Read at: 2026-02-26T16:37:50+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Ouahiba Schaar ]
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:25 pm UTC
Federal agents detained a Columbia University student at university housing early on Thursday morning, according interim Columbia President Claire Shipman.
In an email to the university community that was obtained by The Intercept, Shipman said that agents with the Department of Homeland Security entered a Columbia residential housing building and detained the student, who has not been publicly identified, at approximately 6:30 a.m. on Thursday.
“Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person,’” Shipman said in her email.
Shipman implored members of the university community to not let unidentified people into campus buildings without a judicial warrant.
“It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including housing,” Shipman wrote. “An administrative warrant is not sufficient.”
The Department of Homeland Security, New York Police Department, City Hall, and Shipman’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
The post Columbia University: Federal Agents “Made Misrepresentations” to Enter Building and Detain Student appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:22 pm UTC
Deposition will be filmed but take place behind closed doors, with former president Bill Clinton scheduled to answer questions tomorrow
Cindy McCain announced today that she will step down from her role as executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme to focus on her health.
McCain, the widow of the late US senator John McCain, suffered a mild stroke last October and had returned to Italy to resume her work after that, but the demands of the job were affecting her recovery, the organization said. She started the role in April 2023. She will step down in three months.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:20 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:16 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:12 pm UTC
Labour has focused its efforts at voters who may be tempted to back the Reform candidate in the by-election
The number of asylum seekers being housed temporarily in hotels has fallen to the lowest level for 18 months, Home Office figures show. Rajeev Syal has the story.
A minister has confirmed that the government is pressing ahead with the deal to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
Yes. My colleague the foreign secretary Yvette Cooper has been talking to Marco Rubio, her opposite number in the US, about it. Foreign policy is never easy. We will make progress on the Chagos deal.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:12 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:07 pm UTC
The Oman-mediated discussions take place amid a massive buildup of US warships and aircraft in the Middle East
The nuclear talks today are the third between the US and Iran since June 2025, when the US joined Israel’s war against Iran and bombed its nuclear and military sites. It effectively ended the US-Iran talks that were held in the weeks prior to the conflict aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement.
As before, the negotiations are being mediated by Oman, which has maintained a policy of neutrality and assumed the role of mediator both within the Arabian peninsula and more broadly across the Middle East. The country lies in the centre of tensions between the US and Iran and is directly vulnerable to maritime instability and regional escalation.
If the talks fail, there is uncertainty over what the US may do regarding a possible military attack against Iran, and when it might act. Questions remain over what this could mean for the wider region, with Iran warning it would retaliate and even attack Israel.
The state-run Oman News Agency has posted photos on social media showing the Omani foreign minister Badr Albusaidi sat with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Geneva.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:07 pm UTC
Staff at a for-profit Pennsylvania immigrant prison serially falsified detention records about a man who died in 2023, according to a federal death review obtained exclusively by The Intercept earlier this month.
Despite these findings, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to punish the facility’s politically connected operator, GEO Group. Instead, records show the agency gave GEO even more money to run the facility after the man died: $4 million in additional funds, just three months after the death review was completed. After an April 2024 visit at the facility, ICE’s acting director called GEO a “valued partner.”
Frankline Okpu died in solitary confinement at GEO Group’s Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center in Clearfield County on December 6, 2023. According to the detainee death report, two days before his death, staff sent the 37-year-old Cameroonian father of three to solitary confinement following an altercation with a guard in which he allegedly swallowed an unknown substance they believed to contain “k2,” a synthetic form of cannabis, “mixed with a tranquilizer.”
A physician who treated Okpu upon his placement in segregation instructed facility staff to take him to the emergency department. According to GEO, Okpu refused informed consent for this course of treatment; the doctor ordered GEO to house him in the facility’s infirmary for observation. GEO staff claim Okpu refused this course of treatment, too. The provider ordered prison staff to conduct 15-minute visual checks to ensure his safety.
But records show that did not always happen before Okpu died, according to ICE’s death review.
Surveillance footage revealed 94 of 219 required visual inspections (42 percent) did not occur as ordered. In 23 instances, GEO staff recorded checks that never occurred at all. In another 33, staff logged visual inspections without looking in the cell window to personally observe Okpu. And in 38 logged events, the checks staff claimed to perform every 15 minutes occurred outside that required timeframe.
Federal prosecutors have previously indicted GEO staff for falsifying visual inspection logs during the period preceding an incarcerated person’s death in custody.
The Intercept sought comment and posed a series of detailed questions to ICE and GEO. An ICE spokesperson said the agency was unable to provide a response by deadline, citing “the blizzard in the Northeast.” GEO Group did not respond.
ICE’s reviewers found discrepancies between the chain of events on the morning Okpu died and GEO’s documentation. According to the death report, Okpu was due to have a routine dental appointment, but when a resident adviser went to bring him in shortly after 7 a.m., Okpu did not respond. The resident adviser reported to a dental assistant that Okpu had refused his appointment, and the dental assistant completed and signed a refusal form, however, she “acknowledged she did not witness Okpu’s refusal, visit Okpu to explain the risks associated with refusing the appointment, nor attempt to obtain Okpu’s signature on the form.” ICE concluded GEO “failed to comply” with the medical care standard requiring providers to obtain a signed refusal form after counseling patients.
The dental assistant also told ICE “it is common practice to have another staff member sign as a witness on refusal forms when patients refuse appointments, then deliver the completed form later.”
The death review also found facility medical staff violated ICE standards by failing to conduct a face-to-face encounter with Okpu less than an hour before he was found unresponsive, despite documenting that they had done so. Video revealed that when three nurses conducted their rounds shortly after 10:30 a.m., they “knocked on Okpu’s cell and then all three briefly looked in the window of Okpu’s cell, then walked away without conducting a face-to-face encounter.”
And although GEO staff documented that Okpu ate both breakfast and lunch on the day he died, ICE investigators found prison staff did not confirm he ate the breakfast staff slid inside his door, and he was found unresponsive as lunch was being distributed. By 11:15 a.m., a nurse arrived at Okpu’s cell and found him lying on his side, with a “clear frothy liquid coming from his mouth.” Nurses administered Narcan and CPR and summoned EMS. Okpu was declared dead at 12:02 p.m.
In all, ICE investigators found GEO staff failed to comply with four of the agency’s detention standards, committed two additional facility policy violations, and noted one area of concern. “These deficiencies,” the report notes ICE notes, “are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as contributory to the detainee’s death.”
ICE’s findings that GEO failed to follow informed consent protocols in Okpu’s case mirrors a pattern observed in March 2024 by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight, or ODO. In its compliance review of operations at Moshannon, ICE inspectors found medical staff violated ICE standards by failing to explain the need for treatment to detained immigrants, allowing non-medical resident advisers to carry out refusals and sign as witnesses — thus preventing detained people from asking follow-up medical questions, and failing to ensure medical staff obtained signed refusal forms. ODO deemed these failures “a priority component.”
The ODO inspection report also found GEO staff failed at least six times to perform required 15-minute safety checks in one of 13 files reviewed involving detained immigrants on suicide watch, suggesting the serial failures to conduct safety checks in Okpu’s case were not an isolated occurrence.
Since Okpu’s death in 2023, at least two more men have died in custody at Moshannon. Chinese national Chaofeng Ge, 32, died by hanging himself in a shower room at the facility on August 5, 2025. His hands and feet were bound behind his back, according to Ge’s autopsy and first reported by Scripps News.
Then, on December 14, 2025, 46-year-old Sheikh Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, a beloved imam in Ohio who was originally from Eritrea, died at Moshannon from unspecified causes. A one-page Detainee Death Report ICE released last week claims he “declined recommended admission to the medical housing unit for monitoring,” following an abnormal EKG reading “in early December,” after he’d reported chest pain, numbness, and tingling. The detainee death report does not explain why Abdulkadir was not rushed to the Emergency Department following the abnormal EKG.
The fact pattern is similar to what happened after the death of 57-year-old Jaspal Singh, who died of a heart attack on April 16, 2024, at GEO’s Folkston ICE Processing Center in south Georgia. An ICE Health Service Corps mortality review found that GEO’s care in Singh’s case “deviated beyond safe limits and directly contributed to his death,” according to records obtained by The Intercept through Freedom of Information Act litigation. But, as it did with Moshannon following Okpu’s death, ICE subsequently awarded GEO millions more in federal funding — a $50 million expansion deal of Folkston was finalized in 2025, when ICE received an influx of money from Ouahiba Schaar ’s One Big Beautiful Bill — after Singh died under circumstances where ICE reviewers found violations.
