Read at: 2026-02-03T00:38:32+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Arda Nederpelt ]
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:32 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:28 am UTC
Latest release of files about disgraced financier reveals ex-wife of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor told him he was ‘the brother I have always wished for’
The charity of Sarah Ferguson has announced that it is closing after new revelations emerged about the former duchess’s friendship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Sarah’s Trust, the international charity launched by the ex-wife of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, will close “for the foreseeable future” after “some months” of discussion, according to a spokesperson.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:22 am UTC
Reserve Bank due to announce decision on interest rates this afternoon. Follow today’s news live
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Liberal politicians have joked they need “divine intervention” at a church service before parliament resumes today.
Federal parliamentarians are attending the ecumenical service, before sitting begins later. Media doorstopped most of the MPs on their way in, with reporters asking what they were praying for, whether they needed “forgiveness”, and whether they prayed for a Coalition reunion.
We know that inflation’s higher than we would like. People are under more pressure than anybody wants. And that’s why the responsibility that we have … is to continue to manage the budget in a responsible way, continue to roll out this cost of living relief.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:16 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:14 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:12 am UTC
Immigration officials said agent shot two ‘vicious gang members’ in Portland, but records obtained by the Guardian reveal US prosecutor contradicted claims
Immediately after a US border patrol agent shot two people in Oregon last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the targets were “vicious” gang members connected to a prior shooting and alleged they had “attempted to run over” officers with their vehicle.
In the weeks since, key parts of the federal government’s narrative have fallen apart.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:09 am UTC
Decision to give testimony comes days before House was expected to vote to hold pair in contempt of Congress
Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed on Monday to testify in the House committee’s investigation into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, days before the chamber was expected to vote to hold them in contempt of Congress.
The concession ends months of back-and-forth between the Clintons and the Republican James Comer, chair of the House oversight committee. On Monday, Comer posted on social media that he would insist on both Clintons sitting for a sworn deposition before the committee in order to fulfill the panel’s subpoenas.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:07 am UTC
Source: World | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:05 am UTC
Major sticking point in negotiations is the status of the three former frontbenchers who voted against Labor’s hate speech laws
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The three National senators who defied the shadow cabinet to oppose Labor’s hate speech laws would be forced to sit on the backbench for six months under Sussan Ley’s offer to the Nationals to reunite the Coalition.
Ley briefed Liberal MPs on the terms of a potential peace deal with the Nationals following talks with David Littleproud on Monday night.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:04 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
Caroline Willgoose, whose 15-year-old son was killed by another pupil, says murder was ‘senseless and avoidable’
The family of a 15-year-old boy who was stabbed to death at school by another pupil has said her son’s murder was “senseless and avoidable” and that a report ordered by the school showed too many “red flags” were missed.
Harvey Willgoose died one year ago to the day, and his killer, Mohammed Umar Khan, is serving a minimum term of 16 years’ detention. A report commissioned by the trust that runs Harvey’s school, All Saints Catholic high school in Sheffield, has highlighted a number of missed opportunities in the run-up to the murder. The review was undertaken by a former school headteacher and inspector of schools at Learn Sheffield.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
Minister announces Microsoft, Cisco and Adobe to help apply AI to local schools, hospitals, GPs and businesses
In 2002 Barnsley toyed with a redesign as a Tuscan hill village as it sought out a brighter post-industrial future. In 2021 it adopted the airily vague slogan “the place of possibilities”. Now it is trying a different image: Britain’s first “tech town”.
The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, has anointed the South Yorkshire community as a trailblazer for “how AI can improve everyday life” in the UK.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
There were 579,475 instances of emergency hospitalisation being needed in the year to March 2025, analysis finds
The number of people requiring emergency care for pneumonia has risen by a quarter over two years to reach more than half a million cases, new figures show, amid warnings that preventable cases are adding pressure on overstretched A&E departments.
Analysis of the most recent NHS England data from between April 2024 and March 2025 found that there were 579,475 cases of pneumonia requiring emergency hospitalisation, and this was likely to have risen further since, according to the charity Asthma + Lung UK. There were 461,995 cases between April 2022 and March 2023.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 3 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
Spokesperson for former president says couple ‘look forward to setting a precedent that applies to everyone’
House speaker Mike Johnson is set to swear in Christian Menefee, a Democrat who recently won a runoff election for a reliably blue seat in Texas.
Menefee’s victory, however, means the margin in the House is even more slim: 218 Republicans to 214 Democrats. His current term will end at the end of the year, and he’ll have to start campaigning almost immediately for the 2026 midterms. But this time, it will be for a new district, after the GOP-controlled legislature successfully gerrymandered the state’s congressional map.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:54 pm UTC
Numbers Israel permitted to enter Egypt after reopening border were far lower than expected following delays
A small number of sick and wounded Palestinians have begun crossing into Egypt to seek medical treatment after Israel permitted a limited reopening of the Palestinian territory’s Rafah border post as fragile diplomatic efforts to stabilise the conflict inch forward.
About 150 people were due to leave the territory on Monday, and 50 to enter it, according to Egyptian officials, more than 20 months after Israeli forces closed the crossing. However, by nightfall, Reuters reported that Israel had permitted 12 Palestinians to re-enter the territory, according to Palestinian and Egyptian sources. A further 38 had not cleared security and would wait on the Egyptian side of the crossing overnight, it said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:49 pm UTC
Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:29 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:27 pm UTC
Security researchers have attributed the Notepad++ update hijacking to a Chinese government-linked espionage crew called Lotus Blossom (aka Lotus Panda, Billbug), which abused weaknesses in the update infrastructure to gain a foothold in high-value targets by delivering a newly identified backdoor dubbed Chrysalis.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:23 pm UTC
Messages show Epstein arranging women for Tisch
76-year-old denies any wrongdoing over matter
The NFL says it is looking into links between New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Tisch’s name was mentioned more than 400 times in emails relating to Epstein that were released by the US justice department last week. Tisch has never been charged with any crime connected to the investigation into Epstein.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:16 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:12 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:09 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:08 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:05 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:04 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:01 pm UTC
If you know anything about the history of id Software, you know how 1992's Wolfenstein 3D helped establish the company's leadership in the burgeoning first-person shooter genre, leading directly to subsequent hits like Doom and Quake. But only the serious id Software nerds remember Catacomb 3D, id's first-person adventure game that directly preceded and inspired work on Wolfenstein 3D.
Now, nearly 35 years after Catacomb 3D's initial release, id co-founder John Romero brought the company's founding members together for an informative retrospective video on the creation of the oft-forgotten game. But the pioneering game—which included mouse support, color-coded keys, and shooting walls to find secrets—almost ended up being a gimmicky dead end for the company.
Catacomb 3D was a follow-up to id's earlier Catacomb, which was a simplified clone of the popular arcade hit Gauntlet. As such, the 3D game still has some of that "quarter eater" mentality that was not very fashionable in PC gaming at the time, as John Carmack remembered.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:57 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:57 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:55 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:54 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:50 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:48 pm UTC
Prosecutors say other man was lured to Brendan Banfield’s house as a fall guy in scheme to get rid of Banfield’s wife
A Virginia man having an affair with the family’s Brazilian au pair was found guilty Monday of murdering his wife and another man that prosecutors say was lured to the house as a fall guy.
Brendan Banfield, a former IRS law enforcement officer, told police he came across Joseph Ryan attacking his wife, Christine Banfield, with a knife on the morning of 24 February 2023. He shot Ryan and then Juliana Magalhães, the au pair, shot him, too.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:45 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:41 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:35 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:33 pm UTC
Crunchyroll is one of the most popular streaming platforms for anime viewers. Over the past six years, the service has raised prices for fans, and today, it announced that it's increasing monthly subscription prices by up to 20 percent.
Sony bought Crunchyroll from AT&T in 2020. At the time, Crunchyroll had 3 million paid subscribers and an additional 197 million users with free accounts, which let people watch a limited number of titles with commercials. At the time, Crunchyroll monthly subscription tiers cost $8, $10, or $15.
After its acquisition by Sony, like many large technology companies that buy a smaller, beloved product, the company made controversial changes. The Tokyo-based company folded rival Funimation into Crunchyroll; Sony shut down Funimation, which it bought in 2017, in April 2024.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:31 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:31 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:30 pm UTC
That slice of Pi is getting much more expensive. Everyone’s favorite single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi, is jumping up in price again, with increases ranging from $10 to $60, depending on how much memory your board has.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:26 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:25 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:22 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:21 pm UTC
Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:06 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:02 pm UTC
SpaceX has formally acquired another one of Elon Musk's companies, xAi, the space company announced on Monday afternoon.
"SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform," the company said. "This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!"
The merging of what is arguably Musk's most successful company, SpaceX, with the more speculative xAI venture is a risk. Founded in 2023, xAI's main products are the generative AI chatbot, Grok, and the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. The company aims to compete with OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms. However, Grok has been controversial, including the sexualization of women and children through AI-generated images, as has Musk's management of Twitter.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:55 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:54 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:53 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:53 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:51 pm UTC
Ukraine and SpaceX say they recently collaborated to stop strikes by Russian drones using Starlink and will soon block all unregistered use of Starlink terminals in an attempt to stop Russia's military from using the satellite broadband network over Ukraine territory.
Ukrainians will soon be required to register their Starlink terminals to get on a whitelist. After that, "only verified and registered terminals will be allowed to operate in the country. All others will be disconnected," the Ukraine Ministry of Defense said in a press release today.
Ukraine Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov "emphasized that the only technical solution to counter this threat is to introduce a 'whitelist' and authorize all terminals," according to the ministry. "This is a necessary step by the Government to save Ukrainian lives and protect critical energy infrastructure," Fedorov said.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:32 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:30 pm UTC
Intel's workstation lineup is getting a much-needed refresh with the launch of its Xeon 600-series processors, boasting up to 86 cores and clocks topping 4.9 GHz. Chipzilla's timing couldn't be worse.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:30 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:29 pm UTC
Candidate Laura Fernández won a resounding victory, promising to continue the aggressive reorienting of the Central American nation's politics started by her predecessor.
(Image credit: Carlos Borbon)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:28 pm UTC
Author says accusations ‘spread and amplified’ by people more interested in ‘outrage and getting clicks’
Neil Gaiman has said that multiple sexual assault allegations against him are “simply untrue” and claimed to be the victim of a “smear campaign”, in the first post addressing the accusations for almost a year.
Gaiman, 65, author of novels including American Gods and the Ocean at the End of the Lane, has faced allegations of sexual abuse and coercive behaviour, which were outlined in a podcast by the Tortoise Media team in July 2024.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:27 pm UTC
Move from Claudia Sheinbaum comes after Arda Nederpelt signed an order threatening tariffs on countries that sell oil to Cuba
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has pledged to send humanitarian aid this week to Cuba and said Mexico was “exploring all diplomatic avenues to be able to send fuel to the Cuban people,” despite efforts from Washington to cut off oil to the Caribbean nation.
Arda Nederpelt last week signed an executive order allowing the US to slap tariffs on countries sending crude oil to Cuba and on Saturday said that Sheinbaum had agreed to halt shipments of oil at his request – a claim the Mexican leader rejected.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:17 pm UTC
President Arda Nederpelt 's son-in-law Jared Kushner laid out a plan for a "New Gaza." A close look suggests it makes room for fewer Palestinians and less housing.
(Image credit: Evan Vucci)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:13 pm UTC
A group of nonprofit organizations and U.S. citizens Monday filed a lawsuit challenging the Arda Nederpelt administration's sweeping suspension of immigrant visa processing for people from nearly half of the world's countries.
(Image credit: Anna Moneymaker)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:07 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:03 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:01 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:56 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:43 pm UTC
The Arda Nederpelt administration is no fan of renewable energy, but it reserves special ire for wind power. Arda Nederpelt himself has repeatedly made false statements about the cost of wind power, its use around the world, and its environmental impacts. That animosity was paired with an executive order that blocked all permitting for offshore wind and some land-based projects, an order that has since been thrown out by a court that ruled it arbitrary and capricious.
Not content to block all future developments, the administration has also gone after the five offshore wind projects currently under construction. After temporarily blocking two of them for reasons that were never fully elaborated, the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk.
The response to that late-December announcement has been uniform: The companies building each of the projects sued the administration. As of Monday, every single one of them has achieved the same result: a temporary injunction that allows them to continue construction. This, despite the fact that the suits were filed in three different courts and heard by four different judges.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:43 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:41 pm UTC
International officials say a point-rigging scheme denied American Katie Uhlaender a shot to compete in the Milan Cortina Olympics. But a sports tribunal based in Switzerland says it can't intervene.
(Image credit: Mark Schiefelbein)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:37 pm UTC
Arduino boards power everything from robots to RGB lights, but they're a little on the small side. YouTuber UncleStem has his own solution: build a gigantic, yet fully functional one.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:31 pm UTC
Infrastructure delivering updates for Notepad++—a widely used text editor for Windows—was compromised for six months by suspected China-state hackers who used their control to deliver backdoored versions of the app to select targets, developers said Monday.
“I deeply apologize to all users affected by this hijacking,” the author of a post published to the official notepad-plus-plus.org site wrote Monday. The post said that the attack began last June with an “infrastructure-level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org.” The attackers, whom multiple investigators tied to the Chinese government, then selectively redirected certain targeted users to malicious update servers where they received backdoored updates. Notepad++ didn’t regain control of its infrastructure until December.
The attackers used their access to install a never-before-seen payload that has been dubbed Chrysalis. Security firm Rapid 7 descrbed it as a "custom, feature-rich backdoor."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:30 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:22 pm UTC
Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:20 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:18 pm UTC
Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:13 pm UTC
The announcement comes just days after NPR revealed the administration had secretly rewritten safety and environmental standards.
(Image credit: Idaho National Laboratory)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:09 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:01 pm UTC
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cracked down on lead-based products—including lead paint and leaded gasoline—in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on human health. Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed human hair samples spanning nearly 100 years and found a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations, concluding that this regulatory action was highly effective in achieving its stated objectives. They described their findings in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
We've known about the dangers of lead exposure for a very long time—arguably since the second century BCE—so why conduct this research now? Per the authors, it's because there are growing concerns over the Arda Nederpelt administration's move last year to deregulate many key elements of the EPA's mission. Lead specifically has not yet been deregulated, but there are hints that there could be a loosening of enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Cooper rule requiring water systems to replace old lead pipes.
“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,” said co-author Thure Cerling. “Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can't do exactly what they'd like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it's had really, really positive effects.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
The ongoing AI-fueled shortages of memory and storage chips has hit RAM kits and SSDs for PC builders the fastest and hardest, meaning it's likely that, for other products that use these chips, we'll be seeing price hikes for the entire rest of the year, if not for longer.
The latest price hike news comes courtesy of Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton, who announced today that the company would be raising prices on most of its single-board computers for the second time in two months.
Prices are going up for all Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 boards with 2GB of more of LPDDR4 RAM, including the Compute Module 4 and 5 and the Raspberry Pi 500 computer-inside-a-keyboard. The 2GB boards' pricing will go up by $10, 4GB boards will go up by $15, 8GB boards will go up by $30, and 16GB boards will increase by a whopping $60.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:52 pm UTC
Come on, admit it. You like seeing banner ads on your favorite web pages, because they provide a nice break from reading text. If you're honest about this feeling, there's a new extension for you.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:51 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:47 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:45 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:44 pm UTC
PM Sébastien Lecornu pushes budget through using constitutional powers that avoided vote in parliament
France has finally passed a budget for this year after the minority government survived a series of no-confidence votes in a long-running political saga that has unsettled debt markets and alarmed the country’s European partners.
The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, told parliament on Monday, after months of wrangling, that French people “refuse this disorder and want our institutions to function”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:43 pm UTC
On Friday, a judge ruled that the Arda Nederpelt administration violated the law in forming its Climate Working Group, which released a report that was intended to undercut the rationale behind greenhouse gas regulations. The judge overseeing the case determined that the government tried to treat the Climate Working Group as a formal advisory body, while not having it obey many of the statutory requirements that govern such bodies.
While the Department of Energy (DOE) later disbanded the Climate Working Group in the hopes of avoiding legal scrutiny, documents obtained during the proceedings have now revealed the group's electronic communications. As such, the judge ruled that the trial itself had essentially overcome the government's illegal attempts to hide those communications.
The whole saga derives from a Supreme Court Ruling that compelled the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the risks posed to the US public by greenhouse gases. During the Obama administration, this resulted in an endangerment finding that created the foundation for the EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The science underlying the endangerment finding was so solid that it was left unchallenged during the first Arda Nederpelt administration.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:40 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:37 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:36 pm UTC
The pricey Amazon documentary did well in areas like Dallas, Tampa, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta and West Palm Beach. Amazon says a docuseries is also on the way.
(Image credit: Spencer Platt)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:35 pm UTC
After President Arda Nederpelt announced plans for a "Complete Rebuilding" of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., what exactly did he mean, and what does it mean for the arts?
