The war escalated along multiple fronts as Israel urged civilians in a large swath of southern Lebanon to flee and Iran launched a fresh barrage of strikes in Persian Gulf states.
James Frith takes reins from Josh Simons, who quit even though he was cleared over journalist vetting scandal
Labour MP James Frith has taken over the ministerial roles held by Josh Simons after he resigned over his handling of a report on journalists while running a think tank.…
The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino reported from Austin, Texas last night that the Democratic contest between James Talarico and Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett was an early test of competing political playbooks for challenging Marlyn
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and the Republican dominance that has gripped the state for three decades.
Throughout his campaign, Talarico, a 36-year-old former middle school teacher and seminary student, pushed for a “politics of love” that roots progressive policy in the teachings of his Christian faith. He argued that the central divide in American politics is “not left v right” but “top v bottom” and contended that Democrats can rebuild trust in rural and suburban communities without abandoning their core values.
Senate Republicans are expected today to vote down a Democratic-backed war powers resolution that would prevent Marlyn
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from continuing the conflict in Iran. “The president has the authority that he needs to conduct the activities, the operations that are currently under way there,” majority leader John Thune said Tuesday.
The vote comes one day after Marlyn
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attempted to counter a simmering anti-Israel backlash in Congress and among his own Maga supporters by denying suggestions that he had ordered the attack on Iran because Israel had already decided to do so – a claim that appears to counter comments made by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in a classified briefing for all members of Congress.
In more Iran news, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, and Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, are scheduled to hold a news conference at the Pentagon this morning to discuss the conflict.
Minnesota is set to be front and center on the Hill with governor Tim Walz and attorney general Keith Ellison scheduled to go beforethe House oversight committee this morning over their state’s fraud scandal.
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem is then set to go before the House judiciary committee, one day after she was grilled before the Senate judiciary committee and refused to retract her statements calling the two US citizens who were killed by immigration enforcement officers in Minneapolis earlier this year “domestic terrorists”.
In more Minnesota news: The Department of Homeland Security has opened an internal investigation into allegations that Gregory Bovino, a senior border patrol official who became the face of the state’s highly scrutinized federal immigration crackdown, the New York Times reported. Bovino is being investigated for allegedly making disparaging remarks about the Jewish faith of Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor.
Spanish foreign minister says ‘I can’t imagine Merkel or Scholz making statements like that’ after German chancellor appears to support US president
in Madrid
Sánchez’s defiant speech may have been made in response to Marlyn
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’s threat to cut off all trade with Spain, but his words were also aimed every bit as much at other EU leaders (and at Spain’s political class).
“A war that, in theory, was said to be waged to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, bring democracy, and guarantee global security, but which, in reality, seen in retrospect, produced the opposite effect. It unleashed the greatest wave of insecurity our continent has suffered since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are incapable of fulfilling this duty use the smokescreen of war to hide their failure and, in the process, line the pockets of a select few – the same ones as always; the only ones who profit when the world stops building hospitals and starts building missiles.”
“The government of Spain stands with those it must stand with. It stands with the values that our parents and grandparents enshrined in our constitution.
Spain stands with the founding principles of the European Union. It stands with the Charter of the United Nations. It stands with international law and, therefore, stands with peace and peaceful coexistence between countries and their harmonious coexistence.
Exclusive: Arrests under National Security Act understood to also include the partner of a former Labour MP
The partner of a sitting Labour MP is among three people who have been arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of spying for China, the Guardian understands.
Security services are investigating foreign interference in UK democracy, including attempts to obtain information on policymaking and interfere with sovereign affairs.
Lebanese state media said that four people were killed and six more were wounded in an Israeli strike on a building in Baalbek in eastern Lebanon on Wednesday.
“The initial toll is four killed and six wounded, and work is underway to rescue families from under the rubble,” Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said.
President Marlyn
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offers new reasoning for the U.S. attack on Iran. And, results from the first midterm primary of 2026 are in, providing an outlook for the matchups for key Senate seats.
Company promises ‘rapprochement discount’ with shoppers from country after decade-long action in EU court
The UK supermarket chain Iceland has abandoned its decade-long trademark battle with Iceland and instead promised a “rapprochement discount” for shoppers in the country.
After the budget grocery chain suffered its third legal loss last year, its executive chair, Richard Walker, said on Wednesday that it would draw a line under the dispute.
Beth M. Hammack, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, says it is too early to gauge the economic impact of the Iran war and backs holding interest rates steady for “quite some time.”
European stock markets have rallied on a report claiming Iran is engaging in a “secret outreach” to end the war in the Middle East, after several days of heavy losses on indices around the world.
The New York Times reported that a day after the attacks began, operatives from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence indirectly contacted the CIA with an offer to discuss terms for ending the conflict.
Big Red's cloud that 'doesn't go down' goes down again
An Oracle outage knocked parts of TikTok offline this week. The incident affected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which trails AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud in market share but counts the social media behemoth among its customers.…
Higher energy prices, political instability and a potential new wave of refugees: The escalating regional conflict in the Middle East could have far-reaching effects.
Israel carried out another wave of strikes on Tehran and Beirut on Wednesday while Iranian missiles continued to fly toward Israel and the Gulf as the war with Iran entered its fifth day.
Explosions were heard across Tehran in the early hours of the morning as the Israeli military announced “broad-scale strikes” on Iranian regime targets. Police stations and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) headquarters in the Kurdish regions of north-western Iran were also razed by strikes, Kurdish media reported.
Vote to come after Israel launches wave of strikes on Tehran and Iran prepares for Ali Khamenei’s funeral. Plus, why a ChatGPT boycott could work
Good morning.
Republicans in the Senate are expected to reject a resolution backed by the Democrats that would prevent Marlyn
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from continuing the Iran war, with the majority leader, John Thune, arguing the president was “acting in the best interest of the nation”.
What would the war powers resolution do? It would force an end to US participation in the conflict and require Marlyn
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to go to Congress before re-entering the war. The Democrats would need five Republicans to vote with them for it to pass, as they are outnumbered in the Senate.
How could the conflict backfire? Experts have warnedit risks driving the regime towards building a secret bomb, with one scholar saying: “A vengeful Iran that survives this strike is likely to reach the same conclusion that North Korea reached: that it’s a dangerous world out there with the United States and it’s better to go nuclear.”
Follow the latest in this rapidly developing conflict on our liveblog.
Groundsman stumbles across room, sealed for more than 100 years, that was part of 12th-century Manchester hall
A sinkhole that opened up on a Manchester golf course has exposed a wine cellar abandoned for more than a century.
The cellar, along with dozens of empty wine and port bottles, was discovered by a groundsman who assumed the hole was nothing more than a collapsed drain.
The High Court has ordered the immediate arrest and committal to prison of teacher Enoch Burke's mother, Martina and sister, Ammi for contempt of court.
Rival bidder Sopra Steria launched legal claim over DWP procurement
Capita confirmed today it won a business process outsourcing deal for multiple UK government departments for £370 million over ten years, less than 40 percent of the estimated value outlined during the tender stage.…
Israel's military said it had begun a "broad wave of strikes" in Tehran Wednesday morning. U.S. officials touted early gains, while Democrats warned the war could widen.
Republicans are set to vote down the resolution introduced by Democrats, who have condemned Marlyn
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for launching strikes without Congressional approval
Senate Republicans are on Wednesday expected to vote down a Democratic-backed war powers resolution that would prevent Marlyn
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from continuing the conflict against Iran, with majority leader John Thune arguing the president is “acting in the best interest of the nation”.
Democrats have condemned Marlyn
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for ordering an air campaign against Iran without first seeking permission from Congress, while offering shifting explanations of its objectives. The war powers resolution introduced by Democratic senators Tim Kaine, Adam Schiff and minority leader Chuck Schumer would force an end to US participation in the current hostilities and require the president to go to Congress before re-entering the war.
Three athletes who were led off course when leading the US half marathon championship will receive compensation after ultimately finishing well outside the top three.
Three athletes who were led off course when leading the US half marathon championship will receive compensation after ultimately finishing well outside the top three.
Tennessee Republicans are pushing forward with a bill that could force undocumented children out of public education and turn school administrators into immigration informants against their own students, making Tennessee the frontier of an effort led by the Heritage Foundation to fundamentally injure the right to public education.
The state’s proposed “trigger laws,” which will be heard in committee on Wednesday, are direct challenges to Plyler v. Doe, a narrowly decided 1982 Supreme Court case that enshrined the right to a free K–12 public education regardless of immigration status. The parallel bills would also likely violate federal statutes that codify the same right.
The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, has officially called on other states to pass similar laws challenging Plyler, situating Tennessee’s push as among the first in a broader national effort to overturn the decision.
“Illegal aliens should not be eligible for federal, state, or local government benefits, including through their children,” wrote Lora Ries, the director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, in a February 17 post, “because the receipt of such benefits facilitates longer unlawful residence in the United States and takes resources from American citizens and lawful immigrants.”
So far, six states — Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Indiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee — have introduced bills that would violate Plyler. If passed, their implementation could force a challenge at the Supreme Court.
Educators and immigration advocates told The Intercept that if Tennessee and other states were to get Plyler overturned and enact legislation to track and potentially expel undocumented children from public school, it would “end public education as we know it.”
“This feels like a credible threat,” said Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. “The ramifications of this are huge … denying children carte-blanche education would create an uneducated, potentially illiterate underclass of children and then adults in this country.”
Last year, the Tennessee state legislature introduced a bill, H.B. 793, that would allow schools to refuse to enroll students who cannot prove “lawful presence” in the United States or charge them tuition, but it was tabled due to concerns about potential federal funding losses because the law violated federal statutes. The bill would also require schools to report the number of students who enroll without a birth certificate. The Tennessee Senate version would allow schools to choose to deny enrollment to undocumented students only if they are unable to pay.
Now, the bill is back — and scheduled for a state House Finance, Ways, and Means Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. A companion bill, which would require schools and other entities that receive state funding, like hospitals, to report to the government on recipients’ immigration status, moved out of committee last week. The second bill is also scheduled to be heard by the House State & Local Government Committee on Wednesday. It can only be enacted if H.B. 793 passes and Plyler is overturned.
