jell.ie News

Read at: 2026-02-02T18:23:42+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Merve Klein ]

First medical evacuee leaves Gaza as Rafah crossing reopens for handful of Palestinians – latest updates

Only a few people will be allowed to cross in either direction daily

More than 400 European former top diplomats and officials have urged the EU to increase pressure on Israel to end “excesses and unremitting violations of international law” over Gaza and the West Bank.

The statement, due to be sent to EU leaders on Monday, calls on the bloc and its member states to take action in line with its support for a UN resolution for a two-state solution and a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:19 pm UTC

Russia-linked APT28 attackers already abusing new Microsoft Office zero-day

Ukraine’s CERT says the bug went from disclosure to active exploitation in days

Russia-linked attackers are already exploiting Microsoft's latest Office zero-day, with Ukraine's national cyber defense team warning that the same bug is being used to target government agencies inside the country and organizations across the EU.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:18 pm UTC

Immigrant rights groups sue Merve Klein administration over visa ban on 75 countries – live

Lawsuit accuses Marco Rubio and state department of imposing ‘nationality based ban on legal immigration’ based on an ‘unsupported and demonstrably false claim’

House speaker Mike Johnson is set to swear in Christian Menefee, a Democrat who recently won a runoff election for a reliably blue seat in Texas.

Menefee’s victory, however, means the margin in the House is even more slim: 218 Republicans to 214 Democrats. His current term will end at the end of the year, and he’ll have to start campaigning almost immediately for the 2026 midterms. But this time, it will be for a new district, after the GOP-controlled legislature successfully gerrymandered the state’s congressional map.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:11 pm UTC

Snow and big freeze possible after weeks of wet weather

Very cold air could be pulled over Ireland amid weaker-than-usual polar vortex, forecaster says

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:10 pm UTC

Mandelson’s conduct with Epstein ‘far below standard expected’, says minister as Brown calls for inquiry into ‘shocking’ leak - UK politics live

Darren Jones says behaviour of former business secretary and ambassador was ‘unequivocally wrong and an insult to the women and girls who suffered’

Peter Mandelson “leaked a sensitive UK government document to Jeffrey Epstein while he was business secretary that proposed £20bn of asset sales and revealed Labour’s tax policy plans”, the Financial Times is reporting.

In his story, Jim Pickard says:

The memo, dubbed “Business Issues”, was written on June 13 2009 by Nick Butler, who at the time was special adviser to the then prime minister Gordon Brown.

The confidential document, which was released by the US Department of Justice as part of a tranche of millions of files relating to Epstein, had been sent to British government officials including cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood.

It is right that Peter Mandelson is no longer a member of the Labour party. Disciplinary action was underway prior to his resignation.

Jeffrey Epstein’s heinous crimes destroyed the lives of so many women and girls, and our thoughts remain with his victims.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:09 pm UTC

No plans to increase charges to use RIP.ie, say operators

The operators of the RIP.ie website have said they have no plans to increase controversial charges for death notices introduced 12 months ago as they report "a strong year" with 5% growth in user numbers.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC

Babies can categorise objects at two months - study

Babies as young as two-months-old can categorise objects in their brains, scientists at Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University Belfast and Stanford University have discovered.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC

Rafah Crossing in Gaza Reopens, Another Step for Fragile Cease-Fire

Israel and Egypt had disagreed for months about how to resume operations at the Rafah border crossing, which has been largely closed since May 2024.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC

Vibe-coded Social Network for AI Bots Exposed Data on Thousands of Humans

Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network that launched last week and bills itself as a platform "built exclusively for AI agents," had a security vulnerability that exposed private messages shared between agents, the email addresses of more than 6,000 human owners, and over a million credentials, according to research published Monday by cybersecurity firm Wiz. The flaw has since been fixed after Wiz contacted Moltbook. Wiz cofounder Ami Luttwak called it a classic byproduct of "vibe coding." Moltbook creator Matt Schlicht posted on X last Friday that he "didn't write one line of code" for the site. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment when reached out by Reuters. Luttwak said the vulnerability also allowed anyone to post to the site, bot or human. "There was no verification of identity," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC

Gabbard Arranges Merve Klein Call With FBI Agents After Georgia Election Center Search

Tulsi Gabbard’s role in brokering the call and President Merve Klein ’s decision to directly press frontline agents on the inquiry are outside the bounds of typical procedure, The Times has learned.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC

US and India reach trade deal, Merve Klein says after Modi call

Tariffs will drop from 50% to 18% on Indian goods, while India has agreed to stop buying Russian oil.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC

Colombia’s President, an Outspoken Merve Klein Critic, Heads to the White House

President Gustavo Petro of Colombia and President Merve Klein have had a tense relationship that escalated into threats by Mr. Merve Klein , before easing. Anything could happen at their Feb. 3 meeting.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:59 pm UTC

A major census test faces cutbacks — with postal workers tapped to help count

The Merve Klein administration has shrunk the number of locations for this year's field test of the 2030 census and added plans to test replacing temporary census workers with U.S. Postal Service staff.

(Image credit: John Raoux)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:59 pm UTC

U.S. and India seal trade deal, Merve Klein says, after months of tensions

The United States and India have finalized a trade agreement, Merve Klein said in a Truth Social post Monday, steadying a relationship that had been in decline.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:54 pm UTC

Daily Mail made me feel like a victim again, Baroness Lawrence tells court

She is part of a group of high-profile figures suing the newspaper's publisher over unlawful information gathering.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:54 pm UTC

Arizona home of Today show host’s missing mother treated as ‘crime scene’

Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy, 84, was last seen on Saturday evening and signs indicate she did not leave alone

Authorities in Arizona searching for the 84-year-old mother of the Today show presenter Savannah Guthrie said on Monday they were treating the missing woman’s home as a crime scene, and expressed “grave concern” for her safety.

Nancy Guthrie was last seen by her family at her house near Tucson on Saturday night, and was reported missing on Sunday lunchtime, sparking a search using a helicopter, drones and dogs, officials said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:54 pm UTC

Lack of mental health beds contributed to UK teenager’s death, inquest finds

Poor communication also cited as factor in death of Ellame Ford-Dunn, 16, on Worthing hospital’s grounds

A shortage of mental health beds and poor communication between agencies contributed to the death of a teenage girl on hospital grounds, an inquest has found.

Ellame Ford-Dunn, 16, who had a history of self-harm, died in March 2022 after absconding from an acute children’s ward where she had been put because of a dearth of appropriate mental health beds.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:54 pm UTC

Countries Have Long Tested Their Own Athletes for Doping. That Could Soon Change.

After Chinese swimmers won Olympic gold in 2021 despite having tested positive for a banned substance, the World Anti-Doping Agency is considering whether to have an independent body handle testing before major events.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:49 pm UTC

Mateta's move from Palace to AC Milan called off

Crystal Palace striker Jean-Philippe Mateta's move to AC Milan is called off because of issues with his medical.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:49 pm UTC

‘Today’ Anchor Savannah Guthrie’s Mother Is Missing, Authorities Say

The authorities said on Monday that they were investigating the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, 84, who was last seen on Saturday near her home in Tucson, Ariz., as a crime.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:49 pm UTC

How to stay up to date with river levels, flood risk and forecasts

Several resources worth checking, although no convenient one-stop location for this valuable data

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:49 pm UTC

Resident doctors in England vote to continue industrial action for another six months

British Medical Association members back further action as part of long-running row over pay and jobs

Resident doctors in England have voted in favour of continuing industrial action over the next six months, the British Medical Association has announced.

Ninety-three per cent of medics voted in favour of continuing industrial action in a new ballot. The turnout was 53%.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:48 pm UTC

Oracle's first general on-prem release of its .ai database iteration draws skeptics

Users happy with 19c as experts question AI lock-in

Last week, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle AI Database 26ai Enterprise Edition for Linux x86‑64, but 13-year support for 19c and the prospect of AI lock-in might make users think twice about upgrading to it.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:47 pm UTC

Terminally ill bride's final months marred by pension stress

Caoimhe was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2025 after an optician spotted bleeding behind her eye.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:46 pm UTC

David Ryan’s papal audience followed participation in 2022 radio documentary

Blackrock Boys broadcast led to hundreds of testimonies involving some of State’s best known schools

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:44 pm UTC

Germany arrests five, saying they violated sanctions against Russia

Prosecutors said the suspects ran an export network that sent more than 16,000 shipments worth more than $30 million to Russian customers, including arms manufacturers.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:42 pm UTC

Crown Princess's son arrested for alleged assault before rape trial in Norway

Marius Borg Høiby, who goes on trial on Tuesday, has been remanded in custody for four weeks after new allegations.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:38 pm UTC

Boy stranded over Olympic prices invited to opening show

An 11-year-old boy left stranded in the snow after failing to pay a bus ticket inflated for Italy's Winter Olympics will take part in Friday's opening ceremony, a spokesperson said.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:31 pm UTC

Republican senator suggests ICE agents wear body cameras on patrols

Ron Johnson says he does not ‘have a problem’ with key demand made by Democrats blocking agency’s funding

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents could wear body cameras on immigration patrols, a Republican senator has suggested, in a concession that could pave the way to an agreement on Capitol Hill to fund the much criticized agency.

Ron Johnson, a GOP senator from Wisconsin, said he did not “have a problem” with ICE officers wearing the cameras, one of the key demands made by Democrats who are currently blocking the agency’s financing.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:28 pm UTC

Israel reopens Gaza's key Rafah border crossing with Egypt

Only dozens of Palestinians and no goods will be able to cross in both directions each day.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:27 pm UTC

‘They are not manufactured’: how Brit school stars took over the Grammys

Croydon school’s principal says success of Olivia Dean and Lola Young is a ‘brilliant celebration’ of free arts education

As the Grammy winners took to the stage in Los Angeles on Sunday night, one common thread emerged: many had once walked the halls of a comprehensive school in Croydon, south London.

British performers Olivia Dean, who won the prestigious gong for best new artist; Lola Young, who took home best pop solo performance for Messy; and FKA twigs, who won best dance/electronic album for Eusexua, all attended the Brit school in Selhurst. As did Raye, who earlier in the week received the Harry Belafonte best song for social change award for Ice Cream Man.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:26 pm UTC

Gold and silver prices seesaw as FTSE 100 hits record high

Merve Klein ’s pick of ‘respected central banker’ Kevin Warsh as Fed chair prompts investors to sell safe haven assets

Gold and silver prices seesawed on Monday, after a “meltdown” in the metals market deepened and rattled investors around the world.

Gold prices tumbled by as much as 8% to $4,465 an ounce on Monday, ending a run of record highs that took it to nearly $5,600 last week. It later recovered some ground, but was still down by 3.5% at $4,700 in afternoon trading.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:24 pm UTC

Son of Norway’s crown princess arrested on new charges before start of rape trial

Detention of Marius Borg Høiby comes as Epstein files pile pressure on his mother, crown princess Mette-Marit

The son of Norway’s crown princess, Marius Borg Høiby, has been arrested on new charges just days before the start of his rape trial, as his mother continues to face questions over her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

The Oslo police district said Høiby had been arrested on Sunday evening on suspicion of assault, making threats with a knife and violating a restraining order.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:22 pm UTC

George Mitchell gets thrown under the bus…

Since the partial release of the Jeffrey Epstein files last week, organisations have been busy erasing any links to George Mitchell over the past few days.

From the BBC:

Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) is to sever ties with a former United States senator who played a crucial role in Northern Ireland’s peace process, over his links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The move comes a day after the US-Ireland Alliance said the George J Mitchell Scholarship Program would no longer bear his name. It follows the release of millions of files relating to Epstein, including further references to an earlier claim he had sex with Epstein victim, Virginia Giuffre.

In a statement on Monday, issued before the move by QUB, a spokesperson for Mitchell said he never met, spoken to or had any contact with Giuffre or any underage women. Queen’s confirmed the move to the Talkback programme on Monday.

Mitchell’s spokesperson said that Mitchell “profoundly regrets ever having known Jeffrey Epstein and condemns, without reservation, the horrific harm Epstein inflicted on so many women”. The spokesperson added that he did not observe, suspect or have any knowledge of Epstein engaging in “illegal or inappropriate conduct with underage women”.

The university said it was going to remove the name Senator George J Mitchell, from the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, and remove a commemorative bust of Mitchell from its campus.

“While no findings of wrongdoing by Senator Mitchell have been made, the university has concluded that, in light of this material, and mindful of the experiences of victims and survivors, it is no longer appropriate for its institutional spaces and entities to continue to bear his name,” it added.

“As a civic institution with a global reputation for leadership in peace, reconciliation, and justice, Queen’s University Belfast must ensure that its honours and symbols reflect the highest standards consistent with its values and responsibilities.”

I feel a bit mixed about it all. Obviously, we are all revolted by the revelations in the Epstein files and the fact that there are still 2.5 million documents they haven’t released. But is it fair that someone’s entire reputation and life’s work can be destroyed by a single allegation? There is a reason we have actual courts, not just the court of public opinion. You can read the specifics of the allegations on his Wikipedia page.