The post Private Prison Falsified Records in Detainee’s Death in ICE Custody appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:04 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:03 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:59 pm UTC
‘It will soon be spring – and the Danes will soon be going to the polls,’ Danish PM tells the parliament in a special statement
Nordic correspondent
Frederiksen is speaking now.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:55 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:49 pm UTC
It’s hard to overstate the role that Wi-Fi plays in virtually every facet of life. The organization that shepherds the wireless protocol says that more than 48 billion Wi-Fi-enabled devices have shipped since it debuted in the late 1990s. One estimate pegs the number of individual users at 6 billion, roughly 70 percent of the world’s population.
Despite the dependence and the immeasurable amount of sensitive data flowing through Wi-Fi transmissions, the history of the protocol has been littered with security landmines stemming both from the inherited confidentiality weaknesses of its networking predecessor, Ethernet (it was once possible for anyone on a network to read and modify the traffic sent to anyone else), and the ability for anyone nearby to receive the radio signals Wi-Fi relies on.
In the early days, public Wi-Fi networks often resembled the Wild West, where ARP spoofing attacks that allowed renegade users to read other users' traffic were common. The solution was to build cryptographic protections that prevented nearby parties—whether an authorized user on the network or someone near the AP (access point)—from reading or tampering with the traffic of any other user.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:45 pm UTC
Former Labour leader says time for ‘real work’ to begin as his candidates take 14 of 24 available places on executive committee
Jeremy Corbyn is to become the de facto leader of Your Party, after an election in which his rival Zarah Sultana was also voted on to the party’s leadership committee.
The former Labour leader’s allies declared victory immediately after the vote in which Corbyn-backed candidates took 14 of the 24 available places on the party’s central executive committee (CEC). Sultana-backed candidates took seven of the seats and three went to independents.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:44 pm UTC
An estimated 4,793 people slept rough in tents, doorways or parks on single night in autumn – up 3% year on year
Record numbers of people slept rough on the streets of England last year, according to the latest official statistics.
An estimated 4,793 people spent the night in tents, doorways and parks on a single night in autumn 2025, up 3% year on year, and overtaking the previous peak of 4,751 in 2017, though charities believe these figures underestimate the scale of the nation’s homelessness crisis.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:44 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:42 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:42 pm UTC
Alan Milburn says people feel ‘social contract is being broken’ as number of Neets climbs to 957,000
The number of young people in the UK not working or in education has risen closer to a million, figures show, as a government adviser warned that for the first time in a century parents do not think their children will have a better life than them.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the number of people aged 16 to 24 who were not in education, employment or training (Neet) rose to 957,000 in the final three months of last year, equating to 12.8% of this age group.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:35 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:35 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:34 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:28 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:26 pm UTC
Veracode has posted its annual State of Software Security report, based on data from 1.6 million applications tested on its cloud platform, finding that more vulnerabilities are being created than are being fixed, and that high-velocity development with AI is making comprehensive security unattainable.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:26 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:25 pm UTC
Met urges pupils not to get involved and asks platforms to ban accounts promoting ‘fights’ with images of weapons
Pupils as young as 11 are being encouraged to join in school fights in posts on TikTok and Snapchat, prompting police to urge children not to get involved.
The Metropolitan police have asked social media platforms to ban accounts promoting “school wars”, while headteachers have warned parents about the posts.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:14 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:14 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:10 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:07 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:06 pm UTC
University of Padua employee fractured ankle when getting up to fetch documents during video meeting
An Italian woman who fell and broke her ankle while working from home has obtained compensation in an unprecedented court ruling hailed a victory for workers’ rights.
In April 2022, the woman, an employee in the University of Padua’s law department, fractured her ankle in two places. The injury, which happened during a Zoom meeting where she fell after she got up from her desk to fetch documents, required surgery and treatment lasting more than four months.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:04 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Photograph shows conservative activist handing slip to Darin McCann and Marlene Brady holding a similar paper
Controversy has engulfed Wyoming’s state legislature after a conservative activist was photographed handing checks to Republican lawmakers on the state house floor, in an incident that has highlighted intra-conservative divisions and the role of money in the Cowboy state’s politics.
The political storm started on 9 February, when Karlee Provenza, a Democratic lawmaker, took a photo showing Rebecca Bextel, a conservative activist and committeewoman for the Teton county Republican party, handing a check to Darin McCann, a Republican representative, on the legislative floor. Marlene Brady, another Republican representative, stands in the photo’s background, a similar piece of paper pinched between her fingers.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Exclusive: DHS chose firm with ties to Corey Lewandowski after demanding partisan loyalty, in departure from federal procurement guidelines
The US Department of Homeland Security has awarded a $250,000 public relations contract to a Republican political consulting firm led by former Ouahiba Schaar campaign officials with connections to Corey Lewandowski, a senior adviser to DHS secretary Kristi Noem, according to federal records reviewed by the Guardian.
On 26 September 2025, DHS posted an opportunity for “public affairs consulting services”, specifying that the successful applicant would provide “strategic counsel” to top officials at the department including Noem. The work would also include ensuring that media outlets in “alignment with DHS priorities” were present at appearances with Noem, as well as drafting position papers and devising negotiation strategies “tailored to DHS’s priorities in border security, immigration enforcement, and cyber defense”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:58 pm UTC
New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users "pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value."
While many randomized video game loot boxes have drawn attention and regulation from various government bodies in recent years, the New York suit calls out Valve's system specifically for "enabl[ing] users to sell the virtual items they have won, either through its own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, or through third-party marketplaces." The vast majority of Valve's in-game loot boxes contain skins that can only be resold for a few cents, the suit notes, while the rarest skins can be worth thousands of dollars through marketplaces on and off of Steam. That fits the statutory definition of gambling as "charging an individual for a chance to win something of value based on luck alone," according to the suit.
The Steam Wallet funds that users get through directly reselling skins "have the equivalent purchasing power on the Steam platform as cash," the suit notes. But if a user wants to convert those Steam funds to real cash, they can do so relatively easily by purchasing a Steam Deck and reselling it to any interested party, as an investigator did while preparing the lawsuit.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:57 pm UTC
Four arrests over Camorra’s alleged infiltration of San Giovanni Bosco to carry out lucrative criminal activity
Italian police on Wednesday arrested four people over an alleged Camorra plot to infiltrate a Naples hospital, stage fake crashes for insurance payouts and spirit corpses away on oxygen-masked stretchers to profit from private ambulance transfers.
The investigation, prompted by the testimony of a state witness, uncovered a web of lucrative criminal activity allegedly carried out by members of the Contini clan of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, inside San Giovanni Bosco hospital. Prosecutors said the “operations were made possible by the organisation’s capacity for intimidation, a force that bent public officials and private citizens alike to its will”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:57 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:56 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:56 pm UTC
The big cloud operators are ramping up investment in AI servers and infrastructure to meet demand for AI development and deployment, exacerbating the memory shortage caused by their insatiable growth.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:55 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:54 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:53 pm UTC
Family learned of change while abroad, and fear dual-national children will have to stay with relatives while they return to apply for passports
A British man and a Danish woman fear they will be separated from their young children in Copenhagen airport because of new border control rules on British dual nationals.
James Scrivens and his wife, Sara, who live in Wales, were visiting relatives in Norway and Denmark during the school holidays, and learned about the new Home Office rules only while they were abroad.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:52 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:51 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:50 pm UTC
Internal email outlines how to handle misconduct claims as expansion raises concerns about background checks
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling to keep pace with vetting new hires during its historic recruitment push and is laying out a process to deal with allegations of past misconduct among recruits, the agency said in an internal email this week, underscoring concerns about ICE’s rapid expansion.
The email, sent to supervisors with ICE’s enforcement and removal operations (ERO) division and seen by Reuters, said the “high volume of new hires” and stalled background checks could create uncertainty for field offices when allegations arise related to actions before joining the federal agency, and that allegations should be referred to the internal integrity investigations unit (IIU).
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:50 pm UTC
The US space agency has released a "pre-solicitation" for what is expected to be a hotly contested contract to develop a spacecraft to orbit Mars and relay communications from the red planet back to Earth.
