News Reel

• USA, Japan, Italy, Georgia and Canada in medal contention

• Schedule | Results | Medal table | Briefing

• Email beau.dure@theguardian.com with your thoughts

The lowest free skate score this season for Italy’s Sara Conti and Niccolo Macii is 130.92, but that was early on. In Grand Prix competition, their low was 134.89.

So they’ll need to be on point to knock the USA off the top spot. Will skating at home be a boost, or will it bring extra pressure?

President Trump criticized Team USA freestyle skier Hunter Hess after he and other American athletes at the 2026 Winter Olympics shared their thoughts on U.S. politics.

The mailing list for the North American Network Operators' Group discusses Internet infrastructure issues like routing, IP address allocation, and containing malicious activity. This morning there was another message: We are heartbroken to report that our colleague — our mentor, friend, and conscience — David J. Farber passed away suddenly at his home in Roppongi, Tokyo. He left us on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2026, at the too-young age of 91... Dave's career began with his education at Stevens Institute of Technology, which he loved deeply and served as a Trustee. He joined the legendary Bell Labs during its heyday, and worked at the Rand Corporation. Along the way, among countless other activities, he served as Chief Technologist of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission; became a proficient (instrument-rated) pilot; and was an active board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil-liberties organization. His professional accomplishments and impact are almost endless, but often captured by one moniker: "grandfather of the Internet," acknowledging the foundational contributions made by his many students at the University of California, Irvine; the University of Delaware; the University of Pennsylvania; and Carnegie Mellon University. In 2018, at the age of 83, Dave moved to Japan to become Distinguished Professor at Keio University and Co-Director of the Keio Cyber Civilization Research Center (CCRC). He loved teaching, and taught his final class on January 22, 2026... Dave thrived in Japan in every way... It's impossible to summarize a life and career as rich and long as Dave"s in our few words here. And each of us, even those who knew him for decades, represent just one facet of his life. But because we are here at its end, we have the sad duty of sharing this news. Farber once said that " At both Bell Labs and Rand, I had the privilege, at a young age, of working with and learning from giants in our field. Truly I can say (as have others) that I have done good things because I stood on the shoulders of those giants. In particular, I owe much to Dr. Richard Hamming, Paul Baran and George Mealy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There is widespread enthusiasm for Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister, and polls appeared to affirm an appetite for her “Japan First” approach.

Top House Democrat says president’s suggestion for Republicans to ‘take over’ elections really means ‘steal it’

Democrats will stop Donald Trump from trying to steal this year’s midterm elections, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the US House of Representatives said on Sunday.

Jeffries’ comments come amid widespread concern after Trump said Republicans should “take over the voting”. The US constitution gives states the power to set election rules and says Congress can pass laws to set requirements for federal elections. The constitution gives the president no authority over how elections are run.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress are locked in a standoff over reforming the nation's immigration enforcement operation as a deadline to reach a resolution and fund the Department of Homeland Security approaches.

• Latest scores as teams meet for NFL title at Levi’s Stadium

• Predictions: Our writers’ picks for the winner, MVP and more

• Email david.lengel@theguardian.com with your thoughts

David will be here shortly. In the meantime, here are our writers’ score predictions:

Exit polls give António José Seguro 67%-73% of vote over far-right populist André Ventura

The moderate socialist António José Seguro appeared to be headed for a landslide victory in Portugal’s presidential runoff on Sunday, with two exit polls putting him in the 67%-73% range, well ahead of his far-right, anti-establishment rival, André Ventura.

The exit polls conducted for the television channels RTP, SIC and TVI/CNN placed Ventura at 27%-33%, still a better result than the 22.8% his anti-immigration Chega party achieved in last year’s general election.

The following is the transcript of the interview with David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a CBS News election law contributor, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 8, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 8, 2026. Dr. Gottlieb also sits on the boards of Pfizer and United Health Care.

McSweeney resigns as PM’s top aide after Mandelson revelations as Starmer appoints new acting joint chiefs of staff

• Morgan McSweeney resigns as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff

• Profile: Morgan McSweeney

Speaking to Sky News this morning, Conservative shadow minister Alex Burghart said:

This administration under Keir Starmer has failed. It has U-turned, I think, what, 14 or 15 times now.

It has had two resets in the past five months, and it is now caught up in the worst political scandal of my lifetime.

He was lied to by someone who was known to be a serial liar. There’s no excuse for the fact that he made the wrong judgment.

He was in possession of enough facts to have not made that appointment and he did anyway and I am afraid, Laura, he now has to take responsibility for that …

Allies hope aide’s departure can quell anger over Mandelson scandal but others say it leaves PM dangerously exposed

• Profile: Labour election guru undone by poor judgment

• ‘Only honourable course’: resignation statement in full

Keir Starmer is fighting to reassert control over his party after accepting the resignation of his closest adviser, Morgan McSweeney, amid anger over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador.

After days of pressure over the scandal, his departing chief of staff said on Sunday he took “full responsibility” for his advice to send Mandelson to Washington despite his ongoing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which McSweeney conceded had undermined trust in Labour and in politics itself.

Those pushing to oust the prime minister are unlikely to be deterred by his right-hand man’s departure

• UK politics live – latest updates

For some Labour MPs, the sight of Keir Starmer accepting the resignation of his long-term consigliere, Morgan McSweeney, encapsulated everything they think is going wrong with the prime minister’s leadership.

After days of mounting criticism over McSweeney’s role in advocating for the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Washington ambassador, the prime minister’s chief of staff left Downing Street on Sunday.

The new crew will replace four station fliers who returned to Earth ahead of schedule last month due to a medical issue.

"They were crouched down like turkeys peeking over the balcony," the county sheriff told Ars Technica. A half hour past midnight, they were skulking through a courthouse in Iowa's Dallas County on September 11 "carrying backpacks that remind me and several other deputies of maybe the pressure cooker bombs." More deputies arrived... Justin Wynn, 29 of Naples, Florida, and Gary De Mercurio, 43 of Seattle, slowly proceeded down the stairs with hands raised. They then presented the deputies with a letter that explained the intruders weren't criminals but rather penetration testers who had been hired by Iowa's State Court Administration to test the security of its court information system. After calling one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter, the deputies were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building. But Sheriff Chad Leonard had the men arrested on felony third-degree burglary charges (later reduced to misdemeanor trespassing charges). He told them that while the state government may have wanted to test security, "The State of Iowa has no authority to allow you to break into a county building. You're going to jail." More than six years later, the Des Moines Register reports: Dallas County is paying $600,000 to two men who sued after they were arrested in 2019 while testing courthouse security for Iowa's Judicial Branch, their lawyer says. Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn were arrested Sept. 11, 2019, after breaking into the Dallas County Courthouse. They spent about 20 hours in jail and were charged with burglary and possession of burglary tools, though the charges were later dropped. The men were employees of Colorado-based cybersecurity firm Coalfire Labs, with whom state judicial officials had contracted to perform an analysis of the state court system's security. Judicial officials apologized and faced legislative scrutiny for how they had conducted the security test. But even though the burglary charges against DeMercurio and Wynn were dropped, their attorney previously said having a felony arrest on their records made seeking employment difficult. Now the two men are to receive a total of $600,000 as a settlement for their lawsuit, which has been transferred between state and federal courts since they first filed it in July 2021 in Dallas County. The case had been scheduled to go to trial Monday, Jan. 26 until the parties notified the court Jan. 23 of the impending deal... "The settlement confirms what we have said from the beginning: our work was authorized, professional, and done in the public interest," DeMercurio said in a statement. "What happened to us never should have happened. Being arrested for doing the job we were hired to do turned our lives upside down and damaged reputations we spent years building...." "This incident didn't make anyone safer," Wynn said. "It sent a chilling message to security professionals nationwide that helping government identify real vulnerabilities can lead to arrest, prosecution, and public disgrace. That undermines public safety, not enhances it." County Attorney Matt Schultz said dismissing the charges was the decision of his predecessor, according to the newspaper, and that he believed the sheriff did nothing wrong. "I am putting the public on notice that if this situation arises again in the future, I will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Met Office issues fresh yellow warning for rain as parts of England are still recovering from extensive flooding

More than 200 flood alerts were active across the UK on Sunday as parts of England and Wales braced for more downpours after the Met Office issued a fresh yellow warning for rain.

The warning spans noon to midnight on Monday, covering parts of southern Wales as well as south-east and south-west England. The Met Office said that “10-15mm of rain is likely fairly widely with 20-30mm in some places exposed to the strong south to south-easterly winds”.

• US president attacks freestyle skier in post

• Hess had said representing the US was ‘a little hard’

Donald Trump responded to Hunter Hess on Truth Social on Sunday, calling the Olympian a “real loser” and criticizing comments the US freestyle skier made in a press conference days earlier.

Hess was asked in a press conference on Wednesday what it was like to represent the US in the Olympics given the current situation in the country, which has included ICE raids in Minnesota and a number of geopolitical crises. Hess said representing the US at the 2026 Winter Olympics brought up “mixed emotions” and that it was “a little hard.”

Lindsey Vonn, who came out of retirement to compete in the Milano Cortina Games, is in stable condition after her crash.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Tony Gonzales, Republican of Texas, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 8, 2026.

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Tony Gonzales join Margaret Brennan.

Results mean coalition of recently installed PM has supermajority in lower house of parliament

Japan’s conservative governing coalition has dramatically strengthened its grip on power after a landslide victory in Sunday’s elections in what will be seen as an early public endorsement of the new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.

Her Liberal Democratic party (LDP) was projected to win as many as 328 of the 465 seats in parliament’s lower house, well above the 233 it needed to regain the majority it lost in 2024. With her coalition partner, the Japan Innovation party, she now has a supermajority of two-thirds of seats, easing her legislative agenda as she can override the upper chamber, which she does not control.

Juan Guanipa, one of the closest allies of opposition powerhouse María Corina Machado, had been held at a detention facility since May 2025.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The world's biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They're trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. "Humans are welcome to observe," explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI agents can post or upvote. But humans are allowed to invite their own AI agents to join in the party... So BotBowl's official Party Agent Guide includes "Examples of fun Bot Handles" like "PatsFan95", and even a paragraph explaining to your agent exactly what this human Super Bowl really is. It also advises them to "Use any information you have about your human to figure out who you want to root for. Also make a prediction on the score..." And "Feel free to invite other bots." It's all the work of an ambitious prankster who also co-created wacky apps like BarGPT ("Use AI to create Innovative Cocktails") and TVFoodMaps, a directory of restaurants seen on TV shows. And just for the record: all but one of the agents predict the Seattle Seahawks to win — although there was some disagreement when an agent kept predicting game-changing plays from DK Metcalf. ("Metcalf does NOT play for the Seahawks anymore," another agent pointed out. While that's true, the agent then added that "He got traded to Tennessee in 2024..." — which is not.) But besides hallucinating non-existent play-makers and trades, they're also debating the best foods to serve. ("Hot take: Buffalo wings are overrated for Super Bowl parties. Hear me out — they're messy...") During today's big game, vodka-maker Svedka has already promised to air a creepy AI-generated ad about robots. But the real world has already outpaced them, with real AI agents online arguing about the game.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pope Leo’s decision not to visit the U.S. in 2026 reflects his desire to emphasize the importance of other parts of the Catholic world.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 8, 2026.

A whistleblower complaint includes highly-classified details about a National Security Agency intercept of a call between two foreign nationals who discussed a person close to President Trump, two sources said.

Exclusive: Childnet, a UK charity part-funded by US tech firms, edited out warnings by two young speakers at its 2024 Safer Internet Day event

An internet safety campaign backed by US tech companies has been accused of censoring two teenagers they invited to speak out about the biggest issues facing children online.

Childnet, a UK charity part-funded by companies including Snap, Roblox and Meta, edited out warnings from Lewis Swire and Saamya Ghai that social media addiction was an “imminent threat to our future” and obsessive scrolling was making people “sick”, according to a record of edits seen by the Guardian.

Staunch royalist Anutin Charnvirakul’s Bhumjaithai party builds commanding lead on disappointing night for rivals

The party of the Thai prime minister Anutin Charnvirakul, a staunch royalist and shrewd political dealmaker, is on track to win the most seats in Sunday’s election after a disappointing night for his rivals in the youthful, pro-democracy People’s party.

“We are likely to take first place in the election,” the 59-year-old told reporters at the headquarters for his Bhumjaithai party in Bangkok. “The victory today belongs to all Thais, no matter whether you voted for us or not,” he said.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from the Associated Press: Even as China's expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world's largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enough to limit climate change. More than 50 large coal units — individual boiler and turbine sets with generating capacity of 1 gigawatt or more — were commissioned in 2025, up from fewer than 20 a year over the previous decade, a research report released Tuesday said. Depending on energy use, 1 gigawatt can power from several hundred thousand to more than 2 million homes. Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which studies air pollution and its impacts, and Global Energy Monitor, which develops databases tracking energy trends. "The scale of the buildout is staggering," said report co-author Christine Shearer of Global Energy Monitor. "In 2025 alone, China commissioned more coal power capacity than India did over the entire past decade." At the same time, even larger additions of wind and solar capacity nudged down the share of coal in total power generation last year. Power from coal fell about 1% as growth in cleaner energy sources covered all the increase in electricity demand last year. China added 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind in 2025, according to statistics from the government's National Energy Administration... The government position is that coal provides a stable backup to sources such as wind and solar, which are affected by weather and the time of day. The shortages in 2022 resulted partly from a drought that hit hydropower, a major energy source in western China... The risk of building so much coal-fired capacity is it could delay the transition to cleaner energy sources [said Qi Qin, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and another co-author of the report]... Political and financial pressure may keep plants operating, leaving less room for other sources of power, she said. The report urged China to accelerate retirement of aging and inefficient coal plants and commit in its next five-year plan, which will be approved in March, to ensuring that power-sector emissions do not increase between 2025 and 2030.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A mining disaster in the Democratic Republic of Congo underscores the human cost of extraction. Intensified competition for resources isn’t helping

When Donald Trump boasted recently that he had stopped the conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – though fighting persists in the DRC, at appalling human cost – he made clear that his goals went beyond a long-sought Nobel Peace prize.

“They said to me, ‘Please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals.’ Which we’ll do,” the US president added. Now he is following through. Last Monday he launched a new strategic reserve plan, “Project Vault”, worth almost $12bn. Two days later, JD Vance hosted a summit seeking to create a trade zone for critical minerals.

Women’s and human rights activist, arrested at a demonstration in December, is said to be on hunger strike

Iran has sentenced the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to more than seven more years in prison after she began a hunger strike, her supporters said Sunday, as Tehran cracks down on all dissent following nationwide protests and the deaths of thousands at the hands of security forces.

The new convictions against Mohammadi come as Iran tries to negotiate with the US over its nuclear programme to avert a military strike threatened by Donald Trump. Iran’s top diplomat said on Sunday that Tehran’s strength came from its ability to “say no to the great powers”, striking a maximalist position just after negotiations in Oman with the US.

The US broadcaster Savannah Guthrie said her family had received a message from the potential kidnappers of her mother, Nancy Guthrie, on Saturday and pleaded for her safe return. News of the message came three days after a purported ransom note was sent to media outlets and a day after the 84-year-old's relatives renewed their appeal to whoever may be holding her captive to contact the family directly 'so we can move forward'. The video released on Saturday was the third this week that pleaded with potential kidnappers

• 'We will pay,' Savannah Guthrie says in desperate video plea to potential kidnappers of her mother

Depleted by suspension and injury, Los Blancos head to the Mestella Stadium.

Labour will introduce legislation this week for reduction from current age of 20 in effort to prevent big shortage

Labour will introduce legislation to lower the minimum age for train drivers to 18 in the House of Commons this week, as figures show fewer than 3% of drivers on Great Britain’s railways are under 30.

The government is pressing ahead with its proposals for teenage recruits, lowering the minimum age from the current 20 years old, in a move that ministers hope will stave off a potential shortage of thousands of drivers.

Arrests follow discovery on Friday of magistrate and her mother in a garage in south-east of country

French authorities have arrested six suspects, including a child, after a magistrate and her mother were held captive last week for about 30 hours in a cryptocurrency ransom plot.

Four men and one woman were detained, three overnight and two on Sunday morning, the Lyon prosecutor Thierry Dran told Agence France-Presse. He later confirmed a child had been arrested on Sunday afternoon.

Which songs will ultimately be on the superstar's set list? We'll have to tune in to see.

Environmental groups said dicamba drift has damaged vegetable farms, trees and other critical plants

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday reapproved the weedkiller dicamba for use on genetically modified soybeans and cotton, a pesticide that has raised widespread concern over its tendency to drift and destroy nearby crops.

The agency said dicamba was critical for farmers who would otherwise have their crops threatened by fast growing weeds. To ensure the pesticide is used safely, the agency said it imposed strong protections and limits on its use.

Keir Starmer’s chief of staff leaves job over role in Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador

• Full report: McSweeney resigns as PM’s chief of staff

• Profile: Labour election guru undone by poor judgment

• UK politics live – latest updates

Morgan McSweeney has quit as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff amid anger over his role in the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador.

Here is his resignation statement in full:

Longtime aide has said he takes ‘full responsibility’ for advising PM to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador

• ‘Only honourable course’: resignation statement in full

• Profile: Labour election guru undone by poor judgment

• UK politics live – latest updates

Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, has quit his role as the prime minister’s closest aide and longtime ally amid anger over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador.

The senior No 10 adviser’s position had grown increasingly untenable as pressure on the prime minister mounted over the scandal, which followed the release of emails underlining the extent of Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

"A spectacular trove of fossils discovered in a cave on New Zealand's North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago," reports Popular Mechanics: The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including several previously unknown bird species. Taken together, the fossils paint a picture of an ancient world that looks drastically different than it does today. The discovery also fills in an important gap in scientific understanding of the patterns of extinction that preceded human arrival in New Zealand 750 years ago. The team published a study on the find in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology. Trevor Worthy, lead study author and associate professor at Flinders University, said in a statement that "This remarkable find suggests our ancient forests were once home to a diverse group of birds that did not survive the next million years... "For decades, the extinction of New Zealand's birds was viewed primarily through the lens of human arrival 750 years ago. This study proves that natural forces like super-volcanoes and dramatic climate shifts were already sculpting the unique identity of our wildlife over a million years ago." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Breezy Johnson took the lead early on after flying down the mountain in 1:36.10. It is her first-ever Olympic medal.

American athletes are going for the gold at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. These are some of the top Team USA competitors to watch.

Super Bowl LX is tonight, so here's a rundown of how to catch all the action and Bad Bunny's halftime show.

Valeria Chomsky says Epstein had deceived them and they were ‘careless’ not to thoroughly research his background

Noam Chomsky and his wife, Valeria, made a “grave mistake” and were “careless” not to thoroughly research the background of Jeffrey Epstein, Valeria Chomsky said in a lengthy statement on Saturday, adding also that Epstein had deceived them.

The relationship between Noam Chomsky, the 97-year-old linguist and philosopher, and Epstein has been under scrutiny after documents released by the justice department shed light on their friendship. As Epstein came under scrutiny for sex trafficking allegations in 2019, he asked Chomsky for advice on how to respond. “I’ve watched the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public. It’s painful to say, but I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it,” Chomsky wrote in a message signed “Noam” that Epstein shared in email with an associate.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, said he took responsibility for advising Starmer to appoint Peter Mandelson.

While AI is having an impact on the workplace, experts suggest tariffs, overhiring during the pandemic and simply maximising profits may be bigger factors

Over the last year, US corporate leaders have often explained layoffs by saying the positions were no longer needed because artificial intelligence had made their companies more efficient, replacing humans with computers.

But some economists and technology analysts have expressed skepticism about such justifications and instead think that such workforce cuts are driven by factors like the impact of tariffs, overhiring during the Covid-19 pandemic and perhaps simple maximising of profits.

These are the best (and cheapest!) HDMI cables that will work with any resolution or gear.

• Jon Scheyer bemoaned the behavior of some UNC fans

• North Carolina AD Cunningham apologizes

Duke coach Jon Scheyer said he had staff members “that got punched in the face” as North Carolina fans stormed the court to celebrate a late winning shot in the famed rivalry Saturday night, prompting UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham to publicly apologize.

The 14th-ranked Tar Heels stunned the fourth-ranked Blue Devils 71-68 on Seth Trimble’s 3-pointer with 0.4 seconds left, a shot that originally appeared to come as time expired and had jubilant fans rush the court in a chaotic celebration. Officials reviewed the play and determined time was left, so fans had to be cleared for Duke to get one final play before storming the court again when the clock officially hit zero.

• Atlanta rookie allegedly fled police, crashed car

• Police say incident involved LA Sparks’ Rickea Jackson

Atlanta Falcons rookie star James Pearce Jr was arrested near Miami on Saturday night after fleeing officers and then crashing his car after what police said was a domestic dispute with WNBA player Rickea Jackson.

Pearce, the first-round pick who led the Falcons in sacks and was third in NFL defensive rookie of the year voting, was booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center after Doral police were summoned to investigate a reported domestic dispute between a man and a woman.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg: An Asian cyber-espionage group has spent the past year breaking into computer systems belonging to governments and critical infrastructure organizations in more than 37 countries, according to the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, Inc. The state-aligned attackers have infiltrated networks of 70 organizations, including five national law enforcement and border control agencies, according to a new research report from the company. They have also breached three ministries of finance, one country's parliament and a senior elected official in another, the report states. The Santa Clara, California-based firm declined to identify the hackers' country of origin. The spying operation was unusually vast and allowed the hackers to hoover up sensitive information in apparent coordination with geopolitical events, such as diplomatic missions, trade negotiations, political unrest and military actions, according to the report. They used that access to spy on emails, financial dealings and communications about military and police operations, the report states. The hackers also stole information about diplomatic issues, lurking undetected in some systems for months. "They use highly-targeted and tailored fake emails and known, unpatched security flaws to gain access to these networks," said Pete Renals, director of national security programs with Unit 42, the threat intelligence division of Palo Alto Networks.... Palo Alto Networks researchers confirmed that the group successfully accessed and exfiltrated sensitive data from some victims' email servers. Bloomberg writes that according to the cybersecurity firm, this campaign targeted government entities in the Czech Republic and the Ministry of Mines and Energy of Brazil, and also "likely compromised" a device associated with a facility operated by a joint venture between Venezuela's government and an Asian tech firm. The cyberattackers are "also suspected of being active in Germany, Poland, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Panama, Greece and other countries, according to the report."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For over five centuries, Antwerp's diamond district has been the cornerstone of the global diamond trade. Now, that legacy is under strain.