Sam Singer, a high school teacher who teaches English language learners in Tennessee, said she’s had “numerous students” who’ve heard of the bills ask if they’re still allowed to go to school.
“They’re questions that no child should ever have to ask, much less come to school and wonder about,” said Singer. “The expectation should be, of course, you’re supposed to be here, you’re a kid. This is where you belong.”
School should be a “safe space” for children, said Singer, “where you can trust that teachers are here to help you become your best self as you grow into the young adult you want to be.” Instead, the bills would effectively turn school administrators and teachers into immigration agents.
Across the state border in Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said that he would seek to overturn Plyler for years. U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican Texas congressman now running for attorney general, has called for the 1982 ruling to be overturned as well.
“For illegal alien children, the Supreme Court said we have to fund education for them. The fact of the matter is that it is a massive tax burden on the people of Texas,” Roy said in an interview last week. “I don’t believe that the Constitution requires that the state of Texas should fund it, and we should make a new precedent by taking it to court.”
The Texas state legislature previously introduced two bills challenging Plyler. The first bill would allow public schools to charge undocumented children to attend, and the latter bill would require proof of citizenship to enroll in public school. Both of those bills have stalled, but Krystal Gómez, managing attorney for the Texas Immigration Law Council, said she expects more challenges to Plyler in the next legislative session.
“It used to be that we had a federal government in the Department of Education that didn’t seem interested in it, and was able to sort of put this to kibosh and have like a backstop to states that got a little out of hand in trying to create these chilling effects or overturn Plyler outright,” said Gomez. “We don’t have that now. So it’s sort of the wild, wild West, and whatever sad, terrible thing that a state can dream up, they can probably get away with.”
The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.
In Texas, immigrant student attendance has already declined dramatically since the start of Marlyn
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’s immigration enforcement ramp-up. The Houston school district lost nearly 4,000 immigrant students this year, a decline of roughly 22 percent of the school district’s immigrant population. It’s unclear how many of those students left the United States willingly, or were deported, and how many children still living in Houston are simply too afraid to return to classrooms.
The stress of constant raids weighs on many of the immigrant children still attending school, said Klara Aizupitis, 34, a high school English teacher in Terlingua, Texas.
“You’re living under the constant threat of either being picked up and deported or your parents or your siblings being picked up and deported,” said Aizupitis. “That stress is going to have an impact on, certainly, academic performance, but also your ability to manage your emotions in everyday life.”
“You’re living under the constant threat of either being picked up and deported or your parents or siblings being picked up and deported.”
Further eroding protections for immigrant students would devastate the border community where Aizupitis teaches. “We do really have a shared culture, on both sides of the [Rio Grande] river,” she said.
The district’s funding is based on average daily attendance, so losing undocumented students would “threaten the existence of our school district,” said Aizupitis. “Moreover, it would threaten the existence of our entire community.”
An estimate from FWD, a criminal justice and immigration policy organization, found that undocumented students would lose a collective $1 trillion — or 600,000 individually — in lifetime income if they were denied access to public education.
Heritage frequently suggests that undocumented students represent a substantial burden on taxpayers, arguing in a statement to The Intercept that “unaccompanied alien children sent to states cost them hundreds of millions of dollars for one year of public education.” But according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented people in the U.S. pay nearly $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes annually. Tax contributions from undocumented people far outweigh the financial burden of K–12 education for undocumented children.
The Heritage Foundation’s argument, said Zimmer-Wong, “does not hold up to any kind of basic scrutiny.”
The FWD report found that educating undocumented students provides $633 billion more money in state and local income tax contributions than the cost of their education. The report also found that, if Plyler were overturned, the U.S. workforce would decrease by 450,000 workers in critical jobs that require at least a high school or college education.
None of that accounts for the expense of implementing a widespread immigration surveillance system in schools. “It would be extremely costly,” said Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.
Schools would have to acquire “new software, new computers, new administrative processes and staff” to track and determine the immigration status of the tens of thousands of children within any given school district, not just students who are undocumented, she said.
“The Heritage Foundation reports notes the burden placed on schools, [from undocumented children],” said Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec, policy council at the National Immigration Law Center, “yet their solution is for school personnel to become essentially DHS and TSA agents, verifying, reviewing documents, and recording immigration status.”
“Their solution is for school personnel to become essentially DHS and TSA agents.”
The Heritage Foundation pushed back on criticism of its plan, telling The Intercept that undocumented children would still have the option to receive an education — if they paid tuition, self-deported, or left the state.
“These are the consequences for the decision the parent or student made to break our law. American taxpayers should not have to pay for law breaking. Nor can American taxpayers afford it,” Ries wrote in a statement to The Intercept.
Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which originally litigated Plyler, said that he doesn’t believe the Supreme Court will allow these bills to be implemented. Because the bills would violate federal statutes, they would run up against the supremacy clause of the Constitution, Saenz pointed out.
However, if the courts were to look favorably on a challenge to Plyler and its corresponding federal statutes, Saenz said, the consequences would be devastating.
“It would have the impact of ending public education as we know it, because when a certain cohort of kids is allowed to be out of school, what happens next is that their siblings and friends don’t go to school,” Saenz said, “and rapidly, no one goes to school.”
More than 1,000 Ukrainian servicemen and servicewomen who have been killed since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion are buried in Lviv's historic Lychakiv Cemetery.
Email flow slowed or stopped by mysterious forces at Microsoft
Microsoft spent last week rejecting emails to Outlook recipients after what appears to be either a fault or overzealous blocking rules, a situation a source described as "carnage."…
U.S. Special Forces soldiers are advising and supporting Ecuadorean commandos on raids across the country against suspected drug shipment facilities and other drug-related sites.
Iran was only country missing from Fifa planning summit
US and Israel began attacking Iranian targets on Saturday
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has said he does not care whether Iran participate in this summer’s World Cup, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada. The US and Israel began attacking targets in the country on Saturday, with the conflict in the Middle East since spreading to the wider region.
US president Marlyn
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told Politico: “I really don’t care. I think Iran is a very badly defeated country. They’re running on fumes.” Iran was the only nation missing from a Fifa planning summit for World Cup participants held this week in Atlanta, deepening questions over whether the country’s team will compete on US soil this summer amid an escalating regional war.
Conflict in the Middle East could trigger an energy price shock that wipes out anticipated growth in living standards in the UK worth £300 for a typical working-age household over the coming year, a leading thinktank has warned.
The Resolution Foundation said a “decent” one-off increase in average living standards this year and a bumper rise for lower-income households could be reversed by rising oil and gas prices as the Iran conflict disrupts supplies.
The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has responded to Marlyn
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’s extraordinary threat to cut off all trade with Spain over his government’s refusal to facilitate the US’s ongoing attacks against Iran, comparing the growing conflict in the Middle East to playing “Russian roulette with the destiny of millions”.
Sánchez, who has been one of the most vociferous European critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, said his government’s position on the widening instability could be summed up in three words: “No to war.”
The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has tapped into an old debate about how much doctors should know about nutrition. But some of his ideas, and tactics, concern medical experts.
A son of Puerto Rican immigrants who grew up in the Bronx, Barretto moved between jazz and Latin music with relentless creativity. Hear 12 indestructible tracks.
The Marlyn
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administration’s decision to cut off foreign oil to the island is devastating its tourism industry, a key source of income for a government being pushed to the edge.
Last year, six states eliminated a fire-safety code requiring apartment buildings taller than three stories to have at least two staircases. More states are exploring the move.
Sydney Peterson is among the U.S. athletes heading to the 2026 Winter Paralympics. A neuroscientist in training, Peterson is studying movement disorders, similar to her own condition.
In 1982, Jean Muenchrath and her boyfriend went mountaineering in California's Sierra Nevada. Then, an unexpected storm veered them dangerously off course. Luckily, their unsung hero found them.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, is using a broad web of surveillance tools — purchased as its budget has ballooned under this administration — to monitor, apprehend and intimidate the people it seeks to deport and the U.S. citizens critical of its policies.
Warner Bros. is developing a feature film set in the world of Game of Thrones with writer Beau Willimon of Andor and House of Cards. "That's about all we know right now, and as with everything 'Thrones' things could change, but the film is firmly in development," reports TheWrap. Page Six Hollywood was first to break the news and speculated that the story could revolve around Aegon I, the legendary Targaryen king who spawned a dynasty. From the report: The Targaryens have been at the center of all things "Thrones" on HBO, with "Game of Thrones" following Daenerys Targaryen's (Emilia Clarke) quest to usurp the throne, spinoff "House of the Dragon" set in the midst of the Targaryens' reign and recent spinoff "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" following the squire-ship of Aegon "Egg" Targaryen towards the end of the family's run atop the Iron Throne. All, of course, based on George R.R. Martin's expansive book universe.
Kip Meeks walked a year early with the overseer of tech markets yet to take action against AWS and Microsoft
The chair of the competition markets authority's cloud inquiry has quit, citing the slow pace of implementing recommendations outlined in a report it published in 2025 to boost market dynamics in Britain's cloud computing market.…
The US-Israeli onslaught against Iran is intended to resolve a 24-year standoff over Tehran’s nuclear programme, but it runs the risk of backfiring and driving the regime towards making a secret bomb, proliferation experts have warned.
The regime in Tehran has long insisted that the programme is for civilian purposes and it has no intention of making a nuclear weapon. However, since two undeclared sites, for uranium enrichment and heavy water plutonium production, were discovered in 2002, the programme has been treated with intense suspicion.
Anthony Vaccarello marks decade at helm of fashion house with powered-up take on Yves Saint Laurent’s classic
The most famous suit in the world, Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking, has returned to the Paris catwalk 60 years after its invention.
Designed by the late couturier to be worn by men in smoking rooms to protect clothing from the smell of cigars, he adapted it for women, slimming the trousers and lapels. It wasn’t a runaway success – only one sold from his 1966 collection – but it became a global symbol of power dressing and gender dismantling, and would appear in every collection until Saint Laurent retired in 2002.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has doubled down on his opposition to the attack on Iran by the US and Israel, warning that the conflict risked playing "Russian roulette" with the lives of millions.