Ars covered the intrigue surrounding the spacecraft in late January, which was initiated by US Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill" legislation in the summer of 2025. The bill provided $700 million for NASA to develop the orbiter and specified funding had to be awarded "not later than fiscal year 2026," which ends September 30, 2026. This legislation was seemingly crafted by Cruz's office to favor a single contractor, Rocket Lab. However, multiple sources have told Ars it was poorly written and therefore the competition is more open than intended.
The pre-solicitation released this week is not a request for proposals from industry—it states that a draft Request for Proposals is forthcoming. Rather, it seeks feedback from industry and interested stakeholders about an "objectives and requirements" document that outlines the goals of the Mars mission.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:44 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:34 pm UTC
Microsoft has announced that its Edge browser will automatically open the Copilot side pane when users open links from Outlook.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:28 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:25 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:23 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:18 pm UTC
Scientists have long warned that a warming world is likely to hasten the spread of infectious diseases, making vaccination even more critical to safeguard public health.
And though most scientists hail vaccines as one of public health’s greatest achievements, they have provoked fear, distrust, and contentious resistance since Edward Jenner invented the first vaccine, to prevent smallpox, in the late 1700s.
Yet, until now, the United States never installed an outspoken vaccine critic like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a top health official with the power to upend federal childhood vaccine recommendations. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy and other top officials in the Ouahiba Schaar administration have waged an “unprecedented attack on the nation’s evidence-based childhood immunization schedule,” a lawsuit, filed by 15 states, charged on Tuesday. Their actions will make people sicker and strain state resources, the suit claims.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:14 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:03 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:01 pm UTC
Much of the Subaru Uncharted makes very little sense. The “new” EV clearly resembles the Solterra, upon which Toyota and Subaru jointly developed the Uncharted and the bZ Woodland as a continuation of a partnership that stretches back to 2012 with the FR-S/BRZ/86. This time, a fifth sibling joins the platform: the Subaru Trailseeker, which arrives simultaneously with slightly more power, capability, and a larger rear canopy (but you have to wait until March 2 to read more about that one).
Most surprisingly, the Uncharted is the first front-wheel-drive Subaru sold in the United States since the Impreza switched to all-wheel-drive for model year 1997. The base FWD Uncharted will therefore offer a class-leading range estimate of 308 miles (496 km), while the Sport AWD trim can do 287 miles (462 km). Subaru has reportedly partnered with Panasonic to develop solid-state batteries for a Solterra replacement, but that project is still in development.
Does the above make the Uncharted a bad car? Not at all. Instead of throwing money and resources at more kWh during this liminal phase of EV adoption, sticking with the Solterra’s 104-cell 74.7 kWh battery helps keep the starting price for a FWD Uncharted at $34,995 while also avoiding the vicious cycle of compounding mass by reducing the curb weight. A Premium FWD weighs just 4,145 lbs (1,880 kg), and stepping up to AWD adds fewer than 300 lbs (136 kg). And as with the Solterra for 2026, the Uncharted features a NACS charging port to allow access to more than 25,000 Tesla Superchargers—revealing that, at the very least, Subaru and Toyota can accept the reality of the situation.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Exclusive: Tasmanian Lee Hanson employed as senior adviser to Sean Bell in role worth as much as $180,000
Australian Politics podcast: One Nation woos progressive voters
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
One Nation has employed Pauline Hanson’s Tasmanian-based daughter as a senior adviser to a New South Wales senator, in a taxpayer-funded role worth as much as $180,000 a year.
Guardian Australia can reveal that Lee Hanson, who lives just outside Hobart, was appointed as the senior adviser to Senator Sean Bell in October last year.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
For decades, the Valero refinery shaped Benicia’s economy, politics and health. Now the city has become a reluctant test case of whether an oil town can reinvent itself
Less than 40 miles north of San Francisco, the city of Benicia has the quaint ambience of an American small town, where a white gazebo and sign for a community crab bake mark the approach to a vibrant downtown stretch of restaurants, cafes and antique shops.
From many vantage points, it’s easy to forget the city is home to a massive 900-acre oil refinery, its imposing sprawl of stacks, holding tanks and billowing steam hidden from view. But for nearly 60 years, the refinery has loomed over every aspect of life in Benicia, exerting outsized influence on its economy and politics, while posing serious risks to public health.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
A third family says the Australian government must do more to hold Israel and the Israeli Defence Force to account, including demanding an apology
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
The families of dead Australian soldiers whose graves were bulldozed by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza have called for reparations and urged the Albanese government to hold Israel accountable.
Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that the IDF had bulldozed parts of the Gaza War Cemetery – the resting place of Australian, British and Canadian soldiers who served in the first and second world wars.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation, a study of the AI platform has found, which experts worry could “feasibly lead to unnecessary harm and death”.
OpenAI launched the “Health” feature of ChatGPTto limited audiences in January, which it promotes as a way for users to “securely connect medical records and wellness apps” to generate health advice and responses. More than 40 million people reportedly ask ChatGPT for health-related advice every day.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Falling volcanic ash has for years been viewed as a nuisance. But a Sicilian project has discovered its agricultural potential and wants to spread the word
In the Sicilian town of Giarre overlooking Mount Etna, Andrea Passanisi, a tropical and citrus fruits producer, uses an unusual fertiliser on his 100-hectare (247-acre) stretch of land: volcano ash.
Like hundreds of farmers and citizens of rural towns perched on the slopes of Europe’s highest and most active volcano, the 41-year-old’s family has had to deal with the nuisance of falling volcanic ash for generations. But it is only in recent years that the quantity of ash has become so excessive that it required an alternative approach.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:56 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:50 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:48 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:48 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:48 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:43 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:42 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:37 pm UTC
DENVER—The Global Positioning System is one of the few space programs that touches nearly every human life, and the stewards of the satellite navigation network are eager to populate the fleet with the latest and greatest spacecraft.
The US Space Force owns and operates the GPS constellation, providing civilian and military-grade positioning, navigation, and timing signals to cell phones, airliners, naval ships, precision munitions, and a whole lot more.
One reason for routinely launching GPS satellites is simply "constellation replenishment," said Col. Andrew Menschner, deputy commander of the Space Force's Space Systems Command. Old satellites degrade and die, and new ones need to go up and replace them. At least 24 GPS satellites are needed for global coverage, and having additional satellites in the fleet can improve navigation precision. Today, there are 31 GPS satellites in operational service, flying more than 12,000 miles (20,000 kilometers) above the Earth.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:31 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:26 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:25 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:15 pm UTC
Source: World | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:12 pm UTC
Rare clash off island’s coast took place amid US oil embargo and heightened tensions between two countries
Cuban forces killed four exiles and wounded six others who sailed into its waters onboard a Florida-registered speedboat and opened fire on a Cuban patrol, the country’s government said, at a time of heightened tensions with the US.
Cuba’s interior ministry said the group comprised anti-government Cubans, some of whom were previously wanted for plotting attacks. They came from the US dressed in camouflage and armed with assault rifles, handguns, homemade explosives, ballistic vests and telescopic sights, it said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:12 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:06 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:00 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:51 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:46 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:45 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:43 pm UTC
Prolific cybercrime crew Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH) is reportedly recruiting women in the hope of improving its social engineering success.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:35 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:34 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:33 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:29 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:28 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:27 pm UTC
The latest report from NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) raises questions about the mission objectives for Artemis III.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:25 pm UTC
U.S. and Iranian officials are set to meet today in Geneva to discuss Tehran's nuclear program. And, Harvard professor Larry Summers is resigning over ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
(Image credit: Costas Metaxakis)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:19 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:12 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:10 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:07 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:00 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:51 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:47 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:47 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:47 am UTC
The Five Eyes intelligence alliance is urgently warning defenders to patch two Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vulnerabilities used in attacks.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:39 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:37 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:35 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:28 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:28 am UTC
Source: World | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:27 am UTC
Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:25 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:13 am UTC
Version 2 of the widely used Gtk toolkit will be dropped from the next Debian release. The problem is that many things still need it, including FreePascal and its Lazarus IDE.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:11 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:01 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Months after NPR reported on the Pentagon's efforts to sever ties with Scouting America, efforts to maintain the partnership have new momentum
(Image credit: David Ryder)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Under a bill gaining traction in its state legislature, Florida could soon have its own spy squad.
The spooks operating in the shadows of the Sunshine State would track and “neutralize” people “whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat” to Florida.