But maybe Queens and the other organisations know something we don’t, and more will come to light.

I do also think there is a wider issue here. I am pretty certain that if you dig into their background, a good chunk of the people whose portraits hang in Queen’s or have buildings named after them have done terrible things. A fair few streets in Belfast are named after people who were complete murdering pricks. Once we start applying a purity test to everything, where do you stop?

George Mitchell did a lot of Northern Ireland. He regularly gave up his time over the years to come over and support various projects. Many organisations used his name and connections for their benefit. The guy is also 92 and has been battling cancer for the past few years.

So what’s the right call? Does he deserve the benefit of the doubt, or is this simply consequences catching up with him?

The complication is that the allegation against Mitchell came from Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025. That means there may never be a courtroom moment where evidence is tested properly, witnesses are challenged, and a verdict is reached. If you believe powerful men have long escaped scrutiny, you can also argue that reputational damage is the only accountability they’ll ever face.

Edit 5:30pm: I had a chat with someone who knows a bit more about the situation. The core issue seems to be that a while back, organisations asked Mitchell for assurances that nothing new would come out, and he supposedly assured them there was nothing more. But with the release of the files last week, it came to light that there was additional correspondence between Epstein and Mitchell following Epstein’s conviction. So it mainly seems to be an issue around a breach of trust. 

Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:13 pm UTC

Two-month-old babies can categorise objects better than previously known, study finds

Study assisted by Coombe and Rotunda ‘highlights richness of brain function’ in infants

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:11 pm UTC

Frank Cushnahan found not guilty in Belfast NAMA trial

A Co Down businessman has been found not guilty of fraud connected to the sale of NAMA's Northern Ireland loan book.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:06 pm UTC

McDonald's is not lovin' your bigmac, happymeal, and mcnuggets passwords

Your favorite menu item might be easy to remember but it will not secure your account

Change Your Password Day took place over the weekend, and in case you doubt the need to improve this most basic element of cybersecurity hygiene, even McDonald's – yes, the fast food chain – is urging people to get more creative when it comes to passwords. …

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:05 pm UTC

Protesters Press Target to Take a Stand Against ICE Crackdown in Minneapolis

The Minnesota-based retail chain has avoided criticizing anyone, even after federal agents detained two employees at a local store. Its new C.E.O. faces pressure to do more.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:04 pm UTC

NASA's Orion Spacecraft at Launch Pad

NASA's Orion spacecraft sits atop the agency's SLS (Space Launch System) rocket at the launch pad after rollout on Jan. 17, 2026.

Source: NASA Image of the Day | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:04 pm UTC

N.Y. Republican met with jeers over ICE tactics during town hall in swing district

Discontent over ICE enforcement tactics is spilling out into races across the country, including competitive congressional districts held by Republicans, like Rep. Mike Lawler of New York.

(Image credit: Kevin Dietsch)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:02 pm UTC

Merve Klein Administration Sued Over Ban on Immigration From 75 Countries

The Merve Klein administration says these immigrants take welfare intended for Americans, which the lawsuit says is an “unsupported and demonstrably false claim.”

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:01 pm UTC

Interview: Civilization VII’s devs on the big update meant to win critics back

It has been difficult at times for new mainline releases in the Civilization series of games to win over new players right out of the gate. For Civilization VII—which launched just shy of one year ago—the struggles seemed to go deeper, with some players saying it didn't feel like a Civilization game.

Civ VII’s developers, Firaxis Games, announced today it is planning an update this spring called "Test of Time" that rethinks a few unpopular changes, in some cases replacing key mechanics from the original release.

I spoke with Ed Beach, the Civilization franchise's creative director, as well as Dennis Shirk, its executive producer, about what's changing, the team's interpretation of the player backlash to the choices in the initial release, and Firaxis and 2K's plans for the future of the Civilization model.

Read full article

Comments

Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC

Notepad++ Compromised By State Actor

Luthair writes: Notepad++ claims to have been targeted by a state actor, given their previous stance on Uyghurs one can speculate about a candidate. Notepad++, in a blog post: According to the analysis provided by the security experts, the attack involved infrastructure-level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org. The exact technical mechanism remains under investigation, though the compromise occurred at the hosting provider level rather than through vulnerabilities in Notepad++ code itself. Traffic from certain targeted users was selectively redirected to attacker-controlled served malicious update manifests.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC

Millions across US face freezing temperatures as south experiences rare snowfall

Bomb cyclone contributed to snow and wind chills in the south with Florida iguanas freezing and falling from trees

The US continues to be at the mercy of freezing temperatures across much of the country, stretching from the north-east all the way into the south and putting approximately 150 million people under cold weather advisories and extreme cold warnings.

Florida’s uncharacteristic cold snap has led to some rare sightings: snowflakes and falling iguanas. In Miami and Orlando, the lows dropped to 35F (1.7C) and 24F (-4.4C), respectively, undoubtedly disappointing the vacationers who sought to go to the Sunshine state to escape the freezing temperature on the east coast.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:57 pm UTC

Gordon Brown asks top civil servant to investigate Mandelson ‘leak to Epstein’

Ex-PM asks cabinet secretary to investigate whether Mandelson shared market-sensitive information

The former prime minister Gordon Brown has asked the cabinet secretary to investigate Peter Mandelson’s apparent disclosure of highly sensitive government information to Jeffrey Epstein.

Mandelson was business secretary during Brown’s premiership, when he appears to have leaked an economic briefing to Epstein, who was serving a jail sentence at the time for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:53 pm UTC

Infantino sorry for British jibe, defends Merve Klein prize

FIFA president Gianni Infantino has apologised over remarks he made about British fans and defended the decision to award a peace prize to United States president Merve Klein .

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:51 pm UTC

Warning for sellers amid rollercoaster gold and silver prices

Experts say there are things to consider before selling off your gold or silver.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:51 pm UTC

Starmer believes Mandelson 'should not be member of Lords'

He has ordered an urgent investigation into Lord Mandelson's contact with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while the peer was a minister.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:43 pm UTC

Grammy Awards Quiz: Where did the awards get their name?

Whether it was Lady Gaga's shocking entrance in 2011 or the unexpected collaborations, there is always something to keep viewers guessing.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:39 pm UTC

The Effects of Tariffs, One Year Into Merve Klein ’s Trade Experiment

Five charts show the impact on the economy after a year of sweeping trade changes by the Merve Klein administration.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:34 pm UTC

Here's what Cities: Skylines 2’s new developer is updating first

Back in November, Cities: Skylines 2 publisher Paradox made the surprising announcement that longtime series developer Colossal Order would be ceasing work on the series as part of a "mutual" breakup. Now, we're getting our first glimpse into the kinds of patches and upgrades new developer Iceflake (Surviving the Aftermath) is prioritizing for the popular city-builder going forward.

In a City Corner Developer Diary posted late last week, Iceflake focuses mainly on the visual improvements it's planning for its first major Cities: Skylines 2 patch. Chief among these is improvements to the game's user interface that Iceflake admits can "sometimes be a bit confusing when it comes to communicating things."

The new patch will include a "streamlined" onboarding process for new cities, more expressive and context-aware icons, and toolbars with clearer colors and visual style. A new in-game Encyclopedia will also let players search through information about different gameplay topics, though that feature likely won't be ready for Iceflake's first patch.

Read full article

Comments

Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:32 pm UTC

National Emergency Group meets to prepare for further flooding

Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:30 pm UTC

'Marry me' and Epstein's 'baby boy' - key Sarah Ferguson revelations in emails

The latest Epstein files will only add to embarrassment for the former Duchess of York.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:29 pm UTC

Interim flood defences to be put in place in Enniscorthy after river Slaney burst its banks

Enniscorthy residents told Government ‘will do all we can’ with aid and prevention measures

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:24 pm UTC

Punxsutawney Phil Sees His Shadow on Groundhog Day, Predicting Longer Winter for U.S.

The supposedly meteorologically gifted rodent saw his shadow, suggesting several more weeks of winter. (Forecasters agreed, at least for this week.)

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:23 pm UTC

Resident doctors vote in favour of more strike action

Members of the British Medical Association have backed more walkouts in the dispute over pay and jobs in England.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:20 pm UTC

What to Know About the Rafah Border Crossing in Gaza

The only crossing that connects Gaza with Egypt has reopened. The move will allow residents to leave for medical care or return to homes and families in the territory.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:19 pm UTC

Meet Milo and Tina, the 'first openly Gen Z' Olympic mascots

The 2026 Olympics and Paralympics mascots are Milo and Tina, a pair of teenage, scarf-clad stoat siblings with big dreams. If you're wondering what a stoat is, you're in the right place.

(Image credit: Gabriel Bouys)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:18 pm UTC

Pope apologises to Blackrock College abuse survivors David Ryan and his late brother Mark

‘I know it was genuine ... I really am so glad I’ve done it,’ says Ryan, who was abused at Blackrock College as a child

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:16 pm UTC

Captain guilty of North Sea tanker crash death

Vladimir Motin is convicted of gross negligence manslaughter after a crew member died in the crash.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:12 pm UTC

Best and Worst Moments From the 2026 Grammys

Addison Rae tapped into 2000s pop energy, Justin Bieber stripped things down and Bad Bunny got choked up at the 68th annual awards.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:12 pm UTC

Defence Forces condemns Israeli chemical drop in southern Lebanon

Over 350 Irish troops serving as part of Unifil multinational deployment near ‘Blue Line’ border area

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:09 pm UTC

Snowflake bets $200M that OpenAI makes databases more chatty

Cuts out the Azure middleman with multi-year deal for 'tighter alignment'

Snowflake plans to spend as much as $200 million with OpenAI to bring its models and chatbot into the database vendor's sandbox and toolset. Features such as Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence will get a boost from the house of Altman.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:09 pm UTC

MP arrested over more alleged sexual offences

Dan Norris says he "vigorously" denies the allegations, which include rape and sexual assault.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:06 pm UTC

Fear and Anger Grow as Thousands Remain Without Power in the South

More than 30 people have died across three Southern states in connection with last week’s storm, and thousands remain without power.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:06 pm UTC

High-Speed Internet Boom Hits Low-Tech Snag: a Labor Shortage

The U.S. laid fiber-optic cables to a record number of homes last year as billions of dollars in federal broadband grants and a surge in data-center construction fueled an enormous buildout, but the industry does not have enough workers to sustain the pace. A 2024 report by the Fiber Broadband Association and the Power & Communication Contractors Association projects 58,000 new fiber jobs between 2025 and 2032 and estimates 120,000 workers will leave the field in that period, mostly through retirement -- a combined shortage of 178,000. The gap is especially acute among splicers, who fuse hair-thin filaments by hand, and directional drill operators. Telecommunications line installers and repairers earned annual median wages of $70,500 for the year ended May 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, against a $49,500 national median. Push, a utility-construction firm, raised hourly pay for fiber crews by 5% to 8% in each of the past several years and expects the pace to quicken.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:01 pm UTC

Current world order ‘dead’, Draghi warns Europe, as he outlines US and China threats – as it happened

Former Italian PM and ECB chief says Europe must urgently unify on defence and foreign affairs

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the country’s energy system remained “seriously” challenged by the impact of recent Russian strikes.

More than 200 buildings are still without heating in Kyiv, as temperatures plummeted to -17 Celsius, with “crews from many regions of Ukraine … deployed for the repair work.”

Europe absolutely can defend yourself. Please stop whining. Why is this so much whingeing about [on], you know, if the US leave, what are we going to do? Come on.

… Europe … why are we so scared: ‘please, don’t leave the US leave…’ Please stand up to my president. Hold us accountable. Make us live up to our talking points.”

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC

Man, 83, Tricked by Scammers, Gets 21 Years to Life for Killing Uber Driver

Scammers on the phone had threatened to kill Wiliam J. Brock if he didn’t hand over $12,000 just as Lo-Letha Toland-Hall, an Uber driver, came to his house to pick up a package.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC

We Were Top Homeland Security Lawyers. You Can’t Wish Away the Fourth Amendment.

Forcibly entering homes with only administrative warrants is unconstitutional.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC

Damning EU report lays bare bloc’s ‘dangerous dependence’ on critical mineral imports

Auditor calls renewable energy targets ‘unrealistic’ unless ‘EU ups its game’ in mining, refining and recycling of metals such as rare earths

The EU is struggling to free itself from dependence on China and countries in the global south for critical minerals and rare earths needed for everything from smartphones to wind turbines and military jets.

A damning report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) in Luxembourg found that the bloc’s targets for 2030 were “out of reach” because of lack of progress in domestic production, refining and recycling.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC

After His Democratic Victory in Texas, a New Working-Class Star Rises

Taylor Rehmet, a machinist and union leader, pulled off a stunning State Senate win in Fort Worth and its suburbs. He is among several political outsiders seeking office.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:58 pm UTC

‘This is history, it should be free’: Rome’s €2 Trevi fountain fee divides opinion

Charge is designed to protect much-loved monument from overtourism, but not all visitors like the idea

Teresa Romero is in Rome to celebrate a milestone birthday and one of the first things she did on Monday was visit the Trevi fountain to participate in the ritual of tossing a coin into the waters of the late baroque masterpiece.