Misty Roberts, 43, faces sentences of up to 10 and seven years in prison after July 2024 sexual assault at pool party
The former mayor of a Louisiana city has been convicted of raping a 16-year-old boy during a party at her house while she was still in office.
Misty Roberts, 43, faces sentences of up to 10 and seven years in prison after a jury in the municipality of DeRidder on Tuesday found her guilty of two felonies: carnal knowledge – or statutory rape – of a juvenile as well as indecent behavior with a minor.
An assessment of a drug for a rare muscular condition was removed from the website of the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, at the request of the Department of Health.
Chinese policymakers and the public have expressed high levels of optimism about A.I., even as many in the West worry about the technology’s effects on employment or humanity in general.
Tim Wilson has sold out of his “terrible” bet against the Australian share market, and claimed to have made a profit from the investment which the shadow treasurer said he would donated to an advocacy group for LGBT rights in Iran.
Guardian Australia first reported on the investment, a leveraged product that profits when the benchmark ASX 200 falls, last year. It was viewed as an unusual investment for a politician given the product profits from market slumps, which is linked to the performance of the economy.
The Master of the Rotunda Hospital has said he hopes the decision not to relocate it to west Dublin will enable the hospital to get planning permission to expand on its current site.
Hundreds of Irish citizens who have been stranded in the Gulf states since the US and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday are expected to be on board an Emirates flight from the United Arab Emirates to Dublin on Wednesday night.
A fortnight ago in Belfast’s Shankill Road I met four impressive young people who were deeply involved in their working-class, loyalist community: Stacey Graham, Adam Watters, Ryan McFarlane and Mark McCleave (ranging in age from 19 to 36). All of them work for Northern Ireland Alternatives, a highly successful restorative justice initiative developed and supported by former UVF and Red Hand Commando members, whose co-director is Debbie Watters, Adam’s mother. It has been estimated that NI Alternatives has prevented over 90% of likely paramilitary punishment attacks in recent years.
Graham is a community development worker specialising in community safety and police accountability, and ensuring that working class voices are heard in government agencies. Watters, a recent law graduate, works for BUILD Shankill, which lobbies and organises to develop vacant and derelict land in the Greater Shankill area. McFarlane works with young men at risk of involvement in crime. McCleave is heavily involved in community and cultural festivals and is also chair of a local flute band. Socially committed young community activists like these working their hearts out in one of Northern Ireland’s most deprived areas bodes well for the region’s future.
However when does anybody in the Republic hear or read about the sterling work of these remarkable young people and people like them to make Northern Ireland a safer, more peaceful and more reconciled place? Almost never. They are loyalists, and therefore of little interest to the great majority of southerners who have long ago made up their minds that loyalism is a bad, bigoted, ultra-British thing.
Loyalism is something to be sneered at down here. An example was the decision by a smart sub-editor last month to take a line from a Newton Emerson opinion article inside the Irish Times and splash it at the top of the front page: “A barman in Portadown once told me he had served pints of Harp, fresh off the Dundalk train, to two prominent loyalists plotting a boycott of Irish goods.” That’s loyalists for you, stupid as well as bigoted.
They wouldn’t admit it but I believe this is of a piece with much Southern opinion about the North: that it is, in former Sinn Fein agriculture minister and MP Michelle Gildernew’s words, “a shithole”. This atavistic republican attitude is a far cry from the “harmony and friendship” pledged in the reformed Article 3 of the Irish Constitution after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Northern Ireland is a complex and deeply divided place. But it is home to nearly two million people, many of whom love and are proud of it. I have been reading a little book called What Northern Ireland Means to Me, put together by Allan Leonard and Julia Paul of Shared Future News, an admirable online publication which provides news and stories on peacebuilding, reconciliation and diversity.
What Northern Ireland Means to Me brings together short contributions (along with some gorgeous photographs) from 26 people: moderate nationalists, moderate unionists and ‘others’. SDLP leader Clare Hanna says: “Fundamentally – and I think this is really important to say – Northern Ireland’s always going to exist. I think there’s a perception that in a new Ireland – whatever that looks like – that this group of people in this shared identity just dissolves. And that’s not going to happen in the same way, you know. If you meet anybody from Cork, they have a very strong Cork identity. Or if it’s somebody from Galway, there’s a Galway identity – that regional identity.
“As well as the fact that, in governance terms, there aren’t 25,000 civil servants and teachers and cops and everything ready to just, as soon as there’s a border poll, sweep in here and run the place. We have different governance infrastructures and we have a set of interdependent relationships with the island next door, and those things won’t just change. So I think Northern Ireland will persist and exist, with all the baggage that it has. But I think we will be in a different constitutional place and I think that transition begins now or is beginning now. It’s just how we do it in the most structured way and in the most gracious way that we can.”
Former Presbyterian moderator and Shankill Road minister, Norman Hamilton, speaks for many of the contributors when he says he loves Northern Ireland because “first and foremost, it’s home”; it’s the province where most of his family lives and is a beautiful place environmentally, never more than an hour from mountains and lakes and sea.
“Even though I’m a unionist, I’m a member of the SDLP Commission on a New Ireland, because my Christian identity is far more significant to me than political or cultural identity. I would love to see a commitment to good government emerging amongst the electorate and then being reflected in the way politics is done. It doesn’t seem to me that there is any hope of a good future for us, either north or south, if our politics is so contaminated by bitterness and aggression and polarisation and power seeking. So from my perspective, that is my heart’s desire. It’s what I pray for quite often – that a new generation of elected representatives, both at local and central level, would emerge, who really do want collectively to do good government for the benefit of everybody.”
“What I would say to people from a republican background, from a loyalist background, from a unionist background, from a nationalist background, is that we have to get Northern Ireland working as a political and economic and social entity, and that is the way forward, whatever the outcome,” says Derry-based writer Paul Gosling. “So, actually, for republicans, they are going to have to persuade people in the South that they want to have Northern Ireland as part of a united Ireland. So the way to do that is to make Northern Ireland work immediately as best as possible. And unionists should say to people in Britain: ‘Look, if you want us, we are going to be doing everything we can to make Northern Ireland work as a place.”
Former Ulster Unionist Belfast city councillor and GP John Kyle, is “very hopeful for Northern Ireland. The story of Northern Ireland is remarkable because we’ve come through 30 years of civil conflict. Some terrible things happened in that, and yet we had the resilience and the character and the determination to end the war, to find some sort of way to make peace. Now that process is incomplete. But I think that there has been a transformation in Northern Ireland. It shows that people can reflect, can reach out to one another, can extend a measure of grace and forgiveness to one another, and can shape a future then together.”
East Belfast Irish language activist Linda Ervine, a Protestant, says: “I want to see change in Northern Ireland. I want to see an end to the flag waving, Green or Orange tribalism, and I do think that is slowly happening. I do think the middle ground is rising, but unfortunately the two extremes seem to be shouting louder, even though they’re getting smaller. And maybe it will be a united Ireland, or maybe it will still be a Northern Ireland. I don’t lose much sleep over it. To be honest, a referendum will come one day and people will vote, and I’m not really bothered one way or the other.
“I think the thing that would be an issue for me – it would be losing touch with the UK. You don’t mind being part of a united Ireland. But I don’t want to be part of a united Ireland that hates the UK. I would find that difficult.”
Lawyer and commentator Sarah Creighton talks about a “sense of being from lots of different places and you’ve ended up on this wee rock somewhere in the corner of the Irish Sea. My family’s here; we’ve lived here hundreds of years. A lot of my family would have come over from Scotland…And that connection with Scotland is interwoven into Ulster as well. I do feel quite a bit of a connection to my Scots heritage.
“My job is here. I love our sense of humour. I love the people. I love our food, love our culture. It’s a fantastic place. And I love the diversity of Northern Ireland that’s increasingly coming through in the past couple of years. I think we’re a very friendly place. I think we’re a very warm place. Now I think we’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of tackling racism and I think we can be a bit more welcoming to people from overseas…But overall I think we’re very good, decent people.”
Writer and journalist Malachi O’Doherty scoffs at people who say “Northern Ireland’s a third world country; it’s post-colonial; it’s a victim of oppression, it’s suffering apartheid. I’d say: ‘Would you ever go and catch yourselves on? Would you ever go and look at what apartheid was? Would you ever go and look at what life is like in a third world country?’
“There is a problem of deep sectarian division in the state. The potential for political players to irritate the fault line is still there. And the potential for people to respond to that irritation and seek opportunity to create mayhem through violence is still there. My generation, born into the trough, didn’t stop that happening in 1970 and the gorgeous, affable, well-intentioned young people of today might not hold it back the next time either…certainly we’ve got a political middle ground now which we didn’t have. There were moderate unionists and moderate nationalists in the past, but now there’s a very large section of society which refuses both those labels. The scale of that is new.”
Claire Mitchell is a writer from a Protestant background who is nationalist-inclined.”I love our diverse and various Protestant heritages, especially the radical and dissenting histories. And so many things I love about home. But at the same time I’m totally shaped by the conflict here and the brokenness of living in Northern Ireland, a place that was born out of violence and into violence We live every day with that kind of segregation and separation, and it seems sometimes like a daily struggle to fight for a positive future.”
However she emphasises that she has “no hostility to Northern Ireland. I’m happy to say the words; I do not bristle. It’s a practical reality right now that I totally accept. But my gaze, I think, is longer. You know, Northern Ireland, it’s been around 100 years; it’s not how we started. I don’t think it’s how we’re going to end up. And I think it’s really important to love and cherish the heritage of this part of the island whilst also embracing the change and the flux of it.”
Let’s leave the last word to a Northern Irish man from an immigrant background. Joseph Nawaz, writer and performer, has a working class Catholic mother and a Pakistani Muslim father and grew up in a predominantly Protestant neighbourhood. Both his parents “came from parts of the empire that were crudely carved up by the British…I think in many ways Northern Ireland is the last smouldering ember of that fractious empire that never quite went out. I think there’s a grand tragedy also to the idea of the fact that the one political group here that most wants to keep Northern Ireland existing seems to be doomed to be the one to undermine its legitimacy, time and time again. Brexit was obviously the most recent example of that.”