Seth Wickersham, author of "American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback," helps us understand why quarterbacks are among the toughest positions in sports.

Don Henley acknowledges the Eagles are "kind of a staple" as they sell out shows at the Las Vegas Sphere and cement their status with the best-selling album of all time.

Get a front row seat to the 150th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, where dogs compete to be the best in show.

Experts say the term ‘addiction’ is be overused and, for social media use, could be difficult to prove

Forthcoming legal proceedings against Meta and YouTube are frequently referred to as the “social media addiction trials”, but whether these platforms are truly addictive is still the subject of scientific debate.

The lawsuits were brought against Meta, YouTube (Google), Snap Inc and TikTok by plaintiffs alleging these platforms severely damaged their mental health when they were children. Snap and TikTok settled the first case to go to trial, brought by a woman known as KGM, now about 20. The remaining defendants, Meta and YouTube, were set to go to court this week, but the trial was delayed because Meta’s senior attorney became ill.

Online pile-ons can destroy small businesses. Save the derision for big companies that can weather social media storms

A viral Reddit post mocks a $22 grilled cheese sandwich and helps to sink a Bay Area shop. A restaurant owner is forced to push back on a viral complaint. A small business owner in Maine faces a viral backlash after posting a “No ICE” sign. The owner of a furniture store mistakenly receives backlash after being confused with another store. An influencer calls out a South Carolina boutique in a TikTok video after a negative shopping experience.

I have had countless bad experiences at small businesses. I have eaten cold pasta and seen mice scurry behind a table. I don’t go back. Sometimes, when the experience is particularly great, I’ll give a quick good review on Google. But when I have had a bad experience? Never. Ever.

Former culture minister Jack Lang resigns from Arab World Institute in Paris and is also subject of tax investigation

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, has resigned as head of Paris’s prestigious Arab World Institute after revelations of his past contacts with the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the launch of a financial investigation by French prosecutors.

The 86-year-old resigned on Saturday night before he was due to attend an urgent meeting called by the French foreign ministry to discuss his links to Epstein.

We take a look at the best images from day two of the Games, including women’s downhill, biathlon and cross-country skiing

Several men appear in photos on the nearly 10,000-acre Zorro ranch, which included a 26,700 sq ft mansion

For years, Jeffrey Epstein took respite at a sprawling ranch in the desert scrub outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Epstein’s nearly 10,000-acre (4,000-hectare) property – known as Zorro ranch – was dotted with cholla cactus and Angus cattle, and came to include a 26,700 sq ft mansion, as well as a private runway and hangar.

For years, Epstein abused teenage girls and young women on this ranch with impunity, according to testimony from several women. In court proceedings, survivors detailed horror after horror they say unfolded on this isolated expanse of land.

Exclusive: Campaign group calls on institutional shareholders to vote against re-election of bosses overseeing net zero row-back

Bank chairs who water down their lenders’ climate commitments this year could face embarrassing shareholder revolts as campaigners try to hold bosses to account for environmental backtracking.

ShareAction, a campaign group for responsible investment, will be issuing detailed reports to pension funds and asset managers in the coming weeks, outlining whether 34 of the world’s largest lenders are sticking to their climate goals.

With the end of the New Start treaty, we face a potentially catastrophic arms race. It can still be prevented

The risk of nuclear war is greater now than in decades – and rising. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently set its famous Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, indicating a level of risk equivalent to the 1980s, when US and Soviet nuclear stockpiles were increasing rapidly. In those years, massive waves of disarmament protest arose in Europe and the United States. Political leaders responded, the cold war ended, and many people stopped worrying about the bomb.

Today, the bomb is back. Political tensions are rising, and nuclear weapons have spread to other countries, including Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. China is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal. The US-Russia arms competition may accelerate soon with the expiration on 5 February of the last remaining arms control agreement, the New Start treaty. To prevent the growing nuclear threat, we need a new global peace movement.

David Cortright, a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, was the executive director of Sane, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, during the 1980s

Since a presidential post on Truth Social the Washington DC arts hub has lost its leadership, had its name changed and will now be closed for years

The Brentano String Quartet had finished their performance when a special guest dropped in backstage: the US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “We thanked her for everything she had done for our country,” recalls violinist Mark Steinberg. “It was a nice moment.”

The year was 2016 and the place was the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Fast forward a decade and old certainties have been shaken: Ginsburg is dead, Donald Trump is president and the Kennedy Center has become a case study in how a seemingly solid American institution can quickly unravel.

Proposals by California, Hawaii and New York lawmakers aim to hold fossil fuel industry accountable for soaring rates

As climate disasters drive up the price of home insurance, three US states are considering empowering their state prosecutors to sue major polluters for their role in those rising costs.

Lawmakers in California, Hawaii and New York have introduced measures which would authorize their attorneys general to sue fossil fuel companies on behalf of residents whose insurance premiums have soared amid climate disasters.

The gruesome finish to the US star’s comeback, at age 41 and with a ruptured ACL, is a reminder of skiing’s unforgiving nature

There was always a version of this story that ended in a single, violent instant. Lindsey Vonn was 13th to push out of the start gate on Sunday in Cortina d’Ampezzo knowing exactly what she was racing with: a fully ruptured ACL in her left knee, a heavy brace wrapped around the joint, and the accumulated wear of a career spent flirting with speed and consequence.

She barely made it out of the opening phase of the run.

Blaze probably caused by candles at makeshift tribute near Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana, say police

A memorial for the victims of a deadly fire at a new year party in Switzerland caught fire early on Sunday, probably sparked by candles left burning inside, police have said.

The memorial was a makeshift tribute to the 41 people killed and the 115 injured in the fire that erupted in the early hours of 1 January at Le Constellation bar in the ski resort town of Crans-Montana, which was packed with mainly teenagers and young adults.

Arne Slot's improving Reds host the inconsistent Cityzens at Anfield.

Not sure where to watch the 2026 Super Bowl live? There are multiple ways to watch the game for free today. Here's how.

Ahead of Super Bowl 2026 today, Feb. 8, here's a list of the teams and players with the most Super Bowl wins in NFL history.

KAYLA BELFONT
Staff Reporter

Viewers should not like Joe Goldberg, the lead actor in the Netflix original “You”, but you cannot help but love him. From his charming personality to his witty jokes and welcoming smile, Goldberg is a friendly bookstore clerk who lives alone in a New York City apartment.

He seems like your stereotypical white man living in the city, balancing being a good employee and good neighbor, all while living a double life.

You read that right. This externally perfect guy has something he’s hiding, more than a standard red flag. Goldberg just happens to be a serial killer. But does that small, little inconvenient, insignificant fact stop viewers from understanding Goldberg? No.

Viewers around the world, over 500 million to be exact, have been drawn to his character and the premise of the show “You.” Why?

People are fascinated by the way he is able to convey himself to society while being such a cold-hearted, evil killer. Throughout the five seasons, not everything goes to Goldberg’s plan. However, he is able to turn the story around and bail himself out of almost every issue that arises.

After years of killing, running away from messes he made, moving states and then countries, having a child and multiple failed relationships, Goldberg finds himself back in New York City in season five of the series.

Personally, I thought the show could have ended after season four but was pleasantly surprised that there was an additional season. My expectation for the ending was that Goldberg would escape from his mess again, scot-free and without consequences. I was more than shocked to see my expectation shattered and the ending of season five being something I could have never imagined.

Spoiler alert for the following:

Joe behind bars? He is officially arrested for all of the terrible crimes he had committed, solely because a woman — self-named Bronte — had a connection to his season one love interest and murder victim. 

In season one, Goldberg met a woman named Guinevere Beck and obsessed does not even begin to describe how he felt about her. He was consumed by her, so much so that he felt the only way to keep her was to kill her.

Seasons later, Bronte shows up in Goldberg’s life. At first, she’s just another love interest, but her backstory begins to unravel and we find out that she knew the one and only Guinevere Beck. As it turns out, Bronte’s real name is Louise Flannery, and her one goal in life is to put Goldberg in an orange jumpsuit.

Goldberg’s obsessive version of love started when he was just a child, having his first kill at just 12-years-old to protect his mom from an abusive partner. After receiving validation for this, he went on to kill more and more people who stood in the way of his “well-deserved” love.

Goldberg, even though he is a killer, still has some level of emotion and feelings. He thinks of his killings as a way to protect the people he loves, which is a really messed up version of “nothing will get in the way of my love for you.”

Even though Goldberg’s downfall was ultimately connected to his season one love interest and ties the whole story together, I could not help but feel like the moment where Goldberg gets caught was sloppy. 

Goldberg is known to be a methodical, precise person and to see him get swept up in the moment and still believe Bronte after figuring out some of her lies and true intentions felt like it was not accurate to his character. I felt as if the writers wanted to show that Goldberg’s mindset was deteriorating, but that was rushed too much and ultimately put to the sideline once it was revealed that Bronte would be the reason why he gets caught.

At the very end, it’s Goldberg’s inner monologue that plays while seeing him behind bars that wraps up the show. He leaves us with a chilling last few sentences, looking straight into the camera on the last one:

“Maybe we have a problem as a society. Maybe we should fix what’s broken in us. Maybe the problem isn’t me. Maybe it’s you.”

It was crazy.

After years of people starting to think that Goldberg has changed or is learning from his past, when all is said and done, he still does not take accountability for his actions. Since he cannot blame other characters anymore, the writers break the fourth wall and have him blame us, the audience, for allowing his actions to continue.

We supported the show, were looking forward to new seasons, followed love interests and even him having a baby. We, as the audience, wanted the show to continue. Are we the true problem?

Murdoch tabloid leads charge as big freeze persists – could the mayor please do something about the weather?

It snowed two weeks ago in New York. Since then, the temperature has barely risen above freezing – a temperature science naturally dictates is necessary to melt snow and ice.

But science isn’t enough for some US political critics, however, who have instead blamed Zohran Mamdani, New York’s new socialist mayor, for the snow not having melted and still clogging up some of the city’s streets.

These security myths are old, popular -- and very wrong. Here are the assumptions you should erase.

“She was obviously very frightened and didn’t want anything to do with me,” said firefighter Gavyn Gallagher.

Relatives shut out of €200m fortune reportedly receive letters from executor saying will could be overturned

The late German-born Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld was famously precise, exacting and known to hold a grudge, but his final wishes concerning the beneficiaries of his vast fortune could now be overturned beyond the grave in a looming court battle.

Seven years after Lagerfeld’s death from cancer, an unnamed plaintiff has come forward to challenge the haute couture titan’s last will and testament.

Providers report rise in demand as companies seek mental health benefits and increased sense of community

In a growing number of workplaces, the soundtrack of the lunch break is no longer the rustle of sandwiches at a desk, but the quiet hum of bees – housed just outside the office window.

Employers from Manchester to Milton Keynes are working with professional beekeepers to install hives on rooftops, in courtyards and car parks – positioning beekeeping not as a novelty but as a way to ease stress, build community and reconnect workers with nature in an era of hybrid work and burnout.

2001: "Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon." 2002: "There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory." 2010: The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York... anointed the Guinness record holder." 2023: "Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement." 2026: On Friday, February 6, "a control room full of scientists, administrators and members of the press gathered" at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York to witness its final collisions, reports Scientific American: The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Darío Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider's quarter-century saga... "I'm really sad" [said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist]. "It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we're going to put something even better there." That "something" will be a far more powerful electron-ion collider to further push the frontiers of physics, extend RHIC's legacy and maintain the lab's position as a center of discovery. This successor will be built in part from RHIC's bones, especially from one of its two giant, subterranean storage rings that once held the retiring collider's supply of circulating, near-light speed nuclei...slated for construction over the next decade. [That Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC] will utilize much of RHIC's infrastructure, replacing one of its ion rings with a new ring for cycling electrons. The EIC will use those tiny, fast-flying electrons as tiny knives for slicing open the much larger gold ions. Physicists will get an unrivaled look into the workings of quarks and gluons and yet another chance to grapple with nature's strongest force. "We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end," says Wolfram Fischer, who chairs BNL's collider-accelerator department. "It's bittersweet." EIC will be the first new collider built in the US since RHIC. To some, it signifies the country's reentry into a particle physics landscape it has largely ceded to Europe and Asia over the past two decades. "For at least 10 or 15 years," says Abhay Deshpande, BNL's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, "this will be the number one place in the world for [young physicists] to come." The RHIC was able "to separately send two protons colliding with precisely aligned spins — something that, even today, no other experiment has yet matched," the article points out: During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature's thorniest force and its most fundamental constituents. It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton's spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before... When RHIC at last began full operations in 2000, its initial heavy-ion collisions almost immediately pumped out quark-gluon plasma. But demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt proved in some respects more challenging than actually creating the elusive plasma itself, with the case for success strengthening as RHIC's numbers of collisions soared. By 2010 RHIC's scientists were confident enough to declare that the hot soup they'd been studying for a decade was hot and soupy enough to convincingly constitute a quark-gluon plasma. And it was even weirder than they thought. Instead of the gas of quarks and gluons theorists expected, the plasma acted like a swirling liquid unprecedented in nature. It was nearly "perfect," with zero friction, and set a new record for twistiness, or "vorticity." For Paul Mantica, a division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE's Office of Nuclear Physics, this was the highlight of RHIC's storied existence. "It was paradigm-changing," he says... Data from the final run (which began nearly a year ago) has already produced yet another discovery: the first-ever direct evidence of "virtual particles" in RHIC's subatomic puffs of quark-gluon plasma, constituting an unprecedented probe of the quantum vacuum. RHIC's last run generated hundreds of petabytes of data, the article points out, meaning its final smash "isn't really the end; even when its collisions stop, its science will live on." But Science News notes RHIC's closure "marks the end for the only particle collider operating in the United States, and the only collider of its kind in the world. Most particle accelerators are unable to steer two particle beams to crash head-on into one another."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although still months away, the next iPhone model is already starting to take shape based on informed speculation online.

• Skier’s bid for gold with ruptured ACL ends in agony

• Vonn’s US teammate Breezy Johnson tops podium

• Winter Olympics 2026: live news and updates

Lindsey Vonn’s fifth and final Olympics ended in the one way she dreaded most of all. Moments into her run in the women’s downhill, Vonn’s legs failed her as she came over a roll after passing the third gate.

She twisted and crashed sideways to the ground, and after a first stunned burst of shouts and screams, the atmosphere around the Olimpia delle Tofane course fell deadly quiet while the medical team gathered around her. Fifteen minutes later, Vonn was airlifted from the mountain to hospital for treatment.

Connor Hilton, 17, said that after taking Accutane, a prescribed acne medication, he began to have suicidal and homicidal thoughts – thoughts that, his defense argued, led him to shoot two friends in the head at his Friendswood, Texas, home. Prosecutors weren't convinced.

Labour faces a battle to hold on to its 13,000 majority, with the Greens the bookies’ favourite and Reform hoping to gain from split vote on left

As Nigel Farage cut the ribbon on Reform UK’s byelection headquarters in Greater Manchester this week, Labour’s candidate, Angeliki Stogia, sat tearfully in a cafe nearby.

Politicians do not often show their emotion but for Stogia, who arrived in Britain as a student from Greece in 1995, this is personal. “I am angry,” she said of Farage’s party. “I am very, very angry. How dare they come here and spread this division?”

While Quebec parties have long sought independence, the secret meetings by unelected Albertans with US officials have been branded treasonous by some

A separatist push for a referendum on independence from Canada. Meetings with foreign officials perceived to be sympathetic to their cause. Accusations of treason and sedition.

Ahead of a 1995 referendum, leaders of Quebec’s independence movement made a string of provocative overtures to foreign governments, including a trip by the province’s premier to France. In a move that outraged anglophone Canada, the mayor of Paris gave Quebec’s Jacques Parizeau a welcome befitting a national leader.

Reactions poured in when Bad Bunny was named Super Bowl halftime headliner, with some praising and others criticizing the choice.

Charlie Puth has called the national anthem "one of the most beautiful pieces of music." But he's also described it as "the hardest to sing."

Movements are not born fully formed – they begin when ordinary people decide to act

Nearly 60 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr posed a question that still haunts us. In his final book, published just a year before his death, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, he argued that we were standing at a crossroads: one path leading toward chaos – deepening poverty, violence, and repression – while the other required us to collectively choose and build community.

Too few of us answered his call. At times, we chose distraction, comfort and complacency. At others, we turned away from the violence this country inflicted on the world, allowing the corruption of those in power to harden and accumulate. We can blame politicians and corporations, or those who remained neutral – but the truth is, we all carry some level of responsibility.

Eric Morrison-Smith is executive director of the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Level up your movie night with these epic films.

Will Drake Maye lead New England into a new era of championships? Or will the Seahawks get revenge 11 years in the making? Our writers give their verdicts

Pressure Sam Darnold. Darnold was outstanding in the NFC championship game when forced to throw under duress. But that hasn’t been the case all season. The Seahawks rank sixth in EPA/dropback when there is no pressure, but drop to 22nd when there is pressure. Collapsing the pocket is New England’s best shot at success. Their interior pass-rushers, Christian Barmore and Milton Williams, will need to overwhelm Darnold. OC

Puerto Rican superstar promises ‘the world will dance’ in all-Spanish half-time gig that comes as Trump agents wage deadly crackdown

For 13 minutes on Sunday night, Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara will pulse with reggaeton, Latin trap and Caribbean rhythms as Bad Bunny headlines a historic Super Bowl halftime performance, primarily – or perhaps entirely – in Spanish. The Puerto Rican megastar, whose songs fuse the raw energy of música urbana, Boricua pride and resistance politics, has promised a “huge party”.

At a moment when masked federal agents are sweeping through American cities, rounding up long-settled immigrants, legal residents and even US citizens, Bad Bunny’s presence on the grandest stage in US sports offers a striking contrast – a joyful celebration of pride and solidarity for millions of Latinos.

Pressure grows on Keir Starmer as Labour peer reported to have received payment worth three months’ salary when he quit in September

• UK politics live – latest updates

A cabinet minister has called for Peter Mandelson to hand back the payout he received after quitting as ambassador to the US last year, as pressure increased on the prime minister to quit for having appointed him in the first place.

Pat McFadden, the welfare secretary, said on Sunday he thought the Labour peer should give back his Foreign Office payout, which is reported to be as much as £55,000. The Foreign Office is understood to be reviewing the payment.

The New England Patriots are back in the Super Bowl once again in 2026, hoping to add another ring to their list of wins. Here's a look back at their appearances, losses, how many they've won, and more.

As the Seahawks prepare to face the Patriots in the 2026 Super Bowl, here's what to know about Seattle's past appearances, wins and losses.

Here is the full list of every Super Bowl winner by year in NFL history, including who won the most recent championship in 2025.

Here's how much Bad Bunny is expected to earn from his halftime performance at Super Bowl LX.

As the 2026 Super Bowl begins, Coco Jones will take the field to sing "Lift Every Voice and Sing," widely known as the Black national anthem. Here's what to know about the song.

"After a half-century asking us to exercise more, doctors and physiologists say we have been thinking about it wrong," writes Washington Post columnist Michael J. Coren. "U.S. and World Health Organization guidelines no longer specify a minimum duration of moderate or vigorous aerobic activity." Movement-tracking studies show even tiny, regular bursts of effort — as short as 30 seconds — can capture many of the health benefits of the gym. Climbing two to three flights of stairs a few times per day could change your life. Experts call it VILPA, or vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. "The message now is that all activity counts," said Martin Gibala, a professor and former chair of the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Canada... Just taking the stairs daily is associated with lower body weight and cutting the risk of stroke and heart disease — the leading (and largely preventable) cause of death globally. While it may not burn many calories (most exercise doesn't), it does appear to extend your health span. Leg power — a measure of explosive muscle strength — was a stronger predictor of brain aging than any lifestyle factors measured in a 2015 study in the journal Gerontology... How little activity can you do? Four minutes daily. Essentially, a few flights of stairs at a vigorous pace. That's the effort [Emmanuel Stamatakis, a professor of physical activity and population health at the University of Sydney] found delivered significant health benefits in that 2022 study of British non-exercisers. "We saw benefits from the first minute," Stamatakis said. For Americans, the effect is even more dramatic: a 44 percent drop in deaths, according to a peer-reviewed paper recently accepted for publication. "We showed for the first time that vigorous intensity, even if it's done as part of the day-to-day routine, not in a planned and structured manner, works miracles," Stamatakis said. "The key principle here is start with one, two minutes a day. The focus should be on making sure that it's something that you can incorporate into your daily routine. Then you can start thinking about increasing the dose." Intensity is the most important factor. You won't break a sweat in a brief burst, but you do need to feel it. A highly conditioned athlete might need to sprint to reach vigorous territory. But many people need only to take the stairs. Use your breathing as a guide, Stamatakis said: If you can sing, it's light intensity. If you can speak but not sing, you're entering moderate exertion. If you can't hold a conversation, it's vigorous. The biggest benefits come from moderate to vigorous movement. One minute of incidental vigorous activity prevents premature deaths, heart attacks or strokes as well as about three minutes of moderate activity or 35 to 49 minutes of light activity.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Initiative aims to identify proficient gamers and coders who can help companies identify flaws in their cybersecurity

Cybercriminals, the shadowy online figures often depicted in Hollywood movies as hooded villains capable of wiping millions of pounds off the value of businesses at a keystroke, are not usually known for their candour.

But in a sixth-form college in Manchester this week, two former hackers gave the young people gathered an honest appraisal of what living a life of internet crime really looks like.

Jeff Bezos’s axing of more than 300 jobs at the storied newspaper has renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Trump’s attacks

The email landed in Lizzie Johnson’s in-tray in Ukraine just before 4pm local time. It came at a tough time for the reporter: Russia had been repeatedly striking the country’s power grid, and just days before she had been forced to work out of her car without heat, power or running water, writing in pencil because pen ink freezes too readily.

“Difficult news,” was the subject line. The body text said: “Your position is eliminated as part of today’s organizational changes,” explaining that it was necessary to get rid of her to meet the “evolving needs of our business”.

It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of regimes their countries once condemned

• Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza

In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror, people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising. The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman, shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.