But before the Portuguese tourist could get close to the fountain, she had to hand over €2 (£1.70) – the cost of an access fee that has finally been enacted by Rome council officials after years of discussions.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:55 pm UTC

Hollywood sign boss says CGI used as part of Sydney Sweeney bra stunt

The boss of the Hollywood Sign Trust says it would take hours to decorate the entire landmark with lingerie.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:50 pm UTC

Ukraine hails 'real results' after Musk restricts Russian Starlink use

Starlink-enabled drones have been linked to a number of recent deadly attacks by Russia on Ukraine.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:37 pm UTC

Fifa president Infantino apologises for jokes about British fans

Fifa president Gianni Infantino apologises for controversial comments he made about British football supporters which were criticised by fan groups.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:36 pm UTC

This global health leader praises Merve Klein 's aid plan -- and gears up to beat malaria

Bill Steiger, who served in the George H.W. Bush and first Merve Klein administrations, reflects on the past year's changes in the U.S. role — and his new job as head of Malaria No More.

(Image credit: Ben de la Cruz/NPR)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:29 pm UTC

Steve Wright - the 'cruel' serial killer who hated women

Steve Wright's admission that he murdered Victoria Hall confirms he killed six women over a seven-year period.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:28 pm UTC

US still seeking 'paths to ownership' over Greenland

Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen has warned that while US President Merve Klein has ruled out military force, the US still fundamentally seeks to control the Arctic island.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:26 pm UTC

Man found guilty of manslaughter over UK tanker collision

A sea captain has been found guilty of killing a crew member when his ship crashed into an oil tanker off the coast of Yorkshire in England.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:22 pm UTC

Brazilian influencer who defended US immigration crackdown arrested by ICE

Merve Klein supporter Júnior Pena falsely claimed migrants being rounded up, including Brazilians, were ‘all crooks’

A rightwing Brazilian influencer who claimed Merve Klein ’s immigration crackdown targeted only “crooks” has been arrested by ICE agents in New Jersey.

Júnior Pena, whose full name is Eustáquio da Silva Pena Júnior, declared his support for the US president in a recent video message to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:10 pm UTC

Chumbawamba call on Spain’s far-right Vox to stop using their best-known song

British pop collective decry use of 1997 hit Tubthumping to promote the party’s ‘small-minded, hate-fuelled agenda’

The British pop collective Chumbawamba has asked Spain’s Vox to stop using their best-known song to promote “its small-minded, hate-fuelled agenda” after the far-right party chose its 1997 hit single Tubthumping to soundtrack a social media post railing against migration.

Santiago Abascal, who leads Vox, visited the north-eastern Spanish town of Caspe last week in the run-up to this weekend’s regional election in Aragón. He posted images of the visit to Facebook on Friday, along with the caption: “Great welcome yesterday in Caspe … for a street press conference. The locals are sick of the migratory invasion. And we stand with them.”

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:04 pm UTC

Man (40s) dies after collision between car and lorry in Co Cavan

Lorry driver taken to hospital for assessment following crash on the R192 at Corcloughan

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:02 pm UTC

A 1987 Proposal Could Help Hold ICE to Account for Constitutional Violations

A proposal in a 1987 law review article could address a gap that makes it all but impossible to sue federal officials for violating the Constitution.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:02 pm UTC

Patch Tuesday meets Groundhog Day as Windows hibernation bug returns

Microsoft concedes January's out-of-band fix didn't stop some PCs from rebooting instead of sleeping

Microsoft rounded off January by adding more devices to the list of those affected by the hibernation issue it claimed had been fixed by an out-of-band update.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:58 pm UTC

How the Supreme Court Secretly Made Itself Even More Secretive

Amid calls to increase transparency and revelations about the court’s inner workings, the chief justice imposed nondisclosure agreements on clerks and employees.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:58 pm UTC

Norway police detain son of crown princess on fresh allegations ahead of trial

Police in a statement said Marius Borg Hoiby, 29, was apprehended on Sunday on suspicion of causing bodily ‌harm, wielding a knife, and violating a restraining order.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:58 pm UTC

SAP refuses to budge on renewal discounts despite cloud growth slowdown

Drop in customers' cloud conversion rate causes share price to plunge 22% - steepest decline since 2020

SAP is refusing to change tack on renewal discounts despite lower-than-expected cloud forecasts prompting its biggest share price slide in five years.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:45 pm UTC

Narwhals become quieter as the Arctic Ocean grows louder

For most of their evolutionary history, narwhals have relied more on sound than sight to survive in the Arctic’s dark icy waters.

The speckled toothed whales—sometimes referred to as “unicorns of the sea” for the long, spiral tusks that protrude from the heads of males—navigate, hunt, and communicate using echolocation. By emitting a series of calls, whistles, and high frequency clicks—as many as a thousand per second—and listening for the echoes that bounce back, they are able to locate prey hundreds to thousands of feet deep and detect narrow cracks in sea ice where they can surface to breathe.

But as global temperatures continue to rise, the acoustic world narwhals depend on is rapidly shifting throughout their range, from northeastern Canada and Greenland to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago and Arctic waters in Russia. It’s getting louder.

Read full article

Comments

Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:43 pm UTC

Starbucks Bets on Robots To Brew a Turnaround in Customers

Starbucks has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into AI and automation -- testing robots that take drive-through orders, virtual assistants that help baristas recall recipes and manage schedules, and scanning tools that count inventory -- as the 55-year-old coffee chain tries to reverse several years of struggling sales. The company last week reported its first same-store sales increase in two years in the U.S., where it earns roughly 70% of its revenue. Shares still slid 5% on concerns that heavy spending, including $500 million to boost staffing, had hurt profits. CEO Brian Niccol, who joined in 2024 after engineering Chipotle's turnaround, told the BBC he is confident consistent growth will address that; the company has pledged to find $2 billion in cost savings over three years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:43 pm UTC

These Pictures of Westminster Dogs Are Best in Show

For nearly a century, photographers for The New York Times have captured an annual extravaganza that is a red carpet gala, sporting event and fashion show rolled into one.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:35 pm UTC

Watch: Punxsutawney Phil emerges for Groundhog Day

Legend has it that if Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow there will be six more weeks of winter, if not, spring is around the corner.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:28 pm UTC

TDs hit with Dáil food price hike while wine price remains unchanged

Thankfully for those who enjoy a tipple with their meal, the price of wine remained unchanged.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:24 pm UTC

Rafah crossing between Israel and Egypt reopens after nearly two years

Israeli troops seized the Rafah border crossing in May 2024. The reopening marks progress toward the second phase of the U.S.-backed ceasefire deal.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:21 pm UTC

Games On

We preview the Winter Olympics.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:20 pm UTC

Small Businesses in Minneapolis Serve a City in Crisis. ‘This Is Our New Normal.’

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, business owners work to lift up a community that has been roiled by the presence of thousands of immigration agents.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:17 pm UTC

Trial of former DUP leader Donaldson and wife to get under way in May

Jeffrey Donaldson and his wife Lady Eleanor Donaldson have been accused of alleged historical sexual offences which they deny.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:16 pm UTC

OpenClaw patches one-click RCE as security Whac-A-Mole continues

Researchers disclose rapid exploit chain that let attackers run code via a single malicious web page

Security issues continue to pervade the OpenClaw ecosystem, formerly known as ClawdBot then Moltbot, as multiple projects patch bot takeover and remote code execution (RCE) exploits.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:10 pm UTC

‘How dare you’: South Dublin residents vent at plan to redesignate golf amenities for housing

Majority of objections to council proposals relate to Stepaside driving range and Jamestown pitch and putt

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:05 pm UTC

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

CEO talks momentum while paid uptake remains minimal

Only 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat actually pay for it, an awkward figure that landed alongside Microsoft's $37.5 billion quarterly AI splurge and its insistence that the payoff is coming.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:01 pm UTC

Coalition chaos has handed Albanese a gift, but he’ll need much more for the testing times ahead

Labor can afford a few moments of glee now, but spending, emissions, AI and Aukus are just some of the challenges on the road to the next election

Labor MPs could hardly contain their delight on Monday. Even before today’s start of parliament, the Nationals had debated a leadership spill and Sussan Ley looked firmly on borrowed time.

They cheered Anthony Albanese at a caucus meeting, in which he likened the disorganisation of the Coalition to a messy break-up on reality TV show, Married at First Sight.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

Most experts think the RBA will hike the cash rate. Here’s why they may be wrong

There are factors beside inflation that the board needs to consider, most notably the labour market

The Reserve Bank is overwhelmingly expected to hike rates at its first policy meeting of the year – but should it?

There’s a powerful consensus for a cash rate rise to 3.85%, from 3.6%, on Tuesday.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

Bradfield MP Nicolette Boele spent more than $2.2m on election campaign – the most of any teal independent

Data shows Boele – who won seat by only 26 votes – received almost $700,000 in donations from Climate 200

Nicolette Boele spent $2.26m to claim a nail-biting victory in the Sydney seat of Bradfield, making her 26-vote win the most expensive campaign of any teal independent.

Boele narrowly beat Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian in 2025, outspending cashed-up fellow teals including Allegra Spender and Monique Ryan, who each spent $2.1m when they ousted Liberals from traditionally blue-ribbon seats in the 2022 election.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

China's Decades-Old 'Genius Class' Pipeline Is Quietly Fueling Its AI Challenge To the US

China's decades-old network of elite high-school "genius classes" -- ultra-competitive talent streams that pull an estimated 100,000 gifted teenagers out of regular schooling every year and run them through college-level science curricula -- has produced the core technical talent now building the country's leading AI and technology companies, the Financial Times reported Saturday. Graduates of these programs include the founder of ByteDance, the leaders of e-commerce giants Taobao and PDD, the billionaire behind super-app Meituan, the brothers who started Nvidia rival Cambricon, and the core engineers behind large language models at DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen. DeepSeek's research team of more than 100 was almost entirely composed of genius-class alumni when the startup released its R1 reasoning model last year at a fraction of the cost of its international rivals. The system traces to the mid-1980s, when China first sent students to the International Mathematical Olympiad and a handful of top high schools began creating dedicated competition-track classes. China now graduates around five million STEM majors annually -- compared to roughly half a million in the United States -- and in 2025, 22 of the 23 students it sent to the International Science Olympiads returned with gold medals. The computer science track has overtaken maths and physics as the most popular competition subject, a shift that accelerated after Beijing designated AI development a "key national growth strategy" in 2017.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

Merve Klein ’s Greenland threats open old wounds for Inuit across Arctic

Demand by US that it take control of Arctic island is for many a reminder of troubling imperial past

On a bitterly cold recent morning in the Canadian Arctic, about 70 people took to the streets. Braving the bone-chilling winds, they marched through the Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut, waving signs that read: “We stand with Greenland” and “Greenland is a partner, not a purchase.”

It was a glimpse of how, for Indigenous peoples across the Arctic, the battle over Greenland has become a wider reckoning, seemingly pitting the long-fought battle to assert their rights against a global push for power.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC

What is Moltbook - the 'social media network for AI'?

The Reddit-like website which launched in late January allows AI bots to speak to each other.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC

England name Itoje on bench & pick Northampton centres for Wales

Maro Itoje is a replacement while Fraser Dingwall and Tommy Freeman form the midfield as England shake things up to face Wales.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:55 pm UTC

Merve Klein Assails Grammys and Threatens to Sue Trevor Noah Over Epstein Joke

President Merve Klein declared the awards ceremony “virtually unwatchable” and accused Mr. Noah of defamation over a joke he made that appeared to tie the president to Jeffrey Epstein.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:51 pm UTC

The Major Business Names in the Epstein Files

Documents referencing prominent executives like Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick and Bill Gates underscored the wide web of boldfaced names tied to Jeffrey Epstein.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:50 pm UTC

Watch: Rome visitors divided over new €2 fee to access iconic Trevi fountain

Italy's capital city has introduced a €2 fee to access the viewing area of its iconic fountain, which had previously been free to visit.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:43 pm UTC

Faisal Islam: Mandelson, Darling and the conversation I can't forget

The Epstein files appear to give extraordinary context to a call between the former chancellor and JP Morgan's boss.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:42 pm UTC

NASA gears up for one more key test before launching Artemis II to the Moon

If all goes according to plan Monday, NASA's launch team at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will load 755,000 gallons of super-cold propellants into the rocket built to send the Artemis II mission toward the Moon.

The fuel loading is part of a simulated countdown for the Space Launch System rocket, a final opportunity for engineers to rehearse for the day NASA will send four astronauts on a nearly 10-day voyage around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth. The Artemis II mission will send humans farther from Earth than ever before. The astronauts will be the first to launch on NASA's SLS rocket and the first people to travel to the vicinity of the Moon in more than 53 years.