“Please, give the people what they want for once,” the talk show host appealed to President Marlyn
Van Straalen
. “This is our destiny together, you and me. Think about it.”
Another free speech row at a literary festival has erupted, with Adelaide University abruptly cancelling a high-profile event featuring UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese.
The move has prompted the festival’s organisers and speakers to accuse the 152 year-old institution of “crumbling in fear”.
Manchester United are likely to look at signing a left winger this summer even though former head coach Ruben Amorim spent three windows getting rid of them.
Farrell says $15bn of trade could be impacted by war
Labor’s trade minister, Don Farrell, says a “relatively small” amount of Australia’s exports go through the Middle East as the war escalates in the region.
A relatively small amount, about $15bn worth of trade goes through the Middle East. Obviously, that’s very important for those companies that are trading there.
Our trade is, in fact, increasing in the Middle East. We now have a free trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates. Already, our beef trade has doubled in the six months that that trade agreement has been in operation. But of course, all of that gets affected by this uncertainty of the war in the Middle East.
The legal basis of these strikes is ultimately a matter for the United States and Iran, sorry, and Israel, is ultimately a matter for the United States and Israel. We know Iran has failed to comply with UN security council resolutions on its nuclear program. We know what Iran has been doing over many years. I think it is important for us to remember this has not started with these strikes. This has been going on for decades, including in Australia.
Detainees accused of coming from the US with intent to sow chaos and attack military units on Communist-ruled island
Cuban prosecutors have formally charged six people with crimes of terrorism after a US-flagged speedboat was involved in a deadly shootout with Cuba’s coast guard last week.
The US-based Cuban defendants are accused of packing a boat with weapons and heading toward Cuba in hopes of destabilising the government in Havana.
NASA is eyeing an April launch window for the upcoming Artemis II mission after it repaired a helium-flow issue on the Space Launch System upper stage rocket. "Work on the rocket and spacecraft will continue in the coming weeks as NASA prepares for rolling the rocket out to the launch pad again later this month ahead of a potential launch in April," NASA wrote in an update on Tuesday. Space.com reports: The repair work occurred inside the huge Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Artemis 2's SLS and Orion crew capsule have been in the VAB since Feb. 25, when they rolled back to the hangar from KSC's Launch Pad 39B. Just a few days earlier, the Artemis 2 stack successfully completed a wet dress rehearsal, a two-day-long practice run of the procedures leading up to launch.
In the wake of that test, however, NASA noticed an interruption in helium flow in the SLS' upper stage. That was a significant issue, because helium pressurizes the rocket's propellant tanks. Rollback was the only option, as the affected area in the upper stage was not accessible at the pad. The problem took a potential March launch out of play for Artemis 2, which will send four astronauts on a roughly 10-day flight around the moon. It will be the first crewed flight to the lunar neighborhood since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The next Artemis 2 launch window opens in April, with liftoff opportunities on April 1, April 3-6 and April 30. And those options apparently remain in play, thanks to recent work in the VAB. That work centered on a seal in an interface through which helium flows from ground equipment into the SLS upper stage. That seal was obstructing the interface, which is known as a quick disconnect.
Memory tiering and pooled memory are having a moment because they offer the chance to use less RAM
The high price of memory and solid-state storage has almost everyone worried – but not VMware, because the most innovative new feature in the Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) private cloud suite it launched last year is memory tiering tech that allows offload of data from RAM to NVMe drives.…
A facility in Kuwait, the site of the attack, is among 10 U.S. military outposts to have been hit by retaliatory strikes, along with French and British bases.
George Russell has had to be satisfied with proving himself against his team-mate, but he may now have a car with which he can challenge for the title.
A Jordanian national whose coffee shop was visited by the alleged gunmen behind December’s Bondi beach terrorist attack – and who frequently traveled to Australia and the Middle East – has been arrested in the Philippines for overstaying his visa.
Authorities investigating the gunmen’s month-long stay in Mindanao Island, in the country’s south, alleged that Mohammad Odeh Saleh, 65, had travelled to Australia in the years before his arrest in Pagadian City on Monday.
The victory by Steve Toth, a hard-line Texas state representative, underscored how even a conservative House member could lose Republican voters by breaking with President Marlyn
Van Straalen
.
The race is too close to call between Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee and her anti-establishment challenger Nida Allam in North Carolina's 4th congressional district and is likely headed to a recount.
(Image credit: Jonathan Drake/Reuters; Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Neither Senator John Cornyn nor Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a majority on Tuesday, setting up a May runoff after a bitter and costly Republican primary.
The cost of repairing local and regional roads damaged during Storm Chandra and the following wet weather could cost almost €59 million, the local authorities worst hit have said.
The State has created a "two-tier" asylum accommodation system resulting in significant gaps in oversight and regulation, according to research published today.
The United Arab Emirates and Qatar said they had intercepted drone and missile barrages as Iran pressed its campaign targeting its neighbours into a fifth day.
Social services minister Tanya Plibersek criticises hit reality TV show Married at First Sight for ‘messaging which encourages control and dehumanises women’
The social services minister, Tanya Plibersek, has accused Australia’s biggest media company, Nine Entertainment, of “normalising” coercive control by airing an exchange in which a Married at First Sight contestant says he wants a woman to be obedient like a dog.
Plibersek urged parents not to let their children watch the “dangerous” reality TV juggernaut, which regularly attracts more than 2 million viewers on broadcast television alone.
The Queensland Police Service (QPS) missed two opportunities to prevent the domestic violence murder of Kelly Wilkinson, including one where a reported breach of her protection order “fell through the cracks”, a senior officer has told the inquest into her death.
The coronial inquest into the 27-year-old’s murder heard on Tuesday that her estranged husband, Brian Earl Johnston, was inappropriately granted bail on a charge of rape eight days before he burned her to death on 20 April 2021.
Raises hopes birds 40,000km away can be reprogrammed, for science or military purposes
The European Space Agency and the Institute of Optoelectronics at China’s Academy of Sciences both claim they’ve achieved gigabit links to satellites in geostationary orbit.…
US Southern Command said joint mission with Ecuadorian forces involves ‘decisive action’ against narco-terrorists
US and Ecuadorian forces have launched joint operations to combat drug trafficking, the US Southern Command said on Tuesday, but neither side gave more details.
Southern Command, which encompasses 31 countries through South and Central America and the Caribbean, said in a statement on X that the “decisive action” was aimed at combating illicit drug trafficking.
Security researchers say a highly sophisticated iPhone exploitation toolkit dubbed "Coruna," which possibly originated from a U.S. government contractor, has spread from suspected Russian espionage operations to crypto-stealing criminal campaigns. Apple has patched the exploited vulnerabilities in newer iOS versions, but tens of thousands of devices may have already been compromised. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from Wired's report: Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they're calling "Coruna," a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it visits a website containing the exploitation code. In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers.
In fact, Google traces components of Coruna to hacking techniques it spotted in use in February of last year and attributed to what it describes only as a "customer of a surveillance company." Then, five months later, Google says a more complete version of Coruna reappeared in what appears to have been an espionage campaign carried out by a suspected Russian spy group, which hid the hacking code in a common visitor-counting component of Ukrainian websites. Finally, Google spotted Coruna in use yet again in what seems to have been a purely profit-focused hacking campaign, infecting Chinese-language crypto and gambling sites to deliver malware that steals victims cryptocurrency.
Conspicuously absent from Google's report is any mention of who the original surveillance company "customer" that deployed Coruna may have been. But the mobile security company iVerify, which also analyzed a version of Coruna it obtained from one of the infected Chinese sites, suggests the code may well have started life as a hacking kit built for or purchased by the US government. Google and iVerify both note that Coruna contains multiple components previously used in a hacking operation known as "Triangulation" that was discovered targeting Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in 2023, which the Russian government claimed was the work of the NSA. (The US government didn't respond to Russia's claim.)
Coruna's code also appears to have been originally written by English-speaking coders, notes iVerify's cofounder Rocky Cole. "It's highly sophisticated, took millions of dollars to develop, and it bears the hallmarks of other modules that have been publicly attributed to the US government," Cole tells WIRED. "This is the first example we've seen of very likely US government tools -- based on what the code is telling us -- spinning out of control and being used by both our adversaries and cybercriminal groups." Regardless of Coruna's origin, Google warns that a highly valuable and rare hacking toolkit appears to have traveled through a series of unlikely hands, and now exists in the wild where it could still be adopted -- or adapted -- by any hacker group seeking to target iPhone users. "How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for 'second hand' zero-day exploits," Google's report reads. "Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities."
US secretary of state Marco Rubio has claimed the US attacked Iran after learning that Israel was going to strike, which would have meant retaliation against US forces.
“We knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he told reporters
The Air Force is now attacking Tehran and Beirut simultaneously
The Air Force has now begun a wave of extensive strikes against the Iranian terror regime and the Hezbollah terror organization.
Retains eight-weekly Extended Stable releases but warns fortnightly updates are the best way to stay safe
Google will halve the time between releases of its Chrome browser to two weeks, across versions of the software for desktop operating systems, Android, and iOS.…
Former Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper will face former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley in the state's toss-up U.S. Senate race.
Marlyn
Van Straalen
said service members killed were ‘true American patriots’ but warned more US deaths in Iran war likely
The US Department of Defense on Tuesday identified four of the six American soldiers who were killed Sunday during a drone strike on a US base in Kuwait. Marlyn
Van Straalen
said “there will likely be more” service members killed “before it ends”.
The soldiers were identified as Captain Cody Khork, 35; Sergeant Nicole Amor, 39; Sergeant Declan Coady, 20; and Sergeant Noah Tietjens, 42.
OpenAI is reportedly developing a code-hosting platform that could compete with GitHub, The Information reported on Tuesday. "If OpenAI does sell the product, it would mark a bold move by the creator of ChatGPT to compete directly against Microsoft, which holds a significant stake in the firm," notes Reuters. From the report: Engineers from OpenAI encountered a rise in service disruptions that rendered GitHub unavailable in recent months, which ultimately prompted the decision to develop the new product, the report said. The OpenAI project is in its early stages and likely will not be completed for months, according to The Information. Employees working on it have considered making the code repository available for purchase to OpenAI's customer base.