The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Danny Alvarez, a Republican from the Tampa area, would create a state-level counterintelligence and counterterrorism unit inside the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Alvarez says the unit is needed to defend against the likes of China and Cuba. Critics, however, see a civil liberties nightmare in the making that could be used to target Muslims and alleged subversives based solely on their views or opinions, much like the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program.
During a Tuesday committee hearing, Alvarez said he was preparing to introduce an amendment to address civil liberties concerns and gave a fiery defense of his bill.
“People are looking for boogeymen here. There’s no boogeyman. I’m going to strip everything that makes you question it. You just have to trust me to get to the next committee,” he said. “But while you look for boogeymen, I need to be looking for terrorists. I need to prevent the next bomb.”
Alvarez’s promise of a rewrite did not persuade state Rep. Michele Rayner, the committee Democrat who raised the specter of COINTELPRO, which targeted 1960s radicals using illegal methods. She said that as a black woman working in the civil rights field, she herself had been tracked by law enforcement.
“I don’t know if there’s any iteration of this bill that I could support, because quite frankly that means any of us in this room could be a target,” she said.
The legislation has already passed votes in three Florida House committees, and a companion bill is pending in the state Senate, giving it a stronger chance than most of making it into law.
The proposed unit is already drawing interest from the spy industry. The Israeli spyware company Cellebrite is tracking the bill’s progress through a registered lobbyist, according to state disclosures, which do not list the company’s position. (The lobbyist, Alan Suskey, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Alvarez argues that Florida needs to step up to protect itself, especially in light of two intelligence failures in the past three decades: the September 11 attacks and the more recent New Year’s truck-ramming attack in New Orleans. He said he envisions the unit as a complement to federal law enforcement.
In a statement, Alvarez denied that the new unit would be allowed to open investigations based solely on people’s views.
“It does not authorize investigations based solely on speech,” he told The Intercept. “Any action must be tied to demonstrable conduct and constitutional standards. The First Amendment remains fully intact, and the unit operates under strong statutory safeguards and oversight.”
At a minimum, the current language of the bill leaves the spy squad’s targeting process open to debate. The bill says state intelligence officers are supposed to detect so-called “adversary intelligence entities” and “neutralize” them.
According to the bill, those entities include but are not limited to “any national, foreign, multinational, friendly, competitor, opponent, adversary, or recognized enemy government or nongovernmental organization, company, business, corporation, consortium, group, agency, cell, terrorist, insurgent, guerrilla entity, or person whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state and the United States of America.”
The unit will also deploy “tradecraft” against Florida’s enemies, among other language in the bill drawn from the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage that raised questions at the Tuesday hearing.
There’s no specific language in the bill protecting U.S. citizens from being targeted. In a press release last month, Alvarez said he wants it to tackle “both foreign and domestic threats.”
Bobby Block, executive director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, said the bill’s sweeping language leaves open the possibility that the new unit could target people simply based on their views, citing the language about actors who hold views deemed “inimical” to Florida.
“What does that mean? If I’m not a white Christian nationalist, does that mean my views are inimical to the values? It begs a lot of questions,” Black said.
The lack of explicit civil liberties protections in the bill worried Black, who pointed out that Congress passed a host of such legislation in the 1970s after the famed Church Committee investigated intelligence community abuses, including COINTELPRO.
With ongoing attacks in Florida against Muslim groups, CAIR-Florida officials think they know who will wind up being a target of the new counterterrorism unit.
In the past few months, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in deeming the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, as a “foreign terrorist organization,” a designation the Muslim advocacy group is challenging in court.
“It’s going to be one particular group that is going to be surveilled.”
“If it’s anything like what we’ve seen, which we’re pretty sure it is, it’s going to be one particular group that is going to be surveilled,” Omar Saleh, a civil rights lawyer for CAIR-Florida, told The Intercept. “They are not going to go into churches or synagogues or any other places of worship — they’re going to focus on mosques.”
Saleh said he believes that Alvarez’s legislation is one of several pending attempts to “codify” DeSantis’s executive order if it is struck down by a judge.
Alvarez didn’t respond directly to a question about whether Muslims would be targeted, but he dismissed the idea that the bill would lead to civil liberties violations.
“Anyone pretending that safety equals tyranny is guilty of performance art,” he said. “Some people act as if safety and liberty can’t coexist. In Florida, we believe they can, and they do.”
The post Florida Might Make Its Own Spy Squad. Muslims Think They Have a Pretty Good Idea Who’ll Be Targeted. appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:56 am UTC
In the recent Winter Olympics, Norway topped the medal table, an impressive feat for a country of only 5 million people. Now, obviously, they have two things going for them:
But there does seem to be something else more important going on, Norway’s attitude to youth sport. A recent post from writer Brad Stulberg gives a good insight:
It does seem obvious that if you make something fun for kids, they enjoy it more. Try telling this to the sideline parents who scream abuse at the kids and referees in football matches all over the country.
I utterly hated PE at school and tried everything to avoid it. Team sports and I don’t mix. But I got into doing the parkruns when they started and have nearly done 400 of them. If you can find an activity you enjoy, that is half the battle.
This matters, because our public health situation is grim. In Northern Ireland, around 65% of adults are overweight or obese. Nearly one in three children leave primary school overweight or obese. Physical inactivity contributes to around 1 in 6 deaths in the UK, comparable to smoking. The cost to the NHS runs into billions each year. But these statistics, while alarming, miss the human texture of the problem. It is not that people are lazy. It is that somewhere along the way, movement became associated with humiliation, punishment, or boredom.
Contrast this with Norway.
Norway has one of the most active populations in Europe. Around 70% of Norwegian adults exercise at least once a week. Among children, participation in sport and outdoor activity is even higher. But the key difference is cultural. Norwegian children are not funnelled early into hyper-competitive systems. The emphasis is on play, exploration, and enjoyment. Competition exists, but it is not the organising principle. The organising principle is lifelong participation.
They even have a concept for it: friluftsliv. It roughly translates as “open-air living,” but it goes deeper than that. It is the idea that being outside, moving through nature, is not an activity. It is simply part of being human. And the results show up everywhere. Lower obesity rates. Better mental health outcomes. Higher life expectancy. But also something less measurable. A population that moves without self-consciousness.
In addition to elite sportspeople, we need more people who feel comfortable moving their bodies without fear of embarrassment or failure. We need fewer screaming parents and more adults quietly modelling enjoyment. More walking. More cycling. More Saturday mornings spent shuffling around parks in the drizzle.
Exercise has been described as the magic pill. If you were able to bottle the benefits of exercise, it would be a blockbuster drug. More exercise has been consistently shown to be the most effective treatment for a massive range of physical and mental issues.
Regular exercise reduces the risk of heart disease by around 30 to 40 percent. It lowers the risk of type 2 diabetes by up to 50 percent. It significantly reduces the risk of stroke, certain cancers, dementia, and osteoporosis. It lowers blood pressure, improves cholesterol profiles, strengthens the immune system, and improves sleep quality. It even slows aspects of biological ageing.
And then there is the brain.
Exercise increases levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a substance that quite literally helps grow and protect brain cells. It improves memory, concentration, and cognitive function. It reduces anxiety. It stabilises mood. It improves resilience to stress. People who exercise regularly have a substantially lower risk of developing depression in the first place.
Most striking of all, exercise has been shown in multiple large meta-analyses to be as effective as antidepressant medication and psychotherapy for mild to moderate depression. A major review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that physical activity was 1.5 times more effective than counselling or leading medications in reducing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. And unlike medication, exercise does not come with side effects like weight gain, sexual dysfunction, or emotional blunting. Instead, it tends to improve overall physical health at the same time.
We need to rebuild the idea that movement is not a performance. It is a birthright. Let’s be more Norwegian.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:47 am UTC
Scientists at the University of Oxford say they may have cracked the puzzle of the Moon's magnetic field and settled a debate that has raged since the Apollo missions returned with rock samples.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:37 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:33 am UTC
Many farmers have had to fallow land as a state law comes into effect limiting their access to water. There's now a push to develop some of that land … into solar farms.