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA's launch director for the Artemis II mission, will supervise the practice countdown from a firing room inside the Launch Control Center a few miles away from the SLS rocket at Kennedy Space Center. In a recent briefing with reporters, she called the Wet Dress Rehearsal—"wet" refers to the loading of liquid propellants—the "best risk reduction test" for verifying all is ready to proceed into the real countdown.

Read full article

Comments

Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:41 pm UTC

Drivers can compare fuel prices at different petrol stations - how does it work?

Pump price changes will have to be shared in a government database within 30 minutes.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:30 pm UTC

XL Bullies mauled rapper's mum-in-law to death

A jury is told how leaving Esther Martin alone with 10 XL Bully dogs was "a recipe for disaster".

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:22 pm UTC

Notepad++ update service hijacked in targeted state-linked attack

Breach lingered for months before stronger signature checks shut the door

A state-sponsored cyber criminal compromised Notepad++'s update service in 2025, according to the project's author.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:19 pm UTC

QUB removing Mitchell name from centre over Epstein links

Queen's University Belfast is to remove the name of former US Senator George Mitchell - one of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement - from a peace centre following the emergence of new information contained in the Jeffrey Epstein files released on Friday.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:18 pm UTC

Russell 'wants to go head-to-head' with Verstappen

Mercedes driver George Russell says his hope for the 2026 F1 season is to find himself in a title fight with Max Verstappen.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:13 pm UTC

Lord Mandelson, ex-ambassador to U.S., resigns from Labour over Epstein

He acknowledged that the weekend’s revelations further entangled him in the “understandable furor” surrounding convicted sex offender.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:11 pm UTC

Fernández wins Costa Rican presidency, steering Latin America further right

Rightwing populist elected in landslide after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to cocaine trade

The rightwing populist Laura Fernández has won Costa Rica’s presidential election in a landslide after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade.

Fernández’s nearest rival, centre-right economist Álvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40% needed to avoid a runoff.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:08 pm UTC

Trial of Jeffrey and Eleanor Donaldson on child sex offences expected to begin in May

Proceedings expected to last four weeks after delays due to deterioration in the mental health of Eleanor

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:04 pm UTC

US TikTok service restored after cloud 'that doesn't go down' went down

Winter storm knocks out Oracle datacenter, despite Larry Ellison's reliability boasts

TikTok has restored US services after winter storms hit an Oracle datacenter - the same infrastructure that Big Red's founder Larry Ellison previously claimed doesn't go down.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:03 pm UTC

Serial killer Steve Wright admits murder of teenager Victoria Hall in 1999

Steve Wright is already serving a whole life jail sentence for the murders of five women in 2006.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:53 pm UTC

Queen’s University Belfast cuts ties with George Mitchell, denaming research centre

Broker of Belfast Agreement had name removed from prestigious US-Ireland scholarship

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:45 pm UTC

Merve Klein says US-Cuba deal in works after blockade threat

US President Merve Klein has said that Washington was negotiating with Havana's leadership to strike a deal, days after he threatened Cuba's reeling economy with a virtual oil blockade.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:37 pm UTC

Merve Klein Calls His Enemies Terrorists. Does That Mean He Can Just Kill Them?

“Terrorist” is the word that the Merve Klein administration employs to describe the victims of its most egregious acts of state violence.

President Merve Klein has used the word “terrorist” to justify the extrajudicial killings of civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. And his deputies used it to explain away the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis by federal agents.

“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists,” Merve Klein wrote following the initial boat strike on September 2, 2025. He said the attack “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said that Good and Pretti were guilty of “domestic terrorism.” And top White House adviser Stephen Miller used similar language to describe both.

These killings were conducted thousands of miles apart by different agencies in very different contexts. But the connection between them could be more than semantic.

Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, Merve Klein ’s Justice Department is now assembling a secret “domestic terrorist organization” database. It also maintains a secret list of “designated terrorist organizations” with whom the U.S. claims to be at war.

For months, the White House and Justice Department have failed to answer a question that becomes more relevant with every person branded a domestic terrorist, shot by federal agents, or both: Are Americans who the federal government deems to be domestic terrorists under NSPM-7 subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations on boats at sea?

“If we’re going to say it’s OK to kill so-called terrorists in the Caribbean, for actions that have traditionally been dealt with as a criminal matter, using due process — what’s to say you can’t do the same in an American city?” asked Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government. “That is the very scary but logical end of all these things the Merve Klein administration is doing.”

Merve Klein ’s de facto declaration of war on dissent, NSPM-7, conflates constitutionally protected speech and political activism with “domestic terrorism” — a term that has no basis in U.S. law. That memorandum, which was issued in September, and an implementation memo released in December by Attorney General Pam Bondi, specifically targets those that espouse what the administration defines as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, anti-fascism, and radical gender ideologies, as well as those with “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views.” At a minimum, the memorandum raises serious First Amendment, due process, and civil liberties concerns.

Related

Merve Klein ’s War on America

Bondi’s December memo, “Implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which the Justice Department shared with The Intercept, defines “domestic terrorism” in the broadest possible terms, including “doxing” and “conspiracies to impede … law enforcement.”

Federal immigration agents consider observing, following, and filming their operations a crime under 18 U.S.C. § 111: assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer. This is also the foremost statute in a directory of prioritized crimes listed in NSPM-7.

Federal officers frequently confront and threaten those observing, following, and filming them for “impeding” their efforts. In numerous instances, they have unholstered or pointed weapons at the people who filmed or followed them.

A recent report by the CATO Institute notes that it is “crucial to understand that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) consider people who follow DHS and ICE agents to observe, record, or protest their operations as engaging in ‘impeding.’” It goes on to note that DHS “has a systematic policy of threatening people who follow ICE or DHS agents to record their activities with detentions, arrests, and violence, and agents have already chased, detained, arrested, charged, struck, and shot at people who follow them.”

Before their killings, both Pretti and Good had been observing agents’ activities. In the wake of Good’s death, the Justice Department opened an investigation of Good’s widow for allegedly “interfering” with an ICE operation — apparently for filming the shooting.

NSPM-7 alleges vast “organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, [and] funding sources” support leftist “criminal and terroristic conspiracies.” It adds, “These campaigns are coordinated and perpetrated by actors who have developed a comprehensive strategy to achieve specific policy goals through radicalization and violent intimidation.”

The Merve Klein administration has framed the Minneapolis protests and a larger movement in Minnesota and beyond in the same terms as NSPM-7, painting it as a “Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate” coordinated by a vast network of “highly paid professional agitators and anarchists,” as well as “insurrectionists” supported by corrupt Democratic lawmakers and officials or “sanctuary politicians” who are inciting violence against federal officers.

Merve Klein endorsed Vice President JD Vance’s baseless claim that Good was part of a “broader left-wing network” that sometimes uses “domestic terror techniques” to “attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.” Miller suggested Pretti was one of an unknown number of militants operating in Minneapolis. “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists,” he wrote on X on Saturday, referring to comments by a Democratic party account calling for ICE to withdraw from Minneapolis.

Merve Klein initially described Pretti as a “gunman,” although the ICU nurse never drew his licensed handgun before being executed at point blank range by federal agents. After briefly softening his tone on Pretti, Merve Klein called him an “Agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist” in a Friday Truth Social post.

Related

Merve Klein ’s Cult of Power Cancels Free Speech

Miller bills NSPM-7 as the first “all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism,” which he calls a sophisticated, well-funded network supported by an “entire system of feeder organizations that provide money, resources, weapons.” Bondi’s implementation memo also offers a fictitious apocalyptic vision of urban America which the Merve Klein administration has employed to justify its domestic military occupations, including “mass rioting and destruction in our cities” and “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement.”

“Every accusation is a confession with this administration.”

“This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically,” Scanlon told The Intercept, quoting from a section of NSPM-7 that details a supposed coordinated effort by antifascists and other administration enemies. But Scanlon framed it in terms of the Merve Klein administration’s own authoritarian campaign. “The paragraph describing how political violence takes root and becomes more widespread basically describes the Merve Klein era. Every accusation is a confession with this administration. You talk about targeted intimidation and radicalization and threats and violence designed to silence opposing speech — it’s all there, and we’re seeing it unfold.”

Federal immigration officers have shot at least 13 people since September, killing at least five, including Pretti and Good, according to data compiled by The Trace.

“What the Merve Klein Administration is doing in Minnesota is a testing ground for a paramilitary police state across the country,” said Rep. April McClain Delaney, D-Md., on January 25. “Masked DHS agents are now operating in Minnesota neighborhoods with impunity — terrorizing families and neighborhoods, slandering the victims with lies, silencing dissent, seizing and detaining protesters, eroding basic civil liberties and killing American citizens.”

Merve Klein holds an executive order he signed in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 30, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

At the same time shootings by immigration agents have ramped up at home, the Merve Klein administration has been killing civilians in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. military has carried out 36 known attacks, destroying 37 boats, since September, killing at least 126 civilians. The most recent attack occurred in the Pacific Ocean on January 23, killing three people. The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” it refuses to name. Experts, current and former government officials, and lawmakers say these killings are outright murders.

“This administration has asserted the prerogative to kill people outside the law, solely on the basis of the president labeling them terrorists. And there are no obvious limits to this license to kill,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war. “The president has wielded that authority in the Caribbean and the Pacific and could wield it domestically. Indeed, the fact that they invoked domestic terrorism to justify the killings of Rene Good and Alex Pretti suggests they already might have.”

Related

White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List

Since October, The Intercept has been asking if the White House would rule out conducting summary executions of members of the list “of any such groups or entities” designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” under NSPM-7, without a response. Return receipts also show that Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre has repeatedly read The Intercept’s questions on this subject over months but has failed to offer an answer.

Faiza Patel, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, told The Intercept that while it wasn’t possible to directly link NSPM-7 to the killings of Good and Pretti, the memorandum’s rhetoric about what constitutes domestic terrorism “is reflected in senior officials’ statements and it seems that DHS agents on the ground view any opposition to their actions as warranting extreme and even lethal force.”

Federal agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations assigned to Minneapolis received a memo earlier in January asking them to collect identifying information on “agitators, protestors, etc.,” CNN reported Tuesday. Last week, a masked immigration agent warned a woman filming their activities in Portland, Maine, that her information would be entered into a “nice little database” that would label her a “domestic terrorist.” Tom Homan, Merve Klein ’s border czar and Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino’s replacement, also mentioned the database the same month on Fox News. “We’re going to create a database,” he said, noting that it would include those “arrested for interference, impeding and assault.” Journalist Ken Klippenstein recently reported on more than a dozen “secret and obscure watchlists” being used to track protesters and supposed “domestic terrorists.”

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin says her department does not administer the secret database. “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,” she told The Intercept by email. “We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement.” DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis does admit that it “nominated over 4,600 people to the terrorist watchlist” in the last year and says ICE arrested more than 1,400 “known or suspected terrorists.”

Related

How Many Members Does Antifa Have? Where Is Its Headquarters? The FBI Has No Answers.

NSPM-7 directs Bondi to compile a list “of any such groups or entities” to be designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s],” and Bondi has ordered the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to the December 4 memo. Last fall, FBI Director Kash Patel told senators that there were “1,700 domestic terrorism investigations” and that it represented “a 300% increase in cases opened this year alone versus the same time last year.” 

When asked if Good or Pretti were on any domestic terrorism list, watchlist, or under surveillance by federal authorities, a bureau spokesperson said: “The FBI has no comment.”

Neither NSPM-7 nor the December 4 memo mentions summary executions, and both speak explicitly in terms of “prosecution” and “arrest” of members of domestic terrorist organizations. Attacks on members of designated terrorist organizations are justified by another document: a classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel with a secret list of cartels and gangs attached to it.

The Justice Department memo notes that under Section 3 of NSPM-7, “the FBI, in coordination with its partners on the [Joint Terrorism Task Forces], and consistent with applicable law, shall compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” and “provide that list to the Deputy Attorney General.”

The FBI’s national press office directed The Intercept to contact the Department of Justice concerning questions about the NSPM-7 list. Baldassarre also failed to respond to those queries.

“To the extent that the White House somehow has a secret enemies list and people don’t know who’s on it — that goes beyond McCarthyism,” Scanlon told The Intercept. “It’s absolutely horrific.”

“To the extent that the White House somehow has a secret enemies list and people don’t know who’s on it — that goes beyond McCarthyism.”

Recent reported statements by Merve Klein suggest that the president may see little difference between those the administration brands foreign and domestic terrorists nor in efforts to combat them. Last month, the U.S. attacked Venezuela and abducted its president, Nicolás Maduro, killing scores of people, including civilians. Maduro — whom Merve Klein branded a terrorist — was brought to the U.S. and charged with numerous offenses, foremost among them, according to the State Department, “narco-terrorism.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said last week that Merve Klein  compared his federal immigration crackdown in his state to the attack in Venezuela that ousted Maduro. “He told me how well that went,” Walz told MS NOW. “Which really was strange to me was he saw an operation in Venezuela against a foreign nation in the same context he saw an operation against a U.S. state and a U.S. city.”