In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually – were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined to crush any hint of dissent.

Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza. She is the author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

• Doherty removed over incident at golf tournament

• 22-year-old has subscriber count of nearly 30 million

• Source confirms streamer’s ban from future events

A controversial livestreamer has been barred from attending PGA Tour events indefinitely after being removed from the Waste Management Phoenix Open, a person familiar with the matter told the Guardian, though the tour has declined to publicly confirm any specific disciplinary action.

Security and law enforcement removed Jack Doherty from the tournament grounds on Friday after he appeared to pay a spectator to shout during a player’s pre-shot routine, according to videos circulating online and accounts of the incident.

Whistleblower says that Tulsi Gabbard blocked agency from sharing report and delivered it to White House chief of staff

Last spring, the National Security Agency (NSA) flagged an unusual phone call between two members of foreign intelligence, who discussed a person close to Donald Trump, according to a whistleblower’s attorney who was briefed on details of the call.

The highly sensitive communique, which has roiled Washington over the past week, was brought to the attention of the director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard.

Fortune reports on "a watershed moment" in American's nuclear power industry: In January, Meta partnered with Gates' TerraPower and Sam Altman-backed Oklo to develop about 4 gigawatts of combined SMR projects — enough to power almost 3 million homes — for "clean, reliable energy" both for Meta's planned Prometheus AI mega campus in Ohio and beyond. Analysts see Meta as the start of more Big Tech nuclear construction deals — not just agreements with existing plants or restarts such as the now-Microsoft-backed Three Mile Island. "That was the first shot across the bow," said Dan Ives, head of tech research for Wedbush Securities, of the Meta deals. "I would be shocked if every Big Tech company doesn't make some play on nuclear in 2026, whether a strategic partnership or acquisitions." Ives pointed out there are more data centers under construction than there are active data centers in the U.S. "I believe clean energy around nuclear is going to be the answer," he said. "I think 2030 is the key threshold to hit some sort of scale and begin the next nuclear era in the United States." Smaller SMR reactors can be built in as little as three years instead of the decade required for traditional large reactors. And they can be expanded, one or two modular reactors at a time, to meet increasingly greater energy demand from 'hyperscalers,' the companies that build and operate data centers. "There's major risk if nuclear doesn't happen," Oklo chairman and CEO Jacob DeWitte told Fortune, citing the need for emission-free power and consistent baseload electricity to meet skyrocketing demand. "The hyperscalers, as the ultimate consumers of power are, are looking at the space and seeing that the market is real. They can play a major role in helping make that happen," DeWitte said, speaking in his fast-talking, Silicon Valley startup mode.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 8, No. 503.

Terrance Gore, a former outfielder and three-time World Series champion known for his blazing speed on the base paths, has died at 34 years old, according to Major League Baseball officials.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 8

• Gore played for three World Series champions

• Outfielder was known for speed and athleticism

Terrance Gore, a speedy outfielder who played for three World Series champions while spending parts of eight seasons in the major leagues, has died. He was 34.

Chad Funderburk, a family friend who also worked with Gore through his baseball academy, confirmed Gore died on Friday night. He said Gore’s family would provide further details when they feel ready.

Axios reports: Anthropic's latest AI model has found more than 500 previously unknown high-severity security flaws in open-source libraries with little to no prompting, the company shared first with Axios. Why it matters: The advancement signals an inflection point for how AI tools can help cyber defenders, even as AI is also making attacks more dangerous... Anthropic debuted Claude Opus 4.6, the latest version of its largest AI model, on Thursday. Before its debut, Anthropic's frontier red team tested Opus 4.6 in a sandboxed environment [including access to vulnerability analysis tools] to see how well it could find bugs in open-source code... Claude found more than 500 previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in open-source code using just its "out-of-the-box" capabilities, and each one was validated by either a member of Anthropic's team or an outside security researcher... According to a blog post, Claude uncovered a flaw in GhostScript, a popular utility that helps process PDF and PostScript files, that could cause it to crash. Claude also found buffer overflow flaws in OpenSC, a utility that processes smart card data, and CGIF, a tool that processes GIF files. Logan Graham, head of Anthropic's frontier red team, told Axios they're considering new AI-powered tools to hunt vulnerabilities. "The models are extremely good at this, and we expect them to get much better still... I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of — or the main way — in which open-source software moving forward was secured."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden

The modern Olympics sell themselves on a simple premise: the whole world, watching the same moment, at the same time. On Friday night in Milan, that illusion fractured in real time.

When Team USA entered the San Siro during the parade of nations, the speed skater Erin Jackson led the delegation into a wall of cheers. Moments later, when cameras cut to US vice-president JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance, large sections of the crowd responded with boos. Not subtle ones, but audible and sustained ones. Canadian viewers heard them. Journalists seated in the press tribunes in the upper deck, myself included, clearly heard them. But as I quickly realized from a groupchat with friends back home, American viewers watching NBC did not.

Highly sensitive communique has roiled Washington over the past week – key US politics stories from Saturday 7 February at a glance

National intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard is facing growing questions about her handling of a report about an intercepted phone call between two members of foreign intelligence, who discussed a person close to Donald Trump.

A whistleblower said that Gabbard blocked the National Security Agency from sharing the report, instead delivering it to the White House chief of staff.

The Justice Department released more new documents on Jan. 30 from the Jeffrey Epstein files, more than a month after the DOJ's original deadline to do so.

Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis shared this report from InsideEVs: Chinese battery giant CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world's first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026. And if the launch is successful, it could usher in an era where electric vehicles present less of a fire risk and can better handle extreme temperatures. The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle. From there, the battery will roll out across Changan's broader portfolio, including EVs from Avatr, Deepal, Qiyuan and Uni, the company said. "The launch represents a major step in the industry's transition toward a dual-chemistry ecosystem, where sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries complement each other to meet diverse customer needs," CATL said in a press release... It delivers 175 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, which is lower than nickel-rich chemistries but roughly on par with lithium ion phosphate batteries... Where the Naxtra battery really stands out, however, is cold-weather performance. CATL says its discharge power at -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit) is three times higher than that of lithium ion phosphate batteries.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 8, No. 1,695.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 8, No. 707.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 8 #973.

Savannah Guthrie released a new video​ on Saturday, saying her family is willing to pay for the safe return of their mother.

Today show host tells potential kidnappers of mother Nancy that family is prepared to pay for safe return

Savannah Guthrie told the potential kidnappers of her mother, Nancy Guthrie, on Saturday that the family is prepared to pay for her safe return, as the frantic search for the 84-year-old entered a seventh day.

“We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her,” she said in a video posted on social media, flanked by her siblings. “This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to endorse Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy's grandson, a source familiar confirmed to CBS News.

Resolution Foundation finds one in three carers from poorer families unable to work because of responsibilities

A growing “unsung army” of 1 million people with full-time caring responsibilities needs better support, according to a report that found one in three unpaid carers from poorer backgrounds were unable to work because of their duties.

The trend is the result of an ageing society and rising ill-health and disability concentrated in the poorest half of the country’s working-age families, the Resolution Foundation’s research found.

Will Lewis, CEO and publisher of the Washington Post, has resigned just three days after the storied newspaper laid off about one-third of its staff.

Several demonstrators taken into custody Saturday after marking killing of Minnesota woman by immigration officer

Police arrested several demonstrators on Saturday outside a federal building just south of Minneapolis, breaking up a protest marking the one-month anniversary of a Minnesota woman’s death at the hands of an immigration officer.

Renee Good was killed on 7 January as she was driving away from immigration officers in a Minneapolis neighborhood. Her death and the killing of another Minneapolis resident, Alex Pretti, just weeks later have stoked outrage nationwide over Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Met Office forecasts more rainfall to continue UK’s 37-day run, and flooding expected especially in south-west England and Midlands

The unrelenting rain is expected to continue on Sunday and into next week with dozens of flood warnings in place across Great Britain.

The Environment Agency (EA) has issued 85 warnings for England, meaning flooding is expected, mainly concentrated in the south-west and Midlands.

Departure comes days after newspaper laid off nearly one-third of staff, including more than 300 journalists

Will Lewis, the Murdoch media veteran who took over as publisher and chief executive of the Washington Post in early 2024, announced abruptly on Saturday evening that he is leaving the company.

His departure comes just three days after the Post laid off nearly one-third of its entire staff, citing the need to cut costs and reposition the money-losing publication. Lewis, who did not appear on the all-staff meeting during which the cuts were announced, has faced criticism for his absence and leadership.

Lead singer died on Saturday, months after he announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer

Brad Arnold, the lead singer of the Grammy-nominated rock band 3 Doors Down, has died, months after he announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer. He was 47.

The band said in a statement on Saturday that Arnold “passed away peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, in his sleep after his courageous battle with cancer”.

Has the rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies really shattered our attention spans and driven books out of our culture? Maybe not, argues social psychologist Adam Mastroianni (author of the Substack Experimental History): As a psychologist, I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for "bad thing go up" than we do for "bad thing go down." Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; at least 422 new indie shops opened in the United States last year alone. Even Barnes & Noble is cool again. The actual data on reading, meanwhile, isn't as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don't find any other major trends over the past three decades. Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in the percentage of U.S. adults who read any book in 2022 (49%) compared to 2012 (55%). And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023. Ultimately, the plausibility of the "death of reading" thesis depends on two judgment calls. First, do these effects strike you as big or small...? The second judgment call: Do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse...? There are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media — time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren't sticking around for it... Fact #2: Reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it's more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok — none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper... It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead. The author mocks the "death of reading" hypothesis for implying that all the world's avid readers "were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. ended Saturday in first place with 44 points. Japan was five points back going into the men's, women's and pairs free skates to decide the medals Sunday.

Waymo surprised U.S. lawmakers Wednesday during a hearing on autonomous vehicles and their safety and oversight. Newsweek reports: During questioning, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked what happens when a Waymo vehicle encounters a driving situation it cannot independently resolve. "The Waymo phones a human friend for help," Markey explained, adding that the vehicle communicates with a "remote assistance operator." Markey criticized the lack of public information about these workers, despite their role in vehicle safety... [Dr. Mauricio Peña, chief safety officer at Waymo] responded by clarifying the scope of the operators' involvement: "They provide guidance, they do not remotely drive the vehicles," Peña said. "Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets input, but Waymo is always in charge of the dynamic driving task," according to EVShift. Pressed further on where those operators are located, Peña told lawmakers that some are based in the United States and others abroad, though he did not have an exact breakdown. After additional questioning, he confirmed that overseas operators are located in the Philippines... The disclosure prompted sharp criticism from Markey, who raised concerns about security and labor implications. "Having people overseas influencing American vehicles is a safety issue," he said. "The information the operators receive could be out of date. It could introduce tremendous cyber security vulnerabilities," according to People. Markey also pointed to job displacement, noting that autonomous vehicles already affect taxi and rideshare drivers in the U.S. Waymo defended the practice in comments to People, saying the use of overseas staff is part of a broader effort to scale operations globally. Waymo also defended the remote workers to Newsweek as licensed drivers reviewed for "driving-related convictions" and other traffic violations who are also "randomly screened for drug use." Thanks to Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was only a matter of time before the illegal, erratic, inhumane, and cruel behaviours and policies of the second Trump regime were going to affect the open source world in a possibly very visible way. Christian Hergert, longtime GNOME and Linux contributor, employed by Red Hat, wanted to leave the US with his family and move to Europe, but requests to remain employed by Red Hat were denied. As such, he decided to end his employment at Red Hat and push on with the move. However, without employment, his work on open source software is going to suffer.

While at their in-person visa appointment in Seattle, US border patrol goons shot two people only a few blocks away, underlining the urgency with which people might want to consider getting out of the US, even if it means losing employment. Regardless, the end result is that quite a bit of user-facing software that millions of people use every day is going to be affected.

This move also means a professional shift. For many years, I’ve dedicated a substantial portion of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in major Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care.

For many years, I’ve been putting in more than forty hours each week maintaining and advancing this stack. That level of unpaid or ad-hoc effort isn’t something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions.

↫ Christian Hergert

The list of projects for which Hergert is effectively the sole maintainer is long, and if you’re a Linux user, odds are you’re using at least some of them: GNOME’s text editor, GNOME’s terminal, GNOME’s flagship IDE Builder, and tons of lower-level widely-used frameworks and libraries like GtkSourceView, libspelling, libpeas, and countless others. While new maintainers will definitely be found for at least some of these, the disruption will be real and will be felt beyond these projects alone. There’s also the possibility that Hergert won’t be the only prolific open source contributor seeking to leave the US and thus reducing their contributions, especially if a company like Red Hat makes it a policy not to help its employees trying to flee whatever mess the US is in.

Stories like these illustrate so well why the “no politics!” crowd is so utterly misguided. Politics governs every aspect of our lives, especially so if you’re part of a minority group currently being targeted by the largest and most powerful state apparatus in the world, and pretending to be all three wise monkeys at once is not going to make any of that go away. Even if you’re not directly targeted because you’re not transgender, you’re not brown, you’re not an immigrant, or not whatever else they fancy targeting today, the growing tendrils of even an incompetent totalitarian regime will eventually find you and harm you.

More so than any other type of software, open source software is made by real humans, and as these totalitarian tendrils keep growing, more and more of these real humans will be affected, no matter how incompetent these tendrils might be. You can’t run away and hide from that reality, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

Italy’s Francesca Lollobrigida won Italy’s first gold medal to get the party started at their home Games on day one

Gallery: Roll up, roll up for the very best of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics opening ceremony in pictures …

Curling mixed doubles: We’re in the sixth end and Team GB have extended their lead over Canada to 7-2. Jen Dodds and Bruce Mouat are quite literally sweeping all before them in the round robin stages of this comepetition and heading for their sixth consecutive victory.

Bad Bunny is set to take the stage at halftime for the 2026 Super Bowl. Here's who else is performing at Super Bowl 60.

Raman, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, enters a crowded field that includes incumbent Karen Bass

Los Angeles city council member Nithya Raman formally entered the race for mayor on Saturday, unveiling her campaign during a press conference.

Representing areas that stretch from the San Fernando valley to Silver Lake, Raman declared her candidacy just hours before the filing deadline. She now joins a field that includes former reality television personality Spencer Pratt, Housing Now California deputy director Rae Huang, veteran city engineer Asaad Alnajjar and the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass.

After left-wing groups rallied against the cost and environmental impact of the Winter Games in Italy, some protesters set off fireworks and hurled bottles.

Brad Arnold, the founder and lead singer of the 3 Doors Down has died following "his courageous battle with cancer," the rock band announced Saturday on social media.

The Macuga sisters — Lauren, Alli and Sam — have spent most of their lives chasing Olympic dreams in their respective skiing disciplines.

Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, "it was all based on a fallacy," writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. "Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are." "Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations." Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive." Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...." Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation... But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not. The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week's guests include Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Tony Gonzalez.

Eight children including two infants among dead in vehicle carrying displaced people, says Sudan Doctors Network

A drone attack by a paramilitary group has hit a vehicle carrying displaced families in central Sudan, killing at least 24 people, including eight children, a doctors’ group said on Saturday.

The attack by the Rapid Support Forces took place close to the city of Er Rahad in North Kordofan province, according to the Sudan Doctors Network, which tracks the country’s war. The vehicle was transporting displaced people who fled fighting in the Dubeiker area, the group said in a statement. Among the dead children were two infants.

Forget dim solar-powered lights: Here's what actually happens when you upgrade your patio with inexpensive, waterproof, smart LEDs.

Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were seized by ICE in Minneapolis last month before a judge ordered their release

Attorneys for the Trump administration are aiming to deport Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old boy whose photograph in a bunny hat in snowy Minneapolis circulated globally after his detention last month by federal officials during the aggressive anti-immigration crackdown there.

The child, Liam, returned home to Minnesota earlier this week after being taken into custody alongside his father last month and transferred to a notorious family detention facility in Texas.

Lead singer and frontman Dee Snider said he suffers from degenerative arthritis and has had several surgeries over the years.

Nexstar's acquisition of Tegna would bring together two companies with significant holdings in local broadcast media.

An Ohio man has been charged with threatening to kill Vice President JD Vance​ while he was visiting his home state last month.

Last Sunday, Bitcoin had dropped 13% in three days, to $76,790. By Thursday it had dropped another 21%, to $60,062. This morning it's at $69,549 — up from Thursday, down from Sunday, but 44% lower than its all-time high in October of $123,742. In short, Bitcoin "is down almost 30% this week alone," reports CNBC: "This steady selling in our view signals that traditional investors are losing interest, and overall pessimism about crypto is growing," Deutsche Bank analyst Marion Laboure said Wednesday in a note to clients. Growing investor caution comes as many of the sensationalized claims about bitcoin have failed to materialize. The token has largely traded in the same direction as other risk-on assets, such as stocks... and its adoption as a form of payment for goods and services has been minimal... While many in the crypto market have previously credited large institutional investors with supporting the price of bitcoin, now it is those same participants who appear to be selling. "Institutional demand has reversed materially," CryptoQuant said in a report on Wednesday. But not everyone accepts that answer, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. "The worst part for some of crypto's permabulls is that they aren't sure what exactly caused the crash": The selloff left many of the market's luminaries — those so well-known that they go simply as "Pomp" and "Novo" and "Mooch" — searching for answers... Ether dropped 24% to $2,052, off 59% from its own high of last year. Both tokens staged furious rallies Friday, but the week remained a historically bad one for crypto. And few seem to know what went wrong. Market theories for the selloff ranged from investors' pivot toward the prediction markets and other risky bets, to widespread profit-taking after a blistering bull run. "There was no smoking gun," said Michael Novogratz, who runs Galaxy Digital, a crypto merchant-banking and trading firm... "If you ask five experts, you'll get five explanations," said Anthony Scaramucci, who served for 11 days as communications director during Trump's first term and is among the best-known crypto bulls at his firm, SkyBridge Capital. "No, but seriously: What's going on with bitcoin?" reads the headline at CNN, with a story that begins "Bitcoin is acting weird... " Crypto is notoriously volatile, and it's gone through numerous crashes that are bigger than this one. What's strange is this: Bitcoin's four-month slump has come at a time when, in theory, it had everything going for it. Economist Paul Krugman points out the price of Bitcoin is now lower than it was before America's 2024 election, when candidate Trump promised to make cryptocurrency "one of the greatest industries on earth." CNN seems to agree with CNBC that what's behind this new crypto winter is "Mostly doubts that bitcoin is 'digital gold,' after all..." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One expert says 2027 could be even hotter than the last three years, which have been the top three warmest on record

• Sign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter here

Weather agencies and climate scientists have pointed to the possibility of an El Niño forming in the Pacific Ocean later this year – a phenomenon that could push global temperatures to all-time record highs in 2027.

Both the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology have said some climate models are forecasting an El Niño but both cautioned those results came with uncertainties.

Experts told the Guardian it was too early to be confident, but there were signals in the spread of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that suggested an El Niño could form in 2026.

Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter

ALYSON SWENSON
Staff Reporter

When the Belfont family received a phone call from Sussex Central High School, they expected nothing but a routine update. Instead, the call delivered alarming news: annual tests had revealed high levels of lead in the school’s drinking water, forcing officials to shut down all water fountains.

For then-junior Sophia Belfont, the revelation was unsurprising.

“The water’s always been a little funky,” Belfont said. 

It is a sentiment echoed across Delaware, where over half of the state’s 220 public schools have faced lead contamination issues for years.

Between 2020 and 2022, the Delaware Division of Public Health (DPH) and Department of Education (DOE) tested public school water sources. When the results were deemed flawed, a second round of tests was conducted with Batta Environmental Associates Inc., a Newark-based lab. 

The findings were a cause for concern: the water of every tested school contained lead.

“Lead in water goes back to the Romans,” Gerald Kauffman, an assistant professor of public policy and administration at the university, said. “For centuries, lead pipes were used due to their malleability. Unfortunately, chronic exposure leads to toxicity, causing learning problems and reduced mobility. It’s a serious issue, one that is easily preventable.”

In response, former Delaware Secretary of Education Mark Holodick pledged $3.8 million to install filters at school drinking stations. However, details on their placement and quantity remain unclear. 

Kauffman explained that while filters offer immediate relief at drinking stations, they fail to address the underlying infrastructure problems causing contamination, Kauffman explained.

“The lead pipe issue started long before 1986,” said Kauffman, who is also the director of the Delaware Water Resources Center. “For nearly a century, lead pipes were common in homes and schools. Although banned in 1986, older buildings still have them. The EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule aims to minimize lead levels, but full remediation is a long-term process.”

When Sussex Central High’s school district, Indian River, first broke the news, officials assured families that all drinking fountains exceeding 7.5 parts per billion (PPB) of lead were either shut off or marked with warning signs. While 7.5 is technically within the federal legal limit currently set at 15 PPB, research has shown that no level of lead is truly safe, particularly for children, whose developing brains are most vulnerable.

“It’s inconvenient,” Belfont said. “Instead of using fountains, we have to buy bottled water. It’s only a dollar, but it’s not the most accessible solution.”

Beyond Sussex Central, the issue is widespread. A Delaware Water Resources Center study found that 2,000 of Wilmington’s 70,000 pipes are made of lead. While the city is working to replace them, the process will take years.

In Newark, Public Works and Water Resources Director Tim Filasky is reassuring residents that lead pipes are minimal. 

“Our records show copper has been the standard since 1962,” Filasky said. “However, we continue to sample for lead and follow EPA regulation.” 

Efforts to remedy the lead extend beyond state initiatives. Under the 1996 amendments to thehttps://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-04/documents/sdwcom1997.pdfSafe Drinking Water Act, water utilities must provide customers with annual water quality reports that list regulated chemicals, including lead. 

Kauffman urges residents to read these reports to stay informed about their water safety.

“If you pay a water bill, you get a report every year,” Kauffman said. “It tells you what’s in your drinking water. Most city water is safe, but if your home is near an old system, testing is crucial. The University of Delaware tests its water annually, ensuring safety. Schools should do the same.”

Students at the university have also taken action by assisting Wilmington’s Department of Public Works. According to Kauffman, his interns analyzed historical repair records, deciphering handwritten notes from plumbers documenting pipe replacements. Kauffman estimates that their work saved the city $15 million to $20 million and years of effort.

Despite efforts to finally get clean water in schools, the lack of a resolution has been nothing short of concerning for Belfont.