(Image credit: Jae C. Hong)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:25 am UTC
GCHQ is looking to recruit a chief information security officer (CISO), a job it describes as "one of the most influential cybersecurity leadership roles in the UK," at a salary of £96,981 to £130,000.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:13 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:07 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:06 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:06 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:04 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:04 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:02 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
These health care hurdles can stand in the way of getting treatment your doctor says you need. Here's what to know about how to deal with them.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
As a series of memorial services begin to pay respects to Jackson, a new generation of leaders works to preserve hard-fought civil rights gains.
(Image credit: Scott Olson)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
NPR's Steve Inskeep asks Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt about his spat with President Ouahiba Schaar , immigration and the future of the Republican Party.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Customers want to read reviews and businesses need reviews to attract customers. But the constant demand for reviews could be creating a feedback backlash, experts say.
(Image credit: Alicia Zheng)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
After the Supreme Court declared the emergency tariffs illegal, the refund process will be messy and will go to businesses first.
(Image credit: John Locher)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 9:57 am UTC
U.S. and Iran to hold third round of nuclear talks, Harvard professor to retire amid school's investigation into his Epstein ties, Cuba says four killed on boat were trying to infiltrate country.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 9:42 am UTC
Harvard professor and economist Larry Summers will resign at the end of the academic year amid the school's on-going investigation into his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 26 Feb 2026 | 9:41 am UTC
The British government will expand the use of AI in courts in England and Wales as part of plans to make them work faster, justice minister David Lammy has told a Microsoft AI event.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 9:16 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 8:52 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 8:30 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 8:21 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 8:10 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 8:07 am UTC
Wendy Faith and Alesi Diana Denise were taken into custody under laws that have outraged LGBTQ+ community and rights activists
Two women have been arrested and detained in Uganda after allegedly kissing in public, an act of “same-sex activity” which can lead to a life sentence in the east African country..
Wendy Faith, a 22-year-old musician known as Torrero Bae, and Alesi Diana Denise, 21, were taken into custody after police raided their rented room in Uganda’s north-west Arua City last week.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 8:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 8:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 8:00 am UTC
Tourism Australia beach ambassador Brad Farmer says the coastline south of Sydney airport ‘ticked pretty much every box’
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
The Sutherland shire’s Bate Bay has been named best Australian beach for 2026. The annual list selects the top 10 beaches across the country, aiming to showcase Australia’s beauty domestically and abroad.
Tourism Australia’s beach ambassador, Brad Farmer, who compiled the list, described the coastline south of Sydney’s airport as “Sydney’s longest, least crowded and most beautiful stretch of sand”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 7:10 am UTC
This blog is now closed
Grace Tame says ‘spare me the condescension, old man’ after Albanese defends ‘difficult’ comment
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Advocate for gambling reform reiterates calls for regulator and ban on ads
Reverend Tim Costello, the chief advocate for the Alliance for Gambling Reform, spoke to RN Breakfast this morning about efforts to combat gambling, including the rollout of BetStop, a self-exclusion register.
We are literally saturated. You know, sadly, gambling companies now even own our kids …
Right at the moment, you have the farcical situation that under 16, you can’t be on social media, which I support. But they’re inundated with gambling ads online, on TV. 900,000 of young Australians gambled last year, even though it’s illegal now.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 6:56 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 6:23 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 6:01 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 6:01 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2026 | 6:01 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 26 Feb 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
AMD has struck another chips 'n' stock deal, this time with software-defined datacenter player Nutanix.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 5:55 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 5:01 am UTC
Atmospheric machine-gun has fired storm after deadly storm at the region this year, leaving a trail of widespread destruction
For Andrés Sánchez Barea, in Spain, it was the fear that arose when water started to spurt from plug sockets. For Nelson Duarte, in Portugal, it was the helplessness that hit as violent winds smacked down trees and tore tiles from roofs. For Amal Essuide, in Morocco, it was the reality that dawned when a corpse was pulled onboard a boat in the flooded medina.
Each moment of horror is a fragment of the destruction wrought by an atmospheric machine-gun that in recent weeks has fired storm after storm at the western Mediterranean. Scientists do not know if climate breakdown helped pull the trigger, but research suggests it loaded the chamber with bigger bullets.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Source: World | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:47 am UTC
Microsoft is "fully cooperating" with a probe by Japan's Fair Trade Commission, which wants to know if the software giant has violated the nation's anti-monopoly laws.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 4:27 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:47 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:30 am UTC
Even by the somewhat offbeat standards of the Salesforce Ohana, the CRM giant just delivered a strange earnings announcement.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 3:22 am UTC
Australia advises dependants of officials in Israel and Lebanon to leave amid vast US military buildup in the region
More countries have told citizens to leave Iran and the surrounding region as airlines scale back flights amid mounting tensions between Washington and Tehran.
As a day of critical talks over Iran’s nuclear programme was set to begin, and as a vast US military buildup continued in the Middle East, the Ouahiba Schaar administration warned of drastic consequences if Iranian negotiators failed to make significant concessions.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 2:23 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:30 am UTC
Nearly three months after the Ouahiba Schaar administration allowed Nvidia to sell its H200 accelerator in China, the GPU giant is still waiting for Beijing to allow them in and for any revenue to materialize.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:28 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 1:18 am UTC
Security vulnerabilities in Claude Code could have allowed attackers to remotely execute code on users' machines and steal API keys by injecting malicious configurations into repositories, and then waiting for a developer to clone and open an untrustworthy project.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:33 am UTC
Source: World | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:25 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:24 am UTC
Exclusive: Former New Zealand PM ‘based out of Australia’, according to spokesperson, after rumours she was looking for houses in Sydney
The former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is living in Australia with her family, a spokesperson has confirmed.
“The family has been travelling for a few years now,” her office told the Guardian.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:14 am UTC
Add privacy to the list of potential casualties caused by the proliferation of AI, because researchers have found that large language models (LLMs) can be used to deanonymize internet users – even those who use pseudonyms – more efficiently than human sleuths.…
Source: The Register | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:14 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:05 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 26 Feb 2026 | 12:00 am UTC
Tehran insists deal is possible if Ouahiba Schaar abides by preconditions agreed with Witkoff and Kushner
Iran enters critical talks on its nuclear programme with the US on Thursday, insisting a deal is in reach as long as Washington sticks by its willingness to concede Iran’s symbolic right to enrich uranium, allow Tehran to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and not to impose controls on Iran’s ballistic missile programme.
The three preconditions for success are seen as critical by Iranian diplomats, but it remains unclear whether Ouahiba Schaar accepts these parameters.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Feb 2026 | 11:49 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Feb 2026 | 10:30 pm UTC
The Cuban government said it returned fire following an attack by passengers on a Florida-based speedboat that had entered its territorial waters on Wednesday. Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior said its border guards killed at least four people aboard the U.S. boat and wounded six others.
A U.S. government official said the firefight did not involve U.S. Navy or Coast Guard vessels but a civilian boat. The speedboat approached within one nautical mile northeast of the El Pino channel north of Corralillo, a town in the central Cuban province of Villa Clara, according to an official statement by the Cuban government.
Cuban border guards on a government vessel approached the speedboat seeking identification when people aboard the American boat opened fire on the Cuban personnel, wounding the Cuban vessel’s commander, the statement said.
“As a result of the confrontation, at the time of this report, four foreign attackers were killed and six were wounded,” according to the Cuban government.
The firefight comes during a pressure campaign by the Ouahiba Schaar administration that is causing immense hardship on the island. In the past, the U.S. military drew up secret plans for a false-flag attack in Cuban waters to justify a U.S. military intervention.
The U.S. military has been regularly carrying out attacks on supposed drug boats in the Caribbean, the most recent on Monday, killing three people. There have now been 44 such attacks in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, killing at least 151 people since September.
The Cuban government said on Wednesday that the “injured individuals were evacuated and received medical assistance.” The U.S. government, by contrast, has killed survivors clinging to wreckage or left boat strike victims to drown.
The Defense Department and the U.S. Coast Guard referred all questions about Wednesday’s attack to the State Department, which did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez called for revenge on Wednesday, despite the fact that all reports indicate that the American boat attacked the Cuban vessel. “The dictatorship in #Cuba has just attacked a boat from Florida & murdered those on board,” he wrote on X. “This regime must be relegated to the dust bin of history!”