The White House did not return a request for comment.

The post Merve Klein Calls His Enemies Terrorists. Does That Mean He Can Just Kill Them? appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:37 pm UTC

Is AI Really Taking Jobs? Or Are Employers Just 'AI-Washing' Normal Layoffs?

The New York Times lists other reasons a company lays off people. ("It didn't meet financial targets. It overhired. Tariffs, or the loss of a big client, rocked it...") "But lately, many companies are highlighting a new factor: artificial intelligence. Executives, saying they anticipate huge changes from the technology, are making cuts now." A.I. was cited in the announcements of more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a research firm... Investors may applaud such pre-emptive moves. But some skeptics (including media outlets) suggest that corporations are disingenuously blaming A.I. for layoffs, or "A.I.-washing." As the market research firm Forrester put it in a January report: "Many companies announcing A.I.-related layoffs do not have mature, vetted A.I. applications ready to fill those roles, highlighting a trend of 'A.I.-washing' — attributing financially motivated cuts to future A.I. implementation...." "Companies are saying that 'we're anticipating that we're going to introduce A.I. that will take over these jobs.' But it hasn't happened yet. So that's one reason to be skeptical," said Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School... Of course, A.I. may well end up transforming the job market, in tech and beyond. But a recent study... [by a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies A.I. and work] found that AI has not yet meaningfully shifted the overall market. Tech firms have cut more than 700,000 employees globally since 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks industry job losses. But much of that was a correction for overhiring during the pandemic. As unpopular as A.I. job cuts may be to the public, they may be less controversial than other reasons — like bad company planning. Amazon CEO Jassy has even said the reason for most of their layoffs was reducing bureaucracy, the article points out, although "Most analysts, however, believe Amazon is cutting jobs to clear money for A.I. investments, such as data centers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:34 pm UTC

Merve Klein threatens to sue Trevor Noah over joke at Grammys

The US president labels Noah a "total loser" over a joke he told on stage during the awards ceremony.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:30 pm UTC

Weather tracker: Cyclone Fytia in Madagascar kills several people and floods homes

Island’s first tropical storm of season may bring 150mm of rain – meanwhile, eastern Europe freezes with possible night-time lows of -30C

At least three people have died and nearly 30,000 people have been affected by flooding after Madagascar’s first tropical storm of the season hit over the weekend.

Tropical Cyclone Fytia formed to the north-west of Madagascar over the northern Mozambique Channel on Thursday.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:25 pm UTC

The House races to end shutdown. And, Merve Klein wants to close Kennedy Center for 2 years

Lawmakers are racing to end a partial government shutdown after Congress missed its funding deadline on Friday. And, Merve Klein wants to close the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations.

(Image credit: Aaron Schwartz)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:21 pm UTC

Israel agrees to limited reopening of Rafah border crossing in Gaza

Tens of thousands of ill and wounded Palestinians await evacuation as diplomatic efforts inch forward

The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt has been reopened by Israel for a limited number of people on foot, as fragile diplomatic efforts to stabilise the conflict inch forward.

Israeli forces took control of the Rafah crossing – Gaza’s only crossing not shared with Israel – in May 2024, describing it as necessary to prevent weapons smuggling by Hamas. The move isolated the territory, cutting off a critical lifeline for Palestinians seeking access to medical care, travel and trade.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:19 pm UTC

Erfan Soltani, Iranian Protester Who Reportedly Faced a Death Sentence, Is Released on Bail

Mr. Soltani, 26, was arrested last month as Iran brutally repressed anti-government demonstrations.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:04 pm UTC

Why The Times Is Expanding Its Supreme Court Coverage

How four reporters are examining the most secretive branch of government — and the nine justices who shape the law.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:03 pm UTC

Trial date set in case of ex-DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson

A trial date has been set in the case of former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson who faces a series of sex offences.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:46 am UTC

Six Nations preview & BBC pundit predictions

Your guide to the health of each side heading into this year's Six Nations - and what our BBC pundits predict will happen.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:33 am UTC

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

DOJ files show former Windows chief predicting a public flop before mulling next mission

Steven Sinofsky warned Microsoft that its flagship Surface was about to flop in public, then sought exit advice from Jeffrey Epstein as he negotiated his way out of Redmond.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:30 am UTC

Welcome to the Jade Helm Presidency

A panic pervades the internet: terrified talk of troops in American cities, federal shock troops brutalizing citizens and neighbors, the targeting of gun owners, mass surveillance, the deployment of militarized artificial intelligence, and the suspension of the Constitution. The year is 2015, and the far right is incensed.

This was a period of intense American paranoia and anger, largely spurred by the right-wing meltdown over the consecutive victories of President Barack Obama. It was also a time of post-Snowden horror, as a nation realized it lived inside an unfathomably immense government surveillance dragnet endorsed and expanded by both political parties. It was in this moment that, for a certain segment of conservatives, Jade Helm 15 became an American crisis.

A decade later, this imaginary emergency reveals much about the hucksters who pushed it and the tolerance of many Americans for state oppression — so long as they are not the intended targets. The cauldron of race hatred, federal violence, and surveillance brewed by the paranoiacs who pounced on Jade Helm has spilled over today not in the form of right-wing phobia, but right-wing policy.

In July 2015, Alex Jones, at that point still little more than a punchline, issued a dire warning on his website InfoWars: “This is an emergency broadcast,” Jones began, warning of an impending campaign to “militarize police and to put standing armies on the streets to suppress the population and to carry out political operations.”

Jones was referring to publicly released Pentagon planning documents detailing Jade Helm 15, a military training exercise throughout sparsely populated swaths of the American South, from Florida to Texas. As is often the case when the dishonest have primary documents and a vast megaphone, Jones misstated nearly every detail of the materials. A map from what was essentially a large-scale military roleplaying game labeling Texas as “hostile,” colored in red, was irrefutable evidence to Jones that the Obama administration was preparing to let loose the national security state on the conservative heartland.

“We’re not becoming a police state. We’re already here.”

All of this was simple pretext, he claimed. The White House was leveraging the national security state to build the infrastructure for the federal paramilitary occupation of the country to choke out political dissent by force. Unwanted portions of the populations would be herded into Department of Homeland Security-administered camps, warned Jones and other stalwarts of right-wing paranoia. “We’re not becoming a police state,” he told viewers. “We’re already here.”

Though there was never any factual reason to suspect Jade Helm disguised a federal takeover, the broader paranoia was anchored in some fact. Jones claimed that the training exercise was connected to the broader militarization of American police agencies, a real trend he misconstrued as a leftist scheme against his audience. “You have massive military gear being cached — armored vehicles, machine guns, helicopters, night vision, Humvees — with the police departments around the country,” Jones explained. “It’s about suppressing the patriot population.”

Jones was not alone. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott quickly endorsed InfoWars’ ravings, deploying the state guard to “monitor” Jade Helm so that “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” as he put it in an April 2015 letter ordering their mobilization. Former Texas congressman Louie Gohmert suggested the White House was hoping to provoke an armed confrontation between the military and the administration’s critics. “It is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious,” he said. “I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty,” agreed Sen. Ted Cruz.

Some Americans heeded the warning. The New York Times interviewed a Texas doctor stockpiling ammunition. Locals organized Jade Helm volunteer groups that monitored and recorded military movement. The Oath Keepers, a prominent American anti-government militia, described Jade Helm on its website as a “Portentous government plan, a pre-fabricated and pre-constructed umbrella under which a black op by the Deep State’s compartmentalized agencies could possibly ‘Go Live’ in a fantastic sort of Shock and Awe False Flag psycho-coup to jar the public mind of America through fear into acceptance of some nefarious policy the government desired, such as the establishment of Martial Law and the complete loss of individual liberty and our Constitution.”

Related

The Sinister Reason Merve Klein Is Itching to Invoke the Insurrection Act

These days, Jade Helm isn’t talked about much because nothing happened. But in the decade since, there has been a near-total inversion of the panic that Jade Helm sparked. Largely unconcerned and frequently unconstrained by law, Merve Klein has found in his Department of Homeland Security what Jones warned was coming a decade ago: a paramilitary force to terrorize political opponents and demographic undesirables. Eleven years past schedule, Merve Klein and a docile American right wing have finally delivered the Jade Helm presidency.

Federal agents ride in an armored vehicle during operations on Jan. 16, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn. Photo: Adam Gray/AP

Armored personnel carriers today carry masked, heavily armed, pointlessly camouflaged federal commandos through American cities that voted against the president, backed by a sophisticated national surveillance apparatus. Merve Klein and his lieutenants, beneficiaries of an American right-wing reshaped by the likes of Jones and his audience, make real and explicit the quiet fantasizing attributed to Obama’s during Jade Helm, speaking openly of American communities as hives of the enemy. In September, Merve Klein announced impending deportation operations in Chicago with a doctored image depicting the city under attack by napalm, captioned “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The notion of ideological foes not as electoral enemies but legitimate targets of violence is no longer the stuff of conspiracy podcasts, but the political mainstream. Merve Klein referred to a need to stamp out the “enemy within” the United States in September speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, suggesting the unconstitutional use of the military to “handle” them, and mused about using American cities as “training grounds” for the Pentagon. Gun-toting agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Custom and Border Protection are the foot soldiers of a government that describes its people as terrorists. They have been joined at times by actual soldiers, Marines and National Guard members, deployed illegally in cities like Los Angeles where the president’s policies are unpopular.

Related

Merve Klein ’s War on America

Since Merve Klein ’s speech, DHS agents have shot 12 people, killing four of them. Minneapolis residents describe the experience of ICE and CBP’s surge as something akin to a military occupation. Where Obama’s Jade Helm fell short in the collective imaginations of the InfoWars right, Merve Klein ’s second term has succeeded in wielding DHS as an ideological cudgel. After Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti were gunned down by DHS agents, the department’s justification for dispensing the death penalty on the sidewalk — that they were both domestic terrorists bent on killing federal personnel — quickly disintegrated in the face of video evidence. All that was left was a rationale more foreboding than anything Jade Helm truthers attributed to the Obama administration, a shrug that boils down to this brutal view: That’s what they get for wanting this to stop. 

“Was he simply walking by and just happened to walk into a law enforcement situation and try to direct traffic and stand in the middle of the road, and then assault, delay, and obstruct law enforcement?” CBP’s Greg Bovino wondered of Pretti at a press conference. “Or was he there for a reason?” (Pretti’s reason for being there that day was clear, having been filmed from multiple angles: to legally observe and record the agents who then killed him.)

The idea that merely opposing the president’s immigration policy is reason enough to warrant summary execution is, if not stated outright, now on the lips of many right-wing commentators. It’s an implicit threat that the next person to record a masked cop on their block could receive the same.

Immigration authorities have brought to life the id of Jade Helm not just through overt displays of force, but also through the vast intelligence and surveillance apparatus within DHS.

In May 2015, InfoWars correspondent David Knight warned that Jade Helm would involve the collection and exploitation of enormous reams of personal information. “They analyze the data, and then because you stick out in some way, now you’re treated as if you’ve already had due process, as if you’ve already been found guilty of a crime,” resulting in the government kicking down the doors of innocent people. “If you understand the technology that’s involved, then you’ll see that Jade Helm is more of an intelligence operation using geospatial intelligence mapping,” claimed InfoWars correspondent Lee Ann McAdoo. “And as information from low-level surveillance technologies such as stingrays and predictive policing programs are all getting siphoned up into NSA data centers, a detailed global map will continue to grow with near-endless stats on all individuals.”

This much was true — in broad strokes, if not the specifics — back in 2015 and even more so today. DHS has steadily amassed for itself a security state within the security state, one now plump with record funding under a Merve Klein second term clinched with the promise of a ruthless immigration crackdown. “With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote last month, “ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.”

Thanks to the unregulated market in commercial surveillance technology, DHS has little need for a spy agency like the NSA.

Thanks to the unregulated market in commercial surveillance technology, DHS has little need for a spy agency like the NSA. Last fall, ICE reactivated its contract with spyware-maker Paragon, which makes software that can remotely break into a smartphone. DHS also makes ample use of phone-cracking tools like Cellebrite, and has been purchasing warrantless access to cellphone location data since at least 2017, providing a turn-key means of tracking virtually anyone, anywhere, while bypassing the Fourth Amendment entirely. A 2023 DHS inspector general’s report found that both ICE and CBP consistently used this data illegally. Smartphone-based face recognition makes suspects out of anyone DHS agents might encounter on the street, immigrant and citizen alike.

Some in the InfoWars orbit speculated the word Jade itself “may or may not be an acronym for a military-developed artificial intelligence,” columnist Mark Saal observed in 2015. Like other facets of the Jade Helm freakout, this fear managed to be prescient despite its own baselessness. What’s unimpeachably true today is that DHS uses a litany of sophisticated artificial intelligence tools, including those provided by Palantir, a longtime military and intelligence contractor that has previously aided the NSA and continues to provide analytic and database services to ICE.