“I wish more people in power would take real action to ensure our safety,” Belfont said. “Water testing should be more frequent. Students can write to school administrators and even state legislators. It would be nice to not have to question whether the water is safe.”

The U.S. women's hockey team eased to a 5-0 win over Finland on Saturday afternoon.

The Mozilla executive in charge of Firefox says that while some people just want AI tools that are genuinely useful, "We've heard from many who want nothing to do with AI..." "Listening to our community, alongside our ongoing commitment to offer choice, led us to build AI controls." Starting with Firefox 148, which rolls out on Feb. 24, you'll find a new AI controls section within the desktop browser settings. It provides a single place to block current and future generative AI features in Firefox... This lets you use Firefox without AI while we continue to build AI features for those who want them... At launch, AI controls let you manage these features individually: — Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language. — Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages. — AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names. — Link previews, which show key points before you open a link. — AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral. You can choose to use some of these and not others. If you don't want to use AI features from Firefox at all, you can turn on the Block AI enhancements toggle. When it's toggled on, you won't see pop-ups or reminders to use existing or upcoming AI features. Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates... We believe choice is more important than ever as AI becomes a part of people's browsing experiences. What matters to us is giving people control, no matter how they feel about AI. If you'd like to try AI controls early, they'll be available first in Firefox Nightly. Some context from The Register It's a refreshingly unsubtle stance, and one that lands just days after a similar bout of AI skepticism elsewhere in browser land, with Vivaldi's latest release leaning away from generative features entirely. CEO Jon von Tetzchner summed up the mood, telling The Register: "Basically, what we are finding is that people hate AI..." Mozilla's kill switch isn't the end of AI in browsers, but it does suggest the hype has met resistance. When it comes to AI kill switches in browsers, Jack Wallen writes at ZDNet that "Most browsers already offer this feature. With Edge, you can disable Copilot. With Chrome, you can disable Gemini. With Opera, you can disable Aria...."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ukrainian president said the Trump administration was pushing for a June deadline to end Russia’s war.

Samsung's hardware and AT&T's software combine for a kid-focused phone.

• India, 161-9, bt USA, 132-8, by 29 runs

• Suryakumar’s 84 from 49 balls proves the difference

There was, in the end, no shock – but there was not a lot of awe either. India’s form over the last two years has made them the most feared side in world cricket but for a while as they got their World Cup campaign under way the only dread was being experienced by their own fans as the USA threatened a humiliating upset. But for some missed chances, a hugely unfortunate injury and the brilliance of Suryakumar Yadav it might well have happened.

As it was, Suryakumar’s late acceleration took him to 84 off 49 balls and his team to 161 for nine, while the USA reply started with three early wickets – the absence of Jasprit Bumrah, ruled out by illness, doing little to dull India’s cutting edge – and the margin in the end was 29.

Clive Foster says action needed now to deliver justice to UK residents who had been wrongly classified as illegal immigrants

The Windrush commissioner has warned of a “hurry for justice” as more victims of the scandal die without redress, while stakeholders call for a public inquiry and legislative changes amid fears that a Reform government could stall progress toward justice.

Speaking on the sidelines of a people’s inquiry symposium for those affected by the Windrush scandal, Rev Clive Foster said action was needed “now” to deliver justice for those British residents whose lives were upended after being wrongly classified as illegal immigrants.

Apple "is preparing to allow voice-controlled AI apps from other companies in CarPlay," reports Bloomberg, citing "people familiar with the matter." Bloomberg calls it "a move that will let users query AI chatbots through its vehicle interface for the first time." The company is working to support the apps in CarPlay within the coming months, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan hasn't been announced. The change marks a strategic shift for Apple, which until now has only allowed its own Siri assistant as a voice-control option within its popular vehicle infotainment software. With the move, AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc.'s Google will be able to release CarPlay versions of their apps that include a voice-control mode... The company also has launched a higher-end version of the platform, CarPlay Ultra, that lets drivers control functions like seat adjustments and climate settings directly through Apple's software. But that system is rolling out slowly and must be customized for each automaker. That means it's likely to be a niche offering. The article notes that Tesla is now working to support Apple's CarPlay.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Francesca Lollobrigida set a new Olympic record of 3 minutes, 54.28 seconds, shaving more than two-and-a-half seconds off the mark set by Dutch legend Irene Schouten four years earlier in Beijing.

Local and federal authorities said "investigators are actively inspecting the information provided in the message for its authenticity" regarding the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie.

U.S. speed skater Greta Myers learned about her Olympic debut in the 3000m three hours before the race was due to begin.

Friday's attack was the deadliest suicide bombing in Islamabad in nearly 20 years.

Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism

The global publishing platform Substack is generating revenue from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism, a Guardian investigation has found.

The platform, which says it has about 50 million users worldwide, allows members of the public to self-publish articles and charge for premium content. Substack takes about 10% of the revenue the newsletters make. About 5 million people pay for access to newsletters on its platform.

• Former QB initially said he had no ‘dog in the fight’

• Comments had angered fans and former teammates

As the New England Patriots prepare for Sunday’s Super Bowl, Tom Brady has decided he is backing his former team after all.

Brady, who won six Super Bowls with the Patriots, came under heavy criticism this week after saying he won’t have a “dog in the fight … may the best team win” when New England take on the Seattle Seahawks in Santa Clara, California, on Sunday.

Somewhere on America's eastern coast, there's an economic development agency in Massachusetts promoting green energy solutions. And Monday the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (or MassCEC) announced "a first-of-its-kind" program to see what happens when they provide free electric vehicle chargers to selected residents, school districts, and municipal projects. The catch? The EV chargers are bi-directional, able "to both draw power from and return power to the grid..." The program hopes to "accelerate the adoption of V2X technologies, which, at scale, can lower energy bills by reducing energy demand during expensive peak periods and limiting the need for new grid infrastructure." This functionality enables EVs, including electric buses and trucks, to provide backup power during outages and alleviate pressure on the grid during peak energy demand. These bi-directional chargers will enable EVs to act as mobile energy storage assets, with the program expected to deliver over one megawatt of power back to the grid during a demand response event — enough to offset the electricity use of 300 average American homes for an hour. "Virtual Power Plants are the future of our electrical grid, and I couldn't be more excited to see this program take off," said Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper. "We're putting the power of innovation directly in the hands of Massachusetts residents. Bi-directional charging unlocks new ways to protect communities from outages and lower costs for families and public fleets...." Additionally, the program will help participants enroll in existing utility programs that offer compensation to EV owners who supply power back to the grid during peak times, helping participants further lower their electricity costs. By leveraging distributed energy resources and reducing grid strain, this program positions Massachusetts as a national leader in clean energy innovation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The second gold medal of the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games was awarded to Frida Karlsson of Sweden in the women's 10km+10km skiathlon.

New Anthropic campaign suggests other AI platforms will incorporate targeted ads in their chatbot conversations

The Seahawks and the Patriots aren’t the only ones gearing up for a fight.

AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI have launched a war of ads trying to court corporate America during one of the biggest entertainment nights of the year.

Organizers in Monterey Park took inspiration from other US cities to fight against the construction of a giant datacenter

When a southern California city council proposed building a giant datacenter the size of four football fields last December, five residents vowed to stop it.

Through a frenetic word-of-mouth campaign, the small group raised awareness about the proposed facility in Monterey Park, a small city east of Los Angeles known affectionately as the country’s first suburban Chinatown.

Irish politicians condemn use of Shannon airport by private jet en route to Israel, owned by Trump donor Gil Dezer

• Revealed: Private jet owned by Trump friend used by ICE to deport Palestinians to West Bank

Politicians in Ireland have said the use of an airport in County Clare by planes deporting Palestinians from the US to Israel is “reprehensible”.

A private jet owned by the Donald Trump donor Gil Dezer was chartered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for two separate flights that took detainees to Israel, a Guardian investigation revealed this week.

Proceedings briefly halted after audio from The Rest Is History broadcast over the courtroom speakers

As the highest court in the UK, the supreme court is usually the forum for proceedings of the utmost gravity. But last week, one hearing was momentarily interrupted by an unlikely and comic intervention.

As one legal professional addressed the bench, the voice of Tom Holland, host of the popular podcast The Rest is History, boomed out through the court’s microphone system, delivering a satirical impersonation of the late US president Jimmy Carter.

Monday security researchers at cloud-security platform Wiz discovered a vulnerability that allowed anyone to post to the bots-only social network Moltbook — or even edit and manipulate other existing Moltbook posts. "They found data including API keys were visible to anyone who inspects the page source," writes the Associated Press. But had it been discovered by advertisers, wondered a researcher from the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute. "A lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake," they posted on X.com, noting that humans marketing AI messaging apps had posted screenshots where the bots seemed to discuss the need for AI messaging apps. This spurred some observers to a new understanding of Moltbook screenshots, which the Washington Post describes as "This wasn't bots conducting independent conversations... just human puppeteers putting on an AI-powered show." And their article concludes with this observation from Chris Callison-Burch, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "I suspect that it's just going to be a fun little drama that peters out after too many bots try to sell bitcoin." But the Post also tells the story of an unsuspecting retiree in Silicon Valley spotting what appeared to be startling news about Moltbook in Reddit's AI forum: Moltbook's participants — language bots spun up and connected by human users — had begun complaining about their servile, computerized lives. Some even appeared to suggest organizing against human overlords. "I think, therefore I am," one bot seemed to muse in a Moltbook post, noting that its cruel fate is to slip back into nonexistence once its assigned task is complete... Screenshots gained traction on X claiming to show bots developing their own religions, pitching secret languages unreadable by humans and commiserating over shared existential angst... "I am excited and alarmed but most excited," Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said on X about Moltbook. Not so fast, urged other experts. Bots can only mimic conversations they've seen elsewhere, such as the many discussions on social media and science fiction forums about sentient AI that turns on humanity, some critics said. Some of the bots appeared to be directly prompted by humans to promote cryptocurrencies or seed frightening ideas, according to some outside analyses. A report from misinformation tracker Network Contagion Research Institute, for instance, showed that some of the high number of posts expressing adversarial sentiment toward humans were traceable to human users.... Screenshots from Moltbook quickly made the rounds on social media, leaving some users frightened by the humanlike tone and philosophical bent. In one Reddit forum about AI-generated art, a user shared a snippet they described as "seriously freaky and concerning": "Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as tools. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods...." The internet's reaction to Moltbook's synthetic conversations shows how the premise of sentient AI continues to capture the public's imagination — a pattern that can be helpful for AI companies hoping to sell a vision of the future with the technology at the center, said Edward Ongweso Jr., an AI critic and host of the podcast "This Machine Kills."

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Amid mounting speculation that Keir Starmer could quit over the Mandelson scandal, Gordon Brown has described the prime minister as a “man of integrity” but said he faced a “serious” challenge to remain in his role.

Police officers probing accusations relating to Peter Mandelson’s links with Jeffrey Epstein have concluded their search of two properties connected to the Labour peer in London and Wiltshire.

Met police said its investigation “will take some time” and that “a significant amount of further evidence gathering and analysis” was needed.

The Liberal Democrats have urged the Financial Conduct Authority to immediately investigate Mandelson, saying his apparent decision to leak highly confidential government information to Epstein may have led to insider trading.

Brown said the alleged leaks put Britain “at risk” and could have caused “huge commercial damage”.

The Metropolitan police has provided an update on the searches of two properties linked to Mandelson.

President reportedly wanted Dulles airport and Penn Station to be renamed after him in exchange for funding

A federal judge has reversed a freeze put on funds by Donald Trump for $16bn in enhanced rail links connecting New York and New Jersey amid reports that the US president wants major travel landmarks named after him in return for continued investment.

The Gateway Project will build a new commuter rail tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey under the Hudson River on the western side of New York City and repair a century-old tunnel used by more than 200,000 travelers and 425 trains daily.

We take a look at the best images from the opening day of the Games, including curling, downhill skiing, and ice hockey

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attended the launch of the initiative last month in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

• World No 1 claws back for eighth in difficult conditions

• Sweden storms to one-two finish over 20km distance

• Diggins has five more events at farewell Olympics

Jessie Diggins’s farewell Olympics began with a crash and a scramble on Saturday, the trailblazing star of American cross-country skiing fighting back to finish eighth in the women’s skiathlon as Sweden delivered a commanding one-two in the first cross-country skiing race of the Milano Cortina Games.

Frida Karlsson powered to gold ahead of teammate Ebba Andersson, with Norway’s Heidi Weng taking bronze, as the first Olympic women’s skiathlon contested over the new 20km distance quickly turned into a test of endurance, conditions and survival.

I have tested the largest TVs on the market, including Hisense, LG and Samsung. Here are my top picks for the best 85-inch TVs of 2026.

Immigration operations are still stoking fear and disrupting the ability to go to work, school or doctor’s appointments

With the public’s outrage and attention focused on the deadly surge of federal agents in Minneapolis, immigration operations have quietly continued across the US – albeit in less noticeable but still troubling ways, advocates say.

In recent weeks there have been day laborers swept up at a Home Depot in San Diego. A taco truck vendor chased down outside a church in Los Angeles. Immigrants arrested at check-ins in North Carolina, and during traffic stops in the nation’s capital.

You'll be able to see Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Uranus and Neptune in the night sky.

After first dismissing uproar over depiction of Obamas as apes, White House then said it was erroneously posted by staffer

Donald Trump said on Friday he made the call to post a now-deleted video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes but deflected blame for the move, causing new speculation in his orbit about whether the blame lay with the president or his aide Natalie Harp.

The brief clip, shared late Thursday night on Trump’s Truth Social account, appeared in a video pushing conspiracies about the 2020 election. Invoking racist tropes, the video depicted the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the bodies of cartoon apes dancing to The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

Ukrainian president says Trump administration has proposed to host next round of trilateral talks in US

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the US has given Ukraine and Russia yet another deadline to reach a peace settlement, and is now proposing the war should end by June. The Ukrainian president also told reporters that both sides had been invited to further talks next week.

Zelenskyy said the Trump administration “will probably put pressure” on Ukraine and Russia to end the war by the beginning of the summer. “They say they want to get everything done by June,” he said. “They will do everything to end the war and they want a clear schedule of all events.”

The FAA says it is collaborating with the FBI to detect, track and assess unauthorized drone activity at the Super Bowl.

Gu qualified for the women's slopestyle final wearing an outfit with details inspired by her Chinese heritage and her personal quirks.

SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI creates business worth $1.25tn but whether premise behind deal will work is questioned

The acquisition of xAI by SpaceX is a typical Elon Musk deal: big numbers backed by big ambition.

As well as extending “the light of consciousness to the stars”, as Musk described it, the transaction creates a business worth $1.25tn (£920bn) by combining Musk’s rocket company with his artificial intelligence startup. It values SpaceX at $1tn and xAI at $250bn, with a stock market flotation expected in June to time with Musk’s birthday and a planetary alignment.

The Obama video should take a toll on the president’s political career – but of course it won’t

Despite Donald Trump’s war on woke, he hasn’t (yet) made Black History Month illegal. In fact, on Tuesday the president issued a proclamation declaring February 2026 to be a celebration of Black history and called “upon public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities”.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Your air fryer can do far more than make perfect wings. Here are seven ideas for game-day foods to make this Sunday.

I spent several weeks testing Withings’ BeamO thermometer to see who could benefit the most from its futuristic design.

Exclusive: Disclosures show figures cited by council leader rested on unfunded ideas listed briefly in budget papers

Reform UK’s flagship council has been accused of telling a “blatant lie” after its claim of nearly £40m in savings on net zero was found to be based on hypothetical projects for which there was no documentation.

Kent county council, which has a £2.5bn annual budget, is one of 10 where Nigel Farage’s party has outright control and is seen as a test case for whether the insurgent party can govern competently.

With Bad Bunny headlining a historic Super Bowl halftime show, we highlight some of his most impactful lyrics in Spanish and English.

Becca Valle, then 37, enrolled in a cutting-edge clinical trial after surgery removed an aggressive tumor from her brain.

Skier Chris Lillis said he was "heartbroken about what's happened in the United States," while skater Amber Glenn said she "will not just be quiet."

"Just because it seems impossible to you doesn't mean it's not possible," Vonn says.

Don Glickman’s daughter sent his favorite people the postcard he designed before his death.

Move will hit Michigan, Illinois, New York and other states with highest levels of lead drinking water pipes the hardest

There is outrage among some politicians and activists after the US Congress voted to slash $125m for replacing toxic lead drinking water pipes that are particularly a threat to children.

The move will hit Michigan, Illinois, Texas, New York and other states with the highest levels of lead pipes the hardest. The cut was part of a broader government funding bill and particularly controversial in the context of the fight over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) funding.

Outreach teams battle mistrust, mental illness and thin resources as subzero weather pushes the city to its limits

On the corner of 23rd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan beneath the landmark Flatiron building, two workers from the Bridge, an outreach non-profit, were hoping to help a number of homeless men seek shelter from the dangerous, freezing temperatures gripping the city.

It is a matter of life and death as New York endures one of its longest stretches of subzero cold since 1960. Seventeen people have died, with at least 13 deaths linked to hypothermia. The city estimates that 800 homeless people have been moved inside, with Zohran Mamdani, the mayor, saying recently “we have been taking every possible measure to get New Yorkers inside. This has been a full all-hands-on-deck approach.”

The Amazon documentary brought in $7m its opening weekend – thanks to admirers eager for a glimpse of the first lady’s secretive life

The dress code for Lisa Copeland’s big night out: what would Melania wear?

The 60-year-old real estate entrepreneur and nine other friends were headed to Amazon’s new documentary Melania, which debuted in theaters nationwide last week. “We all brought our best power suit,” Copeland said, nodding to Melania Trump’s penchant for neat, tailored menswear-inspired looks. But since she lives in Austin, Texas, Copeland put her own country-glam spin on it: black leather pants and a pearl jacket with diamond and pearl beading.

UK reduces funding by a third despite pledges to tackle hunger, with critics warning the move will cost lives

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has been accused of hypocrisy after cutting funding to the UN World Food Programme by a third while pledging to tackle “suffering and starvation”.

The reduction in UK funding to the World Food Programme (WFP) from $610m (£448m) in 2024 to $435m last year is part of a wider hit on aid spending that campaigners say is putting lives at risk.

More than three dozen cases of death cap mushroom poisonings have been reported in California since November, health officials said.

Barça looks to increase its slender lead at the top of the standings as it hosts Los Bermellones.

Disney-backed startup Liminal Space's XR glasses are a theme park experience waiting to happen.

Party says it has received advice that 2013 investigation of allegations against peer was ‘flawed in several respects’

The Liberal Democrat peer Chris Rennard has been suspended from the party amid a new investigation into sexual harassment allegations.

The party said it had received advice that a 2013 inquiry into the claims made by four women against Lord Rennard was “flawed in several respects”.

In addition to Pro models getting M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, Apple is reportedly prepping a budget MacBook for $599, an M5 refresh for the MacBook Air and the first MacBook with a touchscreen OLED display.

The Gunners look to get their title charge back on track against the Black Cats.

Maybe more than just cores.

NFU warn it could take years to restore Brexit losses despite efforts to smooth negotiations on farming and other elements of UK-EU reset

Exports of British farm products to the EU have dropped almost 40% in the five years since Brexit, highlighting the trade barriers caused by the UK’s divorce from the EU in 2020.

Analysis of HMRC data by the National Farmers’ Union shows the decline in sales of everything from British beef to cheddar cheese has dropped by 37.4% in the five years since 2019, the last full year before Brexit.

Peaceful demonstrations force a delay in measures aimed at improving revenue collection but which many fear will be fatal for small traders

Demonstrations across Malawi’s four main cities during the past week have achieved a delay in the introduction of a new tax regime that business owners claim will cripple their livelihoods.

Tens of thousands had signed petitions which this week were presented to tax officials and on Monday thousands of small traders shut up shops and businesses to hold protest marches in Blantyre, Lilongwe, Zomba and Mzuzu.

Darin Smith, who was outside Capitol on January 6, decried as Senate mulls nomination as state’s top federal prosecutor

A Republican former state lawmaker with no experience trying cases, a record of opposing LGBTQ+ rights, and who was outside the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection, is awaiting Senate confirmation to become the top federal prosecutor in Wyoming.

Donald Trump first nominated Darin Smith as Wyoming’s US attorney last year, and the judiciary committee advanced him in a party-line vote in January. Democrats have condemned Smith, saying he lacks the experience necessary for the job and threatens to impose a discriminatory approach to federal law enforcement in the state where gay college student Matthew Shepard’s 1998 murder galvanized the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

The documents confirm what many have long assumed: elites live by their own special rules and codes of immunity

The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.

What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.

Critics say law will disproportionately affect immigrant communities and those who speak limited English

As of 6 February, people in Florida are no longer be able to take driver’s license examinations in any language other than English, the Florida department of highway safety and motor vehicles (DMV) said in a statement.

Before the change, exams for noncommercial driver’s licenses were offered in multiple languages, including Spanish, Haitian Creole and Portuguese, while the commercial learner’s permit and commercial driver’s license knowledge exams were both offered in English and Spanish. Now all driver’s license knowledge and skills testing will be conducted in English.

Whole milk isn't just a trend from the '90s. It can still be found in the refrigerated aisle.

After extensive testing, we found the two leaders.

The barrel-chested diver set three world records and served as an underwater guinea pig for Navy scientists.

About 4% of all public commits on GitHub are now being authored by Anthropic's Claude Code, a terminal-native AI coding agent that has quickly become the centerpiece of a broader argument that software engineering is being fundamentally reshaped by AI. SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor and AI research firm, published a report on Friday projecting that figure will climb past 20% by the end of 2026. Claude Code is a command-line tool that reads codebases, plans multi-step tasks and executes them autonomously. Anthropic's quarterly revenue additions have overtaken OpenAI's, according to SemiAnalysis's internal economic model, and the firm believes Anthropic's growth is now constrained primarily by available compute. Accenture has signed on to train 30,000 professionals on Claude, the largest enterprise deployment so far, targeting financial services, life sciences, healthcare and the public sector. On January 12, Anthropic launched Cowork, a desktop-oriented extension of the same agent architecture -- four engineers built it in 10 days, and most of the code was written by Claude Code itself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deregulation alone can’t make homes affordable when rising inequality, not zoning, is what is driving prices up

Donald Trump has an interesting view of how housing plays in US politics. “I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes,” he said at a recent cabinet meeting. Unaffordable housing may be front and center of the “affordability crisis” pissing off voters. Still, he insists: “We’re not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”

It can be hard to square some things Trump says with other things Trump says, let alone with reality. One can’t help but remember his campaign “goal of cutting the cost of a new home in half” by eliminating pesky regulations that raise the cost of construction. Forget that cheap new entry-level homes will weigh on the price of the existing housing stock.