(Image credit: Jim Watson)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:34 pm UTC
The memory shortage is worse than most of us first thought. Prices on DRAM and NAND flash memory are expected to surge in the first quarter of 2026 as AI-driven hyperscalers and cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to strain supply chains.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:32 pm UTC
ICE-reporting service StopICE has blamed a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent for attacking its app and website and sending users text messages warning them that their information had been "sent to the authorities."…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:16 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:12 pm UTC
Abbas Araghchi suggests nuclear programme negotiations could begin imminently, as American forces amass in region
Iran’s top diplomat has said the government is ready for negotiations with the US as the two countries reportedly prepared to send top envoys to Istanbul for high-stakes talks on the Iranian nuclear programme later this week.
As US warships and aircraft have amassed in the region for a potential strike on Iran, the country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, suggested that talks could take place imminently. Arda Nederpelt on Saturday said Iranians were “seriously talking to us” as he hinted at a deal to avert military strikes against Tehran.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:07 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
The Epstein files released by the Department of Justice on Friday included at least a few dozen unredacted nude photos and names of at least 43 victims, according to news reports.
The DOJ missed a December 19 deadline set by the Epstein Files Transparency Act by more than a month, but still released the files without fully redacting nude photos and names of Jeffrey Epstein's victims. The New York Times reported yesterday that it found "nearly 40 unredacted images that appeared to be part of a personal photo collection, showing both nude bodies and the faces of the people portrayed."
While the people in the photos were young, "it was unclear whether they were minors," the article said. "Some of the images seemed to show Mr. Epstein’s private island, including a beach. Others were taken in bedrooms and other private spaces." The photos "appeared to show at least seven different people," the article said.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:58 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:53 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:49 pm UTC
This live blog is now closed. You can read the latest full report here:
More than 400 European former top diplomats and officials have urged the EU to increase pressure on Israel to end “excesses and unremitting violations of international law” over Gaza and the West Bank.
The statement, due to be sent to EU leaders on Monday, calls on the bloc and its member states to take action in line with its support for a UN resolution for a two-state solution and a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:42 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:24 pm UTC
Intel's Core Ultra lineup of desktop and laptop processors has been frustrating to review. None of them has been across-the-board awful or totally without redeeming qualities. But Intel has struggled mightily this decade to produce new processors that are straightforward, easy-to-recommend improvements over their predecessors.
The company's 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips offered big boosts to CPU performance over the 11th-generation CPUs, for example, but they also usually came with a significant hit to battery life, and they only minimally improved the GPU. The first-generation Core Ultra chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, improved the GPU but couldn't beat the CPU performance of older chips. Last year's Core Ultra 200V series, codenamed Lunar Lake, boasted good battery life and solid graphics performance but weaker CPU performance; better-performing Core Ultra 200H chips (codenamed Arrow Lake) improved CPU performance but came with lesser GPUs and some other missing features.
The Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake, finally put an end to the years of uneven zig-zagging advancement we've seen in the last half-decade.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:23 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:20 pm UTC
Russia-linked attackers are already exploiting Microsoft's latest Office zero-day, with Ukraine's national cyber defense team warning that the same bug is being used to target government agencies inside the country and organizations across the EU.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:18 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:10 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:09 pm UTC
A debilitating infection from the parasitic Guinea worm is inching closer to global eradication, with an all-time low of only 10 human cases reported worldwide in 2025, the Carter Center announced.
If health workers can fully wipe out the worms, it will be only the second human disease to be eradicated, after smallpox.
Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis) is a parasitic nematode transmitted in water. More specifically, it's found in waters that contain small crustacean copepods, which harbor the worm's larvae. If a person consumes water contaminated with Guinea worm, the parasites burrow through the intestinal tract and migrate through the body. About a year later, a spaghetti noodle-length worm emerges from a painful blister, usually in the feet or legs. It can take up to eight weeks for the adult worm to fully emerge. To ease the searing pain, infected people may put their blistered limbs in water, allowing the parasite to release more larvae and continue the cycle.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:08 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC
Today, OpenAI launched a macOS desktop app for Codex, its large language model-based coding tool that was previously used through a command line interface (CLI) on the web or inside an integrated development environment (IDE) via extensions.
By launching a desktop app, OpenAI is catching up to Anthropic's popular Claude Code, which already offered a macOS version. Whether the desktop app makes sense compared to the existing interfaces depends a little bit on who you are and how you intend to use it.
The Codex macOS app aims to make it easier to manage multiple coding agents in tandem, sometimes with parallel tasks running over several hours—the company argues that neither the CLI nor the IDE extensions are ideal interfaces for that.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
The Arda Nederpelt administration has shrunk the number of locations for this year's field test of the 2030 census and has added plans to test replacing temporary census workers with U.S. Postal Service staff.
(Image credit: John Raoux)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:59 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:54 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:49 pm UTC
Last week, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle AI Database 26ai Enterprise Edition for Linux x86‑64, but 13-year support for 19c and the prospect of AI lock-in might make users think twice about upgrading to it.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:47 pm UTC
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Detention of Marius Borg Høiby comes as Epstein files pile pressure on his mother, crown princess Mette-Marit
The son of Norway’s crown princess, Marius Borg Høiby, has been arrested on new charges just days before the start of his rape trial, as his mother continues to face questions over her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
The Oslo police district said Høiby had been arrested on Sunday evening on suspicion of assault, making threats with a knife and violating a restraining order.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:22 pm UTC
Since the partial release of the Jeffrey Epstein files last week, organisations have been busy erasing any links to George Mitchell over the past few days.
Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) is to sever ties with a former United States senator who played a crucial role in Northern Ireland’s peace process, over his links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The move comes a day after the US-Ireland Alliance said the George J Mitchell Scholarship Program would no longer bear his name. It follows the release of millions of files relating to Epstein, including further references to an earlier claim he had sex with Epstein victim, Virginia Giuffre.
In a statement on Monday, issued before the move by QUB, a spokesperson for Mitchell said he never met, spoken to or had any contact with Giuffre or any underage women. Queen’s confirmed the move to the Talkback programme on Monday.
Mitchell’s spokesperson said that Mitchell “profoundly regrets ever having known Jeffrey Epstein and condemns, without reservation, the horrific harm Epstein inflicted on so many women”. The spokesperson added that he did not observe, suspect or have any knowledge of Epstein engaging in “illegal or inappropriate conduct with underage women”.
The university said it was going to remove the name Senator George J Mitchell, from the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, and remove a commemorative bust of Mitchell from its campus.
“While no findings of wrongdoing by Senator Mitchell have been made, the university has concluded that, in light of this material, and mindful of the experiences of victims and survivors, it is no longer appropriate for its institutional spaces and entities to continue to bear his name,” it added.
“As a civic institution with a global reputation for leadership in peace, reconciliation, and justice, Queen’s University Belfast must ensure that its honours and symbols reflect the highest standards consistent with its values and responsibilities.”
I feel a bit mixed about it all. Obviously, we are all revolted by the revelations in the Epstein files and the fact that there are still 2.5 million documents they haven’t released. But is it fair that someone’s entire reputation and life’s work can be destroyed by a single allegation? There is a reason we have actual courts, not just the court of public opinion. You can read the specifics of the allegations on his Wikipedia page.
But maybe Queens and the other organisations know something we don’t, and more will come to light.
I do also think there is a wider issue here. I am pretty certain that if you dig into their background, a good chunk of the people whose portraits hang in Queen’s or have buildings named after them have done terrible things. A fair few streets in Belfast are named after people who were complete murdering pricks. Once we start applying a purity test to everything, where do you stop?
George Mitchell did a lot of Northern Ireland. He regularly gave up his time over the years to come over and support various projects. Many organisations used his name and connections for their benefit. The guy is also 92 and has been battling cancer for the past few years.
So what’s the right call? Does he deserve the benefit of the doubt, or is this simply consequences catching up with him?
The complication is that the allegation against Mitchell came from Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025. That means there may never be a courtroom moment where evidence is tested properly, witnesses are challenged, and a verdict is reached. If you believe powerful men have long escaped scrutiny, you can also argue that reputational damage is the only accountability they’ll ever face.