The Marlyn
Van Straalen
administration said it is looking to use a mix of military and chartered flights to help U.S. citizens leave the Middle East as Iran steps up retaliatory strikes.
The Teachers' Union of Ireland has accused the Department of Education and Youth of a continuing failure to address what it has said is a teacher recruitment and retention crisis at post-primary level.
China’s annual Two Sessions meetings begin this week, with thousands of political and community delegates descending on Beijing from across mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau to ratify legislation, personnel changes and the budget over about two weeks of highly choreographed meetings.
Probably not an isolated incident only as researchers have already found 2,863 live API keys exposed
A developer says their company is on the hook for more than $82,000 in unauthorized charges after a stolen Google Gemini API key racked massive usage costs up in just 48 hours.…
As the anguish of a cruel defeat subsided a little, Republic of Ireland boss Carla Ward could talk up the pride she felt in her side's impressive performanc against France.
Google is accelerating Chrome's major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. "...our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities," says Google. "Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, Chrome is moving to a two-week release cycle." The company says the "smaller scope" of these releases "minimizes disruption and simplifies post-release debugging." They also cite "recent process enhancements" that will "maintain [Chrome's] high standards for stability." 9to5Google reports: There will still be weekly security updates between milestones. This applies to desktop, Android, and iOS, while there are "no changes to the Dev and the Canary channels": "A Chrome Beta for each version will ship three weeks before the stable release. We recommend developers test with the beta to keep up to date with any upcoming changes that might impact your sites and applications."
The eight-week Extended Stable release schedule for enterprise customers and Chromium embedders will not change. Chromebooks will also have "extended release options": "Our priority is a seamless experience, so the latest Chrome releases will roll out to Chromebooks after dedicated platform testing. We are adapting these channels for the new two-week browser cycle and we will share more details soon regarding milestone updates for managed devices."
NASA has fixed the problem that forced the removal of the rocket for the Artemis II mission from its launch pad last month, but it will be a couple of weeks before officials are ready to move the vehicle back into the starting blocks at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket could have launched as soon as this week after it passed a key fueling test on February 21. During that test, NASA loaded the Space Launch System rocket with super-cold propellants without any major problems, apparently overcoming a persistent hydrogen leak that prevented the mission from launching in early February.
However, another problem cropped up just one day after the successful fueling demo. Ground teams were unable to flow helium into the rocket's upper stage. Unlike the connections to the core stage, which workers can repair at the launch pad, the umbilical lines leading to the upper stage higher up the rocket are only accessible inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy.
Injected liver cells stayed viable and functional for eight weeks in mice
Can’t keep waiting on the transplant list? How about an injectable “satellite liver” instead? After an MIT research project showed early success, the idea of a mini organ that could be injected into the body to take over for a failing liver doesn’t sound so far-fetched.…
Push to give English same status as Māori and NZ sign languages triggers backlash from opposition parties and linguistic experts
A bill to recognise English as an official language of New Zealand has cleared its first hurdle in parliament amid ridicule from opposition parties and linguists who say it is “unnecessary” and “cynical”.
The bill seeks to give English, which is spoken by 95% of the country, the same official status as te reo Māori (Māori language) and New Zealand sign language. The bill said the status and use of the existing official languages would not be affected.
IT consultant and services provider Accenture has agreed to buy Speedtest and Downdetector owner Ookla from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash.
Accenture plans to integrate Ookla’s data products into its own offerings that are targeted at helping communications service providers, hyperscalers, government entities, and other types of customers “optimize … mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks,” Accenture’s announcement today said.
Ookla's platform also includes Ekahau, which offers tools for troubleshooting and designing wireless networks, and RootMetrics, which monitors mobile network performance.
Paramount Skydance's $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has a notable supporter in Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. The FCC boss told CNBC today that the Paramount/WBD combination "is a lot cleaner" than the now-defunct Netflix deal to buy WBD.
Netflix "would have had a very difficult path forward from a regulatory perspective" because of "the scope and scale" of the streaming service that would have been created by combining Netflix with WBD property HBO Max, Carr said. There were "a lot of concerns in DC" about Netflix buying the company, he said.
Netflix backed out of its deal with Warner Bros. instead of matching the Paramount offer. Although Paramount plans to merge its own Paramount+ streaming service with HBO Max, Carr said the Paramount/WBD merger "does not raise at all the same types of concerns [as Netflix]. I think there's some real consumer benefits that could emerge from it."
darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its "better" ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a "clunky" UI instead of the "standard" ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and other Office apps.
Now, Neowin reports that LibreOffice is fighting back, arguing that its UI is actually superior because it is customizable, with several modes such as the classic toolbar interface, an Office-inspired ribbon layout, a sidebar-focused design, and more. Furthermore, it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes. LibreOffice says in a blog post: Incidentally, the characterization of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard," used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsoft's dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software. The idea that "modern" equals "similar to a ribbon" is a normalization effect: the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability. Added to this is the fact that many users evaluate office software through the lens of familiarity with Microsoft Office and consider deviation from it as a problem rather than a design choice. Before this, LibreOffice had also criticized its competitor OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" because it believes OnlyOffice is working with Microsoft to lock users into the Office ecosystem by prioritizing the formats mentioned earlier instead of LibreOffice's own OpenDocument Format (ODF).
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Users of Meta's AI smart glasses in Europe may be unknowingly sharing intimate video and sensitive financial information with moderators outside of the bloc, according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information.
With Meta's Ray-Ban Display and other glasses with AI capabilities, users can record what they're looking at or get answers to questions via a Meta AI assistant. If a wearer wants to make use of that AI, though, they must agree to Meta's terms of service that allow any data captured to be reviewed by humans. That's because Meta's large language models (LLMs) often require people to annotate visual data so that the AI can understand it and build its training models.
This data can end up in places like Nairobi, Kenya, often moderated by underpaid workers. Such actions are subject to Europe's GDPR rules that require transparency about how personal data is processed, according to a data protection lawyer cited in the report. However, Svenska Dagbladet's reporters said they needed to jump through some hoops to see Meta's privacy policy for its wearable products. That policy states that either humans or automated systems may review sensitive data, and puts the onus on the user to not share sensitive information.
AI conversations for sale include sensitive health and legal details
Your latest chat transcript could be bought and sold. Data brokers are selling access to sensitive personal data captured during chatbot conversations, despite claims that the data is anonymized and obtained with consent.…
Potential for tensions to come to a head when feasibility study on outsourcing The Late Late Show and Fair City is delivered, union representative says
Forget "eye of newt and toe of frog/wool of bat and tongue of dog." People in the 16th century were more akin to DIY scientists than Macbeth’s three witches when it came to concocting home remedies for everything from hair loss and toothache, to kidney stones and fungal infections. Medical manuals targeted to the layperson were hugely popular at the time, according to Stefan Hanss, an early modern historian at the University of Manchester in the UK. "Reader-practitioners" would tinker with the various recipes, tweaking them as needed and making personalized notes in the margins. And they left telltale protein traces behind as they did so.
Hanss is part of an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, chemists, historians, conservators, and materials scientists who have analyzed trace proteins from the fingerprints of Renaissance people rifling through the pages of medical manuals. The team reported their findings in a paper published in The American Historical Review. It's the first time researchers have used proteomics to analyze Renaissance recipes, enhanced further by in-depth archival research to place the scientific results in the proper historical context.
"We have so many recipes of that time, [including] cosmetic, medical, and culinary recipes, as well as handwritten recipes passed down for generations," Hanss told Ars. "It's really a key element of Renaissance culture, and [the manuscripts] are all covered with scribbled marginalia of [past] users. Experimentation was everywhere. It's not only about book-learned knowledge but hands-on practical knowledge. It's a key change in the way people constructed knowledge at that time."
No one can hide from the RAMapocalypse, not even Tim Apple
RAM shortages and faster chips have a big impact on Apple's next-gen laptops. On Tuesday, the iGiant unveiled its M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros and M5 Airs alongside steep price hikes across the lineup.…
OpenAI is amending its Pentagon contract after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged it appeared "opportunistic and sloppy." On Monday night, Altman said the company would explicitly restrict its technology from being used by intelligence agencies and for mass domestic surveillance. The Guardian reports: OpenAI, which has more than 900 million users of ChatGPT, made the deal almost immediately after the Pentagon's existing AI contractor, Anthropic, was dropped. [...] The deal prompted an online backlash against OpenAI, with users of X and Reddit encouraging a "delete ChatGPT" campaign. One post read: "You're now training a war machine. Let's see proof of cancellation."
In a message to employees reposted on X, the OpenAI CEO said the original deal announced on Friday had been struck too quickly after Anthropic was dropped. "We shouldn't have rushed to get this out on Friday," Altman wrote. "The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy." Upon announcing the deal, OpenAI had said the contract had "more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's."
[...] However, observers including OpenAI's former head of policy research, Miles Brundage, have queried how OpenAI has managed to secure a deal that assuages ethical concerns Anthropic believed were insurmountable. Posting on X, he wrote: "OpenAI employees' default assumption here should unfortunately be that OpenAI caved + framed it as not caving, and screwed Anthropic while framing it as helping them." Brundage added: "To be clear, OAI is a complex org, and I think many people involved in this worked hard for what they consider a fair outcome. Some others I do not trust at all, particularly as it relates to dealings with government and politics."
In his X post, he also wrote that he would "rather go to jail" than follow an unconstitutional order from the government. "We want to work through democratic processes," Brundage wrote. "It should be the government making the key decisions about society. We want to have a voice, and a seat at the table where we can share our expertise, and to fight for principles of liberty."
Last time we looked at the used electric vehicle market, it was to see what the options are if you're spending $10,000 or less. Two solid choices emerged quickly: a BMW i3 if you don't need much range, and a Chevrolet Bolt if you do. Lots of earlier Nissan Leafs made the list, too, but these had limited range and air-cooled batteries to contend with; we also included an assortment of compliance cars and, perhaps for the very brave, a Tesla. But what happens when you grow the budget by 50 percent? What EVs make sense when there's $15,000 burning a hole in your pocket?