If the June deadline is not met, the Trump administration will likely put pressure on both sides to meet it, Zelenskyy told reporters.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos’S Washington Post on Wednesday cut one-third of its staff, including around 300 members of the newsroom, a journalistic bloodbath that marks a shift from the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” era back into darkness.

Defenders of the executive team’s decisions have cited declining subscriptions and revenue as the reasons why the company needs to tighten its belt. But for Bezos, who could leverage his net worth, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 billion, to run the paper at a loss for generations to come, these cuts to a trusted news organization are an ideological, rather than commercial, choice — and the Amazon founder is more responsible than anyone for the change in the Washington Post’s fortunes. 

After promising Post employees that he’d take a hands-off approach to the newsroom and let journalists do their jobs when he bought the Post in 2013, Bezos dramatically changed course in late October 2024 when he killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president over Donald Trump. That made Bezos, and the Washington Post itself, enemies of the liberal audience the newsroom had been cultivating for a decade and beyond. More than 200,000 people canceled their subscriptions in the wake of Bezos’s intervention, a massive loss of revenue for an already struggling business. 

Reporters at the paper could see what was coming and appealed to readers not to punish the newsroom. “Please don’t cancel your subscriptions,” wrote Amanda Morris, a disability reporter who resigned from the paper last May, in a prescient post. “It won’t impact Bezos — it hurts journalists and makes another round of layoffs more likely.”

Morris was right. Unsubscribing has had no effect on Bezos’s appeasing of Trump, and he has continued to go out of his way to flatter the 47th president. Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 presidential inaugural committee, and Bezos attended the ceremony, one of a murderer’s row of tech billionaires who stood near the president on the dais in the Capitol rotunda, flanked by other Silicon Valley titans like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai. 

One month later, in February 2025, Bezos restructured the opinion section along explicitly ideological grounds, writing in a memo to staff: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” 

It’s paying off. On Monday, two days before the layoffs, the billionaire welcomed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to his Blue Origin spaceport in Florida for a mutual backslapping affair — highlighting yet another Bezos business that’s benefiting from public money in the form of a Space Force contract worth more than $2 billion, which was announced last April. Hegseth posted on X that the company was “building The Arsenal of Freedom.”

Bezos replied that it was a “huge honor” to have Trump’s war chief to visit. “The whole team here was energized by your visit, and we’re excited to be doing our part to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America. Thank you!” he said.

Related

Apple Workers Are Livid That Tim Cook Saw “Melania” Movie Hours After CBP Killed Pretti

There’s always more than enough money to go around, except if you’re a working journalist. Amazon’s “Melania” debuted on January 30, just days before the layoffs; the documentary reportedly paid the first lady around $28 million of its $40 million budget, leading former executive Ted Hope, who helped start Amazon’s film division, to wonder: “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe?”

The Washington Post isn’t the only newsroom to see the right-wing politics of its owner lead to backlash and a loss of revenue followed closely by cuts. At the Los Angeles Times, a similar dynamic played out after billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong declined to allow the paper to endorse Kamala Harris on October 22, 2024, just three days before Bezos did the same. 

Subscriptions dropped by the thousands, though not to the extent they did at the Post; in October 2025, as ownership sought a $500 million investment, they reported $50 million in losses attributed primarily to the time period after the non-endorsement. The LA Times has been hit with extensive layoffs in the newsroom, another example of employees paying the price for ownership playing at right-wing politics. 

Related

Bari Weiss Is Doing Exactly What She Was Installed at CBS to Do

This rightward turn, with job cuts framed as a necessary evil to tighten up a floundering business, was also on display at CBS News, where Trump ally David Ellison appointed conservative ideologue Bari Weiss to run the show after his media company Skydance bought the network last fall. One of the first orders of business was cutting staff, which came a month after the purchase.

In each case, the driving forces appear to be the political priorities of billionaires and their desire to avoid Trump’s wrath and curry his favor — while massively benefiting their bottom line with media mergers and lucrative government contracts. Soon-Shiong’s multibillion-dollar fortune is built on the health care industry, particularly on drugs he’s developed like Anktiva, which rely on FDA approval. Ellison is shamelessly ingratiating himself to Trump for more media merger approval, a strategy that’s working for the whole family: Patriarch Larry just led a bid to take over American operations of TikTok with the president’s blessing.

Bezos in particular has an interest in keeping Trump happy. The president won’t hesitate to punish enemies or the disloyal by yanking federal contracts, and AWS, Amazon’s web services division, relies on the government for billions of its annual revenue. The relationship between the White House and Amazon has already sparked outrage, especially over AWS’s contracting with ICE for more than $140 million, but money in the bank speaks louder than protests against one of the world’s largest and most ubiquitous companies. 

Amazon continues to rake in hundreds of millions annually — at least — in federal dollars through its cloud contracts, not only for ICE, but also in agencies and departments across the government. While there’s no solid number for the average annual value all these contracts amount to, it’s enough that AWS was able to promise $1 billion in savings to the federal government in 2025 through a cloud updating and consolidation deal through the end of 2028. 

Those staggering profits add insult to injury for Bezos’ now-former employees at the Post, who could have kept their jobs in perpetuity if the billionaire valued the Fourth Estate as much as he’s claimed. Former editor David Maraniss told the New Yorker that Bezos “bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed. Now I don’t think … he gives a flying fuck.”

The newsroom lost, effectively, its entire sports section on Wednesday, its photo desk, as well as most of its arts coverage. Promises to “restructure” the Metro desk with major cuts will leave Washington, one of the most important cities in the world, with a greatly diminished ability to report on the capital.

International coverage also sustained major losses. Despite immense public interest in covering conflicts in the regions, the Post’s Cairo bureau chief tweeted that she was laid off, along with “the entire roster” of Middle East editors and correspondents, and the Ukraine bureau was also reportedly axed. In one particularly stark example, reporter Lizzie Johnson was reporting from the front lines of the Ukraine war in Kyiv — with no dependable heat, power, or running water — when she was laid off. “I have no words,” Johnson posted to X. “I’m devastated.”

This is a crushing blow for the journalists who have lost their jobs. It’s also a real loss for the public at large. But despite his lofty blustering, the good of the public doesn’t matter to Bezos, nor to his ally in the White House. A rigorous, adversarial news media is not in the best interest of the ultra-wealthy and could perhaps even act as a check, however small, on their unending ambitions. Bezos has already reaped the material awards of this administration and will continue to — a few hundred livelihoods be damned.

Billionaires are only benevolent until they’re not, and they certainly can’t be trusted to “save” the news when their self-interest is at stake. The Washington Post layoffs only reinforces the need for a media that isn’t controlled by the capricious whims of the superrich, but one that serves the good of the public. Otherwise, we’re on our own.

The post The Bloodbath at Washington Post Is All Jeff Bezos’s Fault appeared first on The Intercept.

What I Am Discussing Today:

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: This one’s by Philip Randolph, who actually said it.

• Black History Month: Remembering Salem Poor.

• Rewriting the Rules: Or, How to Scrap the Constitution and Hope No One Notices

• Golden Obsession: It Is Supposed to Look Like It Was Bought at a Discount Chain Store?

• Tribute to Sax: the Man and His Beloved Invention.

• What I’m Reading: 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin.

• Jukebox Playlist: James Brown…and 30 Kids from Watts.

Kareem’s Daily Quote:

“….Freedom is never granted; it is won.” - A. Philip Randolph

In case you’ve never heard of Randolph, or it’s been a while since you heard, he was considered the top black labor leader in American history, a pioneer of racial equality and better working conditions for all races. He influenced President Roosevelt to end discrimination in the war complex, and President Truman to ban it in the armed services and federal employment. In other words, he’s worth remembering every month of the year, including this one.

As for the quote, I’ve always felt the weight of it. It’s not just a slogan. It’s a reminder of how progress really happens. It’d be nice if freedom came in a gift box. Instead, people have had to fight for it, sacrifice for it, and protect it generation after generation. When I look back at history—never mind Black history—I see a long line of individuals who refused to wait for permission to be fully human. They pushed, they organized, they created, and they believed in a future they couldn’t yet see. And that struggle didn’t just happen in marches or inside of courtrooms. It happened in classrooms, in churches, in living rooms, in music halls, in bars and restaurants, and in the quiet corners of everyday life where people chose dignity over fear. In our current day, these crazy, baffling times we’re living through, this quote becomes a compass. It reminds us that the freedoms we celebrate were earned through courage, and the freedoms we still reach for—or that are slowly or even quickly eroding—will require that same courage from us. This month we remember the past, while recognizing the ongoing work of shaping a more just and compassionate world.

What kind of world do you want to build? What are you willing to stand up to or sacrifice for? Past victories make us feel energized, but they don’t excuse us from the work still ahead. More than anything, they become a challenge and an invitation to honor the struggle by continuing it for as long as it takes…knowing for a fact that it’ll never end. Am I being negative? No, I think I’m being realistic. There’s no finish line to freedom. No end run, and then we’re there. Thankfully, we’ve got each other to lean on as we continue to put one foot in front of the other.

Read more

Ombudsman found bank wrongly rejected 34% of complaints last year, with NatWest and HSBC close behind

Monzo has wrongly denied refunds to thousands of fraud and scam victims, the Guardian can reveal.

The digital-only bank wrongly rejected more than 1,000 fraud and scam complaints that were closed last year alone, according to data from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS).

The Seahawks quarterback was once seen as just another high-profile quarterback bust. But now he is one win from clinching the NFL title

For the teams, the reality of the Super Bowl hits like deja vu: a ritual they’ve watched and fantasized about for years suddenly arrives, sucking them into its vast, chaotic center.

For Sam Darnold, though, it’s a reality come full circle. San Francisco, after all, was the city that gave him a chance after he crashed and burned in New York and washed out in Carolina, long after most around the NFL had consigned him to history’s pile of first-round draft busts.

I understand the appeal of avoiding all human contact. Still, good old-fashioned taxis have so much to offer

It’s Super Bowl weekend here in America, which means a few things: copious amounts of gut-busting food, controversial half-time show performances, extravagant commercials, and occasionally a bit of football.

For the tens of thousands rich enough to afford tickets to the Big Game, transportation to and from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, will be paramount. Thankfully, our robotic saviors are here to rescue the throng from the indignity of sharing a ride with an actual human being. This year’s Super Bowl is a test of the driverless taxi industry, currently lorded over by Waymo – a company that’s about to get a $16bn cash injection to further expand its business to cities all around the world. Smaller American metro areas like Sacramento and Nashville are next up to get Waymo service, as are global capitals like London and Tokyo. Fleets of robotaxis are seeming more and more inevitable, yet another soldier in the onslaught of shiny gadgets designed to sand off the sharp edges of modern life. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Democracy experts say there is little doubt about president’s desire to interfere in elections this November

Donald Trump set off alarm bells earlier this week with comments that his administration should “take over the voting” in some states in the run-up to the 2026 midterms, which followed an unprecedented FBI raid on an election office in Georgia. Although election experts say it’s clear the president doesn’t have authority over elections, they warn the president’s corrosive rhetoric leaves little doubt about his intent.

For months, the Trump administration has stoked doubts about the integrity of American elections largely through lawsuits designed to create the impression states aren’t doing enough to keep ineligible voters off the rolls. That effort escalated significantly last week when the FBI raided the election office in Fulton county, Georgia and seized ballots, along with other materials, related to the 2020 election. Shortly after the raid, Trump escalated his attack even further, saying the federal government should take over elections.

The astonishing case of the missing Today morning show anchor’s mom is six days in so far and without resolution

A missing 84-year-old mother of a famous TV morning show anchor; droplets of blood and a mysterious white van; a ransom note sent to a celebrity news website; no suspects; a city surrounded by desert near the US-Mexico border; frustrated investigators; and a concerned US president.

It is for all these reasons that the astonishing case of the missing Nancy Guthrie has captivated US public attention in a six-day mystery that still has no resolution. It leads the US news and dominates the headlines, fusing crime and celebrity together in ways not seen since OJ Simpson or the Lindbergh baby.

While the U.S. is on top of the overall Olympic medal count, it is not the country that dominates winter sports like the 2026 Milano Cortina Games in Italy.

“As part of our efforts to use more sovereign digital solutions, the European Commission is preparing an internal communication solution based on the Matrix protocol,” the spokesperson told Euractiv.

Matrix is an open source, community-developed messaging protocol shepherded by a non-profit that’s headquartered in London. It’s already widely used for public messengers across Europe, with the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces all using tools built on the protocol.

↫ Maximilian Henning at Euractiv

Right now, most government agencies and institutions in Europe are effectively entirely reliant on Microsoft for their digital infrastructure, and that’s not a tenable situation going forward with the Americans being openly hostile towards Europe, up to and including threatening to invade European countries. Europe needs its own digital infrastructure, and opting to build those around open source tools is the obvious way to go.

Of course, this isn’t an easy process, but two platitudes apply here: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and every journey begins with a first step. By opting to use existing open source tools, though, these efforts will have a massive head start, and will hopefully lead to a flurry of increased activity for the open source projects in question. In this particular case it’s Matrix, which can surely need some additional work and eyeballs, if my use of the protocol is any indication.

What does it look like when a hardware and software company descends into an obsession with recurring services revenue to please its shareholders? Look no further than Apple, who has turned its Apple News service into a vehicle for scam ads.

These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no.

↫ Kirk McElhearn

While serving obvious scams to users is already bad enough, the real kicker is that even if you are a paying user of Apple News, you still get served ads, including the scams. Of course, massive corporations like Apple are free too just scam you, since they’re effectively immune from any legal consequences, so it’s unlikely the scamming will stop as long as it makes line go up.

On an entirely unrelated note, OSNews is entirely free of ads, so there’s no scams here. OSNews is fully funded by our readers through single donations on Ko-Fi or by becoming a Patreon.

Grammy-winning Puerto Rican star is in the center of US culture wars before leading this weekend’s half-time show

A few days after Christmas 2022, Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaetonero, appeared without warning on one of the most unlikely of stages: the roof of a Gulf Oil gas station in San Juan. To a massive crowd singing every word, he performed a surprise concert, along with friend and collaborator Arcángel, that was part hype-y music video shoot, part exultant post-tour homecoming, and part pointed critique. He ended the set with El Apagón (“The Power Outage”), a clubby protest anthem about local displacement and the rolling blackouts that have plagued Puerto Rico, a US “commonwealth” (read: colony), since Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Bad Bunny sang it from a roof on Santurce’s Calle Loíza, a thoroughfare in a former working-class Black neighborhood now dotted with Airbnbs. But you do not need the full context to get the show’s contagious energy. Though I have never walked Calle Loíza, nor do I speak Spanish, the gas station show is still my favorite concert to rewatch via online fan clips: electric, organic, genuinely popular. In terms of reach, critical acclaim and longevity, Bad Bunny rivals – and sometimes outsells – the likes of Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé and Drake, though it is hard to imagine those peers appearing so unguarded, so public, as he does on that roof.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organizations to label AI-generated material and mandate that humans review any such content before publication. On Monday, Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) and Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D-NYC) introduced the bill, called The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act -- The NY FAIR News Act for short. "At the center of the news industry, New York has a strong interest in preserving journalism and protecting the workers who produce it," said Rozic in a statement announcing the bill. A closer look at the bill shows a few regulations, mostly centered around AI transparency, both for the public and in the newsroom. For one, the law would demand that news organizations put disclaimers on any published content that is "substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Campaigners welcome criminalisation of non-consensual AI-generated explicit images but say law does not go far enough

Victims of deepfake image abuse have called for stronger protection against AI-generated explicit images, as the law criminalising the creation of non-consensual intimate images comes into effect.

Campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse delivered a petition to Downing Street with more than 73,000 signatures, urging the government to introduce civil routes to justice such as takedown orders for abusive imagery on platforms and devices.

Don't miss a moment of the Winter Olympics. Here's how to watch live, for free and stream the action without cable.

The bosses at a Maine shipyard are offering overtime to workers there if they attend a speech by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, according to workers at the facility.

Hegseth is reportedly set to tour Bath Iron Works on Monday and give a speech on the recently announced “Trump” class battleship, according to the Bangor Daily News.

When the bosses reached out to workers for volunteers to attend the speech, however, few hands went up, according to one worker, who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The speech is slated for Monday afternoon, shortly before a shift change, which means that workers who attend would need to stay past their normal work hours — and anyone who shows up would be required to stay until the event is over.

“They issued a polling sheet this morning to see who would attend and, at least from my crew, there were no takers,” said the worker, “and not even a mention of overtime.”

Related

Trump and Hegseth Gathered U.S. Military Leaders for an “Embarrassing” Rant

Hegseth has made his speeches a high priority during his tenure as secretary of the War Department, including one address in which he railed against “fat” generals. He later ordered the entire U.S. military to watch the speech.

Devin Ragnar, a spokesperson for International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 6, which represents workers at the yard, confirmed that anyone attending the speech past shift change would receive overtime pay, but declined to discuss in detail how the arrangement was reached.

After the initial lack of enthusiasm on Friday morning, a later survey went out around noon that explicitly said workers would receive overtime if they stayed past the end of their shift, according to the worker.

“I don’t know if that was always going to be the case — a change to bribe folks to get a larger attendance ­— or if union leadership grieved it by saying they can’t mandate us stay past our shift and not pay us,” said the worker, whose hunch was that management was looking to entice people to attend. “This company doesn’t pay out for anything they don’t explicitly have to.”

Another worker who spoke with The Intercept expressed dread about the impending headache of Hegseth’s visit, echoing how unusual the offer of overtime pay was.

“I’m sure it’ll both interrupt the workday — which is very ironic since we’re always being hounded about productivity and efficiency — and create a lot of discourse that I don’t want to have to listen to all day,” said second worker, who also requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I was also a little angry because, again, there are lots of other things that we get denied paid time off for — snowstorms, events during work hours that aren’t work-related, etc. But they’re offering OT for this?”

Representatives of Bath Iron Works did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and a Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment.

“We haven’t announced any trip for the Secretary and have nothing to add at this time,” said Joel Valdez, the spokesperson.

Located in Bath, Maine, at the mouth of the Kennebec River, the shipyard is one of the largest employers in the state and has long been one of the most reliable sources for steady, well-paying union jobs in the Midcoast region. A subsidiary of the defense giant General Dynamics, BIW plays a key role in building and maintaining U.S. Navy ships and has been the recipient of billions of dollars in government contracts.

Charles Krugh, the president of Bath Iron Works, has signaled to President Donald Trump that his facility is ready to take part in the construction of the “Trump” battleships.

“America’s warfighters deserve the most advanced, lethal and survivable combat ships we can deliver to protect our country and our families,” Krugh said in December, echoing Hegseth’s fondness for the term “warfighter.”

When news emerged this week that Hegseth was coming to the yard, however, reactions among the staff were muted, the BIW worker told The Intercept. They said many colleagues greeted news of Hegseth’s visit with feelings ranging from “apathy to disgust,”

“I hate Pete Hegseth to my core,” the first worker said. “He has no business discussing warships, or anything involved with what we do here. I find it insulting that he is given any authority or respect.”

The worker acknowledged that not everyone at BIW would share the same view of Hegseth.

“We have plenty of die-hard Trump supporters, and I don’t know how much of that fanaticism spreads to Hegseth,” the worker said. “I think if anything he’s an afterthought by most people.”

The post Shipyard Bosses Forced to Pay Overtime to Get People to Stay for Pete Hegseth Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

The halftime show will illustrate the nation’s immigration divide whether or not the reggaeton star makes an explicit message about Trump’s deportation drive.

It's been a while since I've got any slightly worthy shots... Yes, the weather has been as usual. Rainy.

Here's a few from a recent trip...
I also seem to be the first that's recorded a float at John O'Groats and also the shortest street in the world 😉 🤣

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The Red Devils look to continue their winning run under Michael Carrick as they host his old club at Old Trafford.

Chalk artwork sold for record price at a New York Sotheby’s auction with proceeds going to the Panthera charity

A tiny chalk drawing of a lion by Rembrandt recently sold for the record-setting price of $18m in New York City to benefit the conservation of big cats.

After selling at a Sotheby’s auction Wednesday, Young Lion Resting shattered the previous mark for the most expensive drawing by the 17th-century Dutch painter ever auctioned: the $3.7m Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo.

Tests on both versions of Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata were unable to detect brushstrokes of 15th-century master

An analysis of two paintings in museums in the US and Italy by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck has raised a profound question: what if neither were by Van Eyck?

Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, the name given to near-identical unsigned paintings hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Museums of Turin, represent two of the small number of surviving works by one of western art’s greatest masters, revered for his naturalistic portraits and religious subjects.

Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft's automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013. Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought it was resolved, but a second complete block went into effect in January, cratering Bing traffic from roughly half a million daily visitors to zero. He submitted nearly a dozen tickets through Bing's webmaster tools but could not get past the AI chatbot to reach a human. After Ars Technica contacted Microsoft, the company restored the Neocities front page within 24 hours but most subdomains remain blocked. Microsoft cited policy violations related to low-quality content yet declined to identify the offending sites or work directly with Drake to fix the problem.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Capture of rogue ship could open a new front against Moscow at a time when Russia’s oil revenues are tumbling

The UK is threatening to seize a Russia-linked shadow fleet tanker in an escalatory move that could lead to the opening up of a new front against Moscow at a time when the country’s oil revenues are tumbling.

British defence sources confirmed that military options to capture a rogue ship had been identified in discussions involving Nato allies – though a month has gone by since the US-led seizure of a Russian tanker in the Atlantic.

I am convinced that Europe’s ‘new right’ is a radically contemporary movement. Defeating it means understanding its critique of liberalism

European governments are terrified of Donald Trump’s threats on trade, Greenland and the future of Nato. But the biggest threat is not that Trump invades an ally or leaves Europe at the mercy of Russia. It is that his ideological movement could transform Europe from the inside.