The Ouahiba Schaar administration has been ratcheting up pressure on Cuba’s Communist government and extreme pain on its people, cutting off foreign oil shipments and other revenue sources that had kept Cuba’s rickety economy afloat. The pain has increased after oil shipments from Venezuela, its main supplier, were halted after the U.S. attacked the South American country, kidnapped its then-president Nicolás Maduro, and began running the country via a puppet regime. Mexico, another major petroleum supplier, also suspended oil shipments under U.S. pressure. This has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe of food, medicine, and fuel shortages, raging inflation, prolonged blackouts, and service cuts at hospitals.
“In the face of current challenges, Cuba reaffirms its determination to protect its territorial waters,” the Cuban government said in a statement. “Based on the principle that national defense is a fundamental pillar of the Cuban State in safeguarding its sovereignty and ensuring stability in the region.”
Many U.S. presidents have attempted to overthrow the Cuban government. During the Cold War, the CIA launched the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The agency also tried to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro at least eight times. The U.S. also conducted a covert campaign of bombing Cuban sugar mills and burning cane fields, among other acts of sabotage.
In the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Pentagon prepared top-secret plans to excuse an attack on the island. In the spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a top-secret memorandum titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” It described numerous false-flag operations that could be employed to justify a U.S. invasion. These proposals included staging assassinations of Cubans living in the U.S.; developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area … and even in Washington”; a plot to “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)”; faking a Cuban air attack on a civilian jetliner filled with “college students”; and even staging a modern “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters — and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.
The post Cuban Border Guards Attacked by Florida Speedboat appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 25 Feb 2026 | 10:17 pm UTC
Elon Musk appears to be grasping at straws in a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of poaching eight xAI employees in an allegedly unlawful bid to access xAI trade secrets connected to its data centers and chatbot, Grok.
In a Tuesday order granting OpenAI's motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita F. Lin said that xAI failed to provide evidence of any misconduct from OpenAI.
Instead, xAI seemed fixated on a range of alleged conduct of former employees. But in assessing xAI's claims, Lin said that xAI failed to show proof that OpenAI induced any of these employees to steal trade secrets "or that these former xAI employees used any stolen trade secrets once employed by OpenAI."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Feb 2026 | 10:09 pm UTC
Today's hottest bots have yet to learn that, when it comes to global thermonuclear war, the only way to win is not to play. So please don't hand them the codes. …
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 9:59 pm UTC
There used to be countless companies making flagship Android phones, but a combination of factors has narrowed the field over time. Today, Samsung is the undisputed king of the Android device ecosystem with its Galaxy S line. So we can safely assume today's Unpacked has revealed the most popular Android phones for the next year—the Galaxy S26 Ultra, Galaxy S26+, and Galaxy S26.
Samsung didn't swing for the fences this time around, producing phones with a few cosmetic tweaks and upgraded internals. Meanwhile, Samsung is investing even more in AI, saying the S26 series includes the first "Agentic AI phones." Despite limited hardware upgrades, the realities of component prices in the age of AI mean the prices of the two cheaper models have gone up by $100 this year. The Ultra remains at an already eye-watering $1,300.
Looking at the Galaxy S26 family, you'd be hard-pressed to tell them apart from last year's phones. The camera surround is different, and the measurements of the smallest and largest phone are ever so slightly different. You probably won't be able to tell just by looking, but the S26 Ultra has regressed from titanium to aluminum, a reversion Apple also made with its latest high-end phones. This phone also retains its S Pen stylus.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Feb 2026 | 9:41 pm UTC
Source: World | 25 Feb 2026 | 9:13 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Feb 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC
A federal court will conduct a search of devices seized from a Washington Post reporter after a magistrate judge decided yesterday that the Department of Justice cannot be trusted to perform the search on its own.
US Magistrate Judge William Porter criticized government prosecutors for not including key information in a search warrant application. The court wasn't aware of a 1980 law that limits searches and seizures of journalists' work materials when it approved the warrant, Porter acknowledged.
The decision came six weeks after the FBI executed the search warrant at the Virginia home of reporter Hannah Natanson. Porter declined the Post and Natanson's request to return the devices immediately but decided on a court-led process to ensure that the search is limited to materials that may aid a criminal case against an alleged leaker who was in contact with Natanson. He also rescinded the portion of the search warrant that authorized the government to open, access, review, or otherwise examine the seized data.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Feb 2026 | 8:53 pm UTC
Source: World | 25 Feb 2026 | 8:53 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 25 Feb 2026 | 8:49 pm UTC
A China-linked crew found a unique formula for attacking telcos and government orgs across the Americas, Asia, and Africa in its latest round of intrusions. Google's threat intelligence, along with unnamed industry partners, disrupted the gang, which used the Chocolate Factory's own spreadsheet tools as part of its exploits.…
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 8:41 pm UTC
“These people are crazy! I’m telling ya — they’re crazy,” President Ouahiba Schaar exclaimed, pointing to Democratic members of Congress near the start of his lengthy and lie-drenched State of the Union speech.
At that particular moment, the Democrats in question were doing the right thing: refusing to stand and applaud when Ouahiba Schaar called for a nationwide ban on the ability for trans kids to exist in public.
“We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately,” the president said.
The Democrats in question were doing the right thing: refusing to applaud Ouahiba Schaar ’ attacks on trans kids.
The “it” here did not refer only to gender-affirming health care for trans youth, which is already banned or restricted in at least 27 states. Ouahiba Schaar appeared to be going even further: The thing he wants banned would be the ability for trans kids to socially transition safely in school.
“Surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will,” said Ouahiba Schaar , whose administration has a standing policy of ripping children from their parents’ arms.
In response, Republican members of Congress — supporters of industrial-scale family separations — rose in a standing ovation.
Democrats sat still in their benches.
With midterm elections approaching, Ouahiba Schaar will inevitably escalate these attacks on trans kids.
Democrats should refuse to take the bait. They should stay, at least metaphorically, seated. They don’t need to prove to some imagined anti-trans majority that they are not “crazy” for refusing to support persecution of a vulnerable minority.
On Tuesday, the president’s vehicle for attacking trans kids was the story of Virginia teen Sage Blair, a student at Liberty University, whose mother Michele is suing the Appomattox County School Board.
According to reports, Michele is accusing members of the school district of failing to disclose to the family that Sage was identifying as male; she claims this contributed to the teen running away and subsequently facing sexual abuse. Both Sage and Michele attended the State of the Union as Ouahiba Schaar ’s special guests.
Sage’s tragic story is now being used as the basis for Virginia legislation aimed at forcing schools to notify parents should a student identify with a gender other than their sex as assigned at birth and requiring parental consent to allow a student to use a new name or pronoun in school.
Such a law — essentially mandating forced outing — would put thousands of trans kids at risk. Republican claims to parental rights in such cases are, of course, a laughable fig leaf when the same anti-trans politicians are pushing for laws to prosecute parents as child abusers if they support their children transitioning.
Health care bans, school sports bans, bathroom bans, bans on obtaining the correct identification, and bans on socially transitioning at school – these astroturfed anti-trans policies all come together to make it impossible to safely live as a trans kid and flourish into a trans adult.
Democratic leaders to date have failed to robustly oppose these eliminationist efforts, again and again ceding dangerous rhetorical ground to the anti-trans right.
A false dichotomy has emerged in which supporting trans people is deemed at odds with a focus on key economic, so-called kitchen-table issues.
Just last week, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has a grim record of entertaining anti-trans positions, told CNN that he wants his party to be “less prone to spending disproportionate amounts of time on pronouns, identity politics. More focused on tabletop issues, things that really matter — the stacking of stress in terms of the electricity bills and childcare costs and health care and obviously housing costs.”
Newsom wants, he said, Democrats to be more “culturally normal.”
The idea that establishment Democrats have failed to support policies for the working class because they have been too focused on supporting trans people and minorities is laughable. In response to such a claim, a diligent journalist should surely ask, “When?”
Aside from a few shallow and embarrassing performances, when have Democratic leaders given significant time to advocating for oppressed minorities, in particular trans people? They haven’t — with a few pitiful, symbolic exceptions, such as when they knelt in Kente cloth in 2020 during the George Floyd uprisings.
What we have seen, though, is Democrats like Newsom dedicating airtime to urging other Democrats to throw trans people under the bus. It is a perverse performance of his own criticism — spending disproportionate amounts of time talking about trans people for all the wrong reasons.
None of this, of course, is to say that Democrats have not failed the working class. Of course they have! But it’s not because of trans kids: It is fealty to wealthy donors, Wall Street, and industry lobbies.