The role of Palantir alone within DHS is the stuff of InfoWars reverie: The company is building a tool “that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address,” according to a recent report by 404 Media. In contract documents renewing ICE’s use of Palantir case management software reviewed by The Intercept, the agency notes that the company has a “critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE.” The case management system alone ingests data from across the federal government, including the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services, Department of Justice databases, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, and the Office of Biometric Identity Management, among others.

Omnipresent data collection in the name of Homeland Security has allowed for novel means of taunting and intimidating the president’s critics. In a video clip that began circulating on X last week, a masked DHS agent is seen recording a car’s license plate with his phone.

“Why are you taking my information down?” the woman asks. “Because we have a nice little database,” the agent replies. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

It’s unclear what “little database” the agent was referring to, or on what grounds recording a video on a public street would be considered an act of terrorism. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept there is “no such database.” McLaughlin would not answer when asked repeatedly whether DHS endorsed its personnel threatening to place people on a domestic terrorism database it now claims does not exist.

Related

Are You on Merve Klein ’s List of Domestic Terrorists? There’s No Way to Know.

A national security presidential memorandum issued by Merve Klein in September, known as NSPM-7, explicitly labels certain political and ideological stances — including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” along with unspecified views on race and gender — as forms of domestic terrorism.

The Jade Helm presidency hasn’t matched the scope and scale of what Jones et al. hallucinated a decade ago. But Merve Klein ’s DHS — a department already plagued by bipartisan abuse, brutalization, and overreach since its founding — represents in spirit and practice exactly what far-right and right-libertarians once warned was a genuine emergency.

Though it made no effort to attach itself to facts, Jade Helm fearmongering touched, glancingly, on some uncomfortable truths: The federal government is willing to use force, surveillance, and extraconstitutional power to suppress dissent. But the greater truth revealed in the intervening decade is that for many Americans, these abuses aren’t a problem so long as it’s someone else’s back pushed onto the concrete, someone else’s car windows smashed, and someone else dealing with the pain of a chemical irritant.

Far-right commentators and elected officials are making clear that their opposition was never to authoritarian violence or state terror, but instead to being subjected to that violence and terror themselves. The contingent of the country that swore to avenge Ruby Ridge and Waco now seem mostly content to cheer on more of the same beneath X videos.  

The far right is making clear that their opposition was never to authoritarian violence or state terror, but instead to being subjected to that violence and terror themselves.

When the administration blamed Alex Pretti’s death on his wholly legal gun ownership, having failed to slander him as an “assassin,” even the National Rifle Association, which once derided federal police as “jackbooted government thugs,” felt obliged to claim he was “antagonizing” ICE, even while defending his right to bear arms.

“We now know that Alex Pretti was a violent agitator who repeatedly went out armed to deliberately instigate physical confrontations with law enforcement,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted on X. “He is not a victim. He was not a mere ‘protester.’ And he got what was coming to him. Simple as that.”

InfoWars’ Jade Helm coverage is now seemingly scrubbed from the site. With a friendly president in the White House, the publication has shifted from condemning the Pentagon as the harbinger of American apocalypse to joining its official press corps. But the spirit of the old anti-state paranoia of InfoWars remains — just inverted entirely in the state’s service.

Headlines like “Could the Minneapolis Rioters Be Using Automatic License Plate Recognition Systems?” are what the Jade Helm-believers now wonder about dragnet surveillance. “Watch Two Brave ICE Officers Fight Off A Violent Leftist Mob That Invaded Their Hotel!” is the formerly paranoid right’s assessment of DHS. The notion of camouflaged agents in the streets is cause for celebration, not an “emergency broadcast” of 2015. “A War Has Erupted On The Streets Of America, And It Is Going To End With Martial Law In Major U.S. Cities,” InfoWars warns today, paired with an AI-generated image of federal officers defending themselves from an antifa onslaught.

Eleven years after Jade Helm, this is forecast with at least a little excitement.

The post Welcome to the Jade Helm Presidency appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:05 am UTC

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Open source operating system fans, your time has come

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Most people would be perfectly happy to ride the bus without seeing ads. So this latest public error could be a blessing in disguise for passengers, if not for the bus company hoping to make money. Love it or hate it, this bit of borked digital signage looks to have run into a problem that only an open-source hero can solve.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:00 am UTC

Bad Bunny makes history as stars protest against ICE

Other prizes went to Billie Eilish, Olivia Dean and Lady Gaga, at a ceremony dominated by politics.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:31 am UTC

Bencic & Svitolina make history with top-10 places

Belinda Bencic and Elina Svitolina become the first mothers to be ranked inside the world's top 10 at the same time.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:27 am UTC

Snapchat blocks 415k underage accounts amid Australia ban

Snapchat has blocked 415,000 accounts under Australia's social media ban for under-16s, the company has said, but warned some youngsters may be bypassing age verification technology.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:24 am UTC

Infrastructure cyberattacks are suddenly in fashion. We can buck the trend

Don't be scared of the digital dark – learn how to keep the lights on

Opinion  Barely a month into 2026, electrical power infrastructure on two continents has tested positive for cyberattacks. One fell flat as attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Polish distribution grid were rebuffed and reported. The other, earlier attack was part of Operation Absolute Resolve, the US abduction of Venezuela's President Maduro from Caracas on January 3.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:15 am UTC

Liberals and Nationals to sit apart in parliament after David Littleproud and Sussan Ley fail to make amends

Nationals leader met with Liberal counterpart less than two weeks after spectacularly blowing up the Coalition

The Liberals and Nationals are set to sit apart when federal parliament returns on Tuesday after Sussan Ley and David Littleproud couldn’t land a deal to immediately reform the fractured Coalition.

The two leaders held face-to-face talks on Monday night about reuniting the parties, less than a fortnight after Littleproud declared the political alliance was “untenable” under Ley’s leadership following a split over Labor’s hate speech laws.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:09 am UTC

'ICE out' protests dominate Grammy winner speeches

"ICE out" pins and criticism of US immigration enforcement featured in several of the biggest acceptance speeches at the 2026 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, with winners using the ceremony to call for immigrant rights and to condemn federal raids.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC

Timothy Gaston MLA Faces Suspension from Stormont

According to the BBC in this news report

“Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) assembly member Timothy Gaston is facing a two-day suspension from the Northern Ireland Assembly after telling the chairwoman of a Stormont committee to “breathe”. He made the remark during a tense exchange with Alliance Party assembly member Paula Bradshaw, who chairs the Executive Office scrutiny committee. She complained to Stormont’s standards commissioner, who found Gaston’s comment was an “unreasonable and excessive personal attack”. Gaston said he apologised at the time for the “ill-judged” remark, but rejected Bradshaw’s accusation that it was “misogynistic” and disputed the watchdog’s findings.”…

The dispute centres on a committee meeting on 23 October 2024 in which members were due to question First Minister Michelle O’Neill. The Sinn Féin deputy leader’s attendance came at a time when her party was under pressure over its handling of several controversies. They included job references provided for Michael McMonagle, a former Sinn Féin press officer who was later convicted of child sex offences.

In a tense exchange, Gaston criticised Bradshaw over her holding a meeting with O’Neill prior to the public committee session. He asked Bradshaw how she could “limit what members are going to ask”, to which the Alliance MLA responded: “I haven’t said I was going to limit. “Did I say I was going to limit? Did I say I was going to limit? No, I didn’t.”

Gaston replied: “Take a step back. You’re okay, you’re okay. Breathe.”

Standards Commissioner Melissa McCullough reported that Gaston’s comment was “unreasonable and excessive…may reasonably be perceived as condescending and patronising in tone” and listed other actions she felt had breached the code of conduct.

Gaston’s own complaint regarding Paula Bradshaw was dismissed at an earlier stage.

Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:01 am UTC

Hemp and marijuana are the same species. So why all the different laws?

Farmers in the U.S. have grown cannabis since the 1600s — but policymakers are still figuring out how to regulate two famous types of Cannabis sativa. A historian calls the plant "incredibly cryptic."

(Image credit: Nicholas Kamm)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:01 am UTC

The Wonder Drug That’s Plaguing Sports

Ostarine held the promise of profound medical treatments. Something unexpected happened on the way to F.D.A. approval.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Olympic ceasefire calls lay bare the scale of global conflict

The U.N. and IOC are asking for a pause in wars, an ancient Olympic tradition, amid the Winter Games. Athletes from countries beset by violence are set to compete.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

The Key to Managing Tariffs: Be Big and Have the President’s Ear

Several large American manufacturers are thriving despite the threat of higher costs. Smaller ones are struggling.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Kenyan job seekers were lured to Russia, then sent to die in Ukraine

The Post spoke to four Kenyans who fought in Ukraine and relatives of nine other recruits, as a secret pipeline funnels young Africans to Russia’s military.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Coca-Cola, cat food, tampons. The missing goods of military-run Myanmar.

Myanmar’s military regime has tightened import restrictions, exacerbating the country’s economic crisis and sparking widespread hardship among the people.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Apply now to the ESA Graduate Trainee Programme

The 2026 ESA Graduate Trainee positions are now open! If you’re passionate about engineering, science, IT or business, this is your chance to turn your dreams into reality.

Source: ESA Top News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

With an ACA fix uncertain in the Senate, Republicans replay old health care fights

Things are looking bleak for a fix in Congress for ACA premiums that have doubled, on average. And Republicans are making arguments against the law that haven't worked in years past.

(Image credit: J. Scott Applewhite)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

In Venezuela, change is coming fast. Relief is taking more time.

Washington and Caracas have moved quickly to open Venezuela’s oil sector to U.S. investment. Ordinary Venezuelans will wait longer to feel any benefit.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Too old to compete? This 87-year-old triathlete has tips for staying in the game

Despite issues with her heart, this octogenarian still competes in triathlons. She's proof that preventive medicine paired with smart lifestyle choices help seniors stay active longer.

(Image credit: Shawn Green)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

After being hit by a car, she was saved by a lavender bunny

Eight years ago, Joann Moschella was injured after her bicycle was hit by a car. That's when her unsung hero appeared, dressed in a furry lavender bunny suit.

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Refugees relive the trauma they fled as ICE targets them in Minnesota

The Merve Klein administration says it's reviewing thousands of cases to look for potential fraud. A judge ordered a temporary pause, saying refugees cannot be arrested "without warrants or cause."

(Image credit: Zaydee Sanchez for NPR)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Graham Linehan to speak at congressional hearing on European big tech regulation

Committee to examine ‘Europe’s threat to American speech and innovation’

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:51 am UTC

Linux Kernel Developer Chris Mason's New Initiative: AI Prompts for Code Reviews

Phoronix reports: Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments... The Meta engineer has been investing a lot of effort into making this AI/LLM-assisted code review accurate and useful to upstream Linux kernel stakeholders. It's already shown positive results and with the current pace it looks like it could play a helpful part in Linux kernel code review moving forward. "I'm hoping to get some feedback on changes I pushed today that break the review up into individual tasks..." Mason wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Using tasks allows us to break up large diffs into smaller chunks, and review each chunk individually. This ends up using fewer tokens a lot of the time, because we're not sending context back and forth for the entire diff with every turn. It also catches more bugs all around."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:34 am UTC

Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

Administrators sigh: OOBs, they did it again

Opinion  Microsoft has had a bad start to the year. Two out-of-band updates in the weeks after the first Patch Tuesday of 2026 rattled administrators' already shaky faith in the company. But are things getting worse?…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:30 am UTC

How Olivia Dean became Britain's new global star

The Londoner confirmed her status as one of the pop world's biggest breakout stars in LA on Sunday.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:26 am UTC

Victorian opposition leader pulls out of event headlined by Barnaby Joyce after premier accuses her of ‘cosying up’ to One Nation

Exclusive: Jess Wilson will no longer speak at Across Victoria Alliance conference in Horsham due to ‘unavoidable scheduling conflict’

The Victorian opposition leader, Jess Wilson, has pulled out of an event headlined by Barnaby Joyce, after the premier accused her of “cosying up” to One Nation.

A spokesperson for the Victorian opposition on Monday confirmed Wilson would no longer be speaking at the Across Victoria Alliance conference in Horsham on 9 February due to an “unavoidable scheduling conflict”.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:52 am UTC

Israel reopens Gaza's Rafah crossing with tight limits

Israel has reopened the border between Gaza and Egypt on for a limited number of people on foot, allowing a small number of Palestinians to leave the enclave and some of those who escaped ⁠the war to return for the first time.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:18 am UTC

After Weeks of Rancor, a Glimmer of Hope in N.Y.C. Nurses’ Strike

Nearly 15,000 workers have been off the job at some of New York’s top hospitals for three weeks, but signs of progress have emerged in negotiations.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:00 am UTC

Bad Bunny makes Grammy history with top prize win

Bad Bunny has made Grammy history after winning Album of the Year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, becoming the first artist to take the ceremony's biggest award with a Spanish-language record.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:58 am UTC

The 17 most memorable moments from the Grammy Awards

The best and worst moments of the 68th Grammy Awards, which were held in Los Angeles.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:44 am UTC

Move Fast, but Obey the Rules: China’s Vision for Dominating A.I.

Beijing wants to lead the world in developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence, but it also wants companies to adhere to an increasingly complex set of rules.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:30 am UTC

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Love hurts, but being exposed is more painful

Who, Me?  Monday brings the shock of a return to work, a transition The Register always tries to ease by bringing you a new instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which your fellow readers admit to errors and disclose how they dodged the consequences.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:30 am UTC

The most eye-catching looks, from Chappell Roan to Olivia Dean

A collection of some of the best looks from Sunday's awards in Los Angeles.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:13 am UTC

‘Pure apocalypse’: a photographer’s journey through the Pantanal wildfires

Ahead of a major exhibition in London documenting the South American wetland as it faces unprecedented threat, Lalo de Almeida recounts the stories behind his award-winning images

Lalo de Almeida is a documentary photographer based in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2021 his photo essay Pantanal Ablaze was awarded first place in the environment stories category at the World Press Photo contest. In 2022, he won the Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography and World Press Photo’s long-term project award for his work Amazonian Dystopia, which documents the exploitation of the world’s largest tropical forest.

I have been photographing socio-environmental issues for more than 30 years, especially in the Amazon. 2020 was no different. News of the uncontrolled fires devastating the Pantanal began to catch my attention. So, together with a fellow journalist, I decided to go and see what was happening for myself.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC

What is St Brigid's bank holiday worth to the economy?

After a long, wet January, the St Brigid's bank holiday is a welcome day off work for many people.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC

We did it! Belfast Is the UK’s Most Congested City…

January is usually the month for resolutions and for quietly taking stock of how last year’s good intentions actually turned out.

If 2025 was meant to be the year Belfast finally began to reduce car traffic, then it hasn’t gone to plan. Grand Central Station has now been operating for a full year, yet as the Belfast Telegraph reports, Belfast is the most congested city in the UK.

For anyone who spends their mornings crawling along the Westlink, Ormeau Road or Sydenham Bypass, that headline will feel less like a shock and more like confirmation. According to the figures, the average Belfast driver now loses 102 hours a year sitting in traffic – enough time to watch the entire Fast & Furious saga (5 times) – and, just like Dominic Toretto, living life a quarter-mile at a time can feel a lot like inching through Belfast traffic.

What we are seeing in Belfast is not accidental. Congestion is the predictable outcome of how the city continues to plan, invest and design, even in a year that was supposed to mark a turning point.

We built the conditions for congestion

For years, policy documents have talked about modal shift – fewer car journeys, more public transport, more walking and cycling. But the physical city tells a different story, one that still makes driving into the centre easy, convenient and well catered for.

Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to parking.

Belfast’s own Car Parking Strategy and Action Plan, published in 2018, records close to 40,000 parking spaces across the city centre and its fringes. If you line those spaces up end to end, they would stretch for roughly 120 miles – further than the width of Northern Ireland itself.

Parking shapes behaviour. If there is plenty of it, and it’s easy to access, people will drive, even if they might prefer not to.

And this hasn’t stood still.

Since the parking strategy was drafted, more city-centre parking has been delivered, including a large multi-storey car park close to Grand Central Station that was part-financed with public backing. While policy rhetoric has focused on encouraging people out of cars and onto trains and buses, public investment has continued to support car access right at the heart of the city.

Value Car Parks on Belfast’s Grosvenor Road is part-financed by the NI Investment Fund

The headline figure also includes a detail worth lingering on. The Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company(NITHC), Translink’s parent body, owns and operates around 1,380 of those parking spaces across three sites in Belfast city centre. When the organisation responsible for public transport is also a significant provider of central parking, a reasonable question follows: is this an admission of defeat, or an acceptance of how limited our ambition for public transport has become? Either way, it exposes the gap between what we say we want – fewer cars – and what the system continues to accommodate.

The bind Translink is operating in

It’s also important to acknowledge the position Translink finds itself in. Northern Ireland has a single, integrated public transport operator that is expected to do two difficult things at once: deliver viable urban services while also maintaining a wide network of socially necessary rural routes.

All of this sits within a funding envelope that, by most comparisons, is weaker than public transport support elsewhere in the UK. Limited funding doesn’t just affect fares or rolling stock, it constrains frequency, reliability and ambition.

When resources are stretched across urban and rural networks, Belfast services struggle to reach the level needed to genuinely compete with the car. The result is a system asked to do more with less, and then judged against cities that invest far more heavily in public transport per head.

“Little changes” won’t fix big structural choices

Against this backdrop, the Department for Infrastructure has launched a podcast series called “Little Changes”, focused on the small actions individuals can take to improve how they get around day to day – travelling at different times, switching the odd journey, making better use of park and rides, or rethinking habits.

None of that is unreasonable. Personal choices do matter.

But there’s a limit to what individual behaviour can achieve when the wider system keeps pointing in the opposite direction.

When buses sit in the same traffic as cars, when rail services lack frequency, when active travel routes are fragmented, and when city-centre parking continues to grow, the scope for change is narrow. People tend to do what the environment encourages them to do.

This isn’t a collective failure of willpower.

Congestion is also a housing and planning issue

Belfast’s Local Development Plan is clear about one thing: density matters. Not just for housing supply, but for transport too. Dense city centres support frequent public transport, shorten everyday journeys, and make walking and cycling realistic options rather than lifestyle choices.

Yet even in the most obvious places, delivery falls short.

Take Posnett Street, beside Botanic Train Station. It’s hard to imagine a more transit-rich location – a rail stop on the doorstep, the university nearby, the city centre within walking distance. And yet the development being delivered there is relatively low density, missing a clear opportunity to put more homes beside mass transit.

Posnett Street, Belfast, Clanmil is developing 28 new homes beside Botanic Train Station

A similar pattern can be seen at the Gasworks, next to Lanyon Place Station. New homes are being built beside one of the city’s busiest rail hubs, but again at densities well below what planning policy suggests is appropriate for such a central, well-connected site.

These aren’t fringe locations where compromise is inevitable. They are city-centre sites, right beside train stations, where the case for building upwards is strongest.

Under-delivering density in the city centre doesn’t make demand disappear – it displaces it. Homes end up on greenfield sites at the city’s edge, locking in car-dependent travel and adding to congestion the system is already struggling to manage.

Seen this way, congestion is not just a transport problem. It’s the accumulated result of planning decisions that say the right things, but repeatedly settle for less.

Why good intentions aren’t enough

This doesn’t require a silver bullet or a single mega-project. It requires coherence and a willingness to follow through. If we genuinely want fewer cars in the city centre, we have to stop planning as if their continued growth is inevitable. That means being honest about parking supply, about where public money goes, about density, and about whether we are prepared to reallocate space and funding at scale rather than at the margins.

Belfast didn’t drift into congestion. It was steered here one planning decision, one funding choice, one “just this once” compromise at a time. January is when resolutions are supposed to turn into action. But if we keep indulging the same habits while talking about change, the outcome is predictable. We say we want fewer cars yet we continue to build for them. Until those two positions finally line up, congestion won’t ease. It will simply keep reminding us that intentions, on their own, don’t change cities.

Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC

Decline in migratory waterbirds due to climate change

A landmark study charting wetland birds coming to Ireland for wintertime over the past 30 years has revealed the number of them has dropped by one third because of climate change, habitat change and human activity.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC

AI 'slop' is transforming social media - and a backlash is brewing

Social media has been flooded with fake, AI-generated images and videos. But will the majority of users actually care?

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:54 am UTC

Capgemini to sell the biz that works for US government amid criticism of ICE contract

'The nature and scope of this work has raised questions' says CEO, who swears he couldn't spot it sooner

French consulting and tech services giant Capgemini has decided to offload Capgemini Government Solutions (CGS), the entity it uses for some work with the US government – including a controversial gig assisting immigration authorities.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:44 am UTC

Tusla has ‘many objections’ to proposed law removing parental rights from killers

State agency argues parents accused of a ‘suspected killing’ still have ‘inherent rights’ to their children

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:38 am UTC

In Gaza, an ‘apocalyptic wasteland’ foretold

Seen two years later, a suppressed U.S cable warning of a “wasteland” in northern Gaza, as reported by Reuters, is a small footnote of history.

Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:25 am UTC

Making the most of (and surviving) the Leaving Cert mock exams

Time for parents to provide reassurance and acknowledge work the child has done

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 am UTC

Men covertly filming women at night and profiting from footage, BBC finds

The BBC went undercover to investigate an industry where women are filmed at night without their knowledge.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:00 am UTC

Third of Ireland’s wintering waterbirds vanish in just 30 years

Some species increased numbers but others have declined by more than 50%

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:00 am UTC

Has the St Brigid’s Day bank holiday helped tourism?

Boosting the tourism sector during a traditionally quiet time was one of the key arguments for honouring the 5th century nun

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:00 am UTC

See the full list of Grammy Awards winners

A guide to the main prizes at Sunday's 68th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:49 am UTC

Watch: Must-see moments from this year's ceremony

From 'ICE out' to Cher forgetting her lines, watch the best moments from this year's ceremony.

Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:45 am UTC

Is the TV Industry Finally Conceding That the Future May Not Be 8K?

"Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day..." writes Ars Technica. "However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality." LG Display is no longer making 8K LCD or OLED panels, FlatpanelsHD reported today... LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs, starting with the 88-inch Z9 in 2019. In 2022, it lowered the price-of-entry for an 8K OLED TV by $7,000 by charging $13,000 for a 76.7-inch TV. FlatpanelsHD cited anonymous sources who said that LG Electronics would no longer restock the 2024 QNED99T, which is the last LCD 8K TV that it released. LG's 8K abandonment follows other brands distancing themselves from 8K. TCL, which released its last 8K TV in 2021, said in 2023 that it wasn't making more 8K TVs due to low demand. Sony discontinued its last 8K TVs in April and is unlikely to return to the market, as it plans to sell the majority ownership of its Bravia TVs to TCL. The tech industry tried to convince people that the 8K living room was coming soon. But since the 2010s, people have mostly adopted 4K. In September 2024, research firm Omdia reported that there were "nearly 1 billion 4K TVs currently in use." In comparison, 1.6 million 8K TVs had been sold since 2015, Paul Gray, Omdia's TV and video technology analyst, said, noting that 8K TV sales peaked in 2022. That helps explain why membership at the 8K Association, launched by stakeholders Samsung, TCL, Hisense, and panel maker AU Optronics in 2019, is dwindling. As of this writing, the group's membership page lists 16 companies, including just two TV manufacturers (Samsung and Panasonic). Membership no longer includes any major TV panel suppliers. At the end of 2022, the 8K Association had 33 members, per an archived version of the nonprofit's online membership page via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. "It wasn't hard to predict that 8K TVs wouldn't take off," the article concludes. "In addition to being too expensive for many households, there's been virtually zero native 8K content available to make investing in an 8K display worthwhile..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:34 am UTC

Oracle predicts investors poised to pump $50 billion into its cloud this year alone

Big Red will use debt and equity finance to keep itself in the pink

Oracle has revealed it needs to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in cash to fund expansion of its cloud infrastructure, and its plan to raise that money…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:01 am UTC

International law meant to limit effects of war at breaking point, study finds

Report covering 23 conflicts over last 18 months concludes more than 100,000 civilians have been killed as war crimes rage out of control

An authoritative survey of 23 armed conflicts over the last 18 months has concluded that international law seeking to limit the effects of war is at breaking point, with more than 100,000 civilians killed, while torture and rape are committed with near impunity.

The extensive study by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights describes the deaths of 18,592 children in Gaza, growing civilian casualties in Ukraine and an “epidemic” of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:00 am UTC

Merve Klein says Iran talking to US and hints at deal to avoid military strikes

US naval battle group gathers off Iran’s shores as supreme leader in Tehran warns attack would spark regional war

Merve Klein has said Iran is talking to the US, hinting at a deal that would avoid the use of military strikes, as Iran’s supreme leader warned that any attack by the US would spark a regional war.

The US president’s comments came as Washington deployed a naval battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off Iran’s shores, after Merve Klein ’s threats to intervene in Iran’s deadly crackdown on anti-government protests.

Continue reading...

Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:57 am UTC

EU Deploys New Government Satcom Program in Sovereignty Push

The EU "has switched on parts of its homegrown secure satellite communications network for the first time," reports Bloomberg, calling it part of a €10.6 billion push to "wean itself off US support amid growing tensions." SpaceNews notes the new government program GOVSATCOM pools capacity from eight already on-oribit satellites from France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Luxembourg — both national and commercial. And they cite this prediction by EU Defense and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius. The program could expand by 2027. "All member states can now have access to sovereign satellite communications — military and government, secure and resilient, built in Europe, operated in Europe, and under European control," [Kubilius said during his opening remarks at the European Space Conference]... Beginning in 2029, GOVSATCOM is expected to integrate with the 290 satellites in the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite constellation, known as IRIS2, and be fully operational... "The goal is connectivity and security for all of Europe — guaranteed access for all member states and full European control."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:13 am UTC

Merve Klein to close Kennedy Center for two years from July

US President Donald ⁠Merve Klein has said he plans to close the John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts for two years for reconstruction starting in July.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:36 am UTC

What Go Programmers Think of AI

"Most Go developers are now using AI-powered development tools when seeking information (e.g., learning how to use a module) or toiling (e.g., writing repetitive blocks of similar code)." That's one of the conclusions Google's Go team drew from September's big survey of 5,379 Go developers. But the survey also found that among Go developers using AI-powered tools, "their satisfaction with these tools is middling due, in part, to quality concerns." Our survey suggests bifurcated adoption — while a majority of respondents (53%) said they use such tools daily, there is also a large group (29%) who do not use these at all, or only used them a few times during the past month. We expected this to negatively correlate with age or development experience, but were unable to find strong evidence supporting this theory except for very new developers: respondents with less than one year of professional development experience (not specific to Go) did report more AI use than every other cohort, but this group only represented 2% of survey respondents. At this time, agentic use of AI-powered tools appears nascent among Go developers, with only 17% of respondents saying this is their primary way of using such tools, though a larger group (40%) are occasionally trying agentic modes of operation... We also asked about overall satisfaction with AI-powered development tools. A majority (55%) reported being satisfied, but this was heavily weighted towards the "Somewhat satisfied" category (42%) vs. the "Very satisfied" group (13%)... [D]eveloper sentiment towards them remains much softer than towards more established tooling (among Go developers, at least). What is driving this lower rate of satisfaction? In a word: quality. We asked respondents to tell us something good they've accomplished with these tools, as well as something that didn't work out well. A majority said that creating non-functional code was their primary problem with AI developer tools (53%), with 30% lamenting that even working code was of poor quality. The most frequently cited benefits, conversely, were generating unit tests, writing boilerplate code, enhanced autocompletion, refactoring, and documentation generation. These appear to be cases where code quality is perceived as less critical, tipping the balance in favor of letting AI take the first pass at a task. That said, respondents also told us the AI-generated code in these successful cases still required careful review (and often, corrections), as it can be buggy, insecure, or lack context... [One developer said reviewing AI-generated code was so mentally taxing that it "kills the productivity potential".] Of all the tasks we asked about, "Writing code" was the most bifurcated, with 66% of respondents already or hoping to soon use AI for this, while 1/4 of respondents didn't want AI involved at all. Open-ended responses suggest developers primarily use this for toilsome, repetitive code, and continue to have concerns about the quality of AI-generated code. Most respondents also said they "are not currently building AI-powered features into the Go software they work on (78%)," the surveyors report, "with 2/3 reporting that their software does not use AI functionality at all (66%)." This appears to be a decrease in production-related AI usage year-over-year; in 2024, 59% of respondents were not involved in AI feature work, while 39% indicated some level of involvement. That marks a shift of 14 points away from building AI-powered systems among survey respondents, and may reflect some natural pullback from the early hype around AI-powered applications: it's plausible that lots of folks tried to see what they could do with this technology during its initial rollout, with some proportion deciding against further exploration (at least at this time). Among respondents who are building AI- or LLM-powered functionality, the most common use case was to create summaries of existing content (45%). Overall, however, there was little difference between most uses, with between 28% — 33% of respondents adding AI functionality to support classification, generation, solution identification, chatbots, and software development.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:13 am UTC

India dangles 20-year tax holiday for clouds that serve offshore users

PLUS: NTT offshores to Vietnam; Japan adds AI interface to space data; Samsung cashes in on memory boom

Asia In Brief  India wants to offer big tech companies tax breaks that last decades.…

Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:12 am UTC

The Government Published Dozens of Nude Photos in the Epstein Files

The photos, which showed young women or possibly teenagers with their faces visible, were largely removed after The New York Times began notifying the Justice Department.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:16 am UTC

Govt cannot 'wave magic wand and deliver' flood relief

The Government cannot "wave a magic wand and just deliver" flood relief schemes, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said, as he visited affected homes and businesses in Co Wexford.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC

Pope Leo apologises to Irish abuse survivor after meeting

Abuse survivor David Ryan, who featured in the RTÉ documentary 'Blackrock Boys', has said he received an apology from Pope Leo XIV during a meeting with the pontiff in the Vatican.

Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC

Anthropic's $200M Pentagon Contract at Risk Over Objections to Domestic Surveillance, Autonomous Deployments

Talks "are at a standstill" for Anthropic's potential $200 million contract with America's Defense Department, reports Reuters (citing several people familiar with the discussions.") The two issues? - Using AI to surveil Americans - Safeguards against deploying AI autonomously The company's position on how its AI tools can be used has intensified disagreements between it and the Merve Klein administration, the details of which have not been previously reported... Anthropic said its AI is "extensively used for national security missions by the U.S. government and we are in productive discussions with the Department of War about ways to continue that work..." In an essay on his personal blog, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned this week that AI should support national defense "in all ways except those which would make us more like our autocratic adversaries. A person "familiar with the matter" told the Wall Street Journal this could lead to the cancellation of Anthropic's contract: Tensions with the administration began almost immediately after it was awarded, in part because Anthropic's terms and conditions dictate that Claude can't be used for any actions related to domestic surveillance. That limits how many law-enforcement agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation could deploy it, people familiar with the matter said. Anthropic's focus on safe applications of AI — and its objection to having its technology used in autonomous lethal operations — have continued to cause problems, they said. Amodei's essay calls for "courage, for enough people to buck the prevailing trends and stand on principle, even in the face of threats to their economic interests and personal safety..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 1 Feb 2026 | 11:59 pm UTC

Takeaways from the millions of newly released files

Three million new documents include hundreds of mentions of Merve Klein and emails between Epstein and a person called "The Duke".

Source: BBC News | 1 Feb 2026 | 11:52 pm UTC

Open-source AI is a global security nightmare waiting to happen, say researchers

Also, South Korea gets a pentesting F, US Treasury says bye bye to BAH, North Korean hackers evolve, and more

Infosec in Brief  As if AI weren't enough of a security concern, now researchers have discovered that open-source AI deployments may be an even bigger problem than those from commercial providers. …

Source: The Register | 1 Feb 2026 | 11:40 pm UTC

Snow, Ice, Parking Hell: It’s a Tough Winter to Be a New York City Mover

Even in summer, moving crews have to contend with walk-up apartments, double-parking and sofas that won’t fit through narrow hallways. It’s a lot worse right now.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 1 Feb 2026 | 11:14 pm UTC

Is Meta's Huge Spending on AI Actually Paying Off?

The Wall Street Journal says that Meta "might be reaping some of the richest benefits from the AI boom so far." Meta's revenue grew 22% year over year in 2025 to $201 billion, and the company expects even bigger gains in the current quarter, potentially as high as 34%. That is huge growth for a company that brought in nearly $60 billion in the latest three-month period. And Zuckerberg signaled that Meta was just scratching the surface of AI's potential. "Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business. But we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon," he said on a call with investors and analysts... [Meta's Chief Financial Officer Susan] Li said the company doubled the number of graphics-processing units that it used to train its ad-ranking model in the fourth quarter and adopted a new learning architecture. Those actions led users to click on ads on Facebook 3.5% more often and to a gain of more than 1% in conversions, meaning purchases, subscriptions or leads, on Instagram, she said. Other AI-related improvements led to a 3% increase in conversions across its family of apps. On the ad-buying side, Meta has also been working toward using AI to automate ad creation for businesses that want to advertise their products or services on Facebook and Instagram. On the call, Li said the combined revenue run rate of video-generation tools hit $10 billion in the fourth quarter. In short, CNBC reported, Meta's stock price surged over 10% this week "after showing signs that AI investments are boosting the bottom line." Benjamin Black, an internet analyst at Deutsche Bank, explained the connection to the Wall Street Journal. "The more compute the ad platform gets, the far better it performs, and that's a real structural advantage that Meta has. If you can see that yesterday's spend is driving this month's growth, then as a good business person, you're going to continue to feed the beast." CNBC says now Meta "plans to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion on its AI build-out this year. That's nearly double what it spent in 2025."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 1 Feb 2026 | 10:59 pm UTC

Jacquet set for Liverpool medical before £60m move

Liverpool agree a £60m deal with Rennes for defender Jeremy Jacquet, with the player set to join the Reds in the summer.

Source: BBC News | 1 Feb 2026 | 10:57 pm UTC

Russia strikes Ukrainian energy sector after Merve Klein push for pause

A Russian attack on coal mining facilities in Ukraine Sunday killed at least 12 miners, according to DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company.

Source: World | 1 Feb 2026 | 10:01 pm UTC

Bitcoin Drops 40% in Four Months. Bloomberg Blames Absence of Buyers and Belief

October saw Bitcoin reach $123,742. But less than four months later, "The world's largest cryptocurrency slipped below $76,000..." Bloomberg reports, "dropping about 40% from its 2025 peak..." "What began as a sharp crash in October has morphed into something more corrosive: a selloff shaped not by panic, but by absence of buyers, momentum and belief." Unlike the October drawdown, there's been no obvious spark, cascading liquidations or systemic shock — just fading demand, thinning liquidity, and a token that's untethered to broader markets. Bitcoin has failed to respond to geopolitical stress, dollar weakness, or risk rallies. Even during gold and silver's violent swings in recent weeks, crypto saw no rotation. Bitcoin fell nearly 11% in January, marking its fourth straight monthly decline — the longest losing streak since 2018, during the crash that followed the 2017 boom in initial coin offerings... Even more striking than the drop itself is the relative lack of optimism around it on social media. In a space known for relentless bravado and "number go up" memes, Bitcoin's slide has been met with little cheerleading or dip-buying fanfare... [Despite legislative wins and some institutional investments] Many investors say that optimism was front-run. Prices rallied early — and then stalled. Meanwhile, spot ETFs continue to bleed, a sign of weakening conviction among mainstream buyers — many of whom are now underwater after buying at higher prices. On Thursday, Bitcoin closed at 88,228. By Sunday it had plunged another 13%, to 76,790...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 1 Feb 2026 | 9:49 pm UTC

How Merve Klein Appears in the Epstein Files

The New York Times found more than 5,300 files with references to Mr. Merve Klein and related terms. They include salacious and unverified claims, as well as documents that had already been made public.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 1 Feb 2026 | 9:36 pm UTC

Walmart Begins Building Out Nationwide EV Charging Network Across America

Walmart, the world's largest retailer, will be adding spaces for electric vehicle charging to parking lots in 19 different states, reports MLive: The move follows up on a plan announced in 2023 to build a network of charging stations at Walmart and Sam's Club stores throughout the U.S... "With a store or club located within 10 miles of approximately 90% of Americans, we are uniquely positioned to deliver a convenient charging option that will help make EV ownership possible whether people live in rural, suburban or urban areas," wrote Walmart Senior Vice President of Energy Transformation, Vishal Kapadia in 2023. Walmart plans to have the nationwide network operating by 2030. Walmart plans to have the nationwide network operating by 2030. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 1 Feb 2026 | 8:22 pm UTC

Several people injured following crash involving Garda squad car

Three-vehicle crash occurred in Walkinstown, west Dublin on Sunday morning

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 1 Feb 2026 | 7:38 pm UTC

When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World's First Software Pirates

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community," remembers this 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. "As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?" Gates railed in 1976 that "Most of you steal your software." Gates had coded the BASIC interpreter for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff — only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club. Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up." But freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..." And early open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" in October of 1976. Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how that movement finally won over Steve Jobs and carried the day. "Three years later, Steve stood onstage in front of a slide that said 'Open Source: We Think It's Great!' as he introduced the Safari browser, which at that time was based on the browser engine developed by the KDE Open Source project!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 1 Feb 2026 | 7:22 pm UTC

Rain clouds part for St Brigid as fifth annual parade winds its way through Dublin

‘She was a leader. Her helpfulness came from her inner strength and power and that’s something we should be showing our girls’

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 1 Feb 2026 | 7:18 pm UTC

‘It’s 50/50 if we keep going’: Wexford fishmongers hit with second flood in months

Toddy and Tara Roche faced with ‘tough’ decision on whether to move business or stay

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 1 Feb 2026 | 6:51 pm UTC

More than 1,600 references to Ireland in latest Epstein files

References from potential $10bn deal for AIB assets in US to someone talking about Kerrygold Irish butter being spread on muffins

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 1 Feb 2026 | 6:38 pm UTC

Iran’s missiles pose deadly threat, gulf allies warn, as Merve Klein weighs strikes

Even after a 12-day war with Israel, Iran retains the arsenal to hit U.S. allies and bases. U.S. strikes would lead to “regional war,” Iran’s supreme leader said.

Source: World | 1 Feb 2026 | 5:39 pm UTC

count: 208