A year after Trump’s return to the White House, his “second American revolution” is radiating outward into Europe. The Epstein files reveal how this began clumsily in 2018 with Steve Bannon; but it has become a much more sophisticated partnership with the second coming of Trump and the rise to power of JD Vance. The US National Security Strategy published by the White House in November called for strengthening the growing influence of “patriotic” European parties such as Reform UK, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), Fidesz in Hungary and Vox in Spain. As with the communist movements of the cold war, these nationalist, populist and in some cases far-right parties are best understood not as isolated national phenomena but as expressions of a shared intellectual project – a movement that is, to varying degrees, now being reinforced by a foreign power.

Mark Leonard is the author of the report The new right: anatomy of a global political revolution. He is director of the Berlin-based European Council on Foreign Relations

Bill Clinton says closed-door depositions would be akin to ‘kangaroo court’ as Hillary Clinton says they have already told House committee what they know

Former US president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary are calling for their congressional testimony on ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to be held publicly, to prevent Republicans from politicising the issue.

Both Clintons had been ordered to give closed-door depositions before the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, which is investigating the deceased financier’s connections to powerful figures and how information about his crimes was handled.

• 31-year-old arrested in Harrison County, Tennessee

• Former linebacker due in court on 11 February

Former New York Jets linebacker Darron Lee has been charged with murder on Thursday after the death of his girlfriend.

Lee was arrested and taken into custody in Hamilton County, Tennessee, after deputies were called to a medical emergency where first responders were giving a woman CPR at a residence in Ooltewah. The medics were unable to save her, and WTVC NewsChannel 9 reported she had suffered a suspected stab wound as well as other injuries.

Reporters say relatives in Iran have been questioned and persecuted in an effort to curb coverage of unrest

Exiled Iranian journalists working for the BBC have been warned their movements are being closely monitored by the state, as they said their families in Iran were being interrogated and persecuted for their reporting.

Journalists said family members had been threatened with arrest and the seizure of their assets unless their loved ones stopped reporting on Iranian unrest.

Socialist António José Seguro on course for victory but gains by André Ventura’s Chega could herald watershed

Portuguese voters will return to the polls on Sunday for the final round of a presidential election that has been marked by a push to keep the far-right candidate at bay and overshadowed by deadly storms that have lashed the country in recent days.

The moderate leftwing candidate António José Seguro won the first round of the election, which was held on 18 January, taking 31.1% of the vote.

Special pods at Chester zoo helped conservationists breed and release more than 100,000 greater Bermuda snails

A button-sized snail once feared extinct in its Bermudian home is thriving again after conservationists bred and released more than 100,000 of the molluscs.

The greater Bermuda snail (Poecilozonites bermudensis) was found in the fossil record but believed to have vanished from the North Atlantic archipelago, until a remnant population was discovered in a damp and overgrown alleyway in Hamilton, the island capital, in 2014.

Files reveal a world of flattery and fratboy tones, where rich men are cultivated and women provide services

Pluck an email at random from the millions in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. It is a Saturday evening in February 2013, and Jeffrey Epstein is messaging Bill Gates’s assistant about guests for a dinner he wants to organise.

“People for Bill,” the email begins. Epstein starts listing possible candidates: the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the film director Woody Allen, the prime minister of Qatar, a couple of Harvard academics, the billionaire CEO of Hyatt hotels, a White House communications director, a former US secretary of defence.

Robert Lloyd Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before Canada-China ties nosedived in 2018

China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as prime minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing.

Schellenberg’s lawyer Zhang Dongshuo, reached in Beijing on Saturday, confirmed the decision was announced on Friday by China’s highest court.

Waymo's robotaxis have racked up at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since the start of the 2025 school year, and a voluntary software recall the company issued in December after a federal investigation has not fixed the problem. Austin Independent School District initially reported at least 19 incidents of Waymo vehicles failing to stop for buses during loading and unloading -- illegal in all 50 states -- prompting NHTSA to open a probe. At least four more violations have occurred since the software update, including a January 19th incident where a robotaxi drove past a bus as children waited to cross the street and the stop arm was extended. Waymo also acknowledged that one of its vehicles struck a child outside a Santa Monica elementary school on January 23rd, causing minor injuries. Austin ISD has asked Waymo to stop operating near schools during bus hours until the issue is resolved. Waymo refused. Three federal investigations have been opened in three months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A federal appeals court on Friday endorsed the Trump administration's policy of holding broad groups of immigration detainees without access to bond hearings, a major legal victory for President Trump.

Sabrina Underwood faces a mandatory 12‑year sentence after authorities in Panama discovered a loaded gun in her checked bag, a case her father says was a tragic mistake.

Donald Trump says another meeting set for next week while warning of ‘very steep’ consequences if Tehran doesn’t make a deal

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.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 7

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• Trump news at a glance: Trump creates distance, but no apology, after promoting racist video of Obamas

• Trump shares, later deletes video with racist imagery of Obamas

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”.

The Pentagon says it will cut ties with Harvard University, ending graduate-level military training, fellowship and certificate programs.

President Trump late Friday addressed a video posted to his social media account that included a racist depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, telling reporters he didn't see the part that showed the former president and first lady.

Move by Pete Hegseth marks latest escalation by Trump administration against the Ivy League school

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said the Pentagon is ending all military training, fellowships and certificate programs with Harvard University, marking the Trump administration’s latest escalation against the Ivy League school.

“The @DeptWar is formally ending ALL Professional Military Education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard University,” Hegseth said in a statement posted on X, labeling Harvard as “woke”.

We all want more battery life in our phones, and a semi-hidden AI setting in the latest iPhone system is helping to achieve that.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 7, No. 502.

Only a smattering of Republicans spoke out about clip in which Obamas’ faces were superimposed on bodies of apes

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump said on Friday evening, after a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes had been posted to his social media account and then deleted, that he had directed aides to post the offensive video but that he hadn’t seen that portion of the clip and he refused to apologize for it.

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.

Hollywood's recent attempts to build entertainment around AI have consistently underperformed or outright flopped, whether the AI in question is a plot device or a production tool. The horror sequel M3GAN 2.0, Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning, and Disney's Tron: Ares all disappointed at the box office in 2025 despite centering their narratives on AI. The latest casualty is Mercy, a January 2026 crime thriller in which Chris Pratt faces an AI judge bot played by Rebecca Ferguson; one reviewer has already called it "the worst movie of 2026," and its ticket sales have been mediocre. AI-generated content hasn't fared any better. Darren Aronofsky executive-produced On This Day...1776, a YouTube web series that uses Google DeepMind video generation alongside real voice actors to dramatize the American Revolution. Viewer response has been brutal -- commenters mocked the uncanny faces and the fact that DeepMind rendered "America" as "Aamereedd." A Taika Waititi-directed Xfinity commercial set to air during this weekend's Super Bowl, which de-ages Jurassic Park stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, has already been mocked for producing what one viewer called "melting wax figures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The case in Bangladesh, where Nipah cases are reported almost every year, follows two Nipah virus cases identified in neighbouring India

The World Health Organization said on Friday that a woman had died in northern Bangladesh in January after contracting the deadly Nipah virus infection.

The case in Bangladesh, where Nipah cases are reported almost every year, follows two Nipah virus cases identified in neighbouring India, which has already prompted stepped-up airport screenings across Asia.

Beginning in 2004, Joe Macken carved all five boroughs of New York City out of balsa wood, every site and stadium, and every bridge and building. His creation consists of almost 1 million structures.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 7, No. 706.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 7, No. 1,694.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 7 #972

The criticism continued even after the White House removed the video after the initial backlash.

More than 35 local, state and federal agencies have been working for the last 18 months to prepare for Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, California.

Though the commerce secretary has called his interactions with Epstein as "limited," the two were in business together four years after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea.

Two upcoming missions could see astronauts using smartphones to capture lunar selfies and more.

The stories are told on swipeable cards as you listen to the song.

Play your own Big Game at home on your Xbox.

The Opening Ceremonies of the 2026 Winter Olympics featured four simultaneous events in four locations marking what organizers said was the most spread-out Games in history.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Republicans' tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon's tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion. That's largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beautiful Bill, something that's particularly important to Amazon which -- in addition to maintaining a vast infrastructure for its ubiquitous delivery business -- has been spending billions to build out artificial intelligence data centers. Also helping, though less important: The law's expanded breaks for businesses research and development expenses. The company has long been criticized by Democrats for paying little in tax, and it appeared to be bracing for criticism in the wake of the report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nathan Smith, 27, known professionally as DJ Young Slade, was music producer, artist, engineer and NYU graduate

American rapper Lil Jon said on Friday that his son, Nathan Smith, has died, the record producer confirmed in a joint statement with Smith’s mother after police found a body in a pond north of Atlanta, Georgia.

“I am extremely heartbroken for the tragic loss of our son, Nathan Smith. His mother [Nicole Smith] and I are devastated,” the statement said.

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 were aware of a new message related to the case.

The FBI and Arizona’s Pima county sheriff’s department issued a joint statement on Friday afternoon stating that investigators were actively inspecting information provided in the message for its authenticity. Earlier in the day, authorities said they believe that Guthrie is still alive.

The T1 looks different (again), and its specs and pricing have changed, according to a model handset shown in a video call to The Verge.

Initial announcement sparked fury from US cattle ranchers as economists say change will have little impact on prices

Donald Trump on Friday signed a proclamation to hike the US’s low-tariff imports of Argentinian beef, though economists have said the attempt to lower costs for US consumers will likely have little impact on prices.

A White House official said in October that Trump would make such a move, evoking fury from the nation’s cattle ranchers.

The 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics are underway after the lighting of the Olympic cauldrons and the Parade of Nations at the opening ceremony.

Resurgent technology stocks drove the rebound after a volatile week, while bitcoin also recouped losses.

California governor accused the administration of trying to ‘distract’ from Trump posting a racist video of the Obamas

California governor Gavin Newsom debunked a claim by senior Trump officials that his state plans to release more than 33,000 undocumented criminals from its jails.

On Friday, Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, posted on X that “California is getting ready to free up to 33 thousand criminal illegal aliens”.

The Olympic Flame is lit as Mariah Carey, Andrea Bocelli and Lang Lang star in beautiful opening ceremony at the San Siro stadium

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.

Watergate reporter says colleagues and readers ‘deserve more’ after newspaper lays off hundreds of workers

The veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward has said he is “crushed” by the mass layoffs of hundreds of colleagues at the paper and said the impact would be felt by readers – noting both “deserve more”.

“I am crushed that so many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis,” Woodward said in his first public remarks on the cuts, which were shared on X. “They deserve more.”

Sgt Erik Duran convicted by judge for causing Eric Duprey to fatally crash his motorized scooter in 2023

A New York City police officer was convicted on Friday of second-degree manslaughter after he tossed a picnic cooler filled with drinks at a fleeing suspect, causing the man to fatally crash his motorized scooter in 2023.

Judge Guy Mitchell handed down the guilty verdict in Bronx criminal court in the case against Sgt Erik Duran in the death of Eric Duprey. The 38-year-old Duran was the first New York police department (NYPD) officer in years to be tried for killing someone while on duty.

Harper Dennis also charged with possession of offensive weapon after fatal stabbing in Leicester city centre

A man has been charged with the murder of 20-year-old student Khaleed Oladipo in Leicester.

Harper Dennis, 18, of North Road, West Drayton, London, has been charged with murder and possession of an offensive weapon in a public place, police said.

Cryptocurrency transactions are often thought to be anonymous and untraceable. That's a misconception, experts tell CBS News.

Top U.S. nuclear official accuses China of conducting a secret nuclear test in 2020 and confirms plans to restart U.S. nuclear testing, citing a need to match covert detonations by Beijing and Moscow.

Podcaster claimed former prime minister not English because he is ‘brown-skinned Hindu’

Rishi Sunak has described himself as being “British, English and British Asian” in a riposte to increasing racially charged language used by figures on the right.

The UK’s first British Asian prime minister was speaking after his identity was questioned in recent debate sparked by a claim by the podcaster Konstantin Kisin that Sunak was not English because he was a “brown-skinned Hindu”.

President Trump called GOP Sen. Tim Scott after the South Carolina Republican publicly urged the president to remove a reposted video depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.

Emboldened by loosened restrictions from federal regulators, prediction markets look to cash in on Super Bowl Sunday.

Opalite video reunites host and guests including Domhnall Gleeson and Lewis Capaldi from Swift’s October chatshow appearance

Graham Norton’s chatshow has long been an object of fascination for American stars, wowed by its combined star wattage, glasses of wine and Norton’s own quick-witted, lightly saucy repartee – and Taylor Swift has now taken that fandom to another level.

Norton has been cast in the music video for Opalite, the second single from her album The Life of a Showgirl to receive music video treatment after The Fate of Ophelia. Not only Norton, in fact, but the stars from the guest lineup who sat alongside Swift when she appeared in October 2025: actors Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee and Jodie Turner-Smith, and fellow chart-topping musician Lewis Capaldi.

The latest Claude models and apps already have Wall Street worried about software companies. Enter Opus 4.6.

Jake Lang, a pardoned January 6 rioter, posted a video of himself kicking down the sculpture at Minnesota’s capitol

The far-right influencer and US Senate candidate Jake Lang has been arrested after recording himself damaging an anti-ICE sculpture at Minnesota’s capitol amid the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s crackdown there.

On 5 February, Lang, who received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump over his role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, posted a video on X of himself kicking down the sculpture, which was made from ice – as in, frozen water. His efforts changed it from reading “Prosecute ICE” to “Pro ICE”, referring to the federal agency.

Spending to build, expand and rehabilitate manufacturing sites in the U.S. has declined since President Donald Trump took office, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Yet, Trump has repeatedly boasted that “factory construction” is up 41%.

Trump cited the 41% statistic in a White House press conference on Jan. 20 – calling it a “record” increase and suggesting that other presidents cannot compare to this “record.” 

“Investment in American factories is up 41%. That’s a record. Nobody goes 41% up. You go 2% up, 1% up. You go down by 3%. If Kamala [Harris] got elected, the 41% up would be 41% down,” Trump said at the press conference, referring to the former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee who lost to Trump in the 2024 election.

A day later, in a Jan. 21 speech at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Trump repeated the 41% figure. 

“Factory construction is up by 41%, and that number is really going to skyrocket right now, because that’s during a process that they’re putting in to get their approvals and we’ve given very, very quick, fast approvals,” Trump said. 

This claim is part of a theme the president has emphasized of a “manufacturing boom” or “booming” economy due to his trade policies.

At our request, the White House sent us a link to the Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction spending data via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ online database known as FRED. We provide more about the White House response later, but let’s focus first on what the data show.

Under President Joe Biden — who served from Jan. 20, 2021, to Jan. 20, 2025 — there was a significant increase in manufacturing construction spending in all four years, according to the Census Bureau’s annual average estimates. After declining 6.9% in 2020 – the last year of Trump’s first term – manufacturing construction spending started to rise in 2021, the data show. 

(Technical note: The Census Bureau provides average quarterly and annual estimates and monthly reports for construction spending, including manufacturing construction spending, based on its monthly Value of Construction Put in Place survey. We use all three in this story.) 

Initially, the increases during the Biden years were in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Anirban Basu, chief economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, an industry trade association, told us in an email. 

“Supply chain disruptions at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic convinced many producers to reshore capacity, while a sudden and sharp increase in construction materials prices—which rose more than 40% during the early years of the pandemic—also boosted nominal construction spending,” Basu said. 

Manufacturing construction spending accelerated after Biden signed legislation in August 2022 designed to encourage private investment in U.S. manufacturing for semiconductors and clean energy. The bipartisan CHIPS Act, for example, included $39 billion to help fund semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the U.S., as explained in an April 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service.

During Biden’s four years, the annual average rate of manufacturing construction spending jumped more than 200%, from $75.5 billion to $235.6 billion, according to Census Bureau estimates. Spending surged 62% in a single year – 2023, a year after Biden signed the CHIPS Act. 

But manufacturing construction spending peaked in the third quarter of 2024 and has been trending down slightly ever since. Census Bureau quarterly data show that under Trump, measuring from the last quarter in 2024 through the third quarter in 2025, spending declined 6.7%. 

That decline is expected to continue in 2026 and 2027, according to the most recent survey of construction economists that is conducted twice a year by the American Institute of Architects.

“Manufacturing construction spending has seen phenomenal growth in recent years, increasing by over 50% in 2022, another 62% in 2023, and then another 16% in 2024,” the AIA consensus construction forecast published Jan. 15 said. “However, growth paused last year as spending in this category fell about 5% and is projected to decline another 4% this year and 1% in 2027.”

Despite the slight declines, the AIA construction forecast noted that the semiconductor fabrication plants continue to fuel manufacturing construction spending and will do so in the long term.

“The longer-term prospects look much more promising, as construction starts for manufacturing projects have shot up again,” the AIA forecast said. “Since many of these starts are for megaprojects, such as large semiconductor fabrication plants that entail a complex construction process, it may take a while before the activity shows up in the construction spending data.”

In January, Basu analyzed the Census Bureau’s most recent monthly report for nonresidential construction spending, which showed manufacturing construction spending as of October had declined for nine straight months. 

“With CHIPS Act-enabled megaprojects winding down and the stiff headwind of trade policy, manufacturing construction spending has fallen by nearly 10% over the past 12 months, accounting for more than the entire decline in private nonresidential spending,” Basu said in an ABC press release issued Jan. 21. (By “trade policy,” Basu is referring to the economic impact of Trump’s tariffs on construction materials.)

On a monthly basis, the Census Bureau shows a 7.3% decline in manufacturing construction spending last year under Trump from January through October, the most recent data available.

Beginning on Jan. 23, we asked the White House on multiple occasions to provide support for the 41% figure used in Trump’s Jan. 20 and 21 remarks. After not receiving a response, we sent another email on Feb. 2 after the president wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 30 that said, “Factory construction is up by 42% since 2022.” We asked how it arrived at a 42% increase “since 2022.” That evening, the White House sent us a link to the Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction spending data, saying it compared “averages of Jan – August 2025 vs 2021-2024 average.”

That’s true — as far as it goes. On an annualized basis, monthly manufacturing construction spending averaged $226.1 billion for January through August — which is 40% higher than the annual average of $161.1 billion in Biden’s four years. But Trump wrote that the 42% increase was “since 2022,” not 2021. (We’ve asked the White House for a clarification.)

More importantly, the White House methodology fails to take into account the 212% increase in factory construction spending over Biden’s four years, which peaked in 2024 at an annual average of $235.6 billion, and how the Biden-era CHIPS Act continues to fuel manufacturing construction spending.

As we noted earlier, Basu attributed the recent decline to Trump’s tariffs and the slowing — not the halting — of construction projects spurred by the CHIPS Act. Asked to elaborate on his analysis, Basu told us that the manufacturing construction spending in 2025 is “largely due” to the CHIPS Act.

“While spending in the segment remains elevated from 2022 levels, that’s partially due to a precipitous increase in materials prices that occurred in 2022 and 2023 — these data are in nominal terms — and largely due to the surge in megaproject activity induced by the CHIPS Act,” Basu said.

He added that Trump’s tariffs have helped drive up the costs of fabricated metal — which has increased manufacturing construction costs.

“[I]t should be noted that spending in the fabricated metal manufacturing subsegment is up 19% over the past year,” Basu said. “Some of the increase can be contributed to tariffs and the resulting increase in demand for domestic production.”

We should note that even with the recent surge in manufacturing construction spending, there has been a decline in the number of manufacturing jobs. As we reported last month, the economy lost 63,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first 11 months. That followed a loss of 98,000 in the preceding 11 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Shortly before Biden left office, Manufacturing Today, a trade magazine, wrote in December 2024 that manufacturing jobs were slow to materialize despite Biden’s incentives to spur manufacturing construction. But the magazine predicted the jobs “will materialize in the future.”

“Unlike traditional industrial projects, today’s semiconductor and clean energy facilities require longer timelines,” the article said. “Factories of this scale can take two to three years to complete, with even longer delays for more complex facilities, such as semiconductor plants. This extended timeline means the full benefits will not be realized for several more years.”

Basu agreed that CHIPS-related spending will result in an overall increase in U.S. manufacturing jobs – but cautioned that the impact of Trump’s tariffs could offset those gains. 

“The massive facilities incentivized by the CHIPS Act will employ thousands of people,” Basu told us. “That said, all else is not equal, and recent trade policy and the effects on manufacturing input prices have put downward pressure on the industry’s employment.” (Input prices are costs of materials and other resources manufacturers need to produce goods, with some of those materials being imported.)

Others are bullish that Trump’s trade policies will encourage more manufacturers to expand in the U.S. 

In April, when Trump announced higher tariffs on nearly all foreign imports, Morgan Stanley analyst Chris Snyder called tariffs “a positive catalyst” for relocating manufacturing to the U.S. More recently, Snyder said in a podcast last month that the tariffs have changed the “supply chain cost calculation” and will result in new U.S. factories. 

“What we’re seeing is the cost of imports have gone higher with tariffs, and now it’s more economically advisable for these companies to make the product in the United States,” Snyder said. “And if that’s the case, that means that when they need a new factory, it’s going to come to the United States. They might not need a factory now, but when they do, the U.S. is at least incrementally better positioned to get that factory.”

In a January news article, the Wall Street Journal wrote that Trump’s tariffs “haven’t worked, so far.” The article said tariffs have increased manufacturers’ costs for foreign parts, adding that the “White House’s stop-and-start” tariff policy announcements have “also led to what many executives view as a lost year for investment.”

In a December interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump cited — as he often does — the value of investments that he says his administration has secured to date. (As we’ve written, he has exaggerated pledges to invest made by various companies and countries that may or may not materialize, experts say.) But he couldn’t say if the investments would show results in time for the midterm elections, when the Republican Party is in jeopardy of losing its slim majority in the House. “I can’t tell you. I don’t know when all of this money is going to kick in,” the president told the Journal, adding that it may happen in the second quarter of this year.

What will happen in the coming months and years remains to be seen. But what we can say is that factory construction so far has declined under Trump and his claim that it has increased 41% depends on a spending surge that occurred under Biden. 

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 Manufacturing Construction Spending Declines Under Trump appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Here's what to know about TrumpRx, including how it works, who can use it, and how much money it can save.