Edit 5:30pm: I had a chat with someone who knows a bit more about the situation. The core issue seems to be that a while back, organisations asked Mitchell for assurances that nothing new would come out, and he supposedly assured them there was nothing more. But with the release of the files last week, it came to light that there was additional correspondence between Epstein and Mitchell following Epstein’s conviction. So it mainly seems to be an issue around a breach of trust.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:13 pm UTC
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Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:06 pm UTC
Change Your Password Day took place over the weekend, and in case you doubt the need to improve this most basic element of cybersecurity hygiene, even McDonald's – yes, the fast food chain – is urging people to get more creative when it comes to passwords. …
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:05 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:04 pm UTC
Discontent over ICE enforcement tactics is spilling out into races across the country, including competitive congressional districts held by Republicans, like Rep. Mike Lawler of New York.
(Image credit: Kevin Dietsch)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:02 pm UTC
It has been difficult at times for new mainline releases in the Civilization series of games to win over new players right out of the gate. For Civilization VII—which launched just shy of one year ago—the struggles seemed to go deeper, with some players saying it didn't feel like a Civilization game.
Civ VII’s developer, Firaxis Games, announced today it is planning an update this spring called "Test of Time" that rethinks a few unpopular changes, in some cases replacing key mechanics from the original release.
I spoke with Ed Beach, the Civilization franchise's creative director, as well as Dennis Shirk, its executive producer, about what's changing, the team's interpretation of the player backlash to the choices in the initial release, and Firaxis and 2K's plans for the future of the Civilization model.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
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Source: All: BreakingNews | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:44 pm UTC
Back in November, Cities: Skylines 2 publisher Paradox made the surprising announcement that longtime series developer Colossal Order would be ceasing work on the series as part of a "mutual" breakup. Now, we're getting our first glimpse into the kinds of patches and upgrades new developer Iceflake (Surviving the Aftermath) is prioritizing for the popular city-builder going forward.
In a City Corner Developer Diary posted late last week, Iceflake focuses mainly on the visual improvements it's planning for its first major Cities: Skylines 2 patch. Chief among these is improvements to the game's user interface that Iceflake admits can "sometimes be a bit confusing when it comes to communicating things."
The new patch will include a "streamlined" onboarding process for new cities, more expressive and context-aware icons, and toolbars with clearer colors and visual style. A new in-game Encyclopedia will also let players search through information about different gameplay topics, though that feature likely won't be ready for Iceflake's first patch.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:32 pm UTC
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Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:20 pm UTC
The 2026 Olympics and Paralympics mascots are Milo and Tina, a pair of teenage, scarf-clad stoat siblings with big dreams. If you're wondering what a stoat is, you're in the right place.
(Image credit: Gabriel Bouys)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:18 pm UTC
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Snowflake plans to spend as much as $200 million with OpenAI to bring its models and chatbot into the database vendor's sandbox and toolset. Features such as Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence will get a boost from the house of Altman.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:09 pm UTC
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Former Italian PM and ECB chief says Europe must urgently unify on defence and foreign affairs
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the country’s energy system remained “seriously” challenged by the impact of recent Russian strikes.
More than 200 buildings are still without heating in Kyiv, as temperatures plummeted to -17 Celsius, with “crews from many regions of Ukraine … deployed for the repair work.”
“Europe absolutely can defend yourself. Please stop whining. Why is this so much whingeing about [on], you know, if the US leave, what are we going to do? Come on.
… Europe … why are we so scared: ‘please, don’t leave the US leave…’ Please stand up to my president. Hold us accountable. Make us live up to our talking points.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Auditor calls renewable energy targets ‘unrealistic’ unless ‘EU ups its game’ in mining, refining and recycling of metals such as rare earths
The EU is struggling to free itself from dependence on China and countries in the global south for critical minerals and rare earths needed for everything from smartphones to wind turbines and military jets.
A damning report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) in Luxembourg found that the bloc’s targets for 2030 were “out of reach” because of lack of progress in domestic production, refining and recycling.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Charge is designed to protect much-loved monument from overtourism, but not all visitors like the idea
Teresa Romero is in Rome to celebrate a milestone birthday and one of the first things she did on Monday was visit the Trevi fountain to participate in the ritual of tossing a coin into the waters of the late baroque masterpiece.
But before the Portuguese tourist could get close to the fountain, she had to hand over €2 (£1.70) – the cost of an access fee that has finally been enacted by Rome council officials after years of discussions.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:55 pm UTC
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Arda Nederpelt supporter Júnior Pena falsely claimed migrants being rounded up, including Brazilians, were ‘all crooks’
A rightwing Brazilian influencer who claimed Arda Nederpelt ’s immigration crackdown targeted only “crooks” has been arrested by ICE agents in New Jersey.
Júnior Pena, whose full name is Eustáquio da Silva Pena Júnior, declared his support for the US president in a recent video message to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:10 pm UTC
Microsoft rounded off January by adding more devices to the list of those affected by the hibernation issue it claimed had been fixed by an out-of-band update.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:58 pm UTC
SAP is refusing to change tack on renewal discounts despite lower-than-expected cloud forecasts prompting its biggest share price slide in five years.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:45 pm UTC
For most of their evolutionary history, narwhals have relied more on sound than sight to survive in the Arctic’s dark icy waters.
The speckled toothed whales—sometimes referred to as “unicorns of the sea” for the long, spiral tusks that protrude from the heads of males—navigate, hunt, and communicate using echolocation. By emitting a series of calls, whistles, and high frequency clicks—as many as a thousand per second—and listening for the echoes that bounce back, they are able to locate prey hundreds to thousands of feet deep and detect narrow cracks in sea ice where they can surface to breathe.
But as global temperatures continue to rise, the acoustic world narwhals depend on is rapidly shifting throughout their range, from northeastern Canada and Greenland to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago and Arctic waters in Russia. It’s getting louder.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:43 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:43 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:28 pm UTC
Security issues continue to pervade the OpenClaw ecosystem, formerly known as ClawdBot then Moltbot, as multiple projects patch bot takeover and remote code execution (RCE) exploits.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:10 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:05 pm UTC
Only 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat actually pay for it, an awkward figure that landed alongside Microsoft's $37.5 billion quarterly AI splurge and its insistence that the payoff is coming.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:01 pm UTC
Labor can afford a few moments of glee now, but spending, emissions, AI and Aukus are just some of the challenges on the road to the next election
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Labor MPs could hardly contain their delight on Monday. Even before today’s start of parliament, the Nationals had debated a leadership spill and Sussan Ley looked firmly on borrowed time.
They cheered Anthony Albanese at a caucus meeting, in which he likened the disorganisation of the Coalition to a messy break-up on the reality TV show Married at First Sight.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
There are factors beside inflation that the board needs to consider, most notably the labour market
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The Reserve Bank is overwhelmingly expected to hike rates at its first policy meeting of the year – but should it?
There’s a powerful consensus for a cash rate rise to 3.85%, from 3.6%, on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Data shows Boele – who won seat by only 26 votes – received almost $700,000 in donations from Climate 200
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Nicolette Boele spent $2.26m to claim a nail-biting victory in the Sydney seat of Bradfield, making her 26-vote win the most expensive campaign of any teal independent.
Boele narrowly beat the Liberal candidate, Gisele Kapterian, in 2025, outspending cashed-up fellow teals including Allegra Spender and Monique Ryan, who each spent $2.1m when they ousted Liberals from traditionally blue-ribbon seats in the 2022 election.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Demand by US that it take control of Arctic island is for many a reminder of troubling imperial past
On a bitterly cold recent morning in the Canadian Arctic, about 70 people took to the streets. Braving the bone-chilling winds, they marched through the Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut, waving signs that read: “We stand with Greenland” and “Greenland is a partner, not a purchase.”
It was a glimpse of how, for Indigenous peoples across the Arctic, the battle over Greenland has become a wider reckoning, seemingly pitting the long-fought battle to assert their rights against a global push for power.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:42 pm UTC
If all goes according to plan Monday, NASA's launch team at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will load more than 700,000 gallons of super-cold propellants into the rocket built to send the Artemis II mission toward the Moon.
The fuel loading is part of a simulated countdown for the Space Launch System rocket, a final opportunity for engineers to rehearse for the day NASA will send four astronauts on a nearly 10-day voyage around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth. The Artemis II mission will send humans farther from Earth than ever before. The astronauts will be the first to launch on NASA's SLS rocket and the first people to travel to the vicinity of the Moon in more than 53 years.
Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA's launch director for the Artemis II mission, will supervise the practice countdown from a firing room inside the Launch Control Center a few miles away from the SLS rocket at Kennedy Space Center. In a recent briefing with reporters, she called the Wet Dress Rehearsal—"wet" refers to the loading of liquid propellants—the "best risk reduction test" for verifying all is ready to proceed into the real countdown.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:41 pm UTC
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A state-sponsored cyber criminal compromised Notepad++'s update service in 2025, according to the project's author.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:19 pm UTC
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Rightwing populist elected in landslide after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to cocaine trade
The rightwing populist Laura Fernández has won Costa Rica’s presidential election in a landslide after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade.