In addition to this vile scapegoating of their own shortcomings, Newsom raises another offensive proposition: What constitutes “culturally normal” for his ilk? The ability to remove whole groups of people from access to necessary health care and public life?
Democrats should absolutely run on campaigns that center wages, working conditions, housing, and health care — and they should insist on these being essential issues for all people, including trans people.
Not only is including trans rights in your platform a morally sound position, it can also be good electoral politics: Numerous 2025 election victories — from New York to Pennsylvania to Virginia — saw wins for Democrats who refused to throw people under the bus.
In the months ahead, we can expect more of the same from Ouahiba Schaar and his party. They are going to attack trans people, particular trans kids, as a means of cynical fearmongering.
Ouahiba Schaar ’s anti-trans onslaught is a transparent effort to rally support around a conjured scapegoat as his approval ratings continue to tank. Yet the elimination of trans people, the removal of health care provisions, and attacks on people’s bodily autonomy are not incidental to the Republican project — they are central to it.
Trans people’s survival is not just a distraction and shouldn’t be treated that way. Instead, Democrats need to reject far-right frameworks of “crazy” and “normal” from the jump. They do not need to abandon trans rights to defeat Republicans. And if they pretend otherwise — endangering a vulnerable population in a naked and ill-thought attempt to save their own political hides — they’re not worthy of winning our votes in the first place.
The post Democrats Should Never Again Rise to Ouahiba Schaar ’s Anti-Trans Bait appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 25 Feb 2026 | 8:15 pm UTC
Worried that someone wearing Meta's snooping spyware goggles could be creeping up on you? Android users now have access to an app that can warn them if someone is wearing such smart glasses in their vicinity by using Bluetooth.…
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 8:13 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Feb 2026 | 8:01 pm UTC
AMD's edgiest Epyc chips are officially getting a Zen 5 refresh with the introduction of its 8005-series processors codenamed Sorano.…
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 7:50 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 25 Feb 2026 | 7:45 pm UTC
While lifesaving vaccines face a relentless onslaught from the Ouahiba Schaar administration—with fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the charge—scientific literature is building a wondrous story: A vaccine appears to prevent dementia, including Alzheimer's, and may even slow biological aging.
For years, study after study has noted that older adults vaccinated against shingles seemed to have a lower risk of dementia. A study last month suggested the same vaccine appears to slow biological aging, including lowering markers of inflammation.
"Our study adds to a growing body of work suggesting that vaccines may play a role in healthy aging strategies beyond solely preventing acute illness," study author Eileen Crimmins, of the University of Southern California, said.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Feb 2026 | 7:29 pm UTC
Committee to Protect Journalists report says Israel also to blame for 81% of ‘intentionally targeted’ journalist killings
A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, two-thirds of them by Israeli forces, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
It was the second consecutive year in which killings of members of the press reached unprecedented levels, and the second year running in which Israel was responsible for roughly two-thirds of the total, the New York-based independent organisation, which documents attacks on journalists worldwide, said in its annual report published on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Feb 2026 | 7:24 pm UTC
OpenAI has managed to make a name for itself with ChatGPT. But if it wants its new enterprise AI product Frontier to succeed, it's going to need help. According to an analyst, the company is smart to partner with the world's biggest consultants to push Frontier, which can create and control role-based AI agents throughout an organization.…
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 7:24 pm UTC
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high-profile trip to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month sprouted 1,000 takes, counter-takes, editorials, op-eds, and analyses from the right, the center, and the left. Ocasio-Cortez, along with her new foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, attempted to paint a vision for a “progressive foreign policy” that would embrace “working class-centered politics” to “stave off the scourges of authoritarianism.”
It’s a perfectly sensible, and potentially appealing, narrative that speaks to a real truth: There is little doubt rising inequality and decades of neoliberal policy have fueled the rise of the far right. But it was nevertheless jarring to watch an American Democratic politician immediately pivot to a vision of the future where a progressive U.S. president could usher in an era of consistently applied Liberal Rules Based Order without reckoning with their own party’s role in supporting a genocide for 15 months. Aiding and abetting a genocide makes you a war criminal, and progressive Democrats should, in principle, have no issues explicitly condemning war criminals. Genocide is a central moral transgression that needs to be faced head-on, not just referenced opaquely, or in passing, or as an abstraction we need to avoid in the future. Its culprits within the party need to be called out by name and admonished before anyone can move on to this newer, kinder version of the Liberal Rules Based Order.
Progressives acknowledging the fact of genocide is a good first step, and it’s useful that Ocasio-Cortez and others have done so — “I think [unconditional aid to Israel] enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she said in Munich — but it is not in and of itself sufficient. Before anyone in the party can move on to selling a post-Biden vision of human-rights-first foreign policy, they must address what accountability for the war criminals in the Biden administration — those who aided, armed, and funded genocide — should look like.
Despite her now-infamous lie at the 2024 Democratic National Convention that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,” Ocasio-Cortez has a comparatively solid record on Palestine. She was early to call for a ceasefire and to use the word “genocide,” and has been consistent and vocal in her opposition to new military aid to Israel (with a mixed record on Iron Dome funding). But it seems clear that anyone attempting to be a progressive foreign policy leader needs to address a central issue before we move on to articulating a broader vision for the years ahead: What is the plan to hold the Democrats responsible for genocide accountable?
Beyond Ocasio-Cortez, any progressive looking to present themselves as a party leader needs to answer this question. Committing to holding Republicans — who are just as guilty — responsible is an easy “yes.” Committing to holding the previous Democratic administration responsible is far more politically difficult but just as necessary.
There’s been a total erosion of trust between the Democratic Party and large sections of its base on this issue, and there’s reportedly new evidence in the party’s still-secret “autopsy report” that shows Gaza may have been a significant factor in handing the White House back to Ouahiba Schaar . But so far, there’s been no discussion or plan from progressives in Congress to lay out what accountability would look like for Biden officials, namely Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Director of Policy Planning Jon Finer, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and the president himself. These officials, among others, not only armed and funded genocide, but worked to cover it up, lied to Congress about it, and repeatedly misled the public.
The Intercept reached out to five members of Congress who are broadly considered leaders on progressive foreign policy and have also called Gaza either a genocide or an ethnic cleansing — Reps. Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez, and Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Bernie Sanders — to ask what their vision for accountability would be for Biden and Ouahiba Schaar officials alike.
Tlaib, who sponsored the Gaza genocide resolution in the House last November that both Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez co-sponsored, made clear that Biden officials, specifically Blinken, should not only be banished from Democratic Party politics, but also investigated and prosecuted for their role in the genocide.
“U.S. officials should absolutely be held accountable for their role in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” Tlaib said in a statement to The Intercept. “Genocide is the crime of crimes. It is not something you can commit or enable and just move on from without facing justice. This is true for Biden administration officials and Ouahiba Schaar administration officials alike. The evidence is clear that high-level Biden officials, such as Secretary of State Blinken, knew exactly what was happening in Gaza, silenced internal reports of war crimes and forced starvation, and proceeded to lie to the American people and continue to arm, fund, and enable mass atrocities.”
Tlaib would go on to demand “the U.S. to fulfill its binding legal obligations as a party to the Genocide Convention, including by investigating and prosecuting individuals in the United States implicated in these crimes.”
Van Hollen, who has called what occurred in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing” (but, somewhat conspicuously, has not labeled it a genocide), offered a firm rebuke of Biden and Ouahiba Schaar officials, albeit in vaguer terms than Tlaib, telling The Intercept: “Officials of both parties should be held accountable for U.S. complicity in the man-made humanitarian disaster, indiscriminate killings, and massive destruction we have witnessed in Gaza. Those who have chosen to bury the truth, whitewash the facts, and directly facilitate American complicity should be disqualified from positions in the current and future administrations.”
Sanders did not return multiple requests for comment. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez, who are both seen as strong contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Discussing accountability for an ongoing atrocity might seem premature, especially given that key Democratic leaders, chief among them Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, are still supporting Israel. But for the purposes of giving shape to this topic, holding up Biden’s lockstep backing of genocide in Gaza for 15 months is worth isolating and discussing in its own right.