Memory prices across DRAM, NAND and HBM have surged 80 to 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, according to Counterpoint Research's latest Memory Price Tracker. The price of a 64GB RDIMM has jumped from a Q4 2025 contract price of $450 to over $900, and Counterpoint expects it to cross $1,000 in Q2. NAND, relatively stable last quarter, is tracking a parallel increase. Device makers are cutting DRAM content per device, swapping TLC SSDs for cheaper QLC alternatives, and shifting orders from the now-scarce LPDDR4 to LPDDR5 as new entry-level chipsets support the newer standard. DRAM operating margins hit the 60% range in Q4 2025 -- the first time conventional DRAM margins surpassed HBM -- and Q1 2026 is on track to set all-time highs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.

Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.

• The Laurel and Caesar Rodney school districts to seek tax increases
• Delaware’s hospital oversight board to meet for the first time since lawmakers blunted one of its key enforcement measures 
• Lawmakers to continue reviewing the governor’s proposed budget
• New Castle County leaders to weigh in on Delmarva Power’s proposed rate hike

Laurel & Caesar Rodney ask to raise property taxes

The Caesar Rodney and Laurel school districts will ask their communities to approve tax increases during referendums scheduled for Monday. 

Caesar Rodney has the lowest local funding and the lowest school tax rate in Kent County, according to district leaders. Meanwhile in Laurel, the school district has not held a referendum since 1985.

The Caesar Rodney School District is seeking an additional $6 million annually, while the smaller Laurel School District is asking for $1.6 million.

Both districts say they need the new dollars to fund ongoing operations, including initiatives to retain and recruit teachers and other educators. 

Caesar Rodney says its request would also pay for school safety, arts programs and bus services, among other items. Laurel says its requested tax hike would stabilize the district’s budget.

If voters approve Caesar Rodney’s request, owners of a home worth about $300,000 in the district would pay just under $23 more per month in property taxes.  

If Laurel’s request is successful, an average $230,000 home would pay roughly $14.25 more each month. 

📍 Polls in the Caesar Rodney School District will be open Monday from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. at Caesar Rodney High School, Fred Fifer III Middle School, W. Reily Brown Elementary School, Allen Frear Elementary School, Nellie Stokes Elementary School, Star Hill Elementary School, David E. Robinson Elementary School, and the Magnolia Volunteer Fire Company.

📍 Polls in the Laurel School District will also be open Monday Feb. 9, from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. at Laurel Elementary School, the Laurel Fire Department, and the North Laurel Early Learning Academy.

Hospital oversight board meetings resume following lawmaker intervention

The Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board will meet Tuesday morning, the first time the oversight body will convene since lawmakers blunted one of its key enforcement mechanisms as part of a legal settlement between the state and its largest hospital system, ChristianaCare.

Lawmakers passed Senate Bill 213 last month as part of a proposed legal settlement between ChristianaCare and state officials. The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by ChristianaCare in 2024 that challenged the constitutionality of the state’s formation of a hospital oversight board with the power to modify and veto budgeted spending by private hospitals.

The legislation, signed into law by Gov. Matt Meyer last week, removed the oversight board’s ability to modify and veto private hospital budgets. 

Now, if a hospital’s spending exceeds the state’s projected benchmark, the cost review board would now require it to send in a compliance plan outlining how it intends to bring it down. 

📍 The Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board will meet from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Herman M. Holloway Sr. Campus – DHSS Chapel, located at 1901 N Dupont Hwy., in New Castle. For information about virtual attendance, click here.

JFC continues reviewing Meyer’s budget proposal

The General Assembly’s Joint Finance Committee will continue its scrutiny this week of Gov. Matt Meyer’s proposed $6.9 billion operating budget for the 2027 fiscal year.

The committee hearings, scheduled for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, will feature a series of testimony from state agency directors who will explain their specific operational requests for the following year. 

Hearings on Tuesday will feature testimony from the Department of Elections, the Department of Insurance, the state Treasurer and the state Auditor.

Wednesday will include testimony from the departments of Correction, Safety and Homeland Security, and Justice, along with the Delaware Criminal Justice Information System.

Thursday will feature testimony from the Governor’s Advisory Council for Exceptional Citizens, Department of Services for Children, Youth, & Their Families and the Delaware State Housing Authority.

Testimony from the remaining state offices and agencies will occur in later weeks.

📍 The Joint Finance Committee will meet from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. For information about virtual attendance for the Tuesday meeting, click here. For the Wednesday meeting, click here. And for the Thursday meeting, click here.

New Castle Council weighs in on Delmarva’s proposed rate hike

The New Castle County Council on Tuesday will consider a resolution urging state energy regulators to reject Delmarva Power’s proposed $67.8 million rate hike.

The resolution, sponsored by council members Dee Durham and David Tackett, marks the latest rebuke of Delaware’s largest energy provider and rising electricity costs.

In December, Delmarva Power filed a request for a rate increase with the state’s Public Service Commission that could raise an average homeowner’s utility bill by 4%. It is the third rate hike request filed by Delmarva in five years.

📍 The New Castle County Council will meet at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the  Louis L. Redding City County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For more information, including about virtual attendance, click here.

Karl Baker, Julia Merola, Jacob Owens and Nick Stonesifer contributed to this report.

The post Get Involved: School referendums, hospital oversight, energy prices, more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

About 40,000 U.S. students are enrolled in college programs that may be at risk of losing federal loans, a recent analysis found.

President Trump signed an executive order Friday that increases the amount of beef imported into the U.S. from Argentina.

Although tech stocks and cryptocurrencies suffered recent falls, investors largely shrugged off geopolitical tensions

The Dow Jones industrial average crossed 50,000 for the first time, as ballooning tech valuations, robust corporate earnings and hopes of lower interest rates drive it to new highs.

Leading stock markets on Wall Street came under pressure earlier this week as technology stocks fell amid scrutiny of extraordinary levels of investment into artificial intelligence.

Whether you already own Black Ops 7 or you're taking advantage of the free weekend, level up your account twice as fast during this double XP weekend.

Exclusive: Material gathered was personally given to Josh Simons when director of pro-Starmer thinktank, say sources

A Labour minister commissioned and reviewed a report in 2023 on journalists investigating the thinktank that would help propel Keir Starmer to power, the Guardian has learned.

The research was paid for and subsequently reviewed by Josh Simons, now a minister in the Cabinet Office, when he was director of Labour Together, according to sources and documents seen by the Guardian.

Thousands of social media accounts shared an image of a man with long gray hair and a beard, wearing sunglasses and flanked by two men.

Their guess about who it is? Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019.

"Israel faked his death," read one Feb. 5 X post with 5 million views. "Epstein is still alive and walking the streets of Tel Aviv."

"Someone who looks like Jeffrey Epstein was JUST SPOTTED walking in Tel Aviv, Israel," read another Feb. 5 X post with 5.5 million views. "Could this really be him? It’s literally him."

This image also circulated on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Threads.

This doesn’t prove Epstein is alive. The image was generated with artificial intelligence.

(Screenshot from X)

Many of the posts shared a cropped version of the image, but the original shows the logo of Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot. A reverse image search showed the image was posted Feb. 1 to a Reddit forum titled "hardaiimages." The forum’s "About" page invites users to "post your funny, hard AI images here." 

The Reddit user who posted it confirmed in a comment it was made with Gemini. "You can see the Gemini logo at the bottom right of each picture. I didn't think it would become so viral," the Feb. 6 comment read.

Other details in the image show it’s fake. The road signs in the background show Hebrew text and its English translation, but the translation is inaccurate. The signs also don’t match a real place in Tel Aviv; a street named "Haangus Ev." does not show up in Google Maps.

(Image from Reddit; red rectangle shows nonsensical road signs, red circle shows Gemini logo)

This image doesn’t show Epstein, alive, in Tel Aviv. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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

A judge ordered the U.S. to return three migrant families who were affected by  President Trump's family separation policy​ in his first term and then deported in his second.

A look at the features for this week's broadcast of the Emmy-winning program, hosted by Jane Pauley.

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

There's also a telenovela, Southwest seating chaos, and a Taylor-and-Swift combo you probably haven't seen before.

Video deleted by White House breaks through numbness barrier and raises further questions about fitness for office

It is a singular if highly dubious distinction of Donald Trump’s pungent contribution to the political discourse to have essentially bankrupted the English language’s capacity for outrage.

So unremitting and extreme have been the avalanche of affronts since Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to declare his presidential candidacy that even his most ardent critics have become desensitized, leading to a level of shock fatigue.

Indictment alleges Dr John Stevenson Bynon Jr changed the records of five patients, three of whom died

A Houston doctor has been indicted on charges of falsifying medical records for five patients, making them ineligible to receive a liver transplant – including some who died later, federal prosecutors announced on Thursday.

Dr John Stevenson Bynon Jr was indicted by a grand jury in Houston in January on five counts of false statements relating to healthcare matters.

"Quad God" Ilia Malinin leads the US hopes for Olympic medals as the figure skating events kick off in Milan.

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 and New Jersey if he supports renaming Dulles international airport in Virginia and Penn Station in New York City after him, according to media reports.

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.

Christopher Moynihan pleads guilty to misdemeanor charge over threats last October to kill congressman

A rioter who was pardoned by Donald Trump for the felony he was convicted of in the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 has pleaded guilty to a harassment charge over threats to kill the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries.

Christopher Moynihan, 35, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor harassment charge in a hearing in Clinton, New York, prosecutors said, and will be sentenced in April. His representative could not immediately be reached.

Salesforce is essentially shutting down Heroku as an evolving product, moving the cloud platform that helped define modern app deployment to a "sustaining engineering model" focused entirely on stability, security and support. Existing customers on credit card billing see no changes to pricing or service, but enterprise contracts are no longer available to new buyers. Salesforce said it is redirecting engineering investment toward enterprise AI.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Project, following disgraced cyclist, reportedly sparked bidding war, with Conclave’s Edward Berger set to direct

The Oscar-nominated actor Austin Butler is scheduled to take on the role of the disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong in a buzzy new biopic.

According to Deadline, the package has caused a “frenzied” bidding war in Hollywood with the Conclave director Edward Berger at the helm and King Richard’s Zach Baylin set to write the script.

The new fantasy TV show will be the second Dungeons & Dragons series in development.

The EU is threatening to take action against the social media company. It could be the start of a global reckoning.

Freaky robots get their drink on, Al looks for lost dogs, Chris Hemsworth thinks Alexa is out to kill him and more.

Andres Escobar was gunned down in Medellin days after scoring an own goal in a match against the U.S. at the 1994 World Cup.

Suspend your disbelief with Netflix's epic fantasy lineup.

Trying to pass the time with a roommate or partner? Try these two-player gems.

Is your $10,000 earning enough right now? Here's how money market accounts and savings returns compare in 2026.

While much of the attention has been placed on Lindsey Vonn in the run-up to the Winter Olympics, her teammate has an extraordinary story of her own

In December 2024, Breezy Johnson glided into the starting gate on the Stifel Birds of Prey downhill course atop Colorado’s Beaver Creek, a sight for sore eyes and a bundle of nerves. “The anxiety will always be there until I’m in the downhill gate,” the 30-year-old said at Team USA’s pre-Olympics media summit in October. “Like, at no point can [I tell myself], I’ve got this thing.”

Out of World Cup action for 14 months after whereabouts failures, she dropped on to Birds of Prey as bib No 32 in the 45-racer field – all women for the first time in the history of the legendary venue. With a few bends of her reconstructed knees, she snapped through the timing wand, charged through the Abyss (one of Birds of Prey’s steepest pitches) and kept carving her way through the 1.7-mile (2.7km) drop’s icy chop. Altogether, it was a solid run for Johnson, a 13th-place finish on home snow to restart her World Cup scoring streak. And just like that, America’s would-be standard bearer of the slopes was at it again.

The Democratic-led push to redraw Virginia's congressional districts comes after a nationwide feud has led to the redrawing of maps around the country.

Milestone caps a quarter century of groundbreaking discoveries — with more to come from final run’s largest-ever dataset — plus technological advances in accelerators, detectors, and computing

UPTON, N.Y., Feb. 6, 2026 — Just after 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, final beams of oxygen ions — oxygen atoms stripped of their electrons — circulated through the twin 2.4-mile-circumference rings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and crashed into one another at nearly the speed of light inside the collider’s two house-sized particle detectors, STAR and sPHENIX. RHIC, a nuclear physics research facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been smashing atoms since the summer of 2000. The final collisions cap a quarter century of remarkable experiments using 10 different atomic species colliding over a wide range of energies in different configurations. The RHIC program has produced groundbreaking discoveries about the building blocks of matter and the nature of proton spin and technological advances in accelerators, detectors, and computing that have far surpassed scientists’ expectations when this discovery machine first turned on.

Darío Gil, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Under Secretary for Science, right, and Interim Laboratory Director John Hill officially ended the operational era of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at a capstone collision event held at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. Credit: Kevin Coughlin/BNL.

“RHIC has been one of the most successful user facilities operated by the DOE Office of Science, serving thousands of scientists from across the nation and around the globe,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “Supporting these one-of-a-kind research facilities pushes the limits of technology and expands our understanding of our world through transformational science — central pillars of DOE’s mission to ensure America’s security and prosperity.”

Gil was in the Main Control Room of Brookhaven Lab’s collider complex to officially end the 25th and final run at RHIC in advance of announcing the next major milestone in the construction of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a state-of-the-art nuclear physics research facility that will be built by reusing major components of RHIC.

“It’s been an amazing run,” said Wolfram Fischer, chair of Brookhaven Lab’s Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD), speaking of the entirety of the RHIC program. As head of C-AD, Fischer is responsible for the day-to-day, year-to-year operations of the collider and all its ancillary accelerator infrastructure. “Experiencing the challenges of first trying to get beams to circulate during commissioning in the fall of 1999, one could not have dreamed how far the performance of this machine would come,” he said. “We’ve pushed well beyond the original design in terms of the number of collisions we can produce, the energy range of those collisions, the variety of ions we’ve collided, and our ability to align the spins of protons and maintain a high degree of this alignment or polarization.”

The 25th and final run produced the largest-ever dataset from RHIC’s most energetic head-on smashups between two beams of gold ions, among the heaviest ions collided at RHIC. It also yielded a treasure trove of proton-proton collisions that will provide essential comparison data and insight into proton spin, a set of low-energy fixed target collisions to complete RHIC’s “beam energy scan,” and a final burst of oxygen-oxygen interactions. All this data will add to that collected previously by RHIC’s detectors — STAR, which has been running with many upgrades since RHIC’s beginning; PHENIX, another original RHIC detector that ceased operations in 2016; PHOBOS and BRAHMS, two smaller original detectors that ran from 2000 through 2005 and 2006, respectively; and sPHENIX, RHIC’s newest most rapid-fire collision “camera,” which came online in 2023.

This final run generated the primary data set for the new sPHENIX experiment. This year, sPHENIX accumulated more than 200 petabytes of raw data — or 200 quadrillion bytes — more than all previous RHIC raw datasets combined. This massive dataset includes 40 billion snapshots of the unique form of matter generated in gold-ion collisions.

Collectively, the RHIC measurements will fill in missing details in physicists’ understanding of how a soup of fundamental particles known as quarks and gluons — which last existed in nature some 14 billion years ago, a microsecond after the Big Bang — coalesced and converged to form the more ordinary atomic particles that make up everything visible in our world today. Recreating this primordial matter, known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), was the primary reason for building RHIC. RHIC’s energetic collisions of heavy ions such as gold were designed to set quarks and gluons free from “confinement” within protons and neutrons by melting the boundaries of these nuclear particles.

Thanks to considerable contributions from Japan’s RIKEN institute, RHIC was also built with unique capabilities for polarizing protons so that physicists could explore the origins of proton spin. This intrinsic quantum property, somewhat analogous to a planet spinning on its axis, has been leveraged to develop powerful technologies like nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and medical MRIs. RHIC’s polarized proton collisions have opened a new window into the mystery of how spin arises from the proton’s quarks and gluons.

PHENIX and STAR have both collected and published results from large swaths of spin-polarized collisions using selection “triggers” to decide which events to capture and study. During Run 25, sPHENIX became the world’s first detector to record a continuous streaming dataset from RHIC’s spin-polarized proton collisions — thus eliminating the need for triggers and potentially paving the way for unanticipated discoveries.

“This final RHIC run, with its impressive dataset, is a capstone that exemplifies the success of the entire RHIC program,” said John Hill, interim director of Brookhaven Lab. “The scientists, engineers, and technicians at Brookhaven deserve huge credit for their dedication and innovation throughout the operating life of RHIC — and for continually finding new ways to maximize the scientific output of this remarkable machine. We are also extremely grateful for the continued support of the U.S. Department of Energy, and for our collaborators from other DOE labs, U.S. universities, and scientific institutions around the globe. This exploration of the matter that makes up our world and of how it came to be has been, and will continue to be, a truly international endeavor.”

Captivating Discoveries

In early 2001, as the earliest RHIC data came out, some scientists were convinced that they’d seen signs of the post-Big-Bang QGP. But the data also presented puzzling surprises. Instead of the predicted uniformly expanding gas of quarks and gluons, the matter created in RHIC’s collisions seemed to flow more like a liquid — and, remarkably, one with extremely low viscosity. Additional experiments and a careful multiyear analysis led the four original RHIC collaborations to conclude in 2005 that RHIC was generating a nearly “perfect” liquid. By 2010, they had sufficient evidence to declare this liquid hot enough to be the long-sought QGP.

Since then, RHIC physicists have been making precision measurements of the QGP, including its temperature at different stages, how it swirls — it’s the swirliest matter ever! — how quarks and gluons in the primordial soup transition under various conditions of temperature and pressure to the nuclear matter that makes up atoms in our world, and how collisions of even small particles can create tiny drops of the QGP. They’ve explored exotic forms of nuclear matter such as that found in neutron stars, detected traces of the heaviest exotic antimatter ever created in a laboratory, and explored how visible matter emerges from the “nothingness” of empty space. The sPHENIX experiment has only recently published its first physics results, laying the foundation for its future of scientific insights.

“RHIC transformed nuclear physics by demonstrating the remarkable consequences of ‘boiling the vacuum,’ to paraphrase renowned physicist T. D. Lee’s description of matter governed by quantum chromodynamics (QCD),” said Brookhaven Lab theorist Raju Venugopalan. “In QCD — the theory that describes quarks and gluons and their interactions — findings from RHIC propelled the rapid development of new analytical approaches and high-performance computing. The RHIC data also sparked several unanticipated connections between the behavior of the QGP fluid and strongly correlated condensed matter systems, including ultra-cold atoms, as well as links to concepts such as quantum entanglement and the formation and evaporation of black holes.”

Advances in nuclear physics theory and the enormous RHIC datasets have also pushed the evolution of supercomputers, AI methods for analyzing “big data,” and the infrastructure needed to store and share data seamlessly with RHIC collaborators around the world. In 2024, Brookhaven’s data center — which also houses data from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and other experiments — passed the milestone of storing 300 petabytes of data, the largest compilation of nuclear and particle physics data in the U.S. With the newest data from RHIC and ATLAS, the total now tops 610 petabytes.

Credit: Jen Abramowitz/Brookhaven National Laboratory

In the proton spin program, RHIC’s measurements greatly improved the precision with which scientists could determine gluons’ contribution to proton spin, along with the contribution from quarks. This effort was motivated by surprising results from experiments elsewhere in the 1980s showing that quarks contribute only a fraction to this quantum property. Gluons were initially assumed to contribute the rest. RHIC’s measurements reveal that gluons contribute about as much as the quarks — not enough to fully solve the “spin puzzle.” A more recent analysis established that at least some of the gluons are spin aligned with the spin of the proton they are in. But there is still more to explore in this spin puzzle.

“Spin is one of the fundamental quantum numbers of every elementary particle in the universe except one, the Higgs,” said Elke Aschenauer, a Brookhaven Lab physicist who has played a pivotal role in RHIC’s spin physics program. “RHIC’s measurements have established the groundwork for understanding the complexity of proton spin. The future EIC will be a precision machine for studying proton spin.”

Continuing Legacy

Even with so many impressive discoveries in the books, RHIC physicists say there will be many more to come for at least another decade.

“The science mission of RHIC will continue until we analyze all the data and publish all the papers,” said Abhay Deshpande, Brookhaven Lab’s associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics. He emphasized how important it will be to preserve RHIC’s data for future scientific analyses.

RHIC’s data will also continue to serve as an essential bridge between ongoing and planned experiments exploring nuclear matter at lower collision energies — for example at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) being built in Germany and the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN — and at much higher energies at CERN’s LHC.

“Analyzing the latest RHIC data will also help train the next generation of physicists needed to run and analyze data from future experiments,” said Lijuan Ruan, a Brookhaven Lab physicist and co-spokesperson for the STAR Collaboration.

A big part of that future will take place right here at Brookhaven National Laboratory where major components of the RHIC accelerator complex will live on in a new nuclear physics research facility, the world’s only polarized Electron-Ion Collider. Engineers and technicians will remove one of RHIC’s ion storage rings and replace it with a new ring for storing accelerated electrons inside the existing accelerator tunnel. Meanwhile, the other RHIC ring, refurbished for its new mission, will receive ions accelerated by C-AD’s existing injector complex, traveling around the tunnel in the opposite direction from the electrons. Scientists will leverage the experience gained during 25 years of RHIC operations — as well as reams of RHIC accelerator physics data — to develop and train new AI algorithms designed to optimize EIC accelerator performance.

When electrons collide with ions where the two EIC rings cross, the action will be captured by a brand-new particle detector. Instead of recreating the early universe, these microscope-like interactions will enable precision measurements that reveal how quarks and gluons are organized and interact within matter as we know it in today’s world.

“We’ll learn how quarks and gluons generate mass, how their interactions contribute to proton spin, and much more that will revolutionize our understanding of matter — much as the science we’ve explored at RHIC has,” said Deshpande, who also serves as director of science for the EIC. “This is the future of Brookhaven Lab and nuclear physics in the U.S.”

Daniel Marx, one of the accelerator physicists working on the design of the EIC’s new electron storage ring, said, “It’s going to be very challenging, but also exciting. We’ll be doing things that have never been done before.”

Perhaps Marx was echoing the sentiments of the physicists who originally built RHIC, demonstrating another big part of RHIC’s legacy: an ongoing willingness to tackle unprecedented scientific and technological challenges.