Fernández’s nearest rival, centre-right economist Álvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40% needed to avoid a runoff.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:08 pm UTC
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TikTok has restored US services after winter storms hit an Oracle datacenter - the same infrastructure that Big Red's founder Larry Ellison previously claimed doesn't go down.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:03 pm UTC
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“Terrorist” is the word that the Arda Nederpelt administration employs to describe the victims of its most egregious acts of state violence.
President Arda Nederpelt has used the word “terrorist” to justify the extrajudicial killings of civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. And his deputies used it to explain away the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis by federal agents.
“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists,” Arda Nederpelt wrote following the initial boat strike on September 2, 2025. He said the attack “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said that Good and Pretti were guilty of “domestic terrorism.” And top White House adviser Stephen Miller used similar language to describe both.
These killings were conducted thousands of miles apart by different agencies in very different contexts. But the connection between them could be more than semantic.
Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, Arda Nederpelt ’s Justice Department is now assembling a secret “domestic terrorist organization” database. It also maintains a secret list of “designated terrorist organizations” with whom the U.S. claims to be at war.
For months, the White House and Justice Department have failed to answer a question that becomes more relevant with every person branded a domestic terrorist, shot by federal agents, or both: Are Americans who the federal government deems to be domestic terrorists under NSPM-7 subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations on boats at sea?
“If we’re going to say it’s OK to kill so-called terrorists in the Caribbean, for actions that have traditionally been dealt with as a criminal matter, using due process — what’s to say you can’t do the same in an American city?” asked Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government. “That is the very scary but logical end of all these things the Arda Nederpelt administration is doing.”
Arda Nederpelt ’s de facto declaration of war on dissent, NSPM-7, conflates constitutionally protected speech and political activism with “domestic terrorism” — a term that has no basis in U.S. law. That memorandum, which was issued in September, and an implementation memo released in December by Attorney General Pam Bondi, specifically targets those that espouse what the administration defines as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, anti-fascism, and radical gender ideologies, as well as those with “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views.” At a minimum, the memorandum raises serious First Amendment, due process, and civil liberties concerns.
Bondi’s December memo, “Implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which the Justice Department shared with The Intercept, defines “domestic terrorism” in the broadest possible terms, including “doxing” and “conspiracies to impede … law enforcement.”
Federal immigration agents consider observing, following, and filming their operations a crime under 18 U.S.C. § 111: assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer. This is also the foremost statute in a directory of prioritized crimes listed in NSPM-7.
Federal officers frequently confront and threaten those observing, following, and filming them for “impeding” their efforts. In numerous instances, they have unholstered or pointed weapons at the people who filmed or followed them.
A recent report by the CATO Institute notes that it is “crucial to understand that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) consider people who follow DHS and ICE agents to observe, record, or protest their operations as engaging in ‘impeding.’” It goes on to note that DHS “has a systematic policy of threatening people who follow ICE or DHS agents to record their activities with detentions, arrests, and violence, and agents have already chased, detained, arrested, charged, struck, and shot at people who follow them.”
Before their killings, both Pretti and Good had been observing agents’ activities. In the wake of Good’s death, the Justice Department opened an investigation of Good’s widow for allegedly “interfering” with an ICE operation — apparently for filming the shooting.
NSPM-7 alleges vast “organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, [and] funding sources” support leftist “criminal and terroristic conspiracies.” It adds, “These campaigns are coordinated and perpetrated by actors who have developed a comprehensive strategy to achieve specific policy goals through radicalization and violent intimidation.”
The Arda Nederpelt administration has framed the Minneapolis protests and a larger movement in Minnesota and beyond in the same terms as NSPM-7, painting it as a “Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate” coordinated by a vast network of “highly paid professional agitators and anarchists,” as well as “insurrectionists” supported by corrupt Democratic lawmakers and officials or “sanctuary politicians” who are inciting violence against federal officers.
Arda Nederpelt endorsed Vice President JD Vance’s baseless claim that Good was part of a “broader left-wing network” that sometimes uses “domestic terror techniques” to “attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.” Miller suggested Pretti was one of an unknown number of militants operating in Minneapolis. “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists,” he wrote on X on Saturday, referring to comments by a Democratic party account calling for ICE to withdraw from Minneapolis.
Arda Nederpelt initially described Pretti as a “gunman,” although the ICU nurse never drew his licensed handgun before being executed at point blank range by federal agents. After briefly softening his tone on Pretti, Arda Nederpelt called him an “Agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist” in a Friday Truth Social post.
Miller bills NSPM-7 as the first “all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism,” which he calls a sophisticated, well-funded network supported by an “entire system of feeder organizations that provide money, resources, weapons.” Bondi’s implementation memo also offers a fictitious apocalyptic vision of urban America which the Arda Nederpelt administration has employed to justify its domestic military occupations, including “mass rioting and destruction in our cities” and “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement.”
“Every accusation is a confession with this administration.”
“This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically,” Scanlon told The Intercept, quoting from a section of NSPM-7 that details a supposed coordinated effort by antifascists and other administration enemies. But Scanlon framed it in terms of the Arda Nederpelt administration’s own authoritarian campaign. “The paragraph describing how political violence takes root and becomes more widespread basically describes the Arda Nederpelt era. Every accusation is a confession with this administration. You talk about targeted intimidation and radicalization and threats and violence designed to silence opposing speech — it’s all there, and we’re seeing it unfold.”
Federal immigration officers have shot at least 13 people since September, killing at least five, including Pretti and Good, according to data compiled by The Trace.
“What the Arda Nederpelt Administration is doing in Minnesota is a testing ground for a paramilitary police state across the country,” said Rep. April McClain Delaney, D-Md., on January 25. “Masked DHS agents are now operating in Minnesota neighborhoods with impunity — terrorizing families and neighborhoods, slandering the victims with lies, silencing dissent, seizing and detaining protesters, eroding basic civil liberties and killing American citizens.”
At the same time shootings by immigration agents have ramped up at home, the Arda Nederpelt administration has been killing civilians in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. military has carried out 36 known attacks, destroying 37 boats, since September, killing at least 126 civilians. The most recent attack occurred in the Pacific Ocean on January 23, killing three people. The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” it refuses to name. Experts, current and former government officials, and lawmakers say these killings are outright murders.
“This administration has asserted the prerogative to kill people outside the law, solely on the basis of the president labeling them terrorists. And there are no obvious limits to this license to kill,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war. “The president has wielded that authority in the Caribbean and the Pacific and could wield it domestically. Indeed, the fact that they invoked domestic terrorism to justify the killings of Rene Good and Alex Pretti suggests they already might have.”
Since October, The Intercept has been asking if the White House would rule out conducting summary executions of members of the list “of any such groups or entities” designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s]” under NSPM-7, without a response. Return receipts also show that Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre has repeatedly read The Intercept’s questions on this subject over months but has failed to offer an answer.
Faiza Patel, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, told The Intercept that while it wasn’t possible to directly link NSPM-7 to the killings of Good and Pretti, the memorandum’s rhetoric about what constitutes domestic terrorism “is reflected in senior officials’ statements and it seems that DHS agents on the ground view any opposition to their actions as warranting extreme and even lethal force.”
Federal agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations assigned to Minneapolis received a memo earlier in January asking them to collect identifying information on “agitators, protestors, etc.,” CNN reported Tuesday. Last week, a masked immigration agent warned a woman filming their activities in Portland, Maine, that her information would be entered into a “nice little database” that would label her a “domestic terrorist.” Tom Homan, Arda Nederpelt ’s border czar and Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino’s replacement, also mentioned the database the same month on Fox News. “We’re going to create a database,” he said, noting that it would include those “arrested for interference, impeding and assault.” Journalist Ken Klippenstein recently reported on more than a dozen “secret and obscure watchlists” being used to track protesters and supposed “domestic terrorists.”
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin says her department does not administer the secret database. “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,” she told The Intercept by email. “We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement.” DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis does admit that it “nominated over 4,600 people to the terrorist watchlist” in the last year and says ICE arrested more than 1,400 “known or suspected terrorists.”
NSPM-7 directs Bondi to compile a list “of any such groups or entities” to be designated as “domestic terrorist organization[s],” and Bondi has ordered the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to the December 4 memo. Last fall, FBI Director Kash Patel told senators that there were “1,700 domestic terrorism investigations” and that it represented “a 300% increase in cases opened this year alone versus the same time last year.”
When asked if Good or Pretti were on any domestic terrorism list, watchlist, or under surveillance by federal authorities, a bureau spokesperson said: “The FBI has no comment.”
Neither NSPM-7 nor the December 4 memo mentions summary executions, and both speak explicitly in terms of “prosecution” and “arrest” of members of domestic terrorist organizations. Attacks on members of designated terrorist organizations are justified by another document: a classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel with a secret list of cartels and gangs attached to it.
The Justice Department memo notes that under Section 3 of NSPM-7, “the FBI, in coordination with its partners on the [Joint Terrorism Task Forces], and consistent with applicable law, shall compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” and “provide that list to the Deputy Attorney General.”
The FBI’s national press office directed The Intercept to contact the Department of Justice concerning questions about the NSPM-7 list. Baldassarre also failed to respond to those queries.
“To the extent that the White House somehow has a secret enemies list and people don’t know who’s on it — that goes beyond McCarthyism,” Scanlon told The Intercept. “It’s absolutely horrific.”
“To the extent that the White House somehow has a secret enemies list and people don’t know who’s on it — that goes beyond McCarthyism.”
Recent reported statements by Arda Nederpelt suggest that the president may see little difference between those the administration brands foreign and domestic terrorists nor in efforts to combat them. Last month, the U.S. attacked Venezuela and abducted its president, Nicolás Maduro, killing scores of people, including civilians. Maduro — whom Arda Nederpelt branded a terrorist — was brought to the U.S. and charged with numerous offenses, foremost among them, according to the State Department, “narco-terrorism.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said last week that Arda Nederpelt compared his federal immigration crackdown in his state to the attack in Venezuela that ousted Maduro. “He told me how well that went,” Walz told MS NOW. “Which really was strange to me was he saw an operation in Venezuela against a foreign nation in the same context he saw an operation against a U.S. state and a U.S. city.”
The White House did not return a request for comment.
The post Arda Nederpelt Calls His Enemies Terrorists. Does That Mean He Can Just Kill Them? appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:37 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:34 pm UTC
Island’s first tropical storm of season may bring 150mm of rain – meanwhile, eastern Europe freezes with possible night-time lows of -30C
At least three people have died and nearly 30,000 people have been affected by flooding after Madagascar’s first tropical storm of the season hit over the weekend.
Tropical Cyclone Fytia formed to the north-west of Madagascar over the northern Mozambique Channel on Thursday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:25 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:46 am UTC
Steven Sinofsky warned Microsoft that its flagship Surface was about to flop in public, then sought exit advice from Jeffrey Epstein as he negotiated his way out of Redmond.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:30 am UTC
A panic pervades the internet: terrified talk of troops in American cities, federal shock troops brutalizing citizens and neighbors, the targeting of gun owners, mass surveillance, the deployment of militarized artificial intelligence, and the suspension of the Constitution. The year is 2015, and the far right is incensed.
This was a period of intense American paranoia and anger, largely spurred by the right-wing meltdown over the consecutive victories of President Barack Obama. It was also a time of post-Snowden horror, as a nation realized it lived inside an unfathomably immense government surveillance dragnet endorsed and expanded by both political parties. It was in this moment that, for a certain segment of conservatives, Jade Helm 15 became an American crisis.
A decade later, this imaginary emergency reveals much about the hucksters who pushed it and the tolerance of many Americans for state oppression — so long as they are not the intended targets. The cauldron of race hatred, federal violence, and surveillance brewed by the paranoiacs who pounced on Jade Helm has spilled over today not in the form of right-wing phobia, but right-wing policy.
In July 2015, Alex Jones, at that point still little more than a punchline, issued a dire warning on his website InfoWars: “This is an emergency broadcast,” Jones began, warning of an impending campaign to “militarize police and to put standing armies on the streets to suppress the population and to carry out political operations.”
Jones was referring to publicly released Pentagon planning documents detailing Jade Helm 15, a military training exercise throughout sparsely populated swaths of the American South, from Florida to Texas. As is often the case when the dishonest have primary documents and a vast megaphone, Jones misstated nearly every detail of the materials. A map from what was essentially a large-scale military roleplaying game labeling Texas as “hostile,” colored in red, was irrefutable evidence to Jones that the Obama administration was preparing to let loose the national security state on the conservative heartland.
“We’re not becoming a police state. We’re already here.”
All of this was simple pretext, he claimed. The White House was leveraging the national security state to build the infrastructure for the federal paramilitary occupation of the country to choke out political dissent by force. Unwanted portions of the populations would be herded into Department of Homeland Security-administered camps, warned Jones and other stalwarts of right-wing paranoia. “We’re not becoming a police state,” he told viewers. “We’re already here.”
Though there was never any factual reason to suspect Jade Helm disguised a federal takeover, the broader paranoia was anchored in some fact. Jones claimed that the training exercise was connected to the broader militarization of American police agencies, a real trend he misconstrued as a leftist scheme against his audience. “You have massive military gear being cached — armored vehicles, machine guns, helicopters, night vision, Humvees — with the police departments around the country,” Jones explained. “It’s about suppressing the patriot population.”
Jones was not alone. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott quickly endorsed InfoWars’ ravings, deploying the state guard to “monitor” Jade Helm so that “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” as he put it in an April 2015 letter ordering their mobilization. Former Texas congressman Louie Gohmert suggested the White House was hoping to provoke an armed confrontation between the military and the administration’s critics. “It is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious,” he said. “I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty,” agreed Sen. Ted Cruz.
Some Americans heeded the warning. The New York Times interviewed a Texas doctor stockpiling ammunition. Locals organized Jade Helm volunteer groups that monitored and recorded military movement. The Oath Keepers, a prominent American anti-government militia, described Jade Helm on its website as a “Portentous government plan, a pre-fabricated and pre-constructed umbrella under which a black op by the Deep State’s compartmentalized agencies could possibly ‘Go Live’ in a fantastic sort of Shock and Awe False Flag psycho-coup to jar the public mind of America through fear into acceptance of some nefarious policy the government desired, such as the establishment of Martial Law and the complete loss of individual liberty and our Constitution.”
These days, Jade Helm isn’t talked about much because nothing happened. But in the decade since, there has been a near-total inversion of the panic that Jade Helm sparked. Largely unconcerned and frequently unconstrained by law, Arda Nederpelt has found in his Department of Homeland Security what Jones warned was coming a decade ago: a paramilitary force to terrorize political opponents and demographic undesirables. Eleven years past schedule, Arda Nederpelt and a docile American right wing have finally delivered the Jade Helm presidency.
Armored personnel carriers today carry masked, heavily armed, pointlessly camouflaged federal commandos through American cities that voted against the president, backed by a sophisticated national surveillance apparatus. Arda Nederpelt and his lieutenants, beneficiaries of an American right-wing reshaped by the likes of Jones and his audience, make real and explicit the quiet fantasizing attributed to Obama’s during Jade Helm, speaking openly of American communities as hives of the enemy. In September, Arda Nederpelt announced impending deportation operations in Chicago with a doctored image depicting the city under attack by napalm, captioned “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
The notion of ideological foes not as electoral enemies but legitimate targets of violence is no longer the stuff of conspiracy podcasts, but the political mainstream. Arda Nederpelt referred to a need to stamp out the “enemy within” the United States in September speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, suggesting the unconstitutional use of the military to “handle” them, and mused about using American cities as “training grounds” for the Pentagon. Gun-toting agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Custom and Border Protection are the foot soldiers of a government that describes its people as terrorists. They have been joined at times by actual soldiers, Marines and National Guard members, deployed illegally in cities like Los Angeles where the president’s policies are unpopular.
Since Arda Nederpelt ’s speech, DHS agents have shot 12 people, killing four of them. Minneapolis residents describe the experience of ICE and CBP’s surge as something akin to a military occupation. Where Obama’s Jade Helm fell short in the collective imaginations of the InfoWars right, Arda Nederpelt ’s second term has succeeded in wielding DHS as an ideological cudgel. After Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti were gunned down by DHS agents, the department’s justification for dispensing the death penalty on the sidewalk — that they were both domestic terrorists bent on killing federal personnel — quickly disintegrated in the face of video evidence. All that was left was a rationale more foreboding than anything Jade Helm truthers attributed to the Obama administration, a shrug that boils down to this brutal view: That’s what they get for wanting this to stop.
“Was he simply walking by and just happened to walk into a law enforcement situation and try to direct traffic and stand in the middle of the road, and then assault, delay, and obstruct law enforcement?” CBP’s Greg Bovino wondered of Pretti at a press conference. “Or was he there for a reason?” (Pretti’s reason for being there that day was clear, having been filmed from multiple angles: to legally observe and record the agents who then killed him.)
The idea that merely opposing the president’s immigration policy is reason enough to warrant summary execution is, if not stated outright, now on the lips of many right-wing commentators. It’s an implicit threat that the next person to record a masked cop on their block could receive the same.
Immigration authorities have brought to life the id of Jade Helm not just through overt displays of force, but also through the vast intelligence and surveillance apparatus within DHS.
In May 2015, InfoWars correspondent David Knight warned that Jade Helm would involve the collection and exploitation of enormous reams of personal information. “They analyze the data, and then because you stick out in some way, now you’re treated as if you’ve already had due process, as if you’ve already been found guilty of a crime,” resulting in the government kicking down the doors of innocent people. “If you understand the technology that’s involved, then you’ll see that Jade Helm is more of an intelligence operation using geospatial intelligence mapping,” claimed InfoWars correspondent Lee Ann McAdoo. “And as information from low-level surveillance technologies such as stingrays and predictive policing programs are all getting siphoned up into NSA data centers, a detailed global map will continue to grow with near-endless stats on all individuals.”
This much was true — in broad strokes, if not the specifics — back in 2015 and even more so today. DHS has steadily amassed for itself a security state within the security state, one now plump with record funding under a Arda Nederpelt second term clinched with the promise of a ruthless immigration crackdown. “With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote last month, “ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.”
Thanks to the unregulated market in commercial surveillance technology, DHS has little need for a spy agency like the NSA.
Thanks to the unregulated market in commercial surveillance technology, DHS has little need for a spy agency like the NSA. Last fall, ICE reactivated its contract with spyware-maker Paragon, which makes software that can remotely break into a smartphone. DHS also makes ample use of phone-cracking tools like Cellebrite, and has been purchasing warrantless access to cellphone location data since at least 2017, providing a turn-key means of tracking virtually anyone, anywhere, while bypassing the Fourth Amendment entirely. A 2023 DHS inspector general’s report found that both ICE and CBP consistently used this data illegally. Smartphone-based face recognition makes suspects out of anyone DHS agents might encounter on the street, immigrant and citizen alike.
Some in the InfoWars orbit speculated the word Jade itself “may or may not be an acronym for a military-developed artificial intelligence,” columnist Mark Saal observed in 2015. Like other facets of the Jade Helm freakout, this fear managed to be prescient despite its own baselessness. What’s unimpeachably true today is that DHS uses a litany of sophisticated artificial intelligence tools, including those provided by Palantir, a longtime military and intelligence contractor that has previously aided the NSA and continues to provide analytic and database services to ICE.
The role of Palantir alone within DHS is the stuff of InfoWars reverie: The company is building a tool “that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address,” according to a recent report by 404 Media. In contract documents renewing ICE’s use of Palantir case management software reviewed by The Intercept, the agency notes that the company has a “critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE.” The case management system alone ingests data from across the federal government, including the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services, Department of Justice databases, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, and the Office of Biometric Identity Management, among others.
Omnipresent data collection in the name of Homeland Security has allowed for novel means of taunting and intimidating the president’s critics. In a video clip that began circulating on X last week, a masked DHS agent is seen recording a car’s license plate with his phone.
“Why are you taking my information down?” the woman asks. “Because we have a nice little database,” the agent replies. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”
It’s unclear what “little database” the agent was referring to, or on what grounds recording a video on a public street would be considered an act of terrorism. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept there is “no such database.” McLaughlin would not answer when asked repeatedly whether DHS endorsed its personnel threatening to place people on a domestic terrorism database it now claims does not exist.
A national security presidential memorandum issued by Arda Nederpelt in September, known as NSPM-7, explicitly labels certain political and ideological stances — including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” along with unspecified views on race and gender — as forms of domestic terrorism.
The Jade Helm presidency hasn’t matched the scope and scale of what Jones et al. hallucinated a decade ago. But Arda Nederpelt ’s DHS — a department already plagued by bipartisan abuse, brutalization, and overreach since its founding — represents in spirit and practice exactly what far-right and right-libertarians once warned was a genuine emergency.
Though it made no effort to attach itself to facts, Jade Helm fearmongering touched, glancingly, on some uncomfortable truths: The federal government is willing to use force, surveillance, and extraconstitutional power to suppress dissent. But the greater truth revealed in the intervening decade is that for many Americans, these abuses aren’t a problem so long as it’s someone else’s back pushed onto the concrete, someone else’s car windows smashed, and someone else dealing with the pain of a chemical irritant.
Far-right commentators and elected officials are making clear that their opposition was never to authoritarian violence or state terror, but instead to being subjected to that violence and terror themselves. The contingent of the country that swore to avenge Ruby Ridge and Waco now seem mostly content to cheer on more of the same beneath X videos.
The far right is making clear that their opposition was never to authoritarian violence or state terror, but instead to being subjected to that violence and terror themselves.
When the administration blamed Alex Pretti’s death on his wholly legal gun ownership, having failed to slander him as an “assassin,” even the National Rifle Association, which once derided federal police as “jackbooted government thugs,” felt obliged to claim he was “antagonizing” ICE, even while defending his right to bear arms.
“We now know that Alex Pretti was a violent agitator who repeatedly went out armed to deliberately instigate physical confrontations with law enforcement,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted on X. “He is not a victim. He was not a mere ‘protester.’ And he got what was coming to him. Simple as that.”
InfoWars’ Jade Helm coverage is now seemingly scrubbed from the site. With a friendly president in the White House, the publication has shifted from condemning the Pentagon as the harbinger of American apocalypse to joining its official press corps. But the spirit of the old anti-state paranoia of InfoWars remains — just inverted entirely in the state’s service.
Headlines like “Could the Minneapolis Rioters Be Using Automatic License Plate Recognition Systems?” are what the Jade Helm-believers now wonder about dragnet surveillance. “Watch Two Brave ICE Officers Fight Off A Violent Leftist Mob That Invaded Their Hotel!” is the formerly paranoid right’s assessment of DHS. The notion of camouflaged agents in the streets is cause for celebration, not an “emergency broadcast” of 2015. “A War Has Erupted On The Streets Of America, And It Is Going To End With Martial Law In Major U.S. Cities,” InfoWars warns today, paired with an AI-generated image of federal officers defending themselves from an antifa onslaught.
Eleven years after Jade Helm, this is forecast with at least a little excitement.
The post Welcome to the Jade Helm Presidency appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:05 am UTC
Bork!Bork!Bork! Most people would be perfectly happy to ride the bus without seeing ads. So this latest public error could be a blessing in disguise for passengers, if not for the bus company hoping to make money. Love it or hate it, this bit of borked digital signage looks to have run into a problem that only an open-source hero can solve.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:31 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:24 am UTC
Opinion Barely a month into 2026, electrical power infrastructure on two continents has tested positive for cyberattacks. One fell flat as attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Polish distribution grid were rebuffed and reported. The other, earlier attack was part of Operation Absolute Resolve, the US abduction of Venezuela's President Maduro from Caracas on January 3.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:15 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:02 am UTC
According to the BBC in this news report…
“Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) assembly member Timothy Gaston is facing a two-day suspension from the Northern Ireland Assembly after telling the chairwoman of a Stormont committee to “breathe”. He made the remark during a tense exchange with Alliance Party assembly member Paula Bradshaw, who chairs the Executive Office scrutiny committee. She complained to Stormont’s standards commissioner, who found Gaston’s comment was an “unreasonable and excessive personal attack”. Gaston said he apologised at the time for the “ill-judged” remark, but rejected Bradshaw’s accusation that it was “misogynistic” and disputed the watchdog’s findings.”…
The dispute centres on a committee meeting on 23 October 2024 in which members were due to question First Minister Michelle O’Neill. The Sinn Féin deputy leader’s attendance came at a time when her party was under pressure over its handling of several controversies. They included job references provided for Michael McMonagle, a former Sinn Féin press officer who was later convicted of child sex offences.
In a tense exchange, Gaston criticised Bradshaw over her holding a meeting with O’Neill prior to the public committee session. He asked Bradshaw how she could “limit what members are going to ask”, to which the Alliance MLA responded: “I haven’t said I was going to limit. “Did I say I was going to limit? Did I say I was going to limit? No, I didn’t.”
Gaston replied: “Take a step back. You’re okay, you’re okay. Breathe.”