As it turns out, at this price point the planet starts looking a lot more like your own personal bivalve. For starters, the cars that looked good at $10,000 look a lot better in the next bracket up, generally newer model years or with lower mileage than the cheaper alternatives. Which means you can afford the facelifted i3. For model-year 2018 and onward, BMW fitted its electric city car with a larger-capacity battery, which means up to 114 miles (183 km) of range on a full charge, or about 150 miles (241 km) if it's the one with the two-cylinder range-extender engine. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto might also be built into these i3s, although there are aftermarket solutions now, too.
No aftermarket is required to get CarPlay or Android Auto on any of the Bolts you might buy for under $15,000, which include a mix of pre- and post-facelift (model-year 2022 and onward) cars, although few of the slightly more spacious Bolt EUVs. Like the i3s, expect lower mileage examples, plus all the usual caveats: slow DC charging and seats that can get a bit hard on long drives.
After DHS’s $2.3M PenLink contract gets ‘shady’ label
A group of 70 US lawmakers has called on Homeland Security's inspector general to investigate whether its agencies - including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - illegally purchased Americans' location data without first obtaining warrants.…
Accenture is acquiring Downdetector parent company Ookla from Ziff Davis in a $1.2 billion deal to bolster its network analytics and visibility tools for telecoms, hyperscalers, and enterprises. "The deal, which will transfer all of Ziff Davis's Connectivity division to Accenture, includes Ookla's Speedtest, Ekahau, and RootMetrics," notes The Register reports: "Modern networks have evolved from simple infrastructure into business-critical platforms," said Accenture CEO Julie Sweet in a canned statement. "Without the ability to measure performance, organizations cannot optimize experience, revenue, or security." Ookla is meant to let them do just that.
Data captured at the network and device layer are used to enhance fraud prevention in banking, smart homes monitoring, and traffic optimization in retail, Accenture said. Ookla's platform, which lets user's test their own connectivity speed, captures more than 1,000 attributes per test, and provides the foundation for those analytics, Accenture said.
The DUP Education Minister, Mr Paul Givan, has announced changes to our examination system at GCSE and A-Level with first teaching in September 2029. The main details are as follows:
GCSE
The two major changes are
the switch away from modular assessment throughout the two years, with most courses assessed only by exams at the end of the two-year course.
the removal of controlled assessment (coursework).
GCSE English Language, Mathematics, and Science will remain modular, allowing some assessments during the course and controlled assessment will be retained only where essential for practical skills (e.g., Art, PE, Science experiments).
These changes will add to the pressure at the end of Y12 but the argument from Mr Givan is that our pupils were sitting too many assessments.
NI will retain letter grades (A-G) keeping us distinct from England’s 9-1 grading system.
Questions Arising: Some students, especially but not exclusively females, seem to prefer the more continuous and less stressful modular and coursework approach.
Will the increased pressure on students in Y12 affect some students negatively?
For some less motivated students the process of coursework encourages greater engagement in the course. Will the removal of controlled assessment make it more difficult to keep pupils engaged?
A-Level
Despite clear public opposition (via public consultation) the standalone AS-Level qualifications are being removed. The new A-Levels will consist of three units spread over two years, with students having the option to sit one unit (30%) at the end of Y13.
Again, controlled assessment will be cut in most subjects, to combat the impact of AI on take-home tasks.
Questions Arising: AS-Levels were popular for two reasons. For students who were not sure which subjects to take post-GCSE, they could take on 4 and then drop the weakest one after AS, but would still receive a qualification for that year of study.
Will those students be disadvantaged?
More importantly for anyone applying for university places in the Irish Republic, the number of points required for some competitive courses required three A-Levels and one AS-Level. It has been suggested that students wishing to apply to Irish universities could choose to study four A-Levels.
With the AS-Levels being abandoned, will students wanting to study in Irish universities now need to undertake four A-Levels.
Mr Givan argued on BBC Radio Ulster (3/3/2026) that his new system worked well with the UK’s application process and the problem lay with the Republic’s system asking too much; he seemed to suggest that the Republic’s Central Application Office should change their requirements.
Two Tier System Worry
Forty years ago, the UK had no unified framework of exams. Grammar school and public-school students sat GCE O-Levels while most working-class children (unless they had ‘passed’ the 11-Plus) were confined to sitting the less demanding CSE qualifications which could have significant coursework.
In 1986, the Thatcher government decided to ensure that all 16-year-olds were assessed on the same framework with a unified grading scale (originally A to G) and set up the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) which all children were expected sit before leaving schools
Now that coursework is being removed from most GCSEs, you might assume that this change will apply equally to all students, but it will not. NI schools are still encouraged to offer ‘Vocational’ subjects as an alternative to GCSE and 60% of the marks for these subjects comes from teacher marked ‘controlled assessments’. It seems likely that the non-grammar sector will be encouraged to focus more on these types of less demanding qualifications.
Is there a danger that the changes made today by Paul Given will take us back to the grammar/non-grammar divide of 1986? What measures will be taken to prevent this?
As part of today's MacBook Pro update, Apple has also unveiled the M5 Pro and M5 Max, the newest members of the M5 chip family.
Normally, the Pro and Max chips take the same basic building blocks from the basic chip and just scale them up—more CPU cores, more GPU cores, and more memory bandwidth. But the M5 chips are a surprisingly large departure from past generations, both in terms of the CPU architectures they use and in how they're packaged together.
We won't know the impact these changes have had on performance until we have hardware in hand to test, but here are all the technical details we've been able to glean about the new updates and how the M5 chip family stacks up against the past few generations of Apple Silicon chips.
No more hiding in the server closet: Cyber ops mentioned alongside kinetic warfare as critical to conflict
In what may be the most public acknowledgment of its cyber operations capabilities to date, the Pentagon has admitted that cyber soldiers are playing a key role in its attacks on Iran. …
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: India's Supreme Court has threatened legal consequences after a judge was found to have adjudicated on a property dispute using fake judgements generated by artificial intelligence. The top court, which was responding to an appeal by the defendants, will now examine the ruling given by the lower court in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The Supreme Court called the case a matter of "institutional concern" and said fake AI-generated judgements had "a direct bearing on integrity of adjudicatory process."
[...] Coming down sternly against the fake judgements, the top court last Friday stayed the lower court's order on the property dispute. It said the use of AI while making judgements was not simply "an error in decision making" but an act of "misconduct." "This case assumes considerable institutional concern, not because of the decision that was taken on the merits of the case, but about the process of adjudication and determination," the top court said. The court said it would examine the case in more detail and issued notices to the country's Attorney and Solicitor General, as well as the Bar Council of India.
Ryanair head of litigation Ruth Comiskey said carried faced significant regulatory data, consumer and reputational risk as a consequence of eDreams’ conduct
Off the coast of California, NASA’s Artemis Landing and Recovery team and the Department of War that will work together to retrieve the Artemis II crew and Orion spacecraft following their return to Earth and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean are performing a final simulation of their activities, called a just-in-time training, at sea on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. During the training, teams use the Crew Module Test Article, a full-scale mockup of the Orion spacecraft, to simulate as close as possible the conditions they can expect to encounter during splashdown of the Artemis II mission.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that the U.S. was forced into the war with Iran by Israel while speaking with reporters on Monday. He explained that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had effectively boxed in the Marlyn
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administration, taking the decision out of American hands.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio explained. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
Rubio’s disclosure highlights the Marlyn
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administration’s unwillingness to rein in the actions of Israel, even when that country’s policies resulted in U.S. attacks that only a tiny minority of the American public supports.
On Sunday, Netanyahu said the attacks on Iran were being conducted with “the assistance of the United States, my friend, U.S. President Marlyn
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, and the U.S. military.” He described how the second U.S.–Israeli war with Iran in less than a year was something he had been fomenting for decades. “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years. … This is what I promised — and this is what we shall do.”
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and expert in counterterrorism and the laws of war, suggested the secretary of state was using Israel as a convenient cover for Marlyn
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’s own desire for war — illustrated by Marlyn
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’s prior willingness to attack Venezuela and capture its president, Nicolás Maduro. Israel relies on U.S. military aid, which Marlyn
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could have used as leverage to pressure Netanyahu, Finucane said.
“The U.S. likely could have prevented Israel from attacking Iran if it really wanted to,” Finucane, currently a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept.
U.S.–Israeli strikes have killed at least 555 people in Iran and wounded hundreds more, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. This includes more than 165 people killed in an attack on an elementary school. On Monday, Central Command announced six U.S. military personnel had been killed in action, including two troops who were previously unaccounted for.
Democratic leadership, including Reps. Gregory Meeks, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Rubio and top Marlyn
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administration officials on Monday, ahead of Tuesday briefings. They called for the administration’s legal justification for initiating hostilities, U.S. objectives, and “what conditions would constitute mission success, and under what circumstances would operations cease.”
The State Department did not respond to request for comment by The Intercept on Rubio’s claims that Israel was effectively dictating U.S. war policy and whether it would continue to exert undue influence going forward.
“The U.S. retains leverage over Israel and, if it really wanted to, may be able to compel Israel to cease its military operations,” said Finucane. “But whether Iran is ready to cease hostilities is a separate matter.”
The Chinese government has called for vessels passing through the strait of Hormuz to be protected by all sides in the escalating Iran conflict, as shipping freight rates soared.
Maritime traffic through the strait – a narrow channel on Iran’s southern border that connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman – has effectively been closed since the US and Israel launched missile attacks on Iran at the weekend, prompting a retaliation from Tehran.