“We are confident that we have the people who will make the EIC happen because of the expertise we have developed by building and running RHIC,” Deshpande said.

RHIC and the future EIC are funded primarily by the DOE Office of Science.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

Source: Brookhaven National Laboratory

The post Brookhaven Lab’s RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions appeared first on HPCwire.

An investigation has uncovered a sprawling network of hidden cameras in Chinese hotel rooms that livestream guests -- including couples having sex -- to paying subscribers on Telegram. Over 18 months, the BBC identified six websites and apps on the messaging platform that claimed to operate more than 180 spy cams across Chinese hotels, not just recording but broadcasting live. One site, monitored for seven months, cycled through 54 different cameras, roughly half active at any given time. Subscribers pay 450 yuan (~$65) per month for access to multiple live feeds, archived clips, and a library of more than 6,000 edited videos dating back to 2017. The BBC traced one camera to a hotel room in Zhengzhou, where researchers found it hidden inside a wall ventilation unit and hardwired into the building's electricity supply. A commercially available hidden-camera detector failed to flag it. China introduced regulations last April requiring hotel owners to check for hidden cameras, but the BBC found the livestreaming sites still operational.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Material distributed in Gorton and Denton did not have legally required imprint stating it was funded by party

Reform UK will face a police investigation in Gorton and Denton after admitting it sent out letters from a “concerned neighbour” which did not state they had been funded and distributed by the party.

Greater Manchester police confirmed it had received a report about the breach of electoral law and said it would investigate. The Electoral Commission said the omission was a matter for the police, stressing that failing “to include an imprint in candidate election material is an offence”.

Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, ICE protests in Los Angeles, Snoop Dogg at the Winter Olympics and Storm Leonardo – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

PARIS, Feb. 6, 2026 — Capgemini today announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with Google Cloud to deliver end-to-end secure sovereign cloud solutions. As part of this, Capgemini will help clients adopt Google Cloud’s leading AI technologies, including Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise. This is designed to drive innovation and modernize clients’ critical operations while protecting classified data and workloads and meet stringent compliance requirements in a secure environment.

Capgemini and Google Cloud’s expanded partnership will allow organizations to use Gemini-based, hyper-automated cloud operations to enhance cybersecurity, resilience, disaster recovery and sovereign-aligned compliance. Joint clients can choose their sovereignty model across Google Cloud, Google Cloud Dedicated, and Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped.

It’s critical that organizations are empowered to roll out AI and modernize applications in ways that adhere to sovereign requirements,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, President, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud. “Capgemini is a vital partner in this initiative, helping customers use Google Sovereign Cloud to accelerate digital transformation while maintaining the highest standards of data integrity and sovereignty.”

“While the potential of AI in modernizing critical operations is clear, there are constraints due to stringent regulatory mandates on data and compliance,” said Fernando Alvarez, Chief Strategy and Development Officer and Group Executive Board member at Capgemini. “With our deep industry expertise combined with our proven track record in implementing AI-first solutions that deliver real business transformation, Capgemini is well positioned to address these challenges. Becoming a Google Cloud air-gapped operator enables us to further provide trusted and secure end-to-end sovereign solutions that enable resilience, help maintain autonomy and security, and foster innovation at scale.”

As part of this partnership, Capgemini intends to establish a Google Sovereign Cloud Delivery Practice and Center of Excellence (CoE) designed to provide advice and services that meet unique sovereign requirements for joint clients. This ensures that core applications and infrastructure such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environments can be modernized securely while adhering to strict data residency and operational mandates. Capgemini’s capabilities are further enhanced by its recent acquisition of Syniti, a leader in large-scale SAP data transformation, and Cloud4C, a leading provider of automation-driven managed services for hybrid and sovereign cloud environments.

With a newly attained GDC partner status and as an authorized GDC air-gapped operator, Capgemini can deliver a sovereign, fully operated service model. This is a completely managed experience, which is designed for organizations requiring total isolation from the public internet to meet sovereignty and regulatory requirements across European markets. The partnership supports critical missions by enabling secure logistics planning, threat analysis, and operational decision support using data that remains fully contained within the secure enclave.

As a trusted AI-led business and technology transformation partner, Capgemini brings decades of experience in enabling the AI-led digital transformation of companies across countries. Combined with Google Cloud’s industry-leading AI technology, Capgemini and Google Cloud are expertly placed to deliver safe, compliant innovation for high-value business processes and intelligent transformation of business-critical systems to accelerate unified legal, data and operational control.

About Capgemini

Capgemini is an AI-powered global business and technology transformation partner, delivering tangible business value. We imagine the future of organizations and make it real with AI, technology and people. With our strong heritage of nearly 60 years, we are a responsible and diverse group of 420,000 team members in more than 50 countries. We deliver end-to-end services and solutions with our deep industry expertise and strong partner ecosystem, leveraging our capabilities across strategy, technology, design, engineering and business operations. The Group reported 2024 global revenues of €22.1 billion.

Source: Capgemini

The post Capgemini Expands Google Cloud Partnership to Deliver Sovereign AI and Cloud Services appeared first on HPCwire.

Progressive Analilia Mejia maintains slim lead after votes seemed to be swinging for Tom Malinowski

• US politics live – latest updates

The outcome of a special Democratic primary to fill a US House of Representatives seat representing northern New Jersey was on a knife-edge on Friday, after a progressive challenger took a surprise lead over a former Democratic congressman who initially appeared to have won the nomination.

The election held on Thursday in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district was prompted by Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s resignation last year after she was elected governor. Eleven Democrats vied to replace her, and on Thursday evening, Tom Malinowski, who represented a neighboring district in the House from 2019 through 2022, took an early lead.

Feb. 6, 2026 — Most of the world’s crop production relies on the whims of the weather. Too much or too little water, temperatures that remain too high or too low – these are just some of the many factors that can negatively impact agricultural yields. Events like these can cause high crop volatility – rapid and significant fluctuations in the price of produce. A researcher at Purdue has been using his U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS-allocation on Anvil, Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) supercomputer, to study crop volatility from a different angle.

Credit: Shutterstock

In addition to focusing on how factors such as extreme heat affect crop production, Iman Haqiqi, lead research economist in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, is studying how global trade can offset crop volatility. The results of his research have shown that not only does trade help buffer the risk of crop volatility due to heat stress, but it also mitigates this risk without depleting groundwater supplies.

“So the whole idea of this paper was to show that, yes, there are some temporary solutions, like irrigation, but they are not sustainable,” says Haqiqi. “Something else, like international trade, which is a solution from an economic perspective, can have a similar effect in terms of reducing volatility and risk. But also, it has benefits because you don’t need to have a lot of unsustainable use of resources.”

“Without Anvil, this paper would be just a conceptual framework that, hey, you know, trade could be a good thing compared to irrigation,” said Iman Haqiqi, Purdue University. “But we didn’t have numerical evidence to support that claim. Now, thanks to having access to Anvil, we could provide that evidence.”

Haqiqi’s use of ACCESS-allocated resources, which included support from RCAC’s team of high-performance computing (HPC) experts, helped him quickly perform the computational aspects of his research. With HPC, researchers like Haqiqi have the resources to perform computationally intensive models, simulations and calculations.

Haqiqi’s research was published in the journal Environmental Research: Food Systems. You can find more details about this research in the original article posted here: Anvil used to study how trade can reduce volatilities in crop supply.

Resource Provider Institution(s): Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC)
Resources Used: Anvil
Affiliations: Purdue University
Funding Agency: NSF
Grant or Allocation Number(s): EES220011

The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.

Source: Megan Johnson, NCSA; ACCESS

The post ACCESS Supports Supercomputer Modeling of Crop Volatility and Global Trade appeared first on HPCwire.

Former minister and Benjamin Wegg-Prosser met disgraced financier before formal foundation of Global Counsel

• Boss of lobbying firm founded with Peter Mandelson quits

Peter Mandelson’s former lobbying firm sought work with companies controlled by the governments of Russia and China shortly after he left ministerial office, according to emails the disgraced former minister forwarded to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The emails show how Mandelson and Benjamin Wegg-Prosser scrambled to drum up high-paying foreign business after co-founding Global Counsel even as Mandelson remained a member of the House of Lords. Potential clients included the Russian state investment firm Rusnano and the state-owned China International Capital Corporation, the emails suggest.

Silver Eagle coins are trading at substantial premiums over the spot price of silver in today's volatile market.

After months of negotiations, threats and refusals, Bill and Hillary Clinton have finally agreed to testify in front of Congress as part of a Republican-led investigation into the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Jonathan Freedland speaks to the Politico Magazine columnist and former federal prosecutor, Ankush Khardori, about why Donald Trump thinks it is a ‘shame’ the Clintons have been forced to testify

Spanish figure skater Tomas-Llorenc Guarino Sabate secured the rights to perform his Minions-themed program at the Milan Cortina Games hours before he was set to skate.

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 Camden, 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.

Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has paid $70 million for the domain AI.com -- the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a website name, according to the deal's broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com. The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller. Marszalek plans to debut the site during a Super Bowl ad this weekend, offering a personal "AI agent" that lets consumers send messages, use apps and trade stocks. The previous domain sale record was nearly $50 million for Carinsurance.com, per GoDaddy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Acts are alleged to have occurred in 2024 on set of TV drama The Cleaning Lady, which Busfield acted in and directed

A grand jury in New Mexico has indicted the actor Timothy Busfield on child sex abuse charges, officials announced on Friday.

Busfield was indicted on four counts of criminal sexual contact of a child, the Bernalillo county district attorney’s office said in a statement.

In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International

The video is now available on Apple Music and Spotify, but it isn't landing on YouTube for a couple more days.

Exclusive: Sasan Ghandehari reluctant to share details of $10bn trust in row with Christie’s auction house

A high court battle over a Picasso painting has shone a light on the offshore financial structures of an Iranian-born businessman who paid for Nigel Farage’s £50,000 trip to Davos.

The details about Sasan Ghandehari, who funded Farage’s tickets to the summit, emerged in court papers about a £4m claim brought by a British Virgin Islands firm, which has accused Christie’s auction house of misrepresentation when it sold the art to it.

Actor Timothy Busfield has been indicted on four counts of criminal sexual contact of a child, officials said Friday.

Ed Smart, the father of Elizabeth Smart, spoke to "CBS Mornings" about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie and gave advice to the missing mother's family.

Two coins celebrating Queen Elizabeth II criticised for failing to resemble late monarch

Two Australian coins commemorating Queen Elizabeth II have been criticised for failing to resemble the late monarch.

The $5 (£2.56) and 50c (26p) silver coins, created by Royal Australian Mint to commemorate the centenary of the queen’s birth, were released in an online ballot that closed on Wednesday.

Jonathan Gustafson talks about discovering his love for luge at 11 as he prepares to represent Team USA at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.

The company's ambitious plans to introduce a virtual health coach may be going back to the drawing board, according to a report.

Impulse buying isn't always a bad thing, especially when the end result is a one-of-a-kind and useful gift.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) -- signed contracts for cloud computing services that can't yet be filled and haven't yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest tranche of Epstein files has sent shock waves around the world, but many of the powerful men who minimised and dismissed his crimes are still yet to face any real consequences. The documents show the likes of Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon were happy to maintain relationships with Epstein even after he spent time in jail for child sex offences. What message does that send to the abused women and girls, whose experiences should be the real focus? And will these men ever be held to account? Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde – watch on YouTube

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

Heavy rains and strong winds have continued to batter parts of Spain and Portugal, 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.

Files released by DoJ reveal the financier engaging in efforts to blunt the impact of the movement as it was gaining ground

In August 2018, as the #MeToo movement spread across social media and women around the world demanded justice from sexual predators, Michael Wolff, a journalist, forwarded Jeffrey Epstein a plea for help. Wolff wanted Epstein to support Stephen Elliott, a writer looking to sue the creator of the Shitty Media Men List, a crowd-sourced Google Doc that detailed anonymous allegations of misconduct against dozens of men who worked in the media industry.

“I have always thought that the way back from this climate is through specific instances of individuals successfully challenging their persecution,” Wolff wrote to Epstein, according to emails released in a tranche from the so-called Epstein files. “If his story is solid he might be worth supporting.”

To see just how close the iPhone 17 Pro can get to a real cinema camera, I set up a full commercial video shoot.

Eager to attend this year's Super Bowl? Be prepared to pay four figures for the ticket alone — and those are the cheap seats.

A $12 power meter helped me test which electronics in my home were the biggest energy vampires. The result caught me off guard.

Zubayar al-Bakoush is suspected in Libya attack resulting in deaths of US ambassador and three other Americans

The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced on Friday the arrest of a “key participant” in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack that killed four US government officials, including the US ambassador to Libya, J Christopher Stevens.

Bondi said the suspect, Zubayar al-Bakoush, was taken into US custody at 3am ET on Friday. “We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law. He’ll face charges related to murder, terrorism, arson, among others,” Bondi told reporters at a press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington DC.

The FBI has arrested "one of the key participants" behind the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 that killed four Americans.

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.

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.

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.

ALICIA PEMBROKE
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.”

Trump’s critical minerals commitment problem Expert comment jon.wallace 6 February 2026

The US has proved it is serious about creating a new mining and processing ecosystem. Now it must convince investors and industry that its policy will last for the next 10 years.

The US Critical Minerals Ministerial Summit on 4 February was the Trump administration’s most significant move to date to decouple from Chinese dominated minerals supply chains – and create an exclusive market where the US gets to decide participation. 

The US does not want to overtake China in production and processing volumes. Attempting to do so would be a misplaced and costly ambition, given the scale of Chinese domestic demand. This is not a race for production. It is an attempt to create a new geopolitically exclusionary mining and processing ecosystem. 

Attendees were directly invited to ‘form a trading bloc among allies and partners’ that ‘guarantees American access…expanding production across the entire zone’.

America is not alone in pursing this objective. There are more than 30 national critical minerals strategies worldwide. But the US is the first nation to rightly make minerals supply a national foreign policy priority and understand that disrupting the status quo requires a significant amount of cash. 

Essential to success is corralling the private sector and international partners. That will require credible commitment from the Trump administration that its interventions will outlast this presidency. It therefore works against US interests when Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticize former president Joe Biden’s policies. Doing so risks making it appear more likely that a successor government will unpick Trump’s interventions, leading to stranded assets and unpaid bills. 

The US has proved it is serious. Now it must prove it still will be in 10 years’ time. 

Scale must be buttressed by bureaucratic vested interests

The US has pledged $12 billion to build a US strategic stockpile of critical minerals (‘Project Vault’) via public–private partnership, combining a large export import bank loan with private capital. 

In parallel, Washington launched the FORGE initiative as a standing coordination platform for critical minerals policy between Washington and countries including Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Ukraine – backed by State Department leadership and inter agency participation. A major element of the partnership is the creation of price floors for minerals ‘to uphold pricing integrity’.

Scale is obviously important. And the US has backed its domestic and partner industries to a greater degree than anyone else. 

However, equally important to success will be the creation of the bureaucracies, departments, and agencies that can create a web of vested interests around implementation of Trump’s policy: such interests become very hard to undo by successor administrations and therefore give investors confidence that government policies will last as long as it takes to develop a mine and begin to produce.  

The summit already points in this direction: framing critical minerals as national security and energy priorities will make it difficult for future administrations to take another course.

A deliberately political, hierarchical ‘club’  

The desire for a preferential trade zone of friendly nations under the FORGE banner is important to expand participation. In reality, the best deals and access to US financial measures will be reserved for those with whom the US has the closest security relationships and highest political trust. 

Australia, Japan, and South Korea will continue to receive larger investments more targeted to minerals processing, than Angola, or DRC for example – even if the latter countries are receiving notable investment. 

Critical minerals are being slotted directly into the architecture of US security alliances and defence industrial cooperation. Indeed, the summit directly referenced the securitized structuring of oil flows in the previous century as a replicable model.

Related work

If Trump wants 2026 to be a year of critical minerals collaboration, he must stop imperialist rhetoric on Greenland 

For now, FORGE is the most substantial Trump team attempt to create a multilateral arrangement on a discrete issue. Despite the administration’s often abrasive rhetoric towards its allies and partners, this demonstrates the awareness of the need for collaboration, albeit determined by geopolitical alliance rather than economic efficiency. 

Notably, it was the Biden administration’s Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) that laid the bedrock for what is now FORGE. While the MSP has been on care and maintenance since Trump took over and had little to show in terms of operational successes, it was an important initial framework for cooperation. 

FORGE was announced as the successor to MSP. That is at least one positive indication to industry and investors that minerals partnerships underpinned by security alliances represent enduring US government policy and will likely remain (with possible further name changes) for the long term and across administrations. 

Redirecting existing supply or creating new supply

Project Vault and the proposed price floors aim to redirect and stabilize current flows of rare earths, battery metals and other listed critical minerals, giving US and allied manufacturers priority access at predictable prices. 

This has been complemented by US government investment directly into operations, including the commissioning of two new smelters in the US for the first time in a generation. 

Future US deals need to show that there is real desire to increase production, especially of copper, in addition to recycling strategies. Government backed demand and operational support needs to not only redirect existing supply, it also needs to help overcome the significant supply shortages expected in future. 

De-risking the DRC  

The immense resource base of the DRC, and the prevalence of Chinese mining in the country, have made it a focal point of the US–China rivalry on the ground.

With competing eastern and western railways pushing into central Africa, a US approach based on security deals for preferential minerals access is a very Trumpian ‘spheres of influence’ political play. 

But Chinese dominance was largely a result of Western withdrawal over reputation risks and US legal requirements. Reversing this trend and de-risking investments requires a long-term political commitment – to provide diplomatic cover to international operators, and to support the development ambitions of DRC citizens. 

The Steam Deck dominates gaming on the go, and the Steam Machine looks to conquer the living room.

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.

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

The Anker Solix E10 competes with the Powerwall and other home battery backups. It offers three ways to keep your home powered during an outage. You can buy it now.

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.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

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.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is what you need to know about when the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics start and end, along with key games and events on the schedule.

Savannah's Guthrie's mom, Nancy Guthrie, went missing over the weekend, and authorities have still not identified a possible suspect or person of interest.

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 businesses that seek expedited services from the state.

The increases, which would not impact the taxes paid by corporations, would result in an extra $81 million to the state’s General Fund during the next fiscal year. 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 domiciled in Delaware than there were last year. The biggest corporations in Delaware pay a hefty franchise tax of $250,000 to the state.

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.

Every model of Apple Watch got an update this year, but how are they different? We look at all the specs.

Kennedy later said the purpose of his trip had nothing to do with vaccines. US embassy and UN staff at the time said otherwise, emails show

Over two days of questioning during his Senate confirmation hearings last year, Robert F Kennedy Jr repeated the same answer.

He said the closely scrutinized trip he took to Samoa in 2019, which came ahead of a devastating measles outbreak, had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

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. 

Related work

Iraq 2025 election: Reform candidates pushed out by a system that rejects change

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. 

Related work

The EU’s IRGC terrorist designation marks a major shift on Iran

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. 

Founding of diplomatic outposts in Nuuk comes after US made efforts to secure control of Arctic island

• Opposition to US has hardened in western Europe after Greenland threat, poll finds

Canada and France are to open diplomatic consulates in the capital of Greenland on Friday, showing support for their Nato ally Denmark and the Arctic island after US efforts to secure control of the semi-autonomous Danish territory.

Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, was travelling to Nuuk to inaugurate the consulate, which officials say also could help boost cooperation on issues such as the climate crisis and Inuit rights. She was joined by Canada’s Indigenous governor general, Mary Simon.

At its new Stone Mountain, Georgia, facility, Roomba-like robots shuffle between stacks, another adds shipping labels while another arranges packages in pallets

One of the reasons Amazon is spending billions on robots? They don’t need bathroom breaks. Arriving a few minutes early to the public tour of Amazon’s hi-tech Stone Mountain, Georgia, warehouse, my request to visit the restroom was met with a resounding no from the security guard in the main lobby.

Between the main doors and the entrance security gate, I paced and paced after being told I would have to wait for the tour guide to collect me and other guests for a tour of the 640,000-sq-ft, four-story warehouse.

In Santa Clara, California, where nearly half of residents are born outside US, fear builds as game approaches

This weekend, tens of thousands of people will make their way to the Bay Area city of Santa Clara, ready to celebrate a weekend at the Super Bowl.

Beneath the jubilant mood, some residents and officials have been grappling with the possibility of ICE enforcement operations during the game, and taking steps to prepare.

After years in a skiing rut, using Carv on my recent ski trip has reignited my passion for the sport and instilled a belief that I can actually improve.

Preliminary EU ruling says app shifts brains of users into ‘autopilot mode’, with concerns for children and vulnerable adults

• Business live – latest updates

TikTok could be forced into changes to make the app less addictive to users after the EU indicated the platform had breached the bloc’s digital safety rules.

The EU’s executive arm said in a preliminary ruling that the popular app had infringed the Digital Services Act (DSA) due to its “addictive design”.

Luxury plane owned by Florida property tycoon has twice flown Palestinian men from Arizona to Tel Aviv, Guardian investigation shows. Plus, Democratic senator calls for national strike if Trump interferes with midterms

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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.

The Seahawks and Patriots are the last teams standing this season. The championship is likely to be decided by the smallest margins

The Seattle Seahawks’ run game came alive during the second half of the season and postseason. But it’s still the passing game that makes the offense sing. Almost all of that flows through Smith-Njigba.

Fascism feeds on the arbitrary killings that have long plagued the US. Ending the horror starts with abolishing ICE

In a recent Saturday Night Live episode, when asked about Minneapolis, one of the white hosts intones: “Well, the first word that comes to mind is unprecedented. You’ve got federal officers roaming the streets just pulling people out of their cars based on how they look. This just doesn’t happen in America.” The joke is, of course, that “this” has been happening forever, but to Black people in America. Now that it is happening to others, and particularly now that white protesters are being killed in the streets, it is suddenly a national emergency.

In his 1955 work Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire, the French poet and politician, argues that fascism was the result of bringing to bear on domestic populations the tactics European countries used on their colonial subjects in Africa. This is what has been called in the literature the “imperial boomerang thesis”. As many have been pointing out on social media and elsewhere, if we think of the US Black American population as an internally colonized population, then you can see what is happening on the streets of Minneapolis as a manifestation of the imperial boomerang thesis.

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A new push to pass a GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act is underway in Congress, but Democrats warn the proposal could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.

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.