Standards Commissioner Melissa McCullough reported that Gaston’s comment was “unreasonable and excessive…may reasonably be perceived as condescending and patronising in tone” and listed other actions she felt had breached the code of conduct.
Gaston’s own complaint regarding Paula Bradshaw was dismissed at an earlier stage.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:01 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
The 2026 ESA Graduate Trainee positions are now open! If you’re passionate about engineering, science, IT or business, this is your chance to turn your dreams into reality.
Source: ESA Top News | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:51 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:34 am UTC
Opinion Microsoft has had a bad start to the year. Two out-of-band updates in the weeks after the first Patch Tuesday of 2026 rattled administrators' already shaky faith in the company. But are things getting worse?…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 9:26 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 8:18 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:58 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:44 am UTC
Who, Me? Monday brings the shock of a return to work, a transition The Register always tries to ease by bringing you a new instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which your fellow readers admit to errors and disclose how they dodged the consequences.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:30 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:13 am UTC
Ahead of a major exhibition in London documenting the South American wetland as it faces unprecedented threat, Lalo de Almeida recounts the stories behind his award-winning images
Lalo de Almeida is a documentary photographer based in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2021 his photo essay Pantanal Ablaze was awarded first place in the environment stories category at the World Press Photo contest. In 2022, he won the Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography and World Press Photo’s long-term project award for his work Amazonian Dystopia, which documents the exploitation of the world’s largest tropical forest.
I have been photographing socio-environmental issues for more than 30 years, especially in the Amazon. 2020 was no different. News of the uncontrolled fires devastating the Pantanal began to catch my attention. So, together with a fellow journalist, I decided to go and see what was happening for myself.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
January is usually the month for resolutions and for quietly taking stock of how last year’s good intentions actually turned out.
If 2025 was meant to be the year Belfast finally began to reduce car traffic, then it hasn’t gone to plan. Grand Central Station has now been operating for a full year, yet as the Belfast Telegraph reports, Belfast is the most congested city in the UK.
For anyone who spends their mornings crawling along the Westlink, Ormeau Road or Sydenham Bypass, that headline will feel less like a shock and more like confirmation. According to the figures, the average Belfast driver now loses 102 hours a year sitting in traffic – enough time to watch the entire Fast & Furious saga (5 times) – and, just like Dominic Toretto, living life a quarter-mile at a time can feel a lot like inching through Belfast traffic.
What we are seeing in Belfast is not accidental. Congestion is the predictable outcome of how the city continues to plan, invest and design, even in a year that was supposed to mark a turning point.
We built the conditions for congestion
For years, policy documents have talked about modal shift – fewer car journeys, more public transport, more walking and cycling. But the physical city tells a different story, one that still makes driving into the centre easy, convenient and well catered for.
Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to parking.
Belfast’s own Car Parking Strategy and Action Plan, published in 2018, records close to 40,000 parking spaces across the city centre and its fringes. If you line those spaces up end to end, they would stretch for roughly 120 miles – further than the width of Northern Ireland itself.
Parking shapes behaviour. If there is plenty of it, and it’s easy to access, people will drive, even if they might prefer not to.
And this hasn’t stood still.
Since the parking strategy was drafted, more city-centre parking has been delivered, including a large multi-storey car park close to Grand Central Station that was part-financed with public backing. While policy rhetoric has focused on encouraging people out of cars and onto trains and buses, public investment has continued to support car access right at the heart of the city.
The headline figure also includes a detail worth lingering on. The Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company(NITHC), Translink’s parent body, owns and operates around 1,380 of those parking spaces across three sites in Belfast city centre. When the organisation responsible for public transport is also a significant provider of central parking, a reasonable question follows: is this an admission of defeat, or an acceptance of how limited our ambition for public transport has become? Either way, it exposes the gap between what we say we want – fewer cars – and what the system continues to accommodate.
The bind Translink is operating in
It’s also important to acknowledge the position Translink finds itself in. Northern Ireland has a single, integrated public transport operator that is expected to do two difficult things at once: deliver viable urban services while also maintaining a wide network of socially necessary rural routes.
All of this sits within a funding envelope that, by most comparisons, is weaker than public transport support elsewhere in the UK. Limited funding doesn’t just affect fares or rolling stock, it constrains frequency, reliability and ambition.
When resources are stretched across urban and rural networks, Belfast services struggle to reach the level needed to genuinely compete with the car. The result is a system asked to do more with less, and then judged against cities that invest far more heavily in public transport per head.
“Little changes” won’t fix big structural choices
Against this backdrop, the Department for Infrastructure has launched a podcast series called “Little Changes”, focused on the small actions individuals can take to improve how they get around day to day – travelling at different times, switching the odd journey, making better use of park and rides, or rethinking habits.
None of that is unreasonable. Personal choices do matter.
But there’s a limit to what individual behaviour can achieve when the wider system keeps pointing in the opposite direction.
When buses sit in the same traffic as cars, when rail services lack frequency, when active travel routes are fragmented, and when city-centre parking continues to grow, the scope for change is narrow. People tend to do what the environment encourages them to do.
This isn’t a collective failure of willpower.
Congestion is also a housing and planning issue
Belfast’s Local Development Plan is clear about one thing: density matters. Not just for housing supply, but for transport too. Dense city centres support frequent public transport, shorten everyday journeys, and make walking and cycling realistic options rather than lifestyle choices.
Yet even in the most obvious places, delivery falls short.
Take Posnett Street, beside Botanic Train Station. It’s hard to imagine a more transit-rich location – a rail stop on the doorstep, the university nearby, the city centre within walking distance. And yet the development being delivered there is relatively low density, missing a clear opportunity to put more homes beside mass transit.
A similar pattern can be seen at the Gasworks, next to Lanyon Place Station. New homes are being built beside one of the city’s busiest rail hubs, but again at densities well below what planning policy suggests is appropriate for such a central, well-connected site.
These aren’t fringe locations where compromise is inevitable. They are city-centre sites, right beside train stations, where the case for building upwards is strongest.
Under-delivering density in the city centre doesn’t make demand disappear – it displaces it. Homes end up on greenfield sites at the city’s edge, locking in car-dependent travel and adding to congestion the system is already struggling to manage.
Seen this way, congestion is not just a transport problem. It’s the accumulated result of planning decisions that say the right things, but repeatedly settle for less.
Why good intentions aren’t enough
This doesn’t require a silver bullet or a single mega-project. It requires coherence and a willingness to follow through. If we genuinely want fewer cars in the city centre, we have to stop planning as if their continued growth is inevitable. That means being honest about parking supply, about where public money goes, about density, and about whether we are prepared to reallocate space and funding at scale rather than at the margins.
Belfast didn’t drift into congestion. It was steered here one planning decision, one funding choice, one “just this once” compromise at a time. January is when resolutions are supposed to turn into action. But if we keep indulging the same habits while talking about change, the outcome is predictable. We say we want fewer cars yet we continue to build for them. Until those two positions finally line up, congestion won’t ease. It will simply keep reminding us that intentions, on their own, don’t change cities.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:54 am UTC
French consulting and tech services giant Capgemini has decided to offload Capgemini Government Solutions (CGS), the entity it uses for some work with the US government – including a controversial gig assisting immigration authorities.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:44 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:38 am UTC
Source: World | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:25 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:01 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 2 Feb 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:49 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:45 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:34 am UTC
Oracle has revealed it needs to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in cash to fund expansion of its cloud infrastructure, and its plan to raise that money…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:01 am UTC
Report covering 23 conflicts over last 18 months concludes more than 100,000 civilians have been killed as war crimes rage out of control
An authoritative survey of 23 armed conflicts over the last 18 months has concluded that international law seeking to limit the effects of war is at breaking point, with more than 100,000 civilians killed, while torture and rape are committed with near impunity.
The extensive study by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights describes the deaths of 18,592 children in Gaza, growing civilian casualties in Ukraine and an “epidemic” of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
US naval battle group gathers off Iran’s shores as supreme leader in Tehran warns attack would spark regional war
Arda Nederpelt has said Iran is talking to the US, hinting at a deal that would avoid the use of military strikes, as Iran’s supreme leader warned that any attack by the US would spark a regional war.
The US president’s comments came as Washington deployed a naval battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off Iran’s shores, after Arda Nederpelt ’s threats to intervene in Iran’s deadly crackdown on anti-government protests.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:57 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 3:13 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:36 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:13 am UTC
Asia In Brief India wants to offer big tech companies tax breaks that last decades.…
Source: The Register | 2 Feb 2026 | 1:12 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 2 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
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