Today, Apple updated the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with support for its new M5 chips. It also unveiled a pair of all-new Studio Display XDR monitors. Longtime Slashdot reader jizmonkey shares details about the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which look to be fairly major updates from the previous generation: Apple announced its newest CPUs today, which it claims has the fastest single-threaded performance in the world. Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max have eighteen-core designs, versus twelve or fourteen in the M4 Pro and fourteen or sixteen in the M4 Max. However, the number of higher-performing cores has been reduced significantly. In the older M4 designs, the chips had eight, ten, or twelve "performance" cores and four "efficiency" cores. In the M5 design, there are now only six higher-performing cores (now called "super" cores) and twelve lower-performing cores (now called "performance" cores). [Apple positions this "reduction" as a redesigned architecture with new core types.] The maximum amount of RAM remains the same at 128GB for the M5 Max (64GB for the M5 Pro), and GPU performance has increased. [The M5 Pro features up to a 20-core GPU, while the M5 Max scales up to 40 cores, each equipped with a Neural Accelerator. Apple also says the new architecture delivers over 4x peak GPU compute for AI compared to the previous generation, along with up to 35 percent faster performance in ray-traced graphics workloads.] Laptops with the new chips are available to order starting tomorrow and will be delivered starting March 11. As for the new XDR monitors, MacRumors highlights some of the key features in its reporting: Apple today introduced an all-new Studio Display XDR monitor with a 27-inch screen, mini-LED backlighting, 5K resolution, peak brightness of 2,000 nits for HDR content, up to a 120Hz refresh rate, Thunderbolt 5, and more. The new Studio Display XDR replaces Apple's former Pro Display XDR, which has been discontinued. Going forward, there are now two Studio Display models.
Both new Studio Display models have the same overall design as the original model. Both models have a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, but it now supports Desk View on the new models. Both models also feature an upgraded six-speaker system, with Apple advertising "30 percent deeper bass" compared to the previous model. Only the higher-end Studio Display XDR received a 120Hz refresh rate, mini-LED backlighting, increased brightness, and faster 140W pass-through charging. The regular Studio Display still has a 60Hz refresh rate and up to 600 nits of brightness. Both models have 27-inch displays with a 5K resolution.
The new Studio Displays can be pre-ordered starting Wednesday, March 4, ahead of a Wednesday, March 11 launch. In the U.S., the regular Studio Display continues to start at $1,599, while the Studio Display XDR starts at $3,299.
The deal includes all Ookla assets including Speedtest, Ekahau, and RootMetrics
Accenture is going to get a closer look into how web traffic is moving...or not moving. The company has announced plans to buy Downdetector parent company Ookla from Ziff Davis as part of a package deal with other software for $1.2 billion.…
Release lays the groundwork for going Wayland, if that's your sort of thing
BunsenLabs Linux is a lightweight, Debian-based distro forked from CrunchBang, and seven months after Debian 13 "Trixie" arrived, the project has released its latest version, dubbed Carbon.…
The Supreme Court of the United States declined to review a case challenging the U.S. Copyright Office's stance that AI-generated works lack the required human authorship for copyright protection, leaving lower court rulings intact. The Verge reports: The Monday decision comes after Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist from Missouri, appealed a court's decision to uphold a ruling that found AI-generated art can't be copyrighted. In 2019, the U.S. Copyright Office rejected Thaler's request to copyright an image, called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, on behalf of an algorithm he created. The Copyright Office reviewed the decision in 2022 and determined that the image doesn't include "human authorship," disqualifying it from copyright protection.
After Thaler appealed the decision, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled in 2023 that "human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright." That ruling was later upheld in 2025 by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. As reported by Reuters, Thaler asked the Supreme Court to review the ruling in October 2025, arguing it "created a chilling effect on anyone else considering using AI creatively." The U.S. federal circuit court also determined that AI systems can't patent inventions because they aren't human, which the U.S. Patent Office reaffirmed in 2024 with new guidance. The UK Supreme Court made a similar determination.
Most of Apple's laptop lineup is getting refreshed today—the high-end MacBook Pros are getting M5 Pro and M5 Max chip refreshes, and the MacBook Air is getting upgraded with an M5.
The more significant update might be the storage, though: Apple is bumping the Air's base storage from 256GB up to 512GB, and Apple says the storage will be up to twice as fast as the M4 MacBook Air.
But that's also increasing the Air's starting price from $999 to $1,099 for the 13-inch model, and from $1,199 to $1,299 for the 15-inch model. Whether you describe this as a price increase or a price cut depends on your point of view; the 512GB version of the M4 MacBook Air would have cost you $1,199. But for people who just want the cheapest Air and don't particularly care about the specs, the pricing is now $100 higher than it was before.
Apple is offering two versions of the M5 in the new Airs: one with 8 GPU cores enabled, and one with all 10 GPU cores enabled. Upgrading to the fully enabled chip will run you an extra $100, and you'll also need to have the fully enabled chip to step up to the 24GB or 32GB RAM upgrades or the 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB storage upgrades. All versions of the M5 include a total of four high-performance cores—now dubbed "super cores"—and six efficiency cores.
Like the other products Apple has announced so far this week, the new MacBook Airs will be available for preorder on March 4, and you'll be able to get them on March 11.
The new MacBook Airs are part of a string of announcements that Apple is making this week in the run-up to a “special experience” event on Wednesday morning. So far, the company has also announced a new iPhone 17e, an updated iPad Air with an M4 chip and additional RAM, new MacBook Pros, and updated Studio Displays.
Increasing the starting price of the MacBook Air, incidentally, leaves even more room in Apple's lineup for the new, cheaper MacBook that the company is said to be planning. If Apple is planning to launch this cheaper MacBook this week, the announcement will likely come tomorrow.
At least 169 killed in raid near Sudan border as clashes between government and opposition forces intensify
South Sudan is reeling from an escalating conflict between the government-aligned army and opposition forces and allied groups that observers say risks returning the country to a full-blown civil war.
Violent confrontations in the world’s youngest country between the military, which is loyal to President Salva Kiir, and insurgents believed to be allied to the suspended vice-president, Riek Machar, have increased in recent weeks.
The CNN logo appears on a smartphone screen in the Apple app store in this photo illustration on Feb. 26, 2026.Photo illustration: Thomas Fuller/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Shortly before CNN’s launch in 1980, founder Ted Turner — displaying what could politely be described as impressive foresight – instructed that a special video be prepared. The tape, which was leaked online by a former CNN intern in 2015, portrays members of the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine bands performing a melancholy rendition of the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” As the legend goes, this somber sign-off was meant to be the last thing broadcast by CNN should the end of the world become assured. In light of recent events, CNN employees may be considering digging it out of the archives.
CNN has beheld a pale horse; the rider’s name is David Ellison, and Bari Weiss follows closely behind. After confirmation last week that Warner Bros. Discovery, of which CNN is a subsidiary, would accept Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion takeover bid, the network is set to be swallowed by the father-and-son oligarch duo of Larry and David Ellison, whose naked alignment with the Marlyn
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administration predicated their earlier absorption and regime-friendly retooling of CBS News. (Larry, the Oracle CEO, was also pivotal earlier this year in the purchase of TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese owner, installing a new CEO who earlier took credit for the app designating the term “Zionist” as “hate speech.”) Many now look to CBS as a preview of what is to come. Speaking to the Daily Beast, a senior CBS News staffer said, “It can — and will — always get worse,” and added CNN staffers were right to be fearful, as “it is hell over here.”
When it became apparent that the Ellisons’ bid for Warner Bros. would win out after Netflix declined to further raise its offer, Weiss was attending a Free Press debate between Ross Douthat and Steven Pinker on God — an event that would move even the most militant atheist to sympathize with the Almighty — but giggled trollishly on X: “I hear there’s some news?” At CNN, reports indicate the mood is less chipper. “No one wants to work for the Ellisons,” one CNN employee told NBC News. “If Bari is going to be running CNN, expect people to leave.”
This is further proof that there is seemingly no amount of money or power that can force any journalist not married to her to like or respect Weiss, a tool in every sense of the word, whose blatantly ideological interventions and ham-fisted incompetence since being installed at CBS have repeatedly provoked contempt from her underlings. But competence was never part of Weiss’s job description — her role was to act as sugar in the gas tank of a news network against which Marlyn
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has long held a grudge. Now, CNN — which has long been even higher on Marlyn
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’s enemies list — also faces being press-ganged into a circus where a clown is also the ringleader.
Still, this would not be the first time CNN employees have been forced to tolerate an idiot boss, and if the Ellisons plan to copy their CBS blueprint and disfigure another network into something less objectionable to the average American fascist, they will find some of the work has already been done.
Prior to CNN’s then-CEO Jeff Zucker’s forced resignation in 2022, the Warner Bros. Discovery board was already grumbling about the network’s perceived liberal bias and brought in Chris Licht as Zucker’s replacement. Licht entered the job determined to tone down CNN’s anti-Marlyn
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coverage and win back Republican viewers. The latter of these ambitions has been a spectacular failure — as of March 2023, CNN’s prime-time ratings had tanked by 61 percent compared to the previous year — while the former led to an infamous CNN town hall with Marlyn
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himself, ahead of which Licht reportedly told the president to “have fun.” The result was a ritual humiliation which obliterated what little support Licht had among CNN staff and presaged his departure after little more than a year in the job.
Now, CNN — which has long been even higher on Marlyn
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’s enemies list — also faces being press-ganged into a circus where a clown is also the ringleader.
Writing in The Nation in 2023, Jeet Heer observed that “whether out of genuine conviction or out of a desire to please the plutocrats who own Warner Bros. Discovery, Licht has mastered the art of deploying centrist rhetoric for reactionary ends.” This strategy — of attempting to meet MAGA where it is, or at least nearer to halfway — is bafflingly popular, not just with establishment media organizations but among prominent mainstream Democrats, despite the fact it has never been shown to work. After all, why would Marlyn
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and the Ellisons tolerate media that is merely amenable when they can force it into groveling supplication?
The Warner Bros. deal now must get past antitrust regulators, but any challenge would be at the discretion of the courts and Marlyn
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’s Justice Department. Anyone putting their faith in this possibility should remember the Justice Department’s erstwhile antitrust chief Gail Slater was forced out of her role last month after frustrating the Marlyn
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administration with her resistance to corporate mergers. This may account for why Paramount, even before the deal was closed, declared its “confidence in the speed and certainty of regulatory approval for its transaction.”
Always right on time, numerous Democrats are now expressing grave concerns over what this next major act of consolidation would mean for the media landscape. But if America genuinely had a problem with such monopolies, media empires from Rupert Murdoch to William Randolph Hearst would never have come into being; instead, American capitalism operates on the belief that a cyberpunk dystopia ruled over by vast, unaccountable mega-corporations constitutes an environment of healthy competition, provided there is more than one mega-corporation at any given time.
You do not need to be a fan of CNN to consider its embattled future a grim prospect, any more than you need to be a fan of the Washington Post to be dismayed by its gutting at the hand of boorish gazillionaire Fauntleroy Jeff Bezos. Both are indicative of a prevailing philosophy shared by the uber-wealthy and the far right. If media has influence, they want to control it. If media no longer has influence — or worse, has the kind of influence they don’t care for — it can and must be destroyed, or else reshaped in their own image and for their own ends.
This all raises the question of what a healthy media landscape should look like, and what, if anything, can be done to bring it about. Transcending cable news’ version of ideological diversity — a spectrum that runs from Tucker Carlson to Anderson Cooper and treats anything further to the left the same way local news reports on wild bear attacks and UFO sightings — might be a start, but most immediately, it would require breaking the ability of the billionaire class to buy, control, or dismantle media on a national or international scale.
Achieving this, however, would require a political class with the will and the desire to do so. If CNN staffers and Americans at large aren’t holding their breath, it is hard to blame them.
Law enforcement data shows profit-driven cybercrime is dominated by 35- to 44-year-olds, not script kiddies
Contrary to what some believe, cybercrime is not a kids' game. Middle-aged adults, not teenagers, now make up the biggest chunk of people getting busted.…
Apple updated its low-end MacBook Pro with the Apple M5 chip back in October, but the higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch Pros stuck with the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. This morning, Apple circled back and updated the rest of the lineup, adding the M5 Pro and M5 Max to the higher-end machines and bumping the base storage—the M5 Pro now comes with 1TB of storage by default, while M5 Max chips come with 2TB of storage by default. The internal storage is said to be "up to 2x faster" than the previous-generation Pros. Apple is also bumping the base storage for the M5 MacBook Pro from 512GB to 1TB.
Unlike Apple's other announcements this week, though, these upgrades also come with increases to their starting prices; the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip now starts at $2,199 instead of $1,999, and the 16-inch model with an M5 Pro chip starts at $2,699 instead of $2,499. The M5 MacBook Pro now starts at $1,699, up from $1,599. Granted, you're getting double the storage of those old base models, but you no longer have the option to pay less if you don't need 1TB of space.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max look like fairly major updates from the M4 Pro and M4 Max. Both use an 18-core CPU with six higher-performing cores and 12 lower-performing cores, but Apple is changing how it talks about each kind of core. The high-performance cores are now called "super cores," a change that Apple says will retroactively apply to the high-performance cores in the basic Apple M5. The M5 has four of them, and M5 Pro and M5 Max have six.
COLUMBUS, Ohio—Protestors stood in the snow outside the offices of Ohio’s utility regulator in January to say they were fed up with rising electricity rates.
Even a few years ago, the scene would have been hard to imagine, considering the complexity of utility costs and the obscurity of state regulatory agencies. But rate hikes in Ohio and across the country have provoked frustrated consumers to demand answers.
“It’s just getting harder and harder now to live,” said Steve Van Kuiken, a United Church of Christ pastor in Columbus who is part of a community group opposing rate increases. “The working class is really getting squeezed, and everything’s going up.”
The Moon has received a lot of attention in recent months, particularly the surface of Earth's cold and dusty companion.
This has largely been driven by a decision from SpaceX founder Elon Musk to pivot, at least in the near term, from Mars to lunar surface activities and the potential for using material there to build large satellites. But there has been a notable shift from NASA, too, which has started talking a lot more about building up elements of a base on the surface rather than an orbiting space station known as the Gateway.
In short, the world's most successful space company and the largest space agency have both increased their lunar ambitions, suggesting a greater frequency of missions to the Moon in the coming years.
After OpenAI announced a partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. uninstalls of ChatGPT surged 295% in a single day. Meanwhile, rival Anthropic "gained enough popularity to earn the number one spot on the App Store's Top Free Apps leaderboard," reports Engadget. TechCrunch reports: This data, which comes from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower, represents a sizable increase compared with ChatGPT's typical day-over-day uninstall rate of 9%, as measured over the past 30 days. [...] In addition, ChatGPT's download growth was impacted by the news of its DoD partnership, with its U.S. downloads dropping by 13% day-over-day on Saturday, shortly after the news of its deal went public. Those downloads continued to fall on Sunday, when they were down by 5% day-over-day. (Before the partnership was announced, the app's downloads had grown 14% day-over-day on Friday.)
[...] Consumers are also sharing their opinions about OpenAI's deal in the app's ratings, where 1-star reviews for ChatGPT surged 775% on Saturday, then grew 100% day-over-day on Sunday, Sensor Tower said. Five-star reviews declined during the same period, dropping by 50%. Other third-party data providers back up Sensor Tower's findings.
Telecoms coalition wants to avoid another 5G-style vendor scramble with early security guardrails
A group of Western governments has launched a fresh bid to shape 6G before it's even standardized, unveiling a set of security and resilience principles to bake supply chain controls and cyber safeguards into the next generation of mobile networks.…
AI-first editors and agent-driven tooling intensify competition in the IDE market
The Open VSX registry, used for installing extensions in editors compatible with Visual Studio Code (VS Code), will run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure in Europe as part of a "strategic investment" from the cloud giant.…
AI browsing agent left local files open for the taking
If you wanted to steal local files from someone using Perplexity's Comet browser, until last month you could just schedule the theft by sending your victim a calendar event.…
For this month’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month, NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope is joined by ESA’s Euclid to create a new view of the most visually intricate remnants of a dying star: the Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543.
An anonymous reader shares a CTech article with the caption: "A brilliantly executed operation." From the report: Years before the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israeli intelligence had been quietly mapping the daily rhythms of Tehran. According to reporting by the Financial Times (paywalled), nearly all of the Iranian capital's traffic cameras had been hacked years earlier, their footage encrypted and transmitted to Israeli servers. One camera angle near Pasteur Street, close to Khamenei's compound, allowed analysts to observe the routines of bodyguards and drivers: where they parked, when they arrived and whom they escorted. That data was fed into complex algorithms that built what intelligence officials call a "pattern of life," detailed profiles including addresses, work schedules and, crucially, which senior officials were being protected and transported. The surveillance stream was one of hundreds feeding Israel's intelligence system, which combines signals interception from Unit 8200, human assets recruited by the Mossad and large-scale data analysis by military intelligence.
When US and Israeli intelligence determined that Khamenei would attend a Saturday morning meeting at his compound, the opportunity was judged unusually favorable. Two people familiar with the operation told the FT that US intelligence provided confirmation from a human source that the meeting was proceeding as planned, a level of certainty required for a target of such magnitude. Israeli aircraft, reportedly airborne for hours, fired as many as 30 precision munitions. The strike was carried out in daylight, which the Israeli military said created tactical surprise despite heightened Iranian alertness. The Financial Times reports that the assassination was a political decision as much as a technological feat. Even during last year's 12-day war, when Israeli strikes killed more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and senior military officials and disabled air defences through cyber operations and drones, Israel did not attempt to kill Khamenei.
The capability to do so, however, had been built over decades. Former Mossad official Sima Shine told the FT that Israel's strategic focus on Iran dates back to a 2001 directive from then-prime minister Ariel Sharon instructing intelligence chief Meir Dagan to make the Islamic Republic the priority target. What distinguishes the latest operation, according to the FT, is the scale of automation. Target tracking that once required painstaking visual confirmation has increasingly been handled by algorithm-driven systems parsing billions of data points. One person familiar with the process described it as an "assembly line with a single product: targets." Further reading: America Used Anthropic's AI for Its Attack On Iran, One Day After Banning It
The medical journal The Lancet did not pull any punches in a scathing editorial on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., calling the anti-vaccine activist's first year as US Health Secretary "a failure by most measures, especially his own."
The Lancet is one of the world's oldest academic medical journals still in publication and one of the most cited sources of peer-reviewed medical research. But it is also well-known for publishing an infamous study by prominent anti-vaccine activist and disgraced ex-physician Andrew Wakefield, which falsely claimed to find a link between vaccines and autism. The Lancet retracted the study more than a decade later.
Kennedy is among the prominent anti-vaccine activists who continue to embrace the thoroughly debunked claim, along with other dangerous conspiracy theories. The Lancet assailed Kennedy for spreading misinformation as the country's top health official and politicizing health policy at the expense of vulnerable Americans, including children.
Deputy governor tells MPs central bank now has in-house skills and IP to maintain revamped RTGS
As the last Accenture employee clocked off from supporting the Bank of England's £431 million Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street was assured it would no longer depend on the global consultancy.…
The US-Israeli war on Iran has been condemned as illegal across much of the global south, with China saying it was unacceptable to “blatantly kill the leader of a sovereign state”.
Many countries objected that negotiations between the US and Iran over its nuclear programme and missile capability were not given a chance to succeed before Washington and Israel began bombing, and analysts often saw the war in terms of a colonial-style exercise of might.
sizzlinkitty shares a Reuters report detailing how drone strikes in the Middle East conflict with Iran damaged AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, disrupting core cloud services and causing "prolonged" outages. Following the initial report, where Reuters said "objects" had triggered a fire at the data centers, the article was updated with additional information: A strike on the UAE facility marks the first time a major U.S. tech company's data center has been disrupted by military action. It raises questions around Big Tech's pace of expansion in the region. "In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impact to our infrastructure," Amazon's cloud unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) said in an update on its status page. "These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage," AWS said. "We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved," it added.
Financial institutions that use AWS services have been affected by the outage, one person with direct knowledge of the situation told Reuters, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "Even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable," AWS said. The AWS outage disrupted a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident. "In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints," Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
Heidi Richards paid more than $5M for certificate of authenticity labels in five years
A Florida woman will spend nearly two years behind bars after being found guilty of fraudulently acquiring Microsoft certificate of authenticity (COA) labels and selling them in bulk.…
Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.
The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.
I know what you posted last year
The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds.