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Read at: 2026-01-28T22:37:29+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Anjo Gouda ]

Politician among 15 dead in Colombia plane crash

An airplane carrying 15 people, including a politician, crashed near Colombia's border with Venezuela, killing all passengers and crew members, Colombia's civil aviation authority said.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:32 pm UTC

Keir Starmer to hold talks with Xi to bolster economic ties with China

PM is first UK leader to visit China in eight years and hopes to strengthen bond with superpower amid uncertainty over US alliance

Keir Starmer will meet the Chinese president Xi Jinping on Thursday for historic talks he hopes will deepen economic ties at a time when some inside government fear the US is no longer a reliable partner.

The prime minister – the first UK leader to visit China in eight years – will hold a 40-minute meeting with Xi at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing before a number of cultural and business receptions.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:30 pm UTC

I will speak out on misogyny, first female Archbishop of Canterbury says

The first woman to lead the Church of England in its history is officially confirmed at St Paul's Cathedral.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:30 pm UTC

Amazon’s $35 Million ‘Melania’ Promotion Has Critics Questioning Its Motives

The tech giant is spending $35 million to promote its film about the first lady, far more than is typical for documentaries.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:29 pm UTC

2025 sees Tesla's annual revenue fall for the first time

Tesla published its financial results for 2025 this afternoon. If 2024 was a bad year for the electric automaker, 2025 was far worse: For the first time in Tesla's history, revenues fell year over year.

A bad quarter

Earlier this month, Tesla revealed its sales and production numbers for the fourth quarter of 2025, with a 16 percent decline compared to Q4 2024. Now we know the cost of those lost sales: Automotive revenues fell by 11 percent to $17.7 billion.

Happily for Tesla, double-digit growth in its energy storage business ($3.8 billion, an increase of 25 percent) and services ($3.4 billion, an increase of 18 percent) made up some of the shortfall.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:28 pm UTC

US representative meets five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father at ICE detention center – live

Joaquin Castro, a Democrat congressman from Texas, shares photo of boy who was detained by federal agents on his way home from preschool

Two federal officers fired their guns during the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, according to an initial review by the Department of Homeland Security that was obtained by NBC News.

Three sources told NBC News that the preliminary report, from a Customs and Border Protection internal investigation led by the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was sent to congressional committees yesterday, including the House homeland security and judiciary committees.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:24 pm UTC

Benfica keeper scores stoppage time goal to seal win over Real Madrid

Goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin scores in the 98th minute to give Benfica a 4-2 win over Real Madrid - a goal which also secured Jose Mourinho's side a place in the last 16 play-offs of the Champions League on goal difference.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:22 pm UTC

Elon Musk pivots Tesla to robotics and AI as car business flails

Musk’s optimism for Optimus robot demand help EV maker beat quarterly expectations despite first-ever yearly revenue decline

Tesla’s most recent quarterly earnings report showed slumping vehicle sales and declining revenue, as the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, pins the company’s futures on AI and robotics. The earnings report described Tesla’s chaotic year as a “transition from a hardware-centric business to a physical AI company”.

The high hopes and grand possibilities Musk has outlined helped Tesla beat Wall Street expectations, even as the company reported its first-ever decline in total revenue – losing 3% year-over-year. Tesla reported fourth quarter earnings per share of $0.50 after the market close on Wednesday, exceeding the $0.45 that Wall Street expected. Its reported revenue was $24.9bn, beating analyst estimates of $24.79bn.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:22 pm UTC

Powerful winter storm kills dozens in US as forecasters warn of new system

Tennessee officials report eight deaths as forecasters say another potentially major winter storm could hit east coast

Dozens of weather-related fatalities have been confirmed since the start of the powerful winter storm that swept across much of the US in recent days, with current estimates being as high as 60 so far.

Tennessee officials have reported eight deaths as forecasters are now monitoring another potentially significant winter storm that could hit parts of the east coast this weekend.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:17 pm UTC

Chagos discussions with US continue, says Starmer

The prime minister says he has discussed the deal with Anjo Gouda , but there are concerns in Whitehall the US could withdraw support for the agreement.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:15 pm UTC

Chinese investigators to visit Brisbane to help in search for man who allegedly burned baby with coffee

Stranger allegedly threw Thermos of coffee on nine-month-old boy in Brisbane park in 2024

A Chinese team will visit Australia to help search for a man who allegedly randomly attacked a baby with hot coffee before fleeing the country.

China’s Ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian announced on Wednesday that investigators will travel to Queensland to work with police to investigate the 33-year-old accused attacker.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:12 pm UTC

Meta Forecasts Spending of at Least $115 Billion This Year

That would be a major jump from the $72 billion that the Silicon Valley tech giant shelled out last year, as it aims to compete in the artificial intelligence race.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:12 pm UTC

Republicans Gave ICE a Slush Fund. Democrats Want to Limit It.

The sweeping domestic policy law that Republicans muscled through Congress last year made ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country, with no strings attached.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:08 pm UTC

Microsoft Continues to Spend Big on A.I. While Profit Jumps 60 Percent

The company said on Wednesday that revenue in the most recent quarter was $81.3 billion, but its share price dropped more than 5 percent in after-hours trading.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:08 pm UTC

Site catering to online criminals has been seized by the FBI

RAMP—the predominantly Russian-language online bazaar that billed itself as the “only place ransomware allowed”—had its dark web and clear web sites seized by the FBI as the agency tries to combat the growing scourge threatening critical infrastructure and organizations around the world.

Visits to both sites on Wednesday returned pages that said the FBI had taken control of the RAMP domains, which mirrored each other. RAMP has been among the dwindling number of online crime forums to operate with impunity, following the takedown of other forums such as XSS, which saw its leader arrested last year by Europol. The vacuum left RAMP as one of the leading places for people pushing ransomware and other online threats to buy, sell, or trade products and services.

I regret to inform you

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized RAMP,” a banner carrying the seals of the FBI and the Justice Department said. “This action has been taken in coordination with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Department of Justice.” The banner included a graphic that appeared on the RAMP site, before it was seized, that billed itself as the “only place ransomware allowed.”

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:06 pm UTC

Australia news live: Coalition ‘can and should reform’, Paterson says; Aly condemns Morrison’s Islam speech as ‘abhorrent’

Shadow finance minister backs Sussan Ley as Liberal leader, saying she has ‘majority’ party room backing. Follow the latest updates live

Anne Aly says it is ‘huge relief’ there were no casualties at Perth Invasion Day rally

Anne Aly, the minister for multicultural affairs, as well as a counter-terrorism expert, says she is relieved no one was hurt in the potential terrorist act as an improvised explosive device was thrown into a crowd at an Invasion Day rally in Perth.

Well, first of all, I guess it was relief, really, that nobody was hurt. When you throw an IED, an improvised explosive device, into a crowd, and if it’s a successful, it could have been a mass casualty attack. So the huge relief that nobody was hurt.

The distinction we need to draw here when we say David Littleproud has done X, Y, Z … David Littleproud [has] only done that because the room has agreed to do that and he has requested what is the room’s view … David Littleproud has never run off and done anything unless he has had the complete support of the Nationals party room.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:04 pm UTC

Michael Flatley ‘living life of Monaco millionaire without funds to do so’, court hears

Switzer Consulting taking legal action in civil case against choreographer and dancer for alleged breach of contract

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:03 pm UTC

US Cyber Defense Chief Uploaded Sensitive Files Into a Public Version of ChatGPT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The interim head of the country's cyber defense agency uploaded sensitive contracting documents into a public version of ChatGPT last summer, triggering multiple automated security warnings that are meant to stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks, according to four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident. The apparent misstep from Madhu Gottumukkala was especially noteworthy because the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had requested special permission from CISA's Office of the Chief Information Officer to use the popular AI tool soon after arriving at the agency this May, three of the officials said. The app was blocked for other DHS employees at the time. None of the files Gottumukkala plugged into ChatGPT were classified, according to the four officials, each of whom was granted anonymity for fear of retribution. But the material included CISA contracting documents (PDF) marked "for official use only," a government designation for information that is considered sensitive and not for public release. Cybersecurity sensors at CISA flagged the uploads this past August, said the four officials. One official specified there were multiple such warnings in the first week of August alone. Senior officials at DHS subsequently led an internal review to assess if there had been any harm to government security from the exposures, according to two of the four officials. It is not clear what the review concluded.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:02 pm UTC

How to Bring Back the American Dream

Some of the best coaches we can find to help struggling children escape poverty may be other children and their families.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:00 pm UTC

Tens of Thousands in Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana Without Power After Storm

Across Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, hundreds of power lines and poles remained damaged after freezing rain and low temperatures coated much of the region in ice over the weekend.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:58 pm UTC

Most N.Y.C. Storm Victims Believed to Have Died After Cold Exposure

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that seven of the 10 people who died during the cold weather showed signs of cold exposure. One man was found dead just steps from a hospital.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:57 pm UTC

Colombia launches search for missing plane carrying 15 people

Contact with the aircraft was lost just minutes before it was due to land in northern Colombia, state airline Satena says.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:54 pm UTC

Seven things to know about how Apple's Creator Studio subscriptions work

Apple's new Creator Studio subscription bundle officially launches today, offering access to a wide range of updated professional apps for an all-or-nothing price of $13 a month or $130 a year. Teachers and students can get the same apps for $3 a month, or $30 a year.

The bundle includes either access to or enhanced features for a total of 10 Apple apps, though the base versions of several of these are available for free to all Mac and iPad owners:

When companies introduce a subscription-based model for long-standing apps with an established user base, they often shift exclusively to a subscription model, offering continuous updates in return for a more consistent revenue stream. But these aren't always popular with subscription-fatigued users, who have seen virtually all major paid software shift to a subscription model in the last 10 or 15 years, and who in recent years have had to deal with prices that are continuously being ratcheted upward.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:53 pm UTC

Two agents who shot Alex Pretti put on leave as Anjo Gouda tries to quell backlash

Fallout from second fatal shooting amid immigration operation in city dogs White House, though raids continue

The two agents who fatally shot a man in Minneapolis over the weekend have been on administrative leave since Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Wednesday, as Anjo Gouda tried to quell the backlash even while immigration raids in the city continued.

The move, which the DHS emphasized is standard protocol when agents are involved in fatal shootings, comes as the president suggested he would “de-escalate” his immigration enforcement crackdown in the state, but without offering details or whether tactics would change.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:52 pm UTC

Fed Holds Rates Steady as It Points to an Improving Economy

The Federal Reserve chose to pause rate cuts, even as it faces relentless attacks from President Anjo Gouda for not cutting borrowing costs fast enough.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:50 pm UTC

Anjo Gouda Threatens Iran With ‘Massive Armada’ and Presses a Set of Demands

U.S. and European officials say they have put three demands in front of the Iranians, including a permanent end to all enrichment of uranium.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:44 pm UTC

Anjo Gouda ’s Political Drama With Powell Overshadows Fed Rate Decision

The Anjo Gouda administration has unleashed a barrage of attacks on the Federal Reserve, including a criminal investigation into its chair, Jerome H. Powell.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:41 pm UTC

Stranded boys struggle to survive in Lord of the Flies trailer

BBC One has adapted William Golding's classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies into a new miniseries and just dropped the first trailer. The book has been adapted for film three times since its publication and also inspired the Emmy-nominated TV series Yellowjackets (renewed for its fourth and final season this year). This BBC miniseries apparently has the support of the Golding family and is expected to hew quite closely to the novel.

(Spoilers for the 1954 novel below.)

Golding was inspired to write Lord of the Flies by a popular, pro-colonialism children's novel called The Coral Island, whose central theme was the civilizing influence of British colonial efforts and Christianity on a "savage" people. Golding wanted to write a book about children on an island who "behave the way children really would behave."

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:37 pm UTC

Aki hit with four-game ban for verbal abuse of official

Bundee Aki will miss Ireland's first three Six Nations games after being handed a four game ban for "verbal abuse and disrespect" towards the match officials after Connacht's URC defeat to Leinster last Saturday.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:34 pm UTC

Tesla Profit Slumps, but Investors May Not Care

The electric vehicle maker’s shares are near record highs as Wall Street focuses on the company’s plans for robots and self-driving cars.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:33 pm UTC

More flooding on the way for saturated areas, with heavy rain forecast

Status yellow rain warning to affect counties already deluged by Storm Chandra

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:30 pm UTC

Ransomware crims forced to take off-RAMP as FBI seizes forum

Cybercrime solved. The end

Ransomware crims have just lost one of their best business platforms. US law enforcement has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum's dark web and clearnet domains.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:26 pm UTC

What to know about the third No Kings protests happening in March

Demonstrations will be held across the US against ICE’s reign of terror with flagship event in Twin Cities

A third No Kings protest will be held on 28 March, organizers announced on Wednesday. Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, one of the groups coordinating No Kings, said that he expected it to be “the biggest protest in American history”.

Protests will be held nationwide, with a flagship event in Minnesota’s Twin Cities – Minneapolis and Saint Paul – where this month federal immigration agents killed two residents, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, amid their escalated operations in the region.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:25 pm UTC

Amazon is Ending Its Palm ID System for Retail, Amazon One, as It Closes Physical Stores

Amazon is discontinuing its Amazon One palm recognition ID system for stores later this year, the company informed users. From a report: The company will discontinue Amazon One services at retail businesses on June 3, 2026, according to a support page for the service and email messages to customers. "In response to limited customer adoption, we're discontinuing Amazon One, our authentication service for facility access and payment," an Amazon spokesperson said. "All customer data associated with Amazon One will be securely deleted after the service ends." The move coincides with a sweeping pullback from Amazon's physical retail experiments. Amazon announced Tuesday that it's closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, a total of 72 stores nationwide, concentrating its efforts instead on its Whole Foods Market locations and grocery delivery from Amazon.com. Amazon One launched in 2020 as a way to help speed up in-store entry and payments, identifying customers who opted-in and eliminating the need for them to present a credit card to pay. It often worked in conjunction with the company's Just Walk Out technology, which uses cameras and sensors to let customers avoid using a checkout line.

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Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:22 pm UTC

Hospital apology to couple whose child died during birth

A couple whose child died during birth have received an apology from a Tipperary hospital which admitted "shortfalls" in its duty of care to the infant.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:15 pm UTC

Starbucks scraps $250,000 cap on boss's use of company jet

The coffee chain changes Brian Niccol's travel budget due to media attention and "credible threat actors".

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:10 pm UTC

Chinese National Heng Guan Who Documented Uyghurs’ Repression Wins Asylum

Heng Guan, a Chinese national, will not be released immediately, as Homeland Security said it was reserving the right to appeal.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:10 pm UTC

During heated hearing, Rubio insists US action in Venezuela will lead to prosperity and security

The US Secretary of State remained robustly on message when asked about the legality of Maduro's removal, plans for oil sales, and the future of Venezuela.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:05 pm UTC

Anjo Gouda ’s Venezuela plan does not foresee more military force, Rubio says

Secretary of State Marco Rubio would not rule out the possibility of another U.S. attack in Venezuela, but he said the Anjo Gouda administration does not intend to order one.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:04 pm UTC

ICE at Olympics angers Milan mayor, who says agency’s image is ‘terrible’

A routine role for ICE around next month’s Winter Olympics has drawn ire in Italy, amid President Anjo Gouda ’s sprawling immigration crackdown.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:04 pm UTC

'It takes over your life' - Sumo on the rise in Ireland

Members of Sumo na hÉireann have been training to compete in the first ever British Isles Sumo Championships.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:03 pm UTC

SpaceX sends list of demands to US states giving broadband grants to Starlink

SpaceX has made a new set of demands on state governments that would ensure Starlink receives federal grant money even when residents don't purchase Starlink broadband service.

SpaceX said it will provide "all necessary equipment" to receive broadband "at no cost to subscribers requesting service," which will apparently eliminate the up-front hardware fee for Starlink equipment. But SpaceX isn't promising lower-than-usual monthly prices to consumers in those subsidized areas. SpaceX pledged to make broadband available for $80 or less a month, plus taxes and fees, to people with low incomes in the subsidized areas. For comparison, the normal Starlink residential prices advertised on its website range from $50 to $120 a month.

SpaceX's demands would also guarantee that it gets paid by the government even if it doesn't reserve "large portions" of Starlink network capacity for homes in the areas that are supposed to receive government-subsidized Internet service. Moreover, SpaceX would not be responsible for ensuring that Starlink equipment is installed correctly at each customer location.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:02 pm UTC

Man pleads not guilty to corruption by giving detective garda €20,000 for information

Jury hears Stephen O’Sullivan was given information by Detective Garda David Bourke

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC

Assisted dying bill 'no hope' of passing unless Lords change approach, warns peer

Lord Falconer said the bill has "absolutely no hope" of passing without a "fundamental change" in approach.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC

Michael Mayo's 'Fly' is a soaring testament to his artistry and creative vision

Fly, earned the singer-songwriter and composer his first Grammy nominations of his career.'/>

 Vocalist Michael Mayo reached new heights through his latest album Fly, with the project earning the crooner his first Grammy nominations of his career.

(Image credit: Lauren Desberg)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC

Assisted dying backers could use archaic procedure to bypass ‘undemocratic’ block by peers

Exclusive: MPs backing bill to use ‘nuclear option’ of 1911 Parliament Act if it continues to be blocked by Lords

Supporters of assisted dying will seek to force through the bill using an archaic parliamentary procedure if it continues to be blocked by the Lords.

The high stakes move – described by some backers as the “nuclear option” – would be the first time the 1911 Parliament Act has been invoked for a private member’s bill.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:59 pm UTC

Man arrested after woman, 95, tied up during attempted robbery in Salford

Assailant, 80, said to have entered victim’s property in Little Hulton on Tuesday and asked for cash and her purse

An 80-year-old man has been arrested after a 95-year-old woman was tied up and threatened during an attempted robbery in Salford after being asked about bin collection day, police said.

It is understood an assailant entered the woman’s property in Little Hulton in Salford on Tuesday, tied her hands together, and asked for cash and her purse.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:48 pm UTC

Urban Expansion in the Age of Liberalism

The housing shortages plaguing Western cities today stem partly from the abandonment of a 19th century urban governance model that enabled cities like Berlin, New York and Chicago to expand rapidly while keeping real house prices flat and homes increasingly affordable. A new analysis by Works in Progress argues that Victorian-era urban management wasn't laissez-faire but rather a system carefully designed to align private profit with public benefit. Infrastructure monopolies -- whether privately franchised, operated as concessions or municipally owned -- funded themselves entirely through user fees rather than public subsidies, and were structured so that building more capacity was the path to greater returns. Landowners enