining how waves affect offshore or nearshore structures, such as oil platforms,” said Ginis.

The simulations required a powerful computer, so the researchers remotely accessed URI’s high-performance computing nodes installed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts. URI formed a partnership with the computing center in 2021.

Ginis is hopeful that the team’s research, which was funded by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program/Office of Naval Research, will be adopted by weather services to more accurately predict waves during hurricanes.

The professor will have an opportunity to discuss potential operational implementation of the team’s findings with NOAA scientists and hurricane forecasters at the American Meteorological Society Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology in San Diego on March 30.

“This work has strong potential for operational use because we use the same wave and ocean models—WAVEWATCH III and MOM6—that are already part of the National Weather Service’s HAFS hurricane forecast system,” said Ginis. “Our findings could be incorporated without major changes to existing forecasting tools. Our group has a long history of working with NOAA scientists, and results from our previous studies have already been implemented in operational hurricane models.”

More from HPCwire

• URI and UMass Are Jointly Building and Operating a Cluster Called ‘UNITY’ at the MGHPCC [2022]
• U of Rhode Island Partners with the Massachusetts Green HPC Center [2021]

Source: URI

The post URI: Computer Simulations Show Strong Ocean Currents Reduce Size of Surface Waves appeared first on HPCwire.

Love air fryers but not how they look? Here's my review of the powerful and pretty new Cosori Iconic.

Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the 2030s. The vertical laser, developed over six years and already working in WD's labs, emits light straight down onto the disk rather than from the edge, delivering more thermal energy while occupying less vertical space -- enabling areal densities up to 10 TB per platter, up from today's 4 TB, and room for additional platters in the same enclosure. WD's first commercial HAMR drives arrive in late 2026 at 40-44 TB on an 11-platter design, ramping into volume production in 2027. A 12-platter platform follows in 2028 at 60 TB, and WD expects to hit 100 TB by around 2030.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump’s former adviser told Epstein in 2019 that he was ‘focused on raising money for Le Pen and Salvini’ before European elections

Dozens of messages contained in the latest tranche of Epstein files lay bare the attempts by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon to tap Jeffrey Epstein for support and funding to bolster European far-right parties.

The messages mostly date to 2018 and 2019, when Bannon, after being sacked by Trump, regularly visited Europe in his quest to forge a movement in the European parliament uniting ultra-rightwing and Eurosceptic forces from several countries including Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and Austria.

Plus, enjoy a record low on the Roku Smart TV and over 20% off the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8.

Family of Lilia Valutyte, killed by Deividas Skebas in July 2022, say she ‘will always live in our hearts’

A man who stabbed a nine-year-old girl to death in 2022 has been found guilty of her murder.

Deividas Skebas, a 26-year-old Lithuanian man, killed Lilia Valutyte by stabbing her through the heart while the child was playing with a hula hoop outside her mother’s embroidery shop in Boston, Lincolnshire, on 28 July 2022.

Feb. 5, 2026 — Researchers at West Virginia University (WVU) and the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have discovered that by adjusting the ratio of elements in a recently discovered material called “iron telluride selenide,” they can switch “exotic” quantum states on and off in materials that are critical for building quantum computers.

Credit: WVU

Iron telluride selenide is valuable to the scientists and engineers who are trying to make quantum computing a reality because it possesses superconductivity, as well as certain exotic properties.

For quantum computing applications, the elements iron, tellurium and selenium are typically grown in ultra-thin films. The researchers found that by tweaking a chemical recipe and changing the interactions between electrons in the films, they could “tune” those elements, moving them between different quantum phases.

They were also able to reach a highly desirable state called a “topological superconductor.” Topological superconductors are promising for building error-free quantum devices of the future because they are inherently stable and resistant to the noise that affects most quantum materials.

Coauthor Subhasish Mandal, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, explained that today’s most powerful computers hit a wall when tackling certain problems, from designing new drugs to cracking encryption codes. Error-free quantum computers promise to overcome those challenges, but building them requires materials with the exotic properties of topological superconductors, which are difficult to produce.

The research team included University of Chicago collaborators Shuolong Yang, assistant professor of molecular engineering, and graduate student Haoran Lin. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, reveal that as the ratio of tellurium and selenium changes in iron telluride selenide, so do the correlations between different electrons. Changing those ratios serves as a sensitive control knob for engineering exotic quantum phases.

“Iron telluride selenide is a unique material because it brings together all the essential ingredients one would hope for in a platform for topological superconductivity: superconductivity itself, strong spin-orbit coupling, and pronounced electronic correlations,” Mandal said. “This combination makes it an ideal system in which to explore how different quantum effects interact and compete.”

The team noted that overly strong correlations pin electrons in place, while overly weak interactions wash out the material’s topological features. At the right strength, these interactions give rise to topological superconductivity, Mandal said.

Christopher Jacobs, a graduate student in Mandal’s group, turned to advanced computational methods to explain the transition. Jacobs realized that the motion of electrons changed as tellurium concentrations increased, and that those changing electron correlations drove the quantum states and the way electrons behaved on the material’s surface.

“Seeing this delicate balance unfold experimentally was both surprising and illuminating,” said Mandal. “It points to electron correlations as a powerful and previously underappreciated tool for engineering topological quantum matter. And it highlights the fact that quantum materials are not fixed objects — they can be actively tuned by subtle internal interactions.”

Source: UWV

The post WVU and UChicago Researchers Tune Quantum States in Superconducting Material appeared first on HPCwire.

These are the best TVs I’ve reviewed for every budget, including top brands such as LG, Samsung and TCL.

Members of Congress are demanding answers from Meta after it ran advertisements by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they say included imagery and music intended to appeal to white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The lawmakers urged Meta to cease running the ad campaign on its social media platforms and asked whether the company would commit to ending its digital advertising partnership with DHS.

The Intercept was among the first to report ICE’s use of the song in a paid post recruiting for the agency, which published shortly after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. In their letter, the members of Congress cite The Intercept’s reporting.

Related

DHS Used Neo-Nazi Anthem for Recruitment After Fatal Minneapolis ICE Shooting

The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right “reclamation” narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology.

“Businesses are not on the sideline at this moment and it is important they also know how they are contributing to what is happening in Minnesota and across the country,” said Balint. “A lack of change is not neutrality but complicity.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, which has not responded to the congressional letter, defended its recruitment messaging in a statement to The Intercept.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected comparisons between the ads and extremist propaganda, arguing that criticism of the campaign amounted to an attack on patriotic expression.

“By Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal’s standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the Fourth of July should be cancelled and labeled a Nazi,” McLaughlin said. “Not everything you dislike is ‘Nazi propaganda.’ DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

McLaughlin also accused critics of “manufacturing outrage” and said the controversy had contributed to a rise in assaults against ICE personnel. “It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she said.

Related

Judge Censored an ICE Agent’s Face Over “Threats.” His Info Was a Google Search Away.

McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Similar assertions by the Trump administration about sharp increases in assaults against immigration agents are not reflected in publicly available data.

The most controversial ad in the campaign was a paid DHS recruitment post that published less than two days after the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. It paired immigration enforcement footage with the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots. Popular in neo-Nazi online spaces, the song includes lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” In the ad, it played as a cowboy rode a horse with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying overhead.

After publicly rebuking allegations that the song had neo-Nazi ties, DHS later removed the recruitment post from its official Instagram account, according to a review of the page and reporting by other outlets. The department did not announce the deletion or respond to questions about why it was taken down. DHS did not address the song’s documented circulation in white nationalist spaces or its appearance in the manifesto of a 2023 mass shooter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has separately documented the song’s origins and circulation within organized white nationalist networks. The song was written and performed by Pine Tree Riots, a group affiliated with the Männerbund, which the SPLC has previously identified as a white nationalist organization. Hatewatch also found that the song has circulated widely in extremist online spaces and appeared in recruitment efforts by far-right groups.

Balint and Jayapal framed the controversy as bigger than a single post. They accuse Meta of profiting from a large-scale digital recruitment campaign relying on themes that would stand out to white nationalists. They questioned what safeguards existed to prevent extremist-linked content from appearing in government advertising, and whether recent changes to Meta’s hate-speech policies allowed the company to run the ads.

The letter details the scale of the recruitment push. According to the lawmakers, DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram between March and December of last year, and paid Meta an additional $500,000 beginning in August. During the first three weeks of last fall’s government shutdown, ICE spent $4.5 million on paid media campaigns, the lawmakers write. The letter also cites reporting showing DHS spent more than $1 million over a 90-day period on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in Latin music, Spanish as a second language, and Mexican cuisine.

Balint and Jayapal argue that such spending has been made possible by an influx of funding for ICE. A decade ago, ICE’s annual budget totaled less than $6 billion. Under new federal appropriations enacted last year, the agency has roughly $85 billion at its disposal, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. According to analysts cited by lawmakers, its budget is bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

The lawmakers pointed to what they described as a deterioration in internal oversight and hiring standards, including waived age limits, large signing bonuses, and reports of recruits being rushed into the field without adequate training. They argued that the combination of rapid expansion, aggressive recruitment, and weak platform safeguards poses risks to public safety.

“It is important that we scrutinize how that funding is being used, particularly if it is being used to attract certain demographics for hiring while pushing others to the periphery, or out of our society,” Balint said.

The letter asks Meta to disclose the scope and duration of its advertising agreement with DHS, provide any communications related to the recruitment ads, and explain what restrictions apply to paid government content under its policies.

Meta’s Community Standards prohibit content that promotes dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, or calls for exclusion or segregation targeting people based on protected characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status.

The policies also state that Meta removes content historically linked to intimidation or offline violence and applies heightened scrutiny during periods of increased tension or recent violence involving targeted groups. The members of Congress questioned whether those standards were enforced consistently for paid government advertising tied to DHS recruitment.

“There are a whole host of safeguards that should be considered,” Balint said. “But at a minimum, they need to abide by their own community guidelines.”

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Balint said the inquiry is ongoing and could expand beyond the recruitment campaign itself. “I am certainly going to continue looking into how private groups are profiting off of or contributing to the untenable dynamic with ICE that is putting our communities at risk,” she said.

Since the recruitment campaign became the subject of public scrutiny, DHS and ICE have not made additional posts using the same song, imagery, or music across their official social media accounts.

The post Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad Featuring Neo-Nazi Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff said that the US, Ukraine and Russia have agreed to exchange 314 prisoners in “the first such exchange in five months.”

He said:

“This outcome was achieved from peace talks that have been detailed and productive. While significant work remains, steps like this demonstrate that sustained diplomatic engagement is delivering tangible results and advancing efforts to end the war in Ukraine.”

“We may be, in the course of 2026, coming to a point where the whole thing becomes unsustainable, because so much of the Russian economy has been distorted so much by the building up of the war economy at the expense of the civil economy. I think defying the laws of economic gravity can only go on for so long.”

It is not good enough just to criticize Trump. We must offer a positive vision that will improve the lives of Americans

At this difficult moment in American history, it’s imperative that we have the courage to be honest with ourselves.

The United States, once the envy of the world, is now a nation in profound decline. For the sake of our children and future generations, we must reverse that decline and change, in very fundamental ways, the direction of our country.

Former truck driver, now 80, allegedly one of many ‘sniper tourists’ who paid Bosnian Serb soldiers to be allowed fire on city

An elderly Italian man is under investigation as part of an investigation by prosecutors in Milan into individuals who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army for trips to Sarajevo so they could kill citizens during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.

The 80-year-old is being investigated on charges of aggravated murder, a source close to the case told the Guardian. The man, a former truck driver from the northern Italian region of Veneto, is the first suspect to be placed under investigation since the inquiry began in November.

I reviewed Amazon, Hisense, Roku and Samsung TVs under $300 and found one absolute stunner.

CAA’s guidance also including booking sites to enable passengers to make ‘more informed travel decisions’

Airlines and booking firms should give UK customers information about the environmental impact of their flights, the regulator has said.

The Civil Aviation Authority urged booking sites to enable passengers to make “more informed travel decisions” by setting out estimates for carbon emissions for flights landing or taking off from British airports.

Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the creative process. Amazon plans to launch a closed beta program in March, inviting industry partners to test its AI tools. The company expects to have results to share by May. [...] Amazon is leaning on its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, for help and plans to work with multiple large language model providers to give creators a wider array of options for pre- and post-production filmmaking.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Considering a silver investment in today's economic climate? Here's where the price stands as of February 5, 2026.

Russia's customs service says a 2.8-ton chunk of the Aletai meteorite was found in a shipping container, labeled as a garden ornament.

Officials in Reedley, California said they had tried to warn federal authorities about the possibility of similar labs after one was found there in 2023.

Feb. 5, 2026 — SoftBank Corp. announced its wholly owned subsidiary SAIMEMORY Corp. signed a collaborative agreement with Intel Corporation on February 2, 2026 to advance the commercialization of Z-Angle Memory (ZAM), a next-generation memory technology designed for high capacity, high bandwidth and low power consumption.

Established in December 2024, SAIMEMORY is a SoftBank subsidiary conducting research and development to promote the commercialization of next-generation memory technologies. SAIMEMORY will leverage the next-generation memory foundational technologies and technical expertise validated by Intel’s Next Generation DRAM Bonding (NGDB) initiative that was completed under the Advanced Memory Technology (AMT) program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration through the Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

With the aim of creating prototypes in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2028 (FY2027) and achieving commercialization in FY2029, SAIMEMORY will advance research and development on innovative memory architectures and manufacturing technologies. Through the utilization of ZAM next-generation memory technology, SAIMEMORY and Intel will work together to enable high-capacity and high-bandwidth data processing, enhanced processing performance and reduced power consumption in data centers and other environments that require the training and inference of large-scale AI models.

SAIMEMORY’s development of next-generation memory technologies represents one of SoftBank’s key initiatives to support next-generation social infrastructure. By collaborating with Intel and other technology partners and research institutions in Japan and abroad, SoftBank will contribute to the creation of advanced, homegrown semiconductor technologies, and to the strengthening of Japan’s global competitiveness.

More from HPCwire: SoftBank Group and Intel Corporation Sign $2B Investment Agreement

About Intel

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) designs and manufactures advanced semiconductors that connect and power the modern world. Every day, our engineers create new technologies that enhance and shape the future of computing to enable new possibilities for every customer we serve. Learn more at intel.com.

About SoftBank Corp.

Guided by the SoftBank Group’s corporate philosophy, “Information Revolution – Happiness for everyone,” SoftBank Corp. (TOKYO: 9434) operates telecommunications and IT businesses in Japan and globally. Building on its strong business foundation, SoftBank Corp. is expanding into non-telecom fields in line with its “Beyond Carrier” growth strategy while further growing its telecom business by harnessing the power of 5G/6G, IoT, Digital Twin and Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) solutions, including High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS)-based stratospheric telecommunications. While constructing AI data centers and developing homegrown LLMs specialized for the Japanese language, SoftBank is integrating AI with radio access networks (AI-RAN), with the aim of becoming a provider of next-generation social infrastructure. To learn more, please visit https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp.

Source: SoftBank Corp.

The post SoftBank and Intel Collaborate to Commercialize Next-Gen Memory Tech appeared first on HPCwire.

Today show host Savannah Guthrie and her siblings have published a video statement calling for the safe return of their mother, Nancy Guthrie, 84, reported missing on Sunday. Guthrie said her mother's health was fragile and she needed her medicine to survive. She said she had heard of the reports of a ransom letter and continued: 'We are ready to talk, however we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated. We need to know without a doubt that she is alive'

• Savannah Guthrie releases video appealing for proof her missing mother is alive

Housing affordability is improving as more homeowners list their properties, according to data from Zillow.

US federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring warrantless arrests unless there is a likelihood of escape

US immigration agents in Oregon must stop arresting people without warrants unless there is a likelihood of escape, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.

US district judge Mustafa Kasubhai issued a preliminary injunction in a proposed class-action lawsuit targeting the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of arresting immigrants they happen to come across while conducting ramped-up enforcement operations – which critics have described as “arrest first, justify later”.

Oil, regime change, and what's next in Trump’s MAGA playbook? Independent Thinking podcast Audio sseth.drupal@c… 5 February 2026

After the US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, our analysts discuss where in the Western Hemisphere US President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio may turn their attention to next.

Host Bronwen Maddox is joined by Laurel Rapp, director of Chatham House’s US and North America Programme, and Dr Christopher Sabatini, Senior Fellow for Latin America. They dissect the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’, Marco Rubio’s project to reform Cuba’s regime, Haiti, and why oil is central to the MAGA playbook.

Read Dr Sabatini’s full research paper ‘A roadmap for security and governance reform in Haiti’.

About Independent Thinking

Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists, and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify. 

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff calls Ukraine and Russia's exchange of 314 prisoners "tangible progress," but acknowledges a lot of work left to end the war.

Industry leaders urge EU to tell authorities to stand down entry-exit system controls if needed

Travel industry leaders have called on the European Commission to tell all border authorities to stand down the new entry-exit system (EES) if needed as fears increase of summer disruption.

European airports have warned of a potentially “disastrous” experience for passengers and huge queues unless the biometric controls for foreign visitors are relaxed.

South Crofty site could get $225m funding as US seeks to secure supply of critical metal

Donald Trump has aggressively pursued investment into hi-tech industries in recent months, but the US administration has now set its sights on a more traditional sector: tin mining in Cornwall.

The South Crofty mine, near the village of Pool, could start up again after nearly three decades aided by a potential $225m (£166m) investment from across the Atlantic, creating 300 jobs.

CHARLOTTE MCQUILLAN
Staff Reporter

The fanfare surrounding the New York City mayoral race has finally slowed down after New Yorkers elected Democratic Socialist and New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. His campaign succeeded against former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa. 

Unlike most mayoral races, this race captured the attention of many Americans across the country. The main question is: Why did the New York City mayoral race seem so important?

Dr. David Redlawsk, the chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the university, said there has always been a fascination with New York City in the American imagination. 

Not only is it a cultural icon, but it is also a predominant political setting in our nation’s history. Mamdani is a young New Yorker who sits outside of the traditional party perspectives, despite running as a Democrat. 

“He still kind of comes from outside, and he was running in a race against the former governor of New York, who had to resign in disgrace,” Redlawsk said. “And I think it just created kind of a context about power, about where it sits, and also about the future.

He went on to say that democratic politics, particularly, have a past of being run by older politicians, and how there is a strong desire for younger faces. Mamdani’s campaign was compelling because he was a young man who came out of nowhere. 

Not only is Mamdani the city’s first Muslim and Democratic Socialist mayor, but 75% of the youth voted for him with the highest mayoral voter turnout in New York City since 1969. 

“Younger people are less likely to vote in these kinds of elections,” Redlawsk stated. “The campaign that he ran was very much a campaign about a new New York.

“He focused a lot less on the label than on the issues that voters feel, on the day-to-day reality of life for so many people right now.”

A midterm backlash from the Democrats was no surprise for New York, but Mamdani’s election represented both a political and cultural shift toward a different perspective. 

Factions within the Republican Party partially fueled Mamdani’s win. His Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, was openly opposed to President Trump. Contrarily, his Independent (formerly Democratic) opponent, Andrew Cuomo, had been endorsed by Trump. 

“Cuomo was the epitome of a sore loser, in that he lost the primary, but in New York, even if you lose the primary, you can still file as an independent […] And so he also kind of brought that sort of thing; it’s kind of like you already lost. What are you doing here?” Redlawsk said.

Both Cuomo and Sliwa congratulated Mamdani on his win and urged their supporters to give him a chance. 

“Within the Democratic Party there’s potential for a new perspective, for a new leadership, and [Mamdani] could be the vanguard of that,” Redlawsk said.

Spotify is planning to let premium subscribers in the U.S. and U.K. buy hardcovers and paperbacks directly through its app starting this spring, partnering with Bookshop.org to handle pricing, inventory and fulfillment. The Swedish streaming company, which entered the audiobook market in 2022, will also introduce a feature called Page Match that lets users scan a page from a physical book or e-reader and jump to the exact spot in the audiobook edition. Spotify will earn an undisclosed affiliate fee on each purchase.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A leaked pitch to reshape Ethereum’s leadership exposed deep divisions over politics, power and ether’s static price

US crypto developer Danny Ryan submitted a proposal in November 2024 to Vitalik Buterin, the founder and symbolic leader of Ethereum, a prominent blockchain powering the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum’s de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift.

Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too. The EF could now “exercise a stronger voice” without compromising its ethos of decentralization, Ryan said – and he was open to leading that charge if appointed as the foundation’s new executive director.

Explore which states have the highest number of athletes competing for the U.S. Olympic team at the 2026 Winter Games, and search for your own hometown.

SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain, Feb. 5, 2026 — Quantum Motion today announced the opening of its offices in Spain, establishing a permanent base for quantum system development, integration and deployment in the European Union. The new site, which is located in the newly inaugurated nanoGUNE Quantum Tower, supports Quantum Motion’s scale-up of silicon-based quantum computing systems and strengthens the collaboration across Europe’s semiconductor, academic and industrial ecosystems.

Quantum Motion’s offices in the newly inaugurated nanoGUNE Quantum Tower in San Sebastian, Spain

The nanoGUNE Quantum Tower was officially inaugurated on February 4th, 2026. The opening ceremony was attended by the president of the Basque Government, Imanol Pradales; the head of the regional government of Gipuzkoa, Eider Mendoza; the mayor of San Sebastian, Jon Insausti; the president and director-general of nanoGUNE, Javier Martínez-Ojinaga and Jose M. Pitarke respectively; the Basque minister of Science, Universities and Innovation; and other representatives from principal institutions, research centers and the European quantum industry.

“Our expansion in Europe demonstrates our continued commitment to global collaborations and partnerships,” said James Palles-Dimmock, CEO of Quantum Motion. “The state-of-the-art technology infrastructure available in the new Quantum Tower and our collaboration with the Basque government, academia and experts at CIC nanoGUNE provide a huge advantage as we advance our ability to deliver commercially useful, silicon-spin quantum systems at scale.”

“The scale and ambition of this project are such that we decided to expand our facilities with the construction of the new Quantum Tower to provide dedicated space to our Quantum Hardware research group and laboratories and to Quantum Motion,” said Jose M. Pitarke, nanoGUNE’s director-general. “We look forward to advancing the future of quantum computing in collaboration with Quantum Motion.”

Quantum Motion and CIC nanoGUNE are jointly collaborating on initiatives focused on delivering fault-tolerant, utility-scale quantum systems in Europe, including:

• QuDos – A prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant project awarded to Gonzalez-Zalba focused on using semiconductor quantum dots as the basis for building ultra-low-power microwave qubit control and readout electronics for quantum computers.
• SPINS Consortium – The Semiconducting Pilot Line for Industrial quantum nanoSystems, which is bringing together leading European research and technology organizations to deliver semiconductor quantum chips with high manufacturing and technology readiness levels. Quantum Motion, in collaboration with nanoGUNE, is focusing on the integration of quantum and classical electronics on a monolithic chip.

“The Basque Country has one of the strongest ecosystems globally when it comes to the development of quantum technologies,” said Fernando Gonzalez-Zalba, principal engineer at Quantum Motion and Ikerbasque research professor at CIC nanoGUNE. “We look forward to building the next generation of quantum processing units based on silicon manufactured in industrial 300 mm wafer lines, as well as deploying and servicing systems throughout Europe.”

About CIC nanoGUNE

The Nanoscience Cooperative Research Center (CIC) nanoGUNE, located in the Basque city of San Sebastian, was established with the mission of conducting world-class nanoscience research for the competitive growth of the Basque Country. nanoGUNE is recognized by the Spanish Research Agency as a Maria-de-Maeztu center of excellence.

About Quantum Motion

Quantum Motion develops and deploys full-stack quantum computers manufactured using industry standard 300mm CMOS wafer technology with the goal of delivering commercially viable, utility scale, fault tolerant systems. A key part of this approach is the development of cryoelectronics, integrating qubits with classical control circuits capable of operating at deep cryogenic temperatures, which enables extreme scaling of quantum processors. Fault-tolerant quantum computing will enable the most powerful quantum algorithms, targeting solutions to currently intractable problems in fields as diverse as chemistry, materials science, medicine and artificial intelligence. The company employs over 100 people across the UK, US, Australia and Europe and comprises specialists in quantum theory, hardware and system engineering and software. Learn more at www.quantummotion.com.

Source: Quantum Motion

The post Quantum Motion Expands Global Presence by Opening European Offices in Spain appeared first on HPCwire.

You can buy the S24 Ultra for half the price of the latest model but its performance isn't much different.

New collaboration will establish a quantum-control–enabled center at the IQMP to accelerate and scale fault-tolerant quantum computing

CHICAGO, Feb. 5, 2026 — The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) and the Illinois Economic Development Corporation have announced that Quantum Machines will establish a flagship hub at the Park. Quantum Machines, the leading provider of hybrid control solutions, will operate a state-of-the-art lab at the IQMP, for research and development on a hardware-control co-design approach to align quantum processors, classical infrastructure, and control software. While the Park is under development, Quantum Machines will be situated at the IQMP’s On-Ramp facilities in Chicago. On-Ramp is supported by grant funding from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

“Illinois is building the future of quantum technology, and Quantum Machines’ decision to establish a presence at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is further proof that our state is the premier destination for next-generation innovation,” said Governor JB Pritzker. “Quantum Machines is a global leader in quantum control technology, providing the critical systems that enable quantum computers to operate at scale. They will join a growing roster of companies that will be housed at the IQMP and strengthen Illinois’ position as a global leader in this cutting-edge industry.”

Quantum Machines’ platform supports any type of quantum processor, and more than half of the companies developing quantum computers rely on their technology. By harmonizing quantum and classical operations, their hybrid control optimizes performance across hardware and software. Their most advanced controller, OPX1000, will be hosted at the Park, deploying systems comprised of superconducting and spin qubits.

“This collaboration forms part of an ongoing commitment from Quantum Machines to support the regional quantum ecosystem that offers access to world-leading technologies,” said Itamar Sivan, CEO and Co-founder of Quantum Machines. “We are proud to work with the IQMP, which attracts the brightest minds in industry and research, and to continue to grow our collaborations with leading national projects, where our advanced hybrid control solutions will enable the next-generation quantum infrastructure, leveraging classical computing resources at scale.”

Quantum Machines has an existing partnership with Diraq, a future IQMP tenant, to scale silicon-based quantum computers.

“The majority of companies developing quantum computers today utilize Quantum Machines’ technology for their systems, and we are incredibly excited to welcome them as an IQMP tenant,” said Harley Johnson, Executive Director and CEO of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park. “Quantum Machines’ hybrid control solutions will be an asset to the companies, researchers, and innovators who will be driving discovery on Chicago’s South Side, and we are thrilled they’ve chosen to join the IQMP.”

Quantum Machines is also partnering with the IQMP, Illinois EDC, Chicago Quantum Exchange, and other ecosystem stakeholders on workforce development initiatives to help grow Illinois’ quantum talent pipeline. In addition, QM has selected Chicago as the host city for the 2026 Adaptive Quantum Circuits (AQC) conference, a premier annual event that draws Nobel Prize–winning researchers and leading quantum companies.

“Quantum Machines’ decision to join the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park underscores Illinois’ strong leadership in the quantum sector,” said Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Director Kristin Richards. “The State is building the infrastructure and partnerships needed to support innovation, create jobs, and ensure Illinois remains a global leader in quantum technologies.”

The IQMP On-Ramp enables future IQMP tenants to leverage the Chicago and Illinois quantum ecosystem before the Park is complete by operating out of a local innovation facility. Quantum Machines will occupy part of the space that includes more than 2,000 square feet of facilities and specialized equipment for quantum, such as cryostats, control electronics, lasers, and optical tables, in addition to technical and programmatic support.

“We are thrilled to welcome a pioneering company like Quantum Machines to Illinois and look forward to the work we can do together to support our mutual goal of advancing quantum technologies,” said Illinois EDC Chief Quantum Officer Preeti Chalsani. “Quantum Machines’ decision to locate here confirms that Illinois provides quantum innovators the resources, network, and talent to grow and to scale.”

The IQMP, which broke ground in Fall 2025, is a 128-acre development that provides infrastructure and resources to support the development and commercialization of quantum technologies, hardware, software, and applications.

More from HPCwire

• PsiQuantum Launches Construction of Quantum Facilities at Chicago’s South Works Site
• Diraq and QM Employ AI for Scaling Silicon-Based Quantum Computers with NVIDIA DGX Quantum

About the IQMP

The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) is a first-of-its-kind park built for quantum technology scale-up and related quantum and advanced microelectronics research and development. The Park is designed to support the full ecosystem of companies, researchers, suppliers, end users and other partners working to facilitate the development and commercialization of quantum technologies, including the world’s first fault-tolerant computers. Learn more at https://iqmp.org.

About Quantum Machines

Quantum Machines (QM) is a global leading provider of quantum control solutions, driving the advancement of quantum computing with its hybrid control approach. By harmonizing quantum and classical operations, hybrid control eliminates friction and optimizes performance across hardware and software, enabling researchers and builders to iterate at speed, resolve setbacks, and bring visionary ideas to life. Its platform supports any type of quantum processor, empowering the industry to scale systems, accelerate breakthroughs, and push the boundaries – previously impossible.

Source: Quantum Machines

The post Quantum Machines to Establish Flagship Hub at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park appeared first on HPCwire.

Prisoner exchange agreed at most significant contact between Kyiv and Moscow in months, but ‘work remains’

Ukraine and Russia concluded a second day of US-led talks in Abu Dhabi on Thursday without a breakthrough towards ending Europe’s most deadly conflict since the second world war.

The two sides agreed to a reciprocal exchange of 157 prisoners of war each, offering a rare concrete outcome from the discussions.

Owner of local cinema says Amazon is upset at way they marketed movie as some in US say healthy ticket sales are not reflected by empty seats

An independent cinema in Oregon has claimed Amazon pulled screenings of their documentary about Melania Trump in protest at the cinema’s marketing strategy.

As reported by local newspaper the Lake Oswego Review, the general manager of the Lake Theater & Cafe has claimed the corporation cancelled future screenings of Brett Ratner’s authorised study of the first lady after being alerted to promotional pushes such as: “To defeat your enemy. You must know them. Melania” and “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out on Friday!”

Bankers and billionaires are flocking to the city where income tax is zero but critics say it ignores money laundering – and pay disparities are huge

• Business live – latest updates

Aidan Doyle was an estate agent in Liverpool before he decamped to Dubai and turned a £30,000 annual income into £500,000 a year and climbing.

Acting as an agent for buyers and sellers, Doyle has seen his commission soar beyond anything he could hope to generate in the UK after just three years in the city, one of seven city-states in the United Arab Emirates.

Malcolm Turnbull says government is ‘engaged in an exercise of denial’, as defence minister insists $368bn deal is ‘full steam ahead’

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Australia’s submarine agency insists the Aukus agreement is progressing “at pace and on schedule”, but skeptics of the $368bn deal argue the chances of the US ever selling promised Virginia-class submarines to Australia are increasingly remote.

The former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has said the Australian government is engaged “in an exercise of denial” about the parlous state of Aukus’s progress, while the Greens senator David Shoebridge said the deal was a “pantomime”, hopelessly one-sided in America’s favour.

Feb. 5, 2026 — In 2025, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ)—one of Germany’s three national supercomputing centers within the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS)—successfully established an environmental management system in accordance with the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). The certification confirms the center’s commitment to sustainable operation.

Photo credit: V. Hohenegger, LRZ

On top of the energy consumed by IT systems at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), it only needs 23 percent for cooling. This gives the data center a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.23, compared to an average of 1.46 in German data centers. LRZ is similarly economical with water – for one kilowatt-hour (kWh) of cooling output, only 2.3 liters are used in a closed-loop system. A sophisticated water cooling infrastructure in the compute building also eliminates the need for harmful antifreeze chemicals.

While these efforts have been in place to ensure LRZ operates its high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure as efficiently as possible, they also helped ensure the center would be certified for the first time under the demanding European Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) and forms the basis for LRZ being validated  as a sustainable organization. Over the past year, the LRZ systematically organized and documented all sustainability-related measures across various areas of work happening at the institution.

“Ideas for operating our data center efficiently are a deeply ingrained part of the LRZ DNA,” said Prof. Helmut Reiser, deputy director of LRZ. “For decades, we have been researching how to make data center operations more efficient. After all, the money we save on electricity and cooling can be invested in computing performance for science. The calls for electric vehicles in our fleet, for the use of electricity from renewable sources, for waste separation, and for many other measures to minimize environmental impact—these have always come primarily from LRZ employees, who bring forward good ideas and initiatives to use resources more sustainably in everyday operations. With EMAS, we have systematically incorporated these goals and developed a comprehensive environmental management system as well as a sustainability strategy for the LRZ from a wide range of individual measures. The EMAS audit confirmed that our ideas and their implementation are excellent.”

Transparency and Sustainability in Research

LRZ environmental management officers Sophia Kranz and Dr. Hiren Gandhi worked closely with LRZ staff and leaders from all departments and work areas for more than a year to compile information and key figures related to the ecological impacts of LRZ activities. For the EMAS certification, additional measuring devices were installed, applicable regulations and laws were reviewed, and—most importantly—existing processes were reconsidered.

Since 2012, LRZ has used only electricity from renewable sources, and since its foundation, it has evaluated strategies for energy-efficient data center operations. In cooperation with technology partners, it developed and continuously improved a direct high-temperature cooling system for high-performance systems. Energy-conscious planning of computing jobs as well as optimization of scientific codes and algorithms also improve the center’s energy balance.

With its EMAS certification – and, even more importantly, the accompanying environmental statement, which explains the measures and documents consumption figures – the LRZ offers transparency to the scientific community and to funding agencies in Germany and Europe, which increasingly require evidence of sustainability and resource-efficient project execution.

Efficient Computing and Use of Waste Heat

In addition, the Energy Efficiency Act (EnEfG), which came into effect at the end of 2023, requires larger data centres to adhere to standards relating to energy efficiency, waste heat usage, the use of electricity from renewable sources, and transparency about their sustainability. The background is the rapidly increasing electricity demand of IT infrastructures, as well as the realization that waste heat from computing systems can be used cost-effectively for heating or by heat-intensive facilities such as swimming pools or greenhouses.

The LRZ’s environmental statement shows that it already meets most of the legal requirements, and work is underway on the remaining ones – such as supplying heat to neighbouring facilities on the research campus.

For more details, please visit the original LRZ press release here.

Source: GCS

The post LRZ Earns EMAS Certification for Sustainable Data Center Operations appeared first on HPCwire.

ExpressAI and ExpressMailGuard give ExpressVPN users more ways to boost their privacy online.

The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter's seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records. 404Media: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device. "Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device," the court record reads, referring to the FBI's Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson's devices. The FBI raided Natanson's home as part of its investigation into government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is charged with, among other things, retention of national defense information. The government believes Perez-Lugones was a source of Natanson's, and provided her with various pieces of classified information. While executing a search warrant for his mobile phone, investigators reviewed Signal messages between Pere-Lugones and the reporter, the Department of Justice previously said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alexa Plus is aiming higher with a new superhero ad and a US-wide launch, including a free version for any app user.

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Haiti’s vicious circle: Funding is needed to end the violence. But the violence means the funding doesn’t come Expert comment jon.wallace 5 February 2026

Beyond restoring security, a push to rebuild Haiti’s society and create jobs is vital to any lasting solution. But who will fund such an effort, as the cycle of violence continues?

Politics in Haiti is a blood sport. The last elected President, Jovenel Moïse, was gunned down by mercenaries in 2021. Since then, the country has descended into rampant gang violence. Thousands have been killed and abducted in the chaos. Criminals control roughly 90 per cent of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. Legal economic activity has nearly ground to a halt. 

Now there is serious doubt on whether the country will have a government after 7 February, when its Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) was originally set to dissolve. Internecine battles have broken out over what should follow the Council, and more specifically who can remain in power. 

In recent weeks, several TPC members attempted to remove Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé in a palace coup. Those same members have put forward plans for a reduced Council that would include – of course – them. There is a real threat that some Council members will mobilize the gangs to coerce other members and the international community. In response, the US has parked a warship and three coast guard cutters off the coast of Haiti.  

The upheaval threatens the future of any government in Haiti and the status of the UN’s new Gang Suppression Force (GSF) mission to the crime-ridden country. What can be done to break Haiti’s cycle of disaster?

Council of chaos

The TPC was established in April 2024, after gangs prevented interim president Ariel Henri from returning to Haiti. 

At the time, Haiti lacked an elected government. It still doesn’t have one. The parliament was dissolved in 2020 when its mandate ended without new elections. The hope was that the TPC, created after Caribbean Community (Caricom) negotiations, could provide transitional government until new democratic elections could be held in late 2025, with a new government seated by 8 February 2026.  

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A roadmap for security and governance reform in Haiti

Even before the TPC’s recent internal turmoil, political gamesmanship and efforts to protect armed allies and secure access to resources hobbled the transitional authority. The first prime minister, Gary Conille, was forced to resign only six months into his term.

And the Council failed to deliver progress on any coherent policy across any area, most importantly security. From January to November 2025 alone, 8,100 people were killed in the country of 11 million, according to UN Secretary General António Guterres – a 20 per cent increase from 2024. Sexual violence has also spiked in recent years.

In addition to the armada floating just outside Port-au-Prince, the US slapped visa restrictions on five of the members of the TPC jockeying for power in the government. At the end of January, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reported that he had spoken to Fils-Aimé and ‘emphasized the importance of his continued tenure as Haiti’s prime minister to combat terrorist gangs and stabilize the island’ adding that the TPC ‘must be dissolved by February 7 without corrupt actors…’

Violence strangles the economy and the hope for speedy elections

Economically too, the power struggles in the interim government have choked off growth. The World Bank estimates that the crisis had in six years cost Haiti nearly $10 billion a year in lost economic activity by 2024. Small and medium enterprises were particularly affected.

The failure to re-establish even a modicum of security has prevented the planned elections. It became conventional wisdom that attempting to convene a popular vote in a country overwhelmed by gangs would likely – either through coercion, campaign support or running their own candidates – formally turn Haiti’s government over to criminals. Now, with the status or form of an interim government after 8 February uncertain, even an updated plan to hold elections in late 2026 looks unrealistic. 

The potential absence of a credible Haitian government puts the UN mission at risk. The plan is to deploy an 11,000-strong multi-national force to crack down on gang leaders and recapture territory, including transportation hubs and economic infrastructure. But that requires an effective government counterpart in Haiti. 

Even if current dialogues and negotiations can cobble together a governmental authority, it will likely not enjoy broad support among the political elite. As has been the case for decades, corrupt political and business leaders frozen out of power will use gang contacts to sow discontent and chaos – enforcing a street veto on the next government.

The lack of broad acceptance among the political elites (and their followers) and the spectre of politically directed violence will hobble any future government in its greatest – and long overdue – task: purging, reforming and rebuilding Haiti’s security and judicial sectors.  

Any viable solution to the security crisis will require not just effective international and domestic military and police action against gang leaders. It also demands a complete overhaul of Haiti’s police, military forces and intelligence services and a fair and speedy court and penitentiary system to ensure justice for victims, many of them women and children. There must be accountability for the brutal crimes being committed every day. 

A lack of funding could be fatal to that effort, and to the more traditional community and development efforts necessary to ensure long-term success.  

Like many other countries facing security and humanitarian crises, Haiti confronts a declining global budget for development assistance. With the US Agency for Development (USAID) now abolished by the Donald Trump administration and subsequent cuts to development assistance by the UK, Canada and EU, many of the steps needed to follow reducing gang power, such as disarmament and demobilization, will have scant resources. 

Founder’s extraordinary intervention has laid bare rising tensions between European governments and tech firms

• Europe live – latest updates

Spain has accused Pavel Durov of “spreading lies” and seeking to undermine democratic institutions after the Telegram founder used the messaging app to attack government plans to introduce a social media ban for under-16s and to hold tech companies responsible for hateful and harmful content.

Durov’s extraordinary public intervention – which came a day after Elon Musk called Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, a “true fascist totalitarian” over the proposed measures – reveals the rapidly escalating tensions between European governments and powerful global technology chiefs.

Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, is now streaming.

Bank indicates anti-inflation measures in Rachel Reeves’s budget likely to pave way for rate cuts in months ahead

• Business live – latest updates

• UK inflation rises for first time in five months to 3.4% in December

Bank of England policymakers have left interest rates unchanged at 3.75%, but indicated that lower inflation as a result of cost-of-living measures in Rachel Reeves’s budget should pave the way for cuts in the months ahead.

The nine-member monetary policy committee (MPC) voted to leave borrowing costs on hold, despite forecasting weaker growth and lower inflation than at its last quarterly forecast in November.

Savannah Guthrie said she and her family were aware of reports of a ransom note and that they are "ready to talk."

Crews are battling a large fire at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Dickson City, Pennsylvania, Wednesday night.

President Trump said he is directing all federal law enforcement to be at the "complete disposal" of Savannah Guthrie's family as the search continues for her mother, Nancy Guthrie.

The EU’s IRGC terrorist designation marks a major shift on Iran Expert comment thilton.drupal 5 February 2026

Europe has realized that engaging Tehran without leverage, interlocutors or credible pathways to change is unsustainable. But it should not abandon Iranians altogether.

The European Union’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization last week marks the end of the EU’s long strategy of engagement with the Islamic Republic.

That strategy began in the early 1990s and endured throughout the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme that started in late 2002. Over more than three decades, the EU sought to balance pressure with dialogue, preserving diplomatic and economic channels even at moments of acute confrontation. 

The IRGC designation therefore represents not merely a policy adjustment, but the collapse of a core assumption in European Iran policy: that sustained engagement could preserve leverage, empower Iranian interlocutors and ultimately moderate Tehran’s behaviour.

Deteriorating relations

Relations between the EU and Iran had already been eroding since 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launched that year, marked a decisive turning point, as Iran’s provision of drones and military support to Russia placed Tehran directly at odds with a central European security priority. 

The death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 and Tehran’s violent suppression of the ensuing protests further strained ties, exposing the widening gap between the rhetoric of engagement and realities on the ground in Iran. 

The failure to revive the nuclear agreement in mid-2023 due to Iran’s rejection of the latest agreed draft made engagement more challenging and removed the last structured framework for cooperation. The triggering of UN snapback sanctions in September 2025, which was led by the E3 (France, Germany and the UK), angered Iran, entrenching mutual mistrust. 

Still, until early 2026, few would have expected EU–Iran relations to deteriorate further, let alone reach the point of the IRGC being listed. The move has been debated for years in European capitals, particularly after the US designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2019, and Canada followed suit in 2024. 

However, the EU had hesitated until now. Some within Europe saw the listing of the IRGC as a step that would effectively criminalize engagement with large parts of the Iranian state. They also feared retaliation against dual nationals, further escalation in theatres where EU forces operate and the closure of diplomatic off-ramps. 

The anticipated effect of designating the IRGC was never behavioural change by the group itself. Instead, the aims were signalling, deterrence and normative clarity – benefits that the EU had long judged insufficient to justify the costs.

What changed?

This calculus was ultimately shifted by the scale and brutality of Iran’s domestic repression during the early-2026 uprisings. 

Mass arrests, executions, internet shutdowns, and the open use of lethal force against demonstrators erased any remaining confidence in gradual change. Unlike previous episodes, the violence could not plausibly be attributed to rogue commanders or security excesses. It reflected a system-wide choice. Security institutions, clerical authorities, and political officials – including figures previously portrayed as reformist or pragmatic – aligned behind the crackdown and publicly framed repression as necessary.

Related work

Iran’s internet shutdown signals a new stage of digital isolation

For European policymakers, this alignment destroyed the remaining logic of engagement. Europe found itself with no remaining credible interlocutors to engage with, nor any meaningful distinction between coercive and diplomatic power centres. Refraining from the designation therefore risked legitimizing violence, undermining Europe’s credibility and exposing the EU to accusations of moral complicity. The reputational cost became too high.

The decision to designate the IRGC came after Italy, Spain and France decided to support the measure, having reportedly previously been hesitant. Announcing the decision, the EU’s foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas attributed the move to the crackdown on protesters in Iran, saying that ‘repression cannot go unanswered.’ The US welcomed the move, while Tehran described it as a ‘major strategic mistake.’

Impact

From an operational standpoint, the designation is unlikely to dramatically alter Iran-related business in practice, though it materially raises compliance stakes. Any European company with dealings linked to Iran already faces high sanctions risks and many will already have significant due diligence checks in place. 

However, the designation means that companies will need to ensure they check for Iranian counterparties have ownership, control or facilitation links to IRGC-affiliated networks. Enforcement agencies are likely to scrutinize Iran-linked transactions more closely, increasing legal and reputational risk for businesses even where activity is technically permissible. 

By designating the IRGC, the EU also creates another legal tool to impose secondary sanctions against businesses and individuals in third countries with ties to the IRGC. The risk for secondary sanctions will therefore also impact non-EU companies with ties to Iran.  

Europe sidelined?

Politically, the most immediate consequence is the near-total sidelining of the EU from shaping Iran policy.  This is already clear in the US-Iran talks currently scheduled for Friday. A range of countries have been reported as among the potential participants, but none of them are European. 

Europe looks set to lose what little influence it retained as a bridge between Tehran and Washington at precisely the moment when decisive choices will be made over Iran’s future. Whether president Trump will decide to pursue negotiations or escalate militarily, Europe will lack the leverage to shape outcomes. 

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In first-of-its-kind complaint, state accused four fossil fuel majors and US oil lobbying group of climate disinformation

Amid rising concern about global heating and soaring energy costs, Michigan has sued big oil for allegedly fueling both crises – a move experts have hailed as groundbreaking.

In a first-of-its-kind complaint, the state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, accused four fossil fuel majors and the top US oil lobbying group last month of acting as a “cartel” to stifle the growth of renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), while suppressing information about the dangers of the climate crisis. The conduct, the lawsuit alleged, violates federal and state antitrust laws.

Forget about battery woes with these wireless cameras that tap into solar power with excellent results.

From cheap point-and-shoots to pricey medium-format models, these are the best analog film cameras to consider -- and the film to put in them.

rysler is recalling more than 450,000 vehicles with improperly designed trailer tow modules whose trailer lights may not work and that have trailer brakes that could fail, federal officials say.

PM says he is sorry for believing ‘lies’ told by former Labour minister and that he too is ‘angry and frustrated’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has attempted to reboot his faltering premiership, apologising for appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador and urging his MPs to unite behind him.

The prime minister gave a lengthy speech on Wednesday about community cohesion, but faced a barrage of questions about his leadership after one of his most turbulent days since entering Downing Street.

France's navy seized 4.24 tons of cocaine from a ship in the south Pacific and also intercepted a boat trafficking cocaine in the Caribbean, officials said.

Third-quarter figures reveal 57% fall in profits and firm expects to lose 850,000 broadband users in full financial year

• Business live – latest updates

BT lost more than 200,000 broadband customers in the last three months of 2025 and profits fell sharply, mainly linked to its shared ownership of the pay TV broadcaster TNT Sports.

The telecoms company said that in the third quarter of its financial year, 210,000 customers left Openreach, its wholesale broadband network, and that it expected to lose a total of 850,000 broadband customers in its full financial year. That was down from previous guidance of 900,000.

Kalshi, the largest U.S. prediction market, accused a small data startup called Juice Reel of "extortion" after a stock analyst used the company's transaction-level data to argue that prediction market users lose money faster than gamblers on traditional betting apps -- then walked the allegation back hours later. The equity research analyst Jordan Bender at Citizens found that the bottom quarter of prediction market users lost about 28 cents of every dollar wagered in their first three months, compared to roughly 11 cents per dollar on sites like FanDuel and DraftKings. Kalshi's head of communications told Bloomberg the report was "flat-out wrong" and called the data an extortion attempt. Juice Reel CEO Ricky Gold said Kalshi had actually pressured him to tell Bloomberg the data was inaccurate. Kalshi later issued an updated statement saying it continued to dispute the findings but "after further review, we don't believe the intention was extortion." The company did not provide any data to counter the analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Days after Labour’s 2010 defeat former cabinet minister began dogged pursuit of ‘highly paid’ jobs, emails show

Peter Mandelson began seeking advice from the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on how to land “highly paid” senior roles with companies including BP and Glencore within days of Labour’s 2010 electoral defeat, emails show.

A flurry of messages, sent in the weeks and months following the collapse of the New Labour project, reveal how Epstein mentored Mandelson as the former cabinet minister touted himself for lucrative jobs at global businesses.

The Netherlands' Queen Maxima wants to contribute to her country's safety, the royal family says, as Europe's defense anxieties deepen.

A police helicopter crashed near the scene of what authorities in Flagstaff, Arizona called "an active officer-involved shooting investigation," according to police in Page, Arizona.

Minute Maid's parent company, Coca-Cola, says it's ending production of its frozen juice concentrates, including orange juice.

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The president’s policies have weakened the US’s competitive position and undermined its alliances to China’s advantage

If Donald Trump’s presidency has any theme (beyond self-promotion), it’s that his “America First” agenda will Make America Great Again. Unfortunately for the American people, if Trump’s maneuvers and machinations have made any nation greater, it’s been China, not the United States.

During Trump’s first term, he treated China as a strategic rival and often talked of checking its rise. His administration complained that China was seeking to “challenge American power” and “erode American security and prosperity”. But during his first year back in the White House, Trump – in governing by whim and impulse with little strategic vision - has done lots to Make China Great Again.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues

Experts say Tom Homan’s charge, replacing Greg Bovino’s aggressive tactics, may change the tone, but not the mission

In his clearest attempt yet to “de‑escalate” tensions in Minneapolis, Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s “border czar”, announced on Wednesday that the administration will draw down 700 federal immigration officers as the statewide crackdown continues.

The Twin Cities remain on edge, waiting to see whether the fear will ease.

At least two cases confirmed at detention center for children and their parents in Texas

At least two cases of measles have been confirmed at a major immigration detention center for children and their parents in Texas as cases of the dangerous virus in South Carolina, Arizona, Utah and other US states continue growing and alarming experts.

In January alone, the US saw 25% of the total confirmed in all of last year, and the outbreak shows no sign of slowing as federal officials stay silent on vaccination.

Elizabeth Caisaguano and her mother released from Texas facility hit by measles outbreak. Plus, the Epstein stories you may have missed

Good morning.

A 10-year-old Minnesota girl has been released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after a month in detention in Dilley, Texas, school officials said, one of hundreds of children detained at the facility.

What are the conditions like at the detention center? Federal officials have confirmed that Dilley, which houses families, is now the site of a measles outbreak.

What did the judge say? On Monday, Fred Biery, a federal judge in Texas Western District, issued an order blocking the removal or transfer of Elizabeth and her mother and giving the federal government five days to respond to the family’s release petition. “This didn’t have to happen. … They did everything they were supposed to do and still found themselves detained and separated,” he said.

Brad Karp has resigned as chair of the powerful law firm Paul Weiss after revelations of extensive communications with Epstein.

The documents provide a high level of insight into Epstein’s close relationship with the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, in which Bannon acted as a mentor for Epstein’s appearances in the media.

The UK prime minister is fighting for his political future amid fury over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite his friendship with Epstein. Mandelson appeared to leak confidential information to Epstein while a minister.

Bill Gates has said he “regrets” ever knowing Epstein, as his former wife Melinda French Gates alluded to “muck” in their marriage, and said the Microsoft founder has questions to answer.

The release included Epstein’s full “household manual” detailing strict, cult-like requirements for his Florida mansion staff, who were expected to “see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing”.

Writers and theater groups across the country are creating works in response to crackdowns on their communities

On a cool winter night in Los Angeles, dozens gathered to protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on the arts and the recent federal immigration raids in southern California. But these protesters didn’t carry signs or chant in front of a government building – they recited poems such as Antifa Tea Party and Love in Times of Fascism. They performed anti-fascist improv to a small but lively crowd at The Glendale Room, a library-themed theater, as part of the monthly show Unquiet: A Night of Creative Resistance.

“If you’ve got talent or skills as a communicator, you can move people,” Chris Kessler, a writer and poet, said after performing at Unquiet. “I really believe that we need to be moving people toward a stronger sense of collectivism in the face of fascism.”

"Our message is: Wildfire smoke is very dangerous. It is an increasing threat to human health," said a study author.

Sponges are color-coded for a reason. Here's what each one means and when to use it.

The last remaining nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia has expired, ending decades of arms control between the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals.

Seattle’s Aden Durde will be the first British coach to appear in the Super Bowl. He wants to ensure he’s not the last

Midway through the 2023 NFL season, Dallas Cowboys star edge rusher Micah Parsons was frustrated. Asked about the source – a feeling of being held by opponents all the time – Parsons credited his defensive line coach Aden Durde with keeping him in check.

“[Coach Durde] pulled me aside and said, ‘You gotta remember, you’re Micah fucking Parsons,” he recalled. “‘This shit is going to happen. You just gotta keep going. Fuck all the other stuff.’”

The interview,⁠ revealed in the latest tranche of Epstein files, was reportedly intended for a sympathetic documentary

Steve Bannon, a one-time adviser to Donald Trump, has long styled himself as a populist nemesis of the global elites. Yet the latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files shows that he exchanged hundreds of friendly texts with the wealthy financier, discussing politics, travel and other topics.

One of the biggest surprises in the files was a bizarre video in which Epstein – who exploited and abused dozens of young girls – is interviewed by Bannon at what appears to be Epstein’s New York home.

Minutes after a federal agent shot and killed a Mexican immigrant in a Chicago suburb last September, a group of police officers stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out the answer to a question of protocol: Who would investigate the shooting?

“Wouldn’t it be state’s, at a minimum?” one Franklin Park officer asked, according to body camera footage.

Chief Mike Witz shook his head. “No, because it’s a federal shooting,” he said. “You’re not going to investigate a federal officer.”

His officers didn’t investigate. In their report, they didn’t even note the names of the two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the scene of Silverio Villegas González’s death. Instead, they deferred to the FBI.

Local law enforcement officials also did not investigate when a Border Patrol agent shot and wounded a U.S. citizen in her car in Chicago less than a month later. Or when an ICE agent in Phoenix shot a Honduran man during a traffic stop later that month.

In fact, local police did not open investigations into six of the 12 shootings by on-duty federal agents that have led to the deaths or injuries of citizens and immigrants since September, a ProPublica analysis found. In three other shooting cases, state or local police said they have opened inquiries, which they called a routine practice in those jurisdictions. And in Minnesota, where ICE and Border Patrol shot and killed two U.S. citizens and injured a Venezuelan man last month, state police have tried to conduct independent investigations only to be thwarted by the Trump administration, which has gone so far as to block officers from a scene, even when they had a judicial warrant.

In almost every instance, President Donald Trump’s administration blamed the injured and dead for the shooting within hours of the incident, raising questions about whether federal officials can fairly and objectively investigate their own. Legal experts and advocates for immigrants say this apparent lack of accountability demands that local authorities step up and exercise their power to investigate and prosecute federal agents who break state laws — from battery to murder.

“Local police and the state have gotten a free pass,” said Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the co-founder and director of its Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. “Residents have every right and should be demanding that, ‘Hey, state authorities, police, local police: Protect us. Arrest people who kill us, who batter us, who point guns at us and threaten and assault us without legal cause to do so.’”

It’s usually the opposite scenario: federal authorities coming in to investigate a troubled police department. But local authorities have investigated and charged federal agents in the past. It’s just rare and complicated. The federal supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution bars local interference with federal law enforcement officers when they act reasonably and within the scope of their duties.

But given the aggressive tactics employed by immigration agents under the Trump administration, Futterman and other legal experts said local police and prosecutors are morally obligated to at least try to hold federal law enforcement officers accountable.

“We’re in an environment right now where ICE officers are blatantly and egregiously violating the Constitution and the law,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The federal government has made it very clear that they are not going to do anything to provide any sort of accountability backstop to its officers. Unfortunately, because Congress is not taking any steps to rein ICE officers in, there really is no option other than states protecting their constituents’ rights.” 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that agents are “trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and our officers.” All use-of-force incidents are properly reported and reviewed by an appropriate law enforcement agency, the spokesperson said.

Immigration agents at the border have long been criticized for use of deadly force and lack of rigorous investigations afterward. But now the same militarized force is on display in major American cities far from the border, where residents are not used to their presence. 

The shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month — and the federal government’s resistance to a routine local investigation — has prompted Democratic and some Republican officials across the country to call for more accountability. Last week, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order directing police officers to document alleged illegal activity by federal immigration agents and refer any evidence of felonies to prosecutors. 

California’s governor and attorney general issued a reminder to local police of their rights to investigate federal agents. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes launched a website asking residents to submit evidence of federal agents’ misconduct. And prosecutors from nine jurisdictions around the country announced a new coalition to provide mutual support to law enforcement authorities bringing charges against federal officers.

In Minneapolis, prosecutors say they’re working with state police to investigate in spite of resistance from federal officials. So far, DHS officials have refused to provide evidence or even the names of the agents involved in the January shootings. Prosecutors went so far as to obtain an emergency order to require that federal agencies preserve evidence in the Pretti case. A judge dropped the temporary restraining order on Monday, following assurances from the federal government that it would maintain investigative materials. 

The prosecutors said they believe they can still gather enough evidence to make an informed decision about whether to charge the federal agents.

“We get cases submitted to us every day that don’t have all the evidence we would like,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in an interview. “We would certainly like the gun. We would like the shell casings, that kind of thing. But it’s also not a mystery as to why these people died.”

Even after getting a judicial warrant, investigators from the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension were turned away by federal agents from the Minneapolis intersection where Pretti, 37, was shot and killed. Federal officials also excluded the BCA from the investigation into the death of Renee Good, who was shot and killed in her car two weeks before Pretti. 

BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said he’d never seen his officers physically stopped from doing their job by another law enforcement agency. Across the country, he said, state agencies like the BCA routinely investigate deadly force incidents like this one.

“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said.

Within hours of each killing, Trump officials publicly labeled the dead “domestic terrorists.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a gun when he approached the officers, while the Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino claimed Pretti was planning a “massacre.” 

Video footage contradicted the administration’s version of events. Pretti, for instance, never unholstered his gun, which he was legally allowed to carry.  

Early last week, Trump sent Bovino and Border Patrol agents away from Minneapolis, and on Wednesday DHS officials said they would pull another 700 agents out of the state — signs  the administration may be changing its approach in response to rising criticism. The FBI is now investigating the Pretti shooting, and the Justice Department announced Friday that it had opened a civil rights investigation. 

A DOJ spokesperson did not answer questions for this story but referred reporters to a press conference last weekend in which Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said DHS is following its normal investigative protocols in the Pretti shooting. 

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has said it has no plans to investigate Good’s shooting. 

“We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody putting his life in danger,” Blanche told Fox News.

Police in Franklin Park and Chicago have not explained why they didn’t open their own investigations into the two shootings last fall. In the Franklin Park case, the decision to let the FBI alone investigate the killing of Villegas was made within minutes of the shooting, according to dispatch records. 

Villegas, a 38-year-old restaurant cook, was shot as he tried to drive away from ICE agents who had pulled him over. As in Minneapolis, the Trump administration’s narrative of what happened did not match the evidence. DHS claimed that Villegas dragged one of the agents, causing serious injuries. The agent fired “because he feared for his life,” officials said. Police body camera footage released after the shooting showed the agent downplaying his injury as “nothing major.”

At the scene, Franklin Park police officers directed traffic and interviewed a witness, the footage shows. At one point, one officer told his colleague that the police department was “just securing until they get here,” referring to the FBI.

Witz, who was then the police chief but has since retired, could not be reached for comment; the current chief did not respond to interview requests.

A similar situation unfolded in Chicago on Oct. 4 after a Border Patrol agent fired into the vehicle of a woman who federal officials claimed “ambushed” them. Marimar Martinez was charged with assaulting federal agents, though the charges were later dropped. 

At the time, the Chicago Police Department said officers had responded to a call about a shooting “to document the incident” and to “maintain safety and traffic control.” When asked last week why it didn’t open an independent inquiry, the department directed ProPublica to its October statement, which made clear the police were “not involved in the incident or its investigation” and directed questions to federal authorities. 

As the events in Minneapolis continued to generate criticism nationwide, Chicago’s mayor unveiled his executive order that directed officers to investigate federal immigration agents who break the law and to refer them for criminal prosecution. In a statement, the mayor’s office said the initiative was a response to “the absence of legal repercussions in the wake of the shooting of Marimar Martinez in Chicago and the killings of Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park and Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.”

Legal experts said they were not aware of recent examples of Illinois law enforcement agencies investigating an on-duty federal agent, though last month a suburban police department obtained misdemeanor charges against an off-duty ICE agent accused of attacking an activist who was filming him while the agent was pumping gas. 

Illinois State Police officials said they would investigate federal agents who were accused of breaking the law if they are asked to do so.

Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called on a state accountability commission to examine the roles of key Trump officials in the escalation of aggressive tactics during a monthslong immigration enforcement campaign in Chicago and its suburbs late last year. Pritzker had previously established the commission to​ gather videos and testimonies about federal agents’ conduct, and to create a public record of what happened. The commission lacks subpoena power but can refer information about potential violations of state law to law enforcement agencies or prosecutors.

“Just imagine if the agents who shot Mr. Villegas González back on Sept. 12 had been publicly disciplined,” Rubén Castillo, a retired federal judge who chairs the commission, said at a hearing Friday. “Maybe, just maybe, the Minnesota shootings would not have occurred, and two people would be alive who are now dead.”

He added: “We will have conversations with those in local law enforcement to suggest prosecutions that should be occurring even as we speak.”

In California, neither the Los Angeles nor Ontario police departments investigated after two men were shot by federal immigration agents in separate October incidents and then accused of assaulting federal officers — despite video evidence and victim statements that conflicted with the accounts officials provided. A federal judge dismissed the case against one man, a Mexican immigrant and popular TikTokker; the other, a U.S. citizen, pleaded not guilty and has a trial scheduled for April.

Police in Phoenix also said they are not investigating the shooting of a man who federal officials say fled immigration agents last October, leaving the case to the FBI and ICE. And local police in Portland, Oregon, are not investigating an incident where federal agents shot at a Venezuelan man who had allegedly hit an unoccupied Border Patrol vehicle with his car in early January, injuring him and his passenger. The man was later charged with assaulting an officer. Unlike in some of the other cases, the Oregon attorney general’s office has opened its own investigation.

In contrast, police in Pima County, Arizona, and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and the Texas Rangers have all said they opened investigations into recent shootings involving federal immigration officers.

Asking local officials to investigate their federal counterparts does not come without challenges. Police officers and prosecutors are wary of being seen as interfering with federal law enforcement operations. They may be reluctant to damage their already complicated relationships with agencies with whom they sometimes partner. 

Then there’s the worry about the political consequences, including the threat of losing federal funding, a dynamic that’s particularly acute under the Trump administration.

“This particular federal government has lobbed all kinds of threats and acted on threats against local authorities and state authorities for failure to cooperate or not do what they want them to do,” said Futterman, the University of Chicago law professor. “It’s a reason in itself not to bite a hand that feeds you.”

Even when local officials open their own investigations into federal agents, there’s no guarantee they can bring the cases to court. Federal agents can claim immunity in response to state charges, legal experts said, and can move their cases to federal court.

That immunity stems from a Supreme Court ruling more than a century ago. During the Civil Rights Movement, that immunity was used when the federal government wanted to protect its law enforcement officers tasked with enforcing then-controversial efforts like desegregation in hostile states. 

Now local officials face the opposite challenge: protecting their constituents’ constitutional rights from what they believe is excessive force at the hands of federal officers. 

Steve Descano, the commonwealth’s attorney for Fairfax County, Virginia, would be the first to admit that nothing about prosecuting federal agents is easy. During the first Trump administration, Descano brought state manslaughter charges against two U.S. Park Police officers who shot and killed a Virginia man. A federal judge dismissed the case in 2021 and said the officers were entitled to immunity because their actions were necessary and proper.

Still, Descano, who is part of the coalition of prosecutors aiming to hold federal law enforcement accountable, said he believed he and others have a responsibility to do so. 

“If they are not willing to take these actions,” he said, “then they are cowards and they are not worthy of their positions.”

The post “You’re Not Going to Investigate a Federal Officer” appeared first on ProPublica.

Wireless security cams are versatile, but you need to think about battery life and mounting options. We tested models to find the best.

The 2026 Winter Olympics are bringing thousands of athletes from around the world together for more than two weeks of competition — and the Games are a gold mine for statistics.

Some of the largest banks in the nation for years have eschewed the business of private prison giants like GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two firms that operate more than half the private carceral facilities in the country, including many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.

The moves to “debank” the companies, which have been dogged by reports of rights abuses, came after the banks’ reviews of their environmental, social, and governance policies, which included site visits and meeting with civil rights leaders. According to a nonprofit report, the moves by banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, cost the prison companies billions in potential financing.

Now, the private prison firms are fighting back, spending millions on lobbying Congress to pass a law to require that the banks can’t deny their business.

The two prison giants spent millions lobbying for legislation known as the Fair Access to Banking Act, a pending bill that seeks to prevent banks from denying access to institutions or people including those involved in “politically unpopular businesses but that are lawful under Federal law.” A press release marking the bill’s introduction last year said, “The legislation requires that lending and services decisions must be based on impartial, risk-based analysis, not political or reputational favoritism.”

Civil liberties advocates have criticized the legislation.

“Private prisons profit purely from locking people up, but the market is not immune to public accountability,” said Eunice H. Cho, a senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project who has represented immigration detainees housed in privately operated ICE facilities. “Consumer advocacy is a very important part of the democratic process, including economic boycott and protest against corporations. Banks are sensitive to understanding the risks of doing business with harmful industries.”

“We value the relationships we have with our financial partners,” Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, said in a statement. “We also believe all lawful businesses should be treated fairly under the banking system.”

GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Millions in Lobbying

Last year, GEO Group spent $3.3 million in lobbying various departments and agencies of the federal government, of which $1.37 million was spent in lobbying the House and the Senate on issues that included the Fair Access to Banking Act, according to federal lobbying disclosures.

Meanwhile, in 2025, CoreCivic spent $3.5 million total on https://lda.senate.gov/filings/public/filing/search/?registrant=®istrant_country=®istrant_ppb_country=&client=CoreCivic&client_state=&client_country=&client_ppb_country=&house_id=&lobbyist=&lobbyist_covered_position=&lobbyist_conviction_disclosure=&lobbyist_conviction_date_range_from=&lobbyist_conviction_date_range_to=&report_period=&report_year=2025&report_dt_posted_from=&report_dt_posted_to=&report_amount_reported_min=&report_amount_reported_max=&report_filing_uuid=&report_house_doc_id=&report_issue_area_description=&affiliated_organization=&affiliated_organization_country=&foreign_entity=&foreign_entity_country=&foreign_entity_ppb_country=&foreign_entity_ownership_percentage_min=&foreign_entity_ownership_percentage_max=&search=search#js_searchFormTitlelobbying, of which $2 million went toward pushing for the legislation, according to the disclosures.

Despite hiring high-profile D.C. firms for their lobbying activities, both prison companies utilized their in-house government relations experts when it came to advocating for the banking legislation, which is moving through the Senate and the House.

In its fourth-quarter lobbying report, GEO Group mentions “S. 401 and H.R. 987, Fair Access to Banking Act; Issues related to the availability of banking services for federal contractors” as one of its lobbying issues. CoreCivic’s lobbying issues in the same quarter also mentioned “Issues pertaining to financial industry practices; H.R. 987/S. 401 – Fair Access to Banking Act.”

Related

Private Prison CEO on ICE Contracts: We’re a Better Deal Than El Salvador’s CECOT

GEO Group and CoreCivic have long faced criticisms and lawsuits from https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/unchecked-growth-private-prison-corporations-and-immigration-detention-three-years-into-the-biden-administrationrights groups for poor prison conditions, undermining medical needs of detainees, and not doing enough to prevent deaths in their facilities.

In December and January alone, for instance, five of the 11 people who died in ICE custody were housed in detention centers owned and operated by one of the firms, ICE’s press statements show. At least four people died while detained in a GEO Group facility, and one other individual died while detained in a CoreCivic center.

In 2019, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, SunTrust, BNP Paribas, Fifth Third Bancorp, PNC Bank, and Bank of America said that they would no longer provide any new financing to the private prison industry. At the time, the banks reportedly constituted more than 70 percent of the total financing available to the two companies, with many of them having loaned money to either one or both firms.

Many of these Wall Street banks took similar action against gun manufacturers, oil and gas companies, and porn sites, among other industries, in what came to be known as debanking.

The impact was considerable. CoreCivic reportedly had to scramble for finances abroad.

If the new legislation passes, however, the two companies will have access to fresh lines of credit that could help them build new facilities at a faster pace and cash in on a higher demand for ICE detention facilities.

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Deportation, Inc.

Last July, the federal government approved funding of $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

In its third-quarter earnings report, GEO Group said it had secured four ICE contracts for four new ICE detention facilities totaling about 6,000 beds. CoreCivic also reported receiving contracts for four facilities with over 7,000 beds. Financial statements suggest that the new contracts have boosted the revenue figures of both the companies, who rely heavily on federal contracts to support their bottom lines.

An Ally in Trump

The concerted effort put into lobbying by GEO and CoreCivic has already reaped some success.

President Donald Trump signed an https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/guaranteeing-fair-banking-for-all-americans/executive order last August that empowered federal banking regulators, such as the Small Business Administration, to monitor financial institutions that denied services to clients based on “politicized or unlawful debanking action.” Last month, Trump announced he would sue JPMorgan Chase for debanking him over the January 6 riots.

In December, the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published a report that scrutinized nine banks and listed private prisons as being among the sectors affected by debanking. The bureau said that it intends to “hold these banks accountable for any unlawful debanking activities, including by making referrals to the Attorney General.”

In June, even before Trump’s order,https://www.semafor.com/article/06/05/2025/bank-of-america-dropped-private-prison-clients-now-its-taking-them-back Bank of America, which had cut ties with private prisons, reinstated CoreCivic as its client, according to Semafor. A JPMorgan Chase spokesperson said the bank hasn’t changed its policy of freezing out private prisons. Meanwhile, most other banks have been quiet about whether they will change course on financing private prisons. (None of the banks responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

If the Fair Access to Banking Act passes Congress, the banks may not have a choice.

“It has been the worst year for immigration detainees in decades,” said Cho, the ACLU lawyer. “Private prisons have an astronomical amount of funds available to them, and it’s unsurprising they are also looking to protect ways to expand those funds with extra lines of credits available. But for detainees, this can have serious implications.”

The post ICE’s Private Prison Contractors Spent Millions Lobbying to Force Banks to Give Them Loans appeared first on The Intercept.

If US elites can find the courage to speak up, we can still prevent our country from descending into full-blown autocracy

Alex Pretti – an ICU nurse documenting alleged cases of federal immigration agents’ overreach – was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on 24 January. Just hours later, Minnesotans gathered in their neighborhoods for vigils to mourn his death and demand an end to the federal incursion on their state.

Meanwhile, the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Zoom and the New York Stock Exchange attended a glitzy screening of the new Melania documentary at the White House, where they munched on popcorn in special commemorative black-and-white boxes and took home Melania-branded cookies.

Cranston report highly critical of systemic failings and missed opportunities around deaths of at least 33 people

Loss of life was avoidable in the worst mass drowning from a small boat crossing in the Channel, a public inquiry has found.

The 454-page report by the former high court judge Sir Ross Cranston is highly critical of failings around the deaths of at least 24 men, seven women and two children in November 2021, four of whom are still missing.

FBI and Venezuela’s intelligence agency also reportedly arrest billionaire media mogul Raúl Gorrín at same address

A close and powerful associate of the deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro has reportedly been detained during a joint operation by Venezuela’s intelligence agency and the FBI.

Alex Saab, a wealthy Colombian-Venezuelan businessman long considered Maduro’s frontman, was removed from his position in Venezuela’s government a fortnight after US forces captured his ally on 3 January. In the early hours of Wednesday, the 54-year-old was reportedly detained by members of the Bolivarian national intelligence service (Sebin) at a luxury home in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

For the first time since Texas criminalized abortion, the state’s medical regulator is instructing doctors on when they can legally terminate a pregnancy to protect the life of the patient — guidance physicians have long sought as women died and doctors feared imprisonment for intervening.  

The new training from the Texas Medical Board comes nearly five years after the state passed its strict abortion ban in 2021, threatening doctors with severe penalties. ProPublica’s reporting has shown that pregnancy became far more dangerous in the state after the law took effect: Sepsis rates spiked for women suffering a pregnancy loss, as did emergency room visits in which miscarrying patients needed a blood transfusion; at least four women in the state died after they didn’t receive timely reproductive care. More than a hundred OB-GYNs said the state’s abortion ban was to blame.

In response, the Texas Legislature passed the Life of the Mother Act last year. The law updated the abortion ban’s medical exceptions, added to the legal burden needed for prosecutors to criminally charge a doctor and required the medical board to create guidance for doctors by Jan. 1, something no other state with an abortion ban has done.

The new medical training, which ProPublica obtained under a public records request, assures doctors they can now legally provide abortions, even when a patient’s life isn’t imminently in danger, and goes over nine example scenarios, including a patient’s water breaking before term and complications from an incomplete abortion. 

Some of the scenarios make clear how doctors can intervene in circumstances similar to cases ProPublica has investigated. For example, in 2021, Josseli Barnica was diagnosed with an “inevitable” miscarriage, leaving her at high risk of dangerous infection, and she died after doctors would not empty her uterus while there was still a fetal heartbeat. The new training includes an example that indicates an abortion would be legal in similar cases.

But medical and legal experts who reviewed the training for ProPublica said the case studies represent only the most straightforward situations doctors encounter. The complications that women face in pregnancy are varied, complex and impossible to capture in a brief presentation, many cautioned. One attorney called the training “the bare minimum.”

“I could probably list 100 different situations that would cause people to pause and say, ‘Wow, does that fit into the law?’” said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN practicing in Texas. “They’re taking years and years of medical training and experience on how to manage these cases and summarizing it in 43 slides.”

Notably absent from the training is guidance on how doctors should care for patients with chronic conditions, a gray area that has come up again and again in ProPublica’s reporting. Last year, ProPublica investigated the death of Tierra Walker, a San Antonio woman with diabetes and high blood pressure who endured repeated hospitalizations and escalating symptoms before she died. Doctors dismissed her requests for an abortion to protect her health, her family said. Doctors and hospitals involved in Walker’s care did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

And no amount of training can solve what many doctors see as the main problem: the law’s steep criminal penalties. If found guilty of performing an illegal abortion, doctors face up to 99 years in prison, $100,000 in fines and the loss of their medical license. Even the possibility of a lengthy and public court battle can be a powerful deterrent, many physicians told ProPublica. 

The Texas Medical Board writes in its training that “the legal risk of prosecution is extremely low” if doctors practice “evidence-based medicine,” follow “standard emergency protocols” and document cases appropriately. The training also emphasizes multiple times that the burden now falls on the state to prove that “no reasonable doctor” would have performed the abortion. Before the Life of the Mother Act, prosecutors could accuse a physician of performing an illegal abortion with little evidence.

That assurance rings hollow to some doctors, who point to the actions of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton since the state’s abortion ban took effect.

Dr. Damla Karsan, an OB-GYN based in Houston, said she appreciates that the training tells physicians they can use their expertise to make judgment calls during emergency situations. “But having to defend your decision is still scary,” Karsan said. 

In 2023, Paxton overruled Karsan’s medical judgement when her patient Kate Cox sought an abortion at 20 weeks after learning the fetus had a fatal genetic anomaly. Texas bans abortions for all fetal anomalies unless the pregnant woman is facing a medical emergency. Karsan argued that Cox qualified: She had previously had two C-sections, increasing her risk of hemorrhage, infection and future infertility. A Texas lower court permitted the abortion, but Paxton appealed the ruling to the Texas Supreme Court, which ultimately overturned the decision, arguing Karsan hadn’t done enough to prove Cox’s life was at risk. 

Paxton’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the Cox case and the medical board’s assertion that the risk of legal action for doctors who follow its guidance is extremely low.

Texas Medical Board President Dr. Sherif Zaafran told ProPublica that the training was reviewed by Paxton, as well as Gov. Greg Abbott and state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the abortion ban’s author. The board, which has 19 members appointed by the governor, including 12 licensed physicians but no OB-GYNs, also consulted with the Texas Hospital Association and the Texas Medical Association. 

Any doctors who practice obstetric care, including all emergency room and urgent care physicians, will need to complete the self-administered online course before 2027 in order to obtain or renew their license.

Multiple doctors told ProPublica decisions about abortion care are also shaped by hospital lawyers. The Life of the Mother Act required the State Bar of Texas to create its own training for attorneys, which ProPublica reviewed. That presentation also explains that prosecutors looking to file a criminal charge now need to demonstrate that no other doctor would provide an abortion if faced with the same scenario.

Blake Rocap, a longtime reproductive rights attorney, said the state guidance should give doctors and hospitals more protections to help patients access care. “It will save lives,” he said.

After Texas’ six-week abortion ban took effect in 2021, doctors, hospitals and reproductive rights advocates repeatedly urged the Texas Medical Board to provide guidance on how medical professionals could comply with it. In particular, they sought clarity around the law’s vague exception for a “life-threatening emergency.” 

For years, the board declined, saying it lacked the authority. 

In the absence of guidance, confusion reigned across the state. The standard of care for miscarrying patients in the second trimester, for example, is to offer to empty the uterus, which can lower the risk of infection and sepsis, according to leading medical organizations. While some Texas doctors told ProPublica last year they regularly offer to empty the uterus in these cases, others said their hospitals didn’t allow them to do so until the fetal heartbeat stopped or they could document a life-threatening complication, leading to delays in care like the one that Barnica experienced. Across the state, cases of sepsis in second-trimester pregnancy losses shot up more than 50% after the ban took effect, according to a data analysis by ProPublica. 

In 2024, the board released limited guidance stating that providers don’t need to wait until a pregnant woman is on the brink of death to intervene. The new training goes further, offering detailed examples of when abortion would be legal.  

One case study addresses patients who get an abortion out of state but retain tissue in the  uterus. Because the pregnancy was already ended, the medical board advises, “ongoing treatment of any retained products is not an abortion and is not considered aiding and abetting an abortion.” ProPublica investigated the death of a woman in Georgia, Amber Thurman, who died of sepsis when doctors there delayed emptying her uterus after an incomplete abortion.

The training also makes clear that the definition of ectopic pregnancies — which are always life-threatening — includes any that implant in an abnormal location outside of the uterine cavity. Previous laws had defined an ectopic pregnancy as one outside of the uterus. While most ectopic pregnancies occur in the fallopian tubes, some can also implant inside the uterus, such as in the scar tissue from a previous pregnancy.

Still, the training doesn’t address a key issue in miscarriage management that ProPublica’s reporting has highlighted: Early pregnancy loss often can’t be conclusively diagnosed with a single ultrasound. Confirming that a pregnancy has ended can take days or weeks. In those cases, some doctors have left women bleeding and in pain instead of offering a D&C, a procedure that can prevent hemorrhage. Another Texas woman named Porsha Ngumezi bled to death in 2023 while miscarrying, according to the medical examiner, after her doctor did not provide a D&C. 

The training also offers no instruction on how to care for patients whose pregnancies are high risk because of underlying medical conditions like autoimmune disorders, uncontrolled blood pressure or heart disease. Pregnancy can often exacerbate these chronic conditions, sometimes leading to a small risk of death, but doctors may not consider this “life-threatening.” 

Walker, the San Antonio woman ProPublica reported on last year, had uncontrolled blood pressure and developed seizures and blood clots. More than 90 doctors were involved in Walker’s care, but not one offered her the option to end her pregnancy, according to medical records. Doctors who reviewed the new training for ProPublica said they still weren’t clear when they could intervene in cases like hers — would it be when a woman first got pregnant because she already had some risk factors that made pregnancy more dangerous? Or would they have to wait until she developed specific symptoms that showed her health was declining?  

Zaafran said the training makes clear that doctors can judge whether a patient is at risk of death or irreversible damage — and that they can intervene before the patient reaches that state. “In other words, you don’t need to wait until somebody has clots or seizures or whatever it might be to make a determination that something needs to be done.”

What doctors do need to do, Zaafran repeatedly said, is document those risks in case their patients qualify for an abortion. But Karsan argues she did that in the Cox case, and Paxton fought her in court anyway. 

While the medical board’s training includes two case studies related to patients with fatal fetal anomalies, neither addresses whether the updated law allows an abortion in a scenario similar to Cox’s. Karsan documented in the medical records that a third C-section would put Cox at risk of death or a hysterectomy if there was a complication, and that argument is what she shared with the courts. The training emphasizes that a fatal fetal anomaly alone is not covered by the exceptions and that “the mother must have a life-threatening physical condition.” Zaafran declined to comment on Cox’s case specifically but said that his understanding was there was not enough documentation. 

Cox told ProPublica she trusted her medical team’s judgment and she did not want to risk her health by continuing her pregnancy. Grieving the unexpected loss while being denied care and seeing her doctor threatened by the top lawyer in the state, Cox said, “was incredibly scary.” She ultimately traveled out of Texas to get an abortion.

“I’m grateful for my doctors. Their hands were tied in many ways,” she said. “The problem isn’t our doctors. It’s that pregnancy is too complicated to legislate.”

The post After Years of Silence, Texas Medical Board Issues Training for Doctors on How to Legally Provide Abortions appeared first on ProPublica.

Sony announced last month that it plans to pass control of its home entertainment division -- including the two-decade-old Bravia television brand -- to Chinese electronics group TCL through a joint venture in which TCL would hold a 51% stake. The Japanese company was long ago overtaken in sales by South Korea's Samsung and LG and now holds just 2% of the global television market. Sony stopped making its own LCD screens in 2011. Chinese companies supplied 71% of television panels made in Asia last year, according to TCL, and less than 10% are now produced in Japan and Korea. TCL is close to overtaking Samsung as the world's largest television maker. Sony retains valuable intellectual property in image rendering, and the Bravia brand still carries consumer recognition, but its OLED screens are already supplied by Samsung and LG. The company has been shifting toward premium cameras, professional audio, and its entertainment businesses in film, music, and games -- areas where intellectual property is less exposed to Chinese manufacturing scale.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world of hard power, and the future of the war on Ukraine 23 February 2026 — 12:00PM TO 1:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 5 February 2026 Chatham House and Online

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, will speak at Chatham House to mark the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, will appear at Chatham House to mark the fifth year of the Russia invasion.

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi will provide a keynote speech, and answer questions from the audience. The ambassador will give his take on the evolution of the war on the battlefield, and what this means for chances of ending the war.

He will outline a common strategy for European security, focusing on the role of the UK, and what Ukraine can contribute to strengthening both Ukraine’s and Europe’s defence and deterrence capabilities.

The move is among several measures the acting president has touted since Maduro’s capture – yet critics say it erases Venezuela’s long history of repression

It was designed in the 1950s to be the world’s first “drive-through shopping centre”, a futuristic structure with more than than two miles of ramps looping past 300 shops, as well as cinemas, a hotel, a private club, a concert hall and a heliport.

But the building was never completed, and under the regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, spaces envisioned as shops were turned into cells, and El Helicoide became Venezuela’s most notorious torture centre for political prisoners.

Whether you’re chasing gym quality on a budget or a fancy folding model, accelerate your training with our expert’s pick of the best running machines

• The best running shoes, tried and tested by runners
• The best running watches

Although the treadmill has been around since the early 1800s, when it was once used to punish prisoners (sounds about right), it didn’t become a common feature in the home until the late 1960s, when William Staub unleashed his PaceMaster 600 on the US public.

Where they were once a simple rolling deck, treadmills today are often glossy pieces of interactive tech. Many now offer on-demand, real-time workouts (pioneered by Peloton) and the latest blockbuster movies via streaming services. Even if your treadmill doesn’t sport a whopping touchscreen display, it probably works nicely with heart-rate monitors, smartwatches and smartphone apps to track workouts and offer performance statistics after every session.

Best treadmill overall:
Peloton Tread

Best budget treadmill:
JTX Slimline

As his team returns to the Super Bowl, the New England owner who once stood up on social issues proves he is just another transactional billionaire

During the worst of it, when Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police a decade ago and Colin Kaepernick took a knee in protest, when a widespread reaction was to tell the highly accomplished, overwhelmingly Black professional athletes they were un-American, or well-paid farmhands who needed to get back to work, or both, and some of his peers in the ownership class were releasing players as punishment for joining the protest, it was New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft who positioned himself as the voice of reason.

Kraft attempted to broker peace between the ownership hawks who saw the high-paid kneelers as ungrateful mutineers and, after decades of docility, the radicalized players unwilling to collect their checks in exchange for political silence. Kraft encouraged two of his players – the twins Devin and Jason McCourty – into deeper citizenship, to engage with the legal and political systems and promote reforms. As a sign of compassion and a willingness to listen, Kraft visited the incarcerated rapper Meek Mill, and later the two partnered with another artist, Jay-Z, on various criminal justice initiatives.

New Start expires on Thursday. That leaves no limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals

Let’s be honest: America needs another nuclear weapon about as much as Donald Trump deserves a Nobel peace prize.

Yet on Thursday, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U S and Russia will expire. When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – New Start – goes away, there will be no limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time in more than 50 years.

Edward J Markey represents Massachusetts in the US Senate. He is a co-chair of the bicameral congressional nuclear weapons and arms control working group

In the summer of 2019, a crew leader tasked with overseeing farm laborers sent them to harvest corn in a field where they weren’t authorized to work — and where there wasn’t adequate protection from the sweltering sun. One of them died of symptoms of heatstroke.

Five months later, a crew leader for another Georgia farm kidnapped and brutally assaulted one of his workers who had escaped.

Two years after that, a third crew leader confined workers to housing surrounded by an electric fence so they couldn’t try to flee.

These and other recently documented abuses were carried out by third-party middlemen, or farm labor contractors, who were hired by farm owners to recruit and supervise foreign workers. Those contractors had found ways to wield power with near impunity over hundreds of workers at a time. Federal prosecutors spent years revealing the scope of the problem in Georgia, in a giant labor-trafficking case that launched in 2016 and is now nearing its conclusion.

The evidence in that case led prosecutors to liken the abuse to a form of modern-day slavery. 

But despite prosecutors’ efforts to crack down on the exploitation of workers by labor contractors, there has been little to no movement at the state or federal level to make the changes that can stop it. There are laws and regulations that could curb exploitation, but reports from farmworker advocates and labor experts have shown that enforcement has long been lax. A number of elected officials have pushed for years for the government to do more to ensure workers receive those protections. Some advocates now say the only solution is for the government to require that farm owners cut out the middleman and assume ultimate responsibility for their workers.

Experts told ProPublica there aren’t enough state and federal inspectors to adequately vet whether the contractors are following the rules. Nor is there broad political support to invest more resources to protect foreign workers, who themselves have little incentive for reporting abuse given the fear of retribution. 

“Regardless of the administration — even ones that are sympathetic to labor — regulators are handicapped,” said Cesar Escalante, a University of Georgia professor of agricultural and applied economics. “They know what’s happening, but they’re incapable of enforcing the regulations.”

As American farmers continue to rely on the decades-old H-2A visa program to fill the seasonal farmworker jobs, they’ve grown more reliant on contractors to find and oversee those workers. Contractors often are fluent in the languages spoken by workers, familiar with the Mexican towns where they’re plentiful and well-versed in the process of securing their temporary work visas. Many farmers also end up hiring contractors to manage the laborers’ work, pay and housing. 

Federal regulators have long known about contractors abusing and exploiting these workers — including stealing their wages, charging them illegal fees, forcing them to live in substandard housing, and even physically and sexually abusing them. Government watchdogs have published reports about those regulators’ failures to do more to prevent abuses in the fields — inaction that, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s inspector general’s office, has increased the odds of employers getting away with serious H-2A violations. 

The number of H-2A seasonal worker visas requested by contractors has nearly tripled over the past decade, with roughly 2 out of every 5 H-2A workers now directly overseen by a labor contractor. The Government Accountability Office found that more than half of the employers banned from the H-2A visa program between 2020 and 2023 were labor contractors, even though they submitted just 15% of the visa applications during that same period. 

One of the key ways to uncover abuses by labor contractors is for regulators to inspect the farms where their workers pick crops. Daniel Costa, an attorney and director of immigration with the think tank the Economic Policy Institute, said federal regulators have become so strapped for resources that they’re only inspecting a tiny fraction of farms each year.

“When less than 1% of farm employers are investigated every year, they can act with impunity, knowing that there is a very low likelihood that they will ever be investigated,” Costa said. 

Every year, hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers are drawn to America by the promise of steady, seasonal farmwork through the H-2A program. One of them, Agustin Chavez Santiago, traveled more than 1,500 miles from Oaxaca, Mexico, for his chance to pick crops on a Georgia farm. Once he arrived in the spring of 2019, one of the labor contractors he’d worked with failed to pay him the $11 an hour his contract had promised. Soon after, Chavez was sent to work on a farm where he wasn’t authorized to do so. 

As Chavez harvested corn one sweltering afternoon, his body temperature spiked to over 105 degrees. He walked off the field to sip water and rest. Before he cooled down, Chavez collapsed. He was taken to a nearby hospital and died from symptoms of heatstroke. He was 34 years old.

Federal prosecutors charged two contractors involved in recruiting and overseeing Chavez on trafficking charges. Those contractors each pleaded guilty to a lesser crime; one admitted to money laundering and the other admitted to concealing knowledge of a felony. Lawyers for those contractors declined ProPublica’s requests for comment. 

In addition, workplace safety inspectors determined that Chavez died because of the negligence of another labor contractor who oversaw his work in the fields. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded that the labor contractor did not provide a worksite free from “hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” The contractor’s company paid OSHA a fine of $16,433. He was able to keep supervising workers. 

“The fact that OSHA fined him $16,000 is a slap in the face to the victims,” said Teresa Romero, the president of the United Farm Workers, one of the country’s largest farmworker advocacy organizations. “This person should have been behind bars.”

The contractor didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. He told OSHA in 2019 that he provided water to his employees and allowed them to take breaks in the shade as needed.

The U.S. Labor Department can fine or suspend contractors for violating the rules of the H-2A program. But it’s doing fewer agricultural investigations than at any point since the turn of the millennium. In the latest year of available data, including parts of 2024 and 2025, the department completed 649 of those investigations, fining farm employers $8.3 million across the country. That is less than half of the investigations done just a decade earlier, even though the H-2A program more than doubled in size during that time.

Experts say the decline in investigations reflects the limited capacity of federal regulators, not that conditions have improved for H-2A workers. Alexis Guild, vice president of strategy and programs with the advocacy group Farmworker Justice, told ProPublica that regulators now rely on workers to report potential violations against themselves. But she said many workers are too scared to speak out because it may lead to retribution and the loss of future work. “It creates an environment that’s ripe for abuse,” she said.

The U.S. Labor Department is responsible for vetting H-2A visa applications that the contractors submit to get foreign workers cleared to come to America. Those regulators routinely audit the contractors’ applications to verify information about the number of workers needed and the terms of their employment. If contractors submit false information, they may be criminally charged, as happened in the federal case in Georgia. 

But a surge in those requests has meant that large piles of applications haven’t been vetted as closely for red flags. Regulators went from conducting over 500 audits in the fiscal year ending in 2018 to doing less than 50 five years later. The U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General has warned that the way that its regulators audit “increases the risk of fraud and noncompliance going undetected.” That warning followed another OIG report that said the way that the department had conducted those audits created an “unnecessarily elevated risk of foreign labor program abuse.” 

Federal labor regulators have acknowledged to the Government Accountability Office that they have had “widespread concern” about farmworkers being exploited by contractors. They have also told the GAO that the department has “limited resources” to carry out some of its work, including the audits. 

In recent years, the U.S. Labor Department has been pressed to take greater action to fix these problems. After the Georgia case was publicly unveiled in 2021, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia called for more “rigorous oversight” of the contractors. United Farm Workers has also pushed for workers to have “stronger and more effective” protections from their contractors. 

In response, the Biden administration finalized a rule in 2024 that sought to increase protections for H-2A workers and hold their employers more accountable. But after numerous states filed lawsuits challenging the rule, the Trump administration decided to suspend all enforcement of those strengthened protections until the litigation is resolved. 

The U.S. Labor Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. 

With fewer federal investigations of farmworker abuses, some states that heavily depend on H-2A workers have tried to address rampant contractor abuses. 

Florida regulators require labor contractors to get a state license — a move intended to help ensure greater compliance with the rules of the H-2A program. Washington posts all of its housing inspection and enforcement records in an online database, allowing workers to look at those records before they accept a job. California lawmakers last year passed a new law that will give greater power to its regulators to crack down on the abuses of foreign farmworkers by labor contractors. 

But even amid a period of extra scrutiny, Georgia hasn’t made those or any other major changes that could prevent the kind of abuses uncovered in the massive federal probe. 

Labor experts say that one of the most important actions that states can take to protect H-2A workers is to devote sufficient resources to the inspection of their housing conditions. In the last full year of available data, Georgia had one H-2A housing inspector for roughly every 7,100 H-2A workers. Other states with high numbers of H-2A workers had hired more inspectors relative to the number of workers. In recent years, Michigan has had one housing inspector for every 2,000 or so H-2A workers; North Carolina has had one inspector for roughly every 4,000 workers. (Other states, including California, have had worse inspector-to-worker ratios.)

At the same time that Georgia’s Labor Department failed to expand its oversight of farmworker housing, one of its top officials called for an internal investigation into alleged problems within the department. 

In 2018, as federal investigators were building their case, Georgia’s Labor Department received a complaint alleging that one of its regulators had been approving inspections of H-2A worker housing in exchange for cash. Four years later, a federal agent testified in court that employees of Georgia’s Labor Department had accepted bribes to approve inspections of H-2A worker housing. The employee accused in the 2018 complaint, who was not indicted and retired three months after that agent testified, told ProPublica that he denied any wrongdoing.

Around the time of his retirement, labor advocates published a report that called for the “rebuilding” of the state’s Labor Department. They demanded more stringent inspections of H-2A worker housing, better monitoring for potential violations and increased funding so regulators could more effectively do their jobs. 

Instead of having Georgia’s Labor Department adopt those recommendations, Gov. Brian Kemp signed an executive order that stripped the beleaguered department of its oversight powers. 

Georgia’s Labor Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for Kemp said the decision was made to “improve alignment with workforce training programs.”

Kemp transferred H-2A oversight to the Technical College System of Georgia. A Technical College System spokesperson said its officials have “strengthened its monitoring processes to ensure thorough oversight of potential H-2A violations.” 

She also noted that the agency has increased the number of employees who conduct housing inspections from three to six — with plans to add a seventh soon. In a statement, the spokesperson wrote that the Technical College System has taken steps that “have enhanced our ability to monitor, document, and respond to issues more effectively than before.”

Yet, even after doubling the number of inspectors, Georgia still has fewer inspectors per H-2A worker than some of the other states that heavily rely on the visa program.

States like Georgia that have too few inspectors for H-2A workers all but guarantee that violations of the program’s rules will increase, according to Diane Charlton, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University. “We need to invest more in actually monitoring labor conditions,” Charlton said. “This has to be a major priority.”

The post The Dramatic Rise of Farm Labor Contractors Has Led to Rampant Abuses. Here’s Why Regulators Have Failed to Stop Them. appeared first on ProPublica.

New European measures to crack down on Russia’s shadow fleet could severely hurt its economy at a time when it is looking increasingly vulnerable.

Post reporters ventured to northwest Nigeria, where fighters affiliated with the Islamic State are on the offensive despite December airstrikes ordered by President Trump.

The number of Black and Hispanic faculty increased at large research universities after a wave of commitments. Now these pledges are being rolled back, a Post analysis found.

On Wednesday, storied newspaper axed nearly one-third of company after earlier unpopular moves by owner Jeff Bezos

Under Marty Baron, the Washington Post won 11 Pulitzer prizes and expanded its newsroom to house more than 1,000 journalists. The storied newspaper’s future is now in question, according to its former executive editor.

“The aspirations of this news organization are diminished,” Baron told the Guardian in an interview. “I think that’ll translate into fewer subscribers. And I hope it’s not a death spiral, but I worry that it might be.”

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Since the passage of legislation in 2023 requiring all Delaware municipalities to create Police Accountability Boards, reform advocates have often criticized the boards as disorganized and lacking real authority. The New Castle County Council passed an ordinance that would transfer more power over its county police accountability board to the county executive, prompting questions from citizens.

The New Castle County Council passed an ordinance earlier this week taking more authority over appointments to the county’s Police Accountability Board away from community groups and giving it to County Executive Marcus Henry. 

The move grants Henry the power to appoint the accountability board’s chair, replacing the previous system where the county executive had to ask for recommendations to fill the role from local nonprofit organizations. 

The new ordinance also removes certain community representation requirements from the board, such as a civil rights group and a faith-based leader; mandates board members complete 20 hours of police officer-run training; and reduces the number annual board meetings from 10 to six. 

County council members and representatives from Henry’s office are lauding the ordinance as a way of tightening up the accountability board to make it more effective, but police reform advocates are pointing to it as another example of the accountability boards across the state not functioning properly. 

House Bill 205, passed in 2023, instituted a requirement for each local police department in Delaware to create its own Police Accountability Board to address citizen concerns and discuss potential reforms. 

Most boards, like those of the cities of Wilmington and Dover, oversee their own municipal police departments. New Castle County is the only county-wide Police Accountability Board. It was established in July 2024 to preside over the county police department, which itself is directly overseen by the county’s Department of Public Safety. 

In the nearly two and a half years since HB 205 was passed, police reform advocates have criticized some jurisdictions for not having functioning accountability boards, and others for having boards that only met once or twice over the years. 

The New Castle County ordinance was introduced to the council’s Public Safety Committee at the request of Henry’s office in mid-January.

County Councilmen Kevin Caneco and Brandon Toole, the committee chairs, made it clear at multiple discussions of the ordinance that they were not involved in writing the proposal, but rather were simply introducing it to council at the direction of Henry’s office. 

Still, Caneco said he supports the ordinance as a means of adjusting the board’s functions and providing some more flexibility to meeting times and appointments to the board. 

“I think it actually kind of tightens up the language to make the accountability board a little more organized as we move forward,” Caneco told Spotlight Delaware. 

The ordinance passed 12-1 on Feb. 2, with Councilman Jea P. Street casting the lone vote against the ordinance. 

Street made his disapproval of the ordinance clear at the meeting, arguing that it goes against the “spirit and intention” of Police Accountability Boards. His comments come more than two years after the council engaged in a debate over the creation of the board. 

At that time, Street – a longtime advocate for police reform – issued a warning to his colleagues: Either approve the advisory board, or “we’ll have to look to the courts to run the police department.”  

County executive sought feedback

When New Castle County created its 13-member Police Accountability Board in 2023, it was hailed for being the first jurisdiction in the state to do so.

The county had endured the bruising public scrutiny in the officer-involved killing of Lymond Moses just two years earlier, which came in the wake of calls for reform initiated by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.

When then-New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer created the board, he said that, “County residents now have a seat at the table when it comes to law enforcement accountability.”

That approach has now been significantly altered.

Caneco and Toole also said at Tuesday’s meeting that they consulted with members of the Police Accountability Board before moving forward with the ordinance, and got written approval of the changes from Board Vice Chair Kevin Evans.

Natalie Criscenzo, a spokesperson for Henry’s office, wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware that Henry met one-on-one with board members to hear their feedback before proposing the ordinance. 

“While some of the proposed changes originated from the executive office, they were shared with board leadership for review,” Criscenzo wrote. “The intent is to support a more responsive, transparent, and community focused police accountability board.” 

The move by Henry was foreshadowed in a sit-down interview with Spotlight Delaware last spring, when he said that he had “a different perspective” on oversight of police.

“I appreciate the work of the Police Accountability Board and other efforts, but I look at it like this: At the end of day, I’m responsible. I’m personally responsible for what happens with the conduct of the police department,” he said. “I appreciate the help of citizens groups and others, but I don’t need additional help in terms of the seriousness and the veracity in my reviews to make sure we’re doing the best we can.”

Caneco introduced an amendment to the ordinance on Tuesday night, requiring the accountability board to submit annual reports and recommendations to county leaders by April 1 of each year.

Discussion of the ordinance among council members focused on the specifics of Caneco’s amendment, and how often the accountability board should present its recommendations to the county council. 

Street was the only council member to bring up the power over the accountability board that the ordinance would grant to Henry. 

Advocates express concern

Citizens, however, expressed concern about the impact of the regulation on the board’s ability to function, and the power being stripped from community organizations to decide who represents them.  

Chris Asay, a member of the League of Women Voters of Delaware who attends various Police Accountability Board meetings around the state, said the ordinance is disappointing for the integrity of boards in the First State. 

“These changes further weaken the independence and diversity of the board,” Asay said, “making it a faux accountability board like most of the other police accountability committees.”

Tanya Whittle, a current member of the New Castle County Police Accountability Board, said she found it “disheartening” that both the county executive’s office and the county council supported an ordinance that she sees as undermining police accountability. 

“It’s moving us away from the efforts we’ve made as far as really having community-led accountability boards,” she said. 

Whittle’s term on the board is up this month. She told Spotlight Delaware she does not plan to seek another term because she has been “frustrated” by the county’s handling of the board.

The post NCC Council gives Henry more authority over Police Accountability Board appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Women in rural communities describe trauma of moderating violent and pornographic content for global tech companies

On the veranda of her family’s home, with her laptop balanced on a mud slab built into the wall, Monsumi Murmu works from one of the few places where the mobile signal holds. The familiar sounds of domestic life come from inside the house: clinking utensils, footsteps, voices.

On her screen a very different scene plays: a woman is pinned down by a group of men, the camera shakes, there is shouting and the sound of breathing. The video is so disturbing Murmu speeds it up, but her job requires her to watch to the end.

alternative_right writes: The city of Munich has developed its own measurement instrument to assess the digital sovereignty of its IT infrastructure. The so-called Digital Sovereignty Score (SDS) visually resembles the Nutri-Score and identifies IT systems based on their independence from individual providers and 'foreign' legal spheres. The Technical University of Munich was involved in the development. In September and October 2025, the IT Department already conducted a first comprehensive test. Out of a total of 2780 municipal application services, 194 particularly critical ones were selected and evaluated based on five categories. The analysis already showed a high degree of digital sovereignty: 66% of the 194 evaluated services reached the highest levels (SDS 1 and 2), only 5% reached the critical level 4, and 21% reached the most critical level 5. The SDS evaluates not only technical dependencies but also legal and organizational risks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stars, new events, iconic Alpine venues and a return to full Olympic atmosphere after the pandemic era. Here’s everything you need to know about Milano Cortina 2026

The Winter Olympics are back – and this time they’re zigzagging across northern Italy. Milano Cortina 2026 will be the most spread-out Winter Games ever staged, jumping from Milan’s arenas to the Dolomites’ classic Alpine slopes. With returning superstars, brand-new events and Italy leaning hard into its Olympic heritage, these Games may feel like they’ve arrived quietly – but there is a lot going on. From how and when to watch, to who matters and why these Olympics could look very different, here are your most pressing questions answered.

• This article was amended on 5 February 2026. In an earlier version, a map misspelled the resort of Livigno as “Livingo”.

Compact and comfortable Pixel Buds have noise cancelling, decent battery life and good everyday sound

Google’s latest budget Pixel earbuds are smaller, lighter, more comfortable and have noise cancelling, plus a case that allows you to replace the battery at home.

The Pixel Buds 2a uses the design of the excellent Pixel Buds Pro 2 with a few high-end features at a more palatable £109 (€129/$129/A$239) price, undercutting rivals in the process.

Water resistance: IP54 (splash resistant)

Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.4 (SBC, AAC)

Battery life: 7h with ANC (20h with case)

Earbud dimensions: 23.1 x 16 x 17.8mm

Earbud weight: 4.7g each

Driver size: 11mm

Charging case dimensions: 50 x 57.2 x 24.5mm

Charging case weight: 47.6g

Case charging: USB-C

Apparent collapse of Nvidia–OpenAI tie-up raises questions about circular funding and who will bear the cost of AI’s expansion

Did the circular AI economy just wobble? Last week it was reported that a much-discussed $100bn deal – announced last September – between Nvidia and OpenAI might not be happening at all.

This was a circular arrangement through which the chipmaker would supply the ChatGPT developer with huge sums of money that would largely go towards the purchase of its own chips.

The five-time Olympian leads a young US team into Milan after nearly two decades at the vanguard of women’s hockey’s rise and transformation

For nearly two decades, Hilary Knight has been the heartbeat of USA women’s ice hockey – the constant through gold-medal ecstasy and silver-medal heartbreaks, coaching changes, domestic league collapses and the sport’s long, uneven push toward professional stability. Now, at 36, she’s arrived in Milan chasing one more Olympic gold before bringing down the curtain on one of the most influential careers the game has known.

The Olympic women’s hockey tournament opens on Thursday with the United States bringing one of their youngest and fastest teams in years – and their longest-tenured player in the captain’s sweater. Only 11 players return from the team that won silver in Beijing four years ago. Seven are still in college. Many developed inside a professional structure that did not exist for most of Knight’s career, shaped by the emergence of the Professional Women’s Hockey League and the broader surge in investment across women’s sports.

In today’s newsletter: A police investigation, newly released documents and long‑standing questions about​ accountability have converged to place one of Labour’s most enduring figures under unprecedented scrutiny

Good morning. Older readers may remember Peter Mandelson as a man in a sharp suit drifting through New Labour’s 1990s heyday like a Bond villain with a Filofax. An architect of Labour’s modernisation and a lightning rod for right-wing press ire, he has been in the orbit of power for more than three decades.

That run has now come to a shuddering halt after the release of the so-called Epstein files by the US Department of Justice, which detail the extent of Mandelson’s contact with the late billionaire financier and convicted child sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein. While the Met police investigate Mandelson on suspicion of misconduct in public office, the disclosures from the files have also raised urgent questions about judgment, access and accountability at the highest levels of public life.

UK politics | Labour MPs have warned that Keir Starmer’s days as prime minister are numbered after a day of fury over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Gaza | Israeli forces have bulldozed part of a Gaza cemetery containing the war graves of dozens of British, Australian and other allied soldiers killed in the first and second world wars.

Crime | An 18-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a student in his 20s was stabbed in Leicester city centre and later died in hospital, Leicestershire police have said.

Media | Washington Post editor in chief Matt Murray on Wednesday morning announced internally a “broad strategic reset” that will result in “significant” layoffs across the company.

Immigration | Donald Trump’s border tsar said about 700 federal agents would leave Minnesota, a large drop in agents on the ground but still leaving about 2,000 agents there, far above typical levels for the state.

Taiwanese president says ties with Washington ‘rock solid’, hours after leaders of US and China share first call since November

In their first call since November, Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned US president Donald Trump to be “prudent” about supplying arms to Taiwan, according to a readout of their call provided by China’s foreign ministry.

“President Xi emphasised that the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations,” the readout said. “China must safeguard its own sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will never allow Taiwan to be separated. The US must handle the issue of arms sales to Taiwan with prudence.”

Huge release of files provides extraordinary detail on the extent of the disgraced financier’s network

Among the new trove of 3m files relating to Jeffrey Epstein released last week are a vast number of stories shedding light on his relationships with prominent figures in the US, the UK, and around the world. Inclusion in the files does not imply wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s wrongdoing – but a sampling of some of the details they include provides extraordinary detail on the extent of his network.

The chairman of Paul Weiss dined with Jeffrey Epstein and sought his help getting his son a job with a Woody Allen film production

Brad Karp, the longtime chair of powerful Wall Street law firm Paul Weiss, has resigned his top leadership role and will be replaced by partner Scott Barshay, the firm said on Wednesday.

Karp has faced scrutiny after emails released by the US Department of Justice on Friday revealed extensive personal and business communications he had with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

President Trump is awarding the Medal of Honor to a pilot whose faceoff with Soviet fighter jets remained secret for a half-century and a soldier who died in Afghanistan while shielding somebody from a suicide bomber.

Exclusive: David O’Sullivan says war-based economy may be nearing point of becoming ‘unsustainable’

Western sanctions are having a “significant impact” on the Russian economy, the EU’s sanctions envoy has said, ahead of the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

David O’Sullivan, a veteran Irish official, said sanctions were “not a silver bullet” and would always face circumvention, but insisted that after four years he was confident they were having an effect.

Why Putin isn’t thriving in Trump’s anarchic world.

Venezuela, Iran, and the dicey politics of military intervention.

Valve has pushed back the launch of its Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller hardware from its original Q1 2026 window to a vaguer "first half of the year" target, blaming the ongoing memory and storage shortage that has been squeezing the tech industry. The company said in a post today that rising component prices and limited availability forced it to revisit both its shipping schedule and pricing plans. Valve had previously indicated the Steam Machine would be priced at the entry level of the PC space.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Illinois governor pledges to put ‘science, preparedness and people’ first by participating in global response network, following similar move by California

The state of Illinois and New York City have both announced that they will join the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), following Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the global body in 2025.

Illinois’s governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, made the announcement on Tuesday, confirming that Illinois will become part of the coordinated international network dedicated to monitoring and responding to global disease outbreaks.

Police have accused members of a motorcycle club​ and a street gang of targeting the judge.

The 5th Dimension had broad crossover success and won six Grammy Awards, including record of the year twice.

A judge says U.S. immigration agents in Oregon must stop arresting people without warrants unless they are likely to escape.

Democratic leaders outlined their demands for funding the Department of Homeland Security beyond next week.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 5

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 5, No. 500.

"Nancy and Savannah have both contributed so much to the Tucson community," Sally Shamrell, the Guthries' family friend of over 30 years, told CBS News.

Ex-House speaker says at dinner ‘facts are challenged, truth is distorted and press is treated as enemy’ by those in power

The Democratic former speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said on Wednesday that press freedom is “under siege” in the United States after the Trump administration arrested a prominent journalist and searched the home of another.

The warning from Pelosi comes on the same day that the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who has recently sought to curry favor with Donald Trump, conducted mass layoffs of its reporters and editors worldwide.

Some Democratic Colorado lawmakers are demanding answers after reports that "death cards" were left in the vehicles of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and over claims that immigration agents used fake traffic stops to detain them.

BMW may have retreated from its controversial plan to charge monthly fees for heated seats, but the German automaker is pressing ahead with subscription-based vehicle features through its ConnectedDrive platform. A company spokesperson told The Drive that BMW "remains fully committed" to ConnectedDrive as part of its global aftersales strategy. Features requiring data connectivity will likely carry recurring fees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is now a Class I recall, meaning that the use of these continuous glucose monitoring systems could cause serious health consequences or death.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 5, No. 1,692.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 5 #970.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 5, No. 704.

A Covington Army veteran facing deportation after more than 50 years in the U.S. could be removed this week.

As Trump questions the loyalty of a NATO ally, CBS News joins one of its warships taking part in a drill far from home, aimed at defending Europe and the U.S.

"Right now we have the Wild West. I want to see some rules of the road," said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

President Trump told NBC News the call to remove 700 immigration officers from Minneapolis came from him.

Trump’s stopgap bill funds the Department of Homeland Security until 13 February

• White House border czar says 700 federal agents will leave Minnesota

Tom Homan, the president’s so-called “border czar” is set to speak to reporters in Minneapolis shortly.

A reminder that Homan took over the immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota from senior border official Gregory Bovino, just days after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and the mounting backlash in the Twin Cities.

Microsoft has finally delivered on its promise to integrate Sysmon -- the long-standing system monitoring tool from its Sysinternals suite -- directly into Windows, a move that should make life considerably easier for enterprise administrators who have struggled with deploying and managing the utility across thousands of endpoints. The functionality landed this week in Windows Insider builds 26300.7733 (Dev channel) and 26220.7752 (Beta channel). Sysmon allows administrators to capture system events through custom configuration files, filter for specific activity, and pipe the data into standard Windows event logs for pickup by security tools and SIEM pipelines. Mark Russinovich, Microsoft technical fellow and Winternals co-founder, has previously noted the lack of official customer support for Sysmon in production environments -- a gap this integration addresses. The feature ships disabled by default and requires PowerShell to enable. Microsoft notes that any existing Sysmon installation must be uninstalled before activating the built-in version.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet reports $34.5bn profit and revenue soars 48% in recent quarter as it plans a sharp increase in AI spending

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, beat Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, and is planning a sharp increase in capital spending in 2026 as it continues to invest deeply in AI infrastructure.

Alphabet on Wednesday reported profit of $34.5bn in the recently ended quarter, as revenue from cloud computing soared 48%.

The HPC community has made great strides in energy efficiency over the past 25 years, with a 100x improvement in gigaflops per watt on TOP500 systems. However, the advent of generative AI is changing the rules of the game, both in terms of power consumption and the relative efficiency of systems and software. Does AI spell the end of the road for energy efficiency in HPC?

The short answer is no, but with several caveats. According to Kirk Cameron, the faculty lead the Virginia Tech Institute for Advanced Computing and a co-founder of the GREEN500 list, there is still plenty of work to be done in driving efficiency into HPC systems.

“It hasn’t been solved to my knowledge yet,” Cameron quipped during a presentation at SC25 in St. Louis. “I still have a job.”

Cameron and his Virginia Tech colleague Wu-chun Feng founded the GREEN500 list back in 2006 as a means to spread awareness on the need for energy efficiency in HPC, as well as to help drive improvements. Cameron had been studying the topic for years, but outside of a handful of researchers, interest in the field was practically non-existent.

“In 2001 the notions of Green HPC and energy proportional computing were unknown,” Cameron wrote in a 2013 HPCwire story. “There was no tangible evidence that power was an issue in supercomputers. Vendors simply built large systems to customer specifications. Performance kept increasing exponentially and while performance efficiency was of interest, power efficiency was not.”

Much of Cameron’s work has been on closing the “efficiency gap” he identified nearly 20 years ago (Image courtesy Kirk Cameron)

‘Not My Problem’

Back then, the bulk of the HPC community didn’t worry about how efficiently their systems were using electricity and whether that use was sustainable, Cameron said in his SC25 presentation. There was an assumption that it was a minor problem that would be solved by industry and government and academic labs.

Cameron and Feng didn’t believe that, and they foresaw there was a ton of work to make HPC systems efficient. However, HPC had a few things going for it, namely that the nature of HPC systems lent themselves well to efficiency. So they set out to do something about it.

Their first step was to gather data, which was a challenge at the time because systems were not instrumented to measure power consumption at the granularity that they needed. “The information was pretty sparse back then in terms of how much power things actually consumed,” Cameron said.

When the electricity consumption data was gathered, it showed there was a yawning efficiency gap between the potential efficiency of HPC systems and the actual efficiency demonstrated in real-world systems. While many supercomputers were capable of power efficiency in the 50% to 60% range, many were actually running in the 10% to 20% range.

“The trends are clear and irrefutable,” Cameron wrote back in 2013. “Supercomputer power was a liability and would soon limit scalability. Of course, it would be almost 4 years before the community at-large began to acknowledge supercomputer power was a fundamental constraint. Let’s just say I’ve learned to be patient.”

100x Efficiency Gain

Impacting the efficiency curve is something else entirely. The approach advocated by Cameron has been to identify opportunities in the HPC workloads themselves to cut out energy waste. One source of energy waste is idling CPUs. While supercomputers are designed to run flat-out for hours or days at a time, their workloads are not uniform and they’re not static.

Energy efficiency of systems on the GREEN500 have improved by 100x over the past 15 years (Image courtesy Kirk Cameron)

One source of low-hanging fruit has been to identify when CPUs are idle because the system is moving data, either between memory on the bus or over the network. “Those are opportunities for energy savings and energy efficiency,” he said at SC25.

Fast forward two decades, and the work of Cameron and Feng has borne fruit. The HPC community has broken the exascale barrier with systems that consume 30 megawatts or less. What’s more, systems on the GREEN500 list are now, on average, 100x more efficient that they were 20 years ago. Yes, the energy consumption has increased exponentially, but production of gigaflops has grown even faster.

“Two orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency across the list,” Cameron mused. “I think that’s pretty impressive.”

In November 2025, for the first time, the top five most efficient systems on the GREEN500 list–all BullSequana XH3000 systems with Nvidia GH200 Superchips and Quad-Rail Invidia InfiniBand NDR200 interconnects–all scored more than 68.5 gigaflops per watt on the power efficiency metric. More efficiency gains are expected in teh future.

“That’s a tribute to all the people that worked on energy efficiency over the years,” Cameron said. “We did work a lot of work. We got a lot of things done. But the stakes just got higher, didn’t they.”

Power Redux

Despite the real progress made in efficiency, energy remains a critical factor in HPC. The current trend, of course, is the huge demand for generative AI, along with the HPC and energy that make it run.

We’ve gone from exascale systems that consume about 30 megawatts of power to giant clusters, like xAI’s Colussus, that will consume 10 times that amount in a single system. Multiple GPU-heavy clusters are being built in massive AI factories to run AI training and inference workloads. At least five gigawatt-scale data centers are under construction and due to op

Kirk Cameron is a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech

en this year across the United States, with many more slated for the years to come. All told, about 100 gigawatts of new data center capacity is slated to come online by the end of the decade.

Cameron sees some of the same energy efficiency issues from the early 2000s coming around again. For starters, there’s the issue of whether people actually care about energy efficiency and are willing to do something about it, as opposed to assuming that it’s someone else’s problem. Secondly, there are new challenges related to measuring power consumption. Lastly, what are the steps can be taken to reduce energy waste?

“We did this before,” Cameron said in his SC25 presentation. “But I think it’s going to be more important to consider the tradeoffs.”

Efficiency Tradeoffs

There are some interesting factors in AI and energy efficiency. For starters, it turns out that LLMs running on GPUs can be a pretty efficient use of electricity, Cameron said.

“These are really dense linear algebra codes that are regular, that are compute bound or high data reuse. The more power you give them, the more compute they can do in a given second,” Cameron said. “They don’t leave a lot of room for energy efficiency, because they actually use the hardware pretty efficiently.”

GPUs are less efficient running other HPC workloads, such as sparse unstructured linear algebra codes, which demonstrate irregular memory accesses and low arithmetic intensity, Cameron said. Examples of these workloads include building design, seismic modeling, and Web search, he said.

The least efficient use of GPUs involve moving data across memory or the network, Cameron said. Examples of these workloads include epidemic prediction, radiation therapy, or risk modeling. These inefficient workloads are memory-bound and communication-heavy, and are good candidates for improve energy efficiency, he said.

Idle processors are a major target for efficiency improvements (Image courtesy Kirk Cameron)

Gaining efficiency in these HPC systems will likely involve making tradeoffs. HPC users may tolerate slightly lower accuracy in an LLM prediction, for example, if it means saving more energy. Similarly, device makers may want to throttle down an inefficient piece of hardware when it’s not being used with low-efficiency codes.

One possibility for efficiency gains is to use specialized hardware instead of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology. This was attempted in the early 2000s and didn’t work out so well, Cameron said. It’s also quite expensive. While it’s one possible avenue for efficiency gains, it’s not a likely one.

More than likely, HPC will continue to use COTS technology. That’s because massive investment in AI–not traditional HPC workloads–is driving the design for the next generation of GPUs.

“I know it’s hard to swallow for some of us, myself included, but we don’t drive technology innovation,” Cameron said. “Our job in HPC will be to adapt the technologies that we see in the other markets–cloud or AI–for our purposes, to exploit them as best we can.”

The post AI and Power: Where Does Green HPC Go from Here? appeared first on HPCwire.

Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets – whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later.

Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They’ve shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw – performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment.

↫ Pavel Osadchuk

There’s quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn’t care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren’t a lot of great widgets and we hadn’t entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive.

Now Metro, that’s where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user – I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter – and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I’m still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered.

On desktops and laptops, though, it’s a different story, and I don’t think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?

The message, believed to be from Ghislaine Maxwell, was released as part of the latest tranche of the Epstein files

An email believed to have been sent by Ghislaine Maxwell appears to confirm a photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with his arm around Virginia Giuffre’s waist is real.

The message, released as part of the latest tranche of the Epstein files, was headed “draft statement” and sent by “G Maxwell” to Jeffrey Epstein in 2015.

Luke Pollard says blueprint expected last autumn is ‘a bigger task than many people outside defence realise’

A government minister has defended long delays to a military spending plan that are also stalling the UK’s next-generation Tempest fighter jet programme, but refused to say when it will be complete.

The defence investment plan (DIP), originally expected last autumn, has faced repeated postponements amid warnings that the military faces a £28bn funding gap over the next four years.

Industry bigger than all but seven world economies, and accounts for more than third of China’s economic growth

China’s clean energy industries drove more than 90% of the country’s investment growth last year, making the sectors bigger than all but seven of the world’s economies, a new analysis has shown.

For the second time in three years, the report showed the manufacture, installation and export of batteries, electric cars, solar, wind and related technologies accounted for more than a third of China’s economic growth.

Go behind the scenes with our team as we find and make sense of the numbers.

Microsoft Research, in collaboration with various others, has just released LiteBox, a library operating system.

LiteBox is a sandboxing library OS that drastically cuts down the interface to the host, thereby reducing attack surface. It focuses on easy interop of various “North” shims and “South” platforms. LiteBox is designed for usage in both kernel and non-kernel scenarios.

LiteBox exposes a Rust-y nix/rustix-inspired “North” interface when it is provided a Platform interface at its “South”. These interfaces allow for a wide variety of use-cases, easily allowing for connection between any of the North–South pairs.

↫ LiteBox GitHub Page

Suggested use-cases are running unmodified Linux applications on Windows, sandboxing Linux applications on Linux, running OP-TEE applications on Linux, and more. It’s written in Rust, and the code is available on GitHub under an MIT license.

Besides noise, what does Zero Vector Frequency affect when it comes to board performance or riding?

The Puerto Rican singer’s highly anticipated Super Bowl half-time show has inspired non-Spanish speakers to study Puerto Rican dialect and slang

Bad Bunny is expected to perform the Super Bowl half-time show on Sunday entirely in Spanish – which has inspired fans to quickly learn the language.

In October, the Puerto Rican singer – born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio – kicked off the 51st season of Saturday Night Live expressing pride over the achievement in Spanish, after which he said in English, “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn!”

Major obstacles to viable deal remain after Volodymyr Zelenskyy accuses Moscow of violating energy truce

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators have held a “productive” first round of US-led peace talks in Abu Dhabi, as Washington seeks a pathway to end the nearly four-year war in Ukraine.

The two-day trilateral talks that are due to continue on Thursday come after Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Moscow of exploiting a US-backed energy truce last week to stockpile weapons before launching a record number of ballistic missile attacks at Ukraine on Tuesday.

By age 20 diagnosis rates for men and women almost equal, research finds, challenging assumptions of gender discrepancy

Females may be just as likely to be autistic as males but boys are up to four times more likely to be diagnosed in childhood, according to a large-scale study.

Research led by the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden scrutinised the diagnosis rates of autism for people born in Sweden between 1985 and 2020. Of the 2.7 million people tracked, 2.8% were diagnosed with autism between the ages of two and 37.

We may want to go places with Ken and order a bunch of food after watching these.

The five new heroes offer a variety of playstyles that should appeal to a range of players across all three roles.

The five new heroes offer a variety of playstyles that should appeal to a range of players across all three roles.

Singer was member of vocal group that scored 1960s hits with Up, Up and Away and Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In

Singer LaMonte McLemore has died. He was a founding member of the 5th Dimension, a vocal group whose smooth pop and soul sounds with a touch of psychedelia brought them big hits in the 1960s and 70s.

McLemore died on Tuesday aged 90 at his home in Las Vegas, surrounded by his family, his representative Jeremy Westby said in a statement. He died of natural causes after having a stroke.

Former Lieutenant Governor Tahesha Way is not the clear front-runner in New Jersey’s special congressional election on Thursday. She’s seventh in fundraising out of 10 candidates as of last week’s Federal Election Commission deadline, and public polling has been sparse. But as the race drew close to the finish line, the Israel lobby made her the beneficiary of a last-minute push. 

In the final weeks before the election, an Intercept analysis has found, 30 donors to groups including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its super PAC, and Democratic Majority for Israel have poured more than $50,000 into Way’s campaign. On Friday, amid the fundraising push and less than a week before the election, DMFI officially endorsed her. 

The lobby is known for spending against progressives and the most vocal critics of the state of Israel, but in New Jersey, it appears to be backing one moderate to pick off another. Yet more pro-Israel money in the race comes at the expense of Tom Malinowski, who is no progressive on Israel policy but nevertheless has become the subject of AIPAC ire — marking a reversal for the group, which supported him in 2022.

AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent more $2.3 million on ads against Malinowski. The ads do not mention Israel but attack Malinowski on immigration, saying he helped fund “Trump’s deportation force” because he voted in favor of a 2019 bipartisan appropriations bill that funded the Department of Homeland Security. The majority of Democrats, including many supported by AIPAC, voted for the bill.

In a statement to The Intercept, UDP spokesperson Patrick Dorton made no mention of Malinowski’s DHS funding vote. He said Malinowski had fallen afoul of the group’s policy priorities by discussing the possibility of conditioning aid to Israel.

“It’s our goal to build the largest bipartisan pro-Israel majority in Congress. There are several candidates in this race far more pro-Israel than Tom Malinowski,” Dorton said.

Related

AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.

Way and Malinowski are competing in a crowded race in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District to replace former Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who vacated the seat after she was elected governor. 

Way and Malinowski’s campaigns did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Also running are Analilia Mejia, the former political director for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign; veteran Zach Beecher; Passaic County commissioner and election lawyer John Bartlett; former Morris Township Mayor Jeff Grayzel; and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill. 

Way already had substantial support from the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association, which endorsed her and has spent more than $1.7 million backing her campaign, almost half of what it spent in total last cycle. But even with close to $4 million in outside spending on her side, she has lagged behind her opponents in fundraising. She’s raised just over $400,000 — compared to Malinowski’s over $1.1 million, more than $800,000 for Gill, and over half a million for Beecher. Bartlett has raised more than $460,000, Grayzel has raised $428,000, and Mejia has raised just over $420,000.