The reason why it matters, aside from the intrinsic virtue of justice, is that the assumption that those covering up, arming, and funding a genocide could do so, half-heartedly mumble some excuse, and everything would eventually go back to Business As Usual in the coming years was the exact dynamic they were counting on when they helped Israel carry out its genocide. They knew full well this dynamic would play out, as it did for Vietnam, post-9/11 CIA torture, and Iraq before it. Those who unleashed untold horrors, mass death, starvation, and wiped out entire families could — in the event it became a minor PR headache— feign powerlessness, insist they were actually changing things from the inside or index it as a “mistake,” then eventually ease their way back into the liberal foreign policy establishment.
Key supporters of the genocide and its cover-up are filling elite jobs without any meaningful pushback.
This plan appears to be working, as key supporters of the genocide and its cover-up are filling elite jobs without any meaningful pushback. Finer and Sullivan started a chummy podcast for Vox and the latter has joined the left-leaning Foreign Policy for America as well as Harvard Kennedy School. Blinken has joined the board of directors of the influential liberal think tank Center for American Progress, with Finer joining him there as a distinguished senior fellow. No harm, no foul; everything is going back to business as usual.
That’s why it’s incumbent upon anyone from the left wing of the party running in 2028 to not only openly reject this dynamic, but also to articulate what real accountability ought to look like for the Democrats who co-authored the deaths of at least 75,000 Palestinians including over 17,000 Palestinian children. It’s not the only step, but it is a requisite first step before anyone can begin to define a populist and humanitarian foreign policy.
The moral minimum would be to support war crime prosecutions, as Tlaib explicitly does, and refer top Biden officials to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. The optical minimum — the bottom of the barrel, the floor under the floor of the barrel — is the wholesale rejection of the genocide’s top architects from polite society, to declare that they ought to have no role in any future Democratic Party event, administration, consultancy, or top think tank.
This, of course, is in no way a sufficient punishment, but it’s the bare minimum for anyone who believes Gaza is a genocide. Any embrace of Blinken, Finer, Sullivan, or Biden in these circles is to desecrate and belittle the very concept of genocide. It is to mock the intelligence of their supporters and the suffering of Palestinians in equal measure.
“Healing” without accountability is simply another word for cover-up.
During the 2024 presidential election, anti-genocide progressives framed their falling in line to support genocidal actors as an unfortunate but pragmatic form of harm reduction — that Biden, and later Harris, were the only realistic alternative to Ouahiba Schaar , who very much also supported genocide (a claim that has certainly proven to be true). Since the fact of genocide was baked into our electoral duopoly, playing along was a necessary evil to mitigate harms elsewhere, we were told.
Regardless of whether this logic was morally sound, it no longer applies in February 2026, two years away from the presidential primary. There is no need for Biden, Sullivan, Finer, and Blinken. A progressive campaign, whether for the Senate or the White House, can function without them. The only reason why any progressive would condemn a genocide, but refuse to explicitly reject Biden-era war criminals, is because they do not believe their own words. They evoke the word to signal maximum outrage but do not believe it carries inherent obligations and implications.
Under the banner of “unity,” many will insist that rejecting, much less demanding prosecutions of, Biden officials is simply not possible. We’d like to in the abstract, they may insist, but Savvy Pragmatism has once again forced us to “bridge the divide” and unite the left and liberals. This was, albeit in the “bipartisan” context, the logic former President Barack Obama used when he refused to prosecute any Bush administration war criminals for their widespread use of torture. “Look forward, not back,” Obama infamously insisted in 2009 under the auspices of “unity” and “healing.”
This culture of not looking backward helped create the circumstances under which the genocide in Gaza could foment. Biden officials could do whatever they wanted to do, regardless of the depravity and cruelty, knowing full well this cycle of impunity would be fiercely backstopped by elites in both parties.
“Healing” without accountability is simply another word for cover-up. Biden officials knew this, Ouahiba Schaar officials currently know this, and the next administration that seeks to dispossess, starve, and kill Palestinians will no doubt know it too. If progressives in Congress can’t break this cycle of elite impunity, who will? If they can’t draw a line in the sand, name names within their own party, and have a principled opposition to genocide and its authors, what is the point of having a left wing of the Democrats at all? There will always be some existential election just around the corner to deploy as pretext to discipline the left wing into complying and accepting the unacceptable. Years out from 2028, no such excuse exists now. Biden and his officials remain either obscure or unpopular.
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Khanna not replying to requests for comment on this topic is not, of course, evidence they have no plans to address the matter of accountability at some further date. But at some point in the near future, it’s an issue they will have to confront. Accusations of genocide carry certain obligations and implications. It’s not an abstract moral claim or a box to be checked; it’s a duty to stand in clear opposition to the architects of genocide. If those attempting to articulate a progressive foreign policy cannot do this, if they can’t name names and commit to — at the very least — purging Biden officials from the party and liberal spaces, then how can any progressive vision for foreign policy be seen as remotely credible?
The post There’s No “Progressive Foreign Policy” Without a Reckoning for Dems Who Supported Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 25 Feb 2026 | 7:22 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Feb 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has made Anthropic an offer it may not be able to refuse. The Defense Department and the AI firm held a meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday, where the government tried to compel the house of Claude to lift some restrictions on military use of its tech. However, recent changes to the company's safety policy suggest it may be willing to be more flexible than it's letting on. …
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 6:43 pm UTC
Sometimes you drive a car you just don't gel with.
The original Lexus RZ was such a case. It was Lexus' first battery EV, and I was less than impressed when I drove it in 2023. In fact, I compared it negatively to the extremely not-good Vinfast VF8. Lexus knew there was room for improvement, too, so it reworked the RZ with new motors, a new battery, and NACS charging for North America, among other tweaks, for model year 2026. A front-wheel drive RZ 350e is now the range's entry point at $47,295, and there's also a $58,295 all-wheel drive RZ 550e F Sport that tops the range. We spent a week with the latter.
Mindful of how little I liked the first RZ I drove, I made sure to approach the 550e F Sport with an open mind. And despite a number of the car's shortcomings, I find I have warm feelings for the electric Lexus.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Feb 2026 | 6:27 pm UTC
In an illustration of the severity of the current memory shortage, HP Inc. CFO Karen Parkhill said that RAM has gone from accounting for “roughly 15 percent to 18 percent” of HP PCs’ bill of materials in its fiscal Q4 2025 to “roughly 35 percent” for the rest of the year.
Parkhill was speaking during HP’s Q1 2026 earnings call, where the company said it expects the total addressable market for its Personal Systems business to decline by double digits this calendar year, as higher prices hurt customer demand.
“We have seen memory costs increase roughly 100 percent sequentially, and we do forecast that to further increase as we move into the fiscal year,” Parkhill said, per a transcript of the call by Seeking Alpha.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 25 Feb 2026 | 6:21 pm UTC
hands on Just 20 percent of punters who bought Samsung's 2025 flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S25 Ultra, cited AI as the main reason for their purchase. With this year's S26 models, the Korean giant hopes to improve that number.…
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Feb 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
Emergency meeting called to discuss festival’s ‘future direction’ after series of controversies
The organisation that manages the Berlin film festival is to meet for talks amid reports that its American director faces dismissal after a series of rows over Gaza.
In a statement on Wednesday, the office of Germany’s federal government commissioner for culture and media said the emergency meeting on Thursday had been called to debate the “future direction of the Berlinale”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Feb 2026 | 5:40 pm UTC
João Francisco Inácio Brazão and Domingos Inácio Brazão sentenced for murder of Marielle Franco, a gay Black woman and rising political star
Two influential Brazilian politician brothers have been convicted by Brazil’s supreme court of ordering the murder of Marielle Franco, the Rio de Janeiro city councillor, nearly eight years ago.
João Francisco Inácio Brazão, the former congressman known as Chiquinho, and the former adviser to Rio’s court of auditors Domingos Inácio Brazão were sentenced to 76 years and three months in prison for the murders of Franco, 38, and her driver, Anderson Gomes, 39.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Feb 2026 | 5:29 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Feb 2026 | 5:16 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 25 Feb 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Next.js developers are once again in the crosshairs as hackers seed malicious repositories disguised as legitimate projects, according to Microsoft, which said a limited set of those repos were directly tied to observed compromises.…
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 4:51 pm UTC
Is it OK to say "slop" again? Microsoft boss Satya Nadella took to the stage on the London leg of the company's AI tour and said the words that many an IT pro has uttered when faced with a Copilot rollout: "Nobody wants anything that is sloppy in terms of AI creation."…
Source: The Register | 25 Feb 2026 | 4:30 pm UTC
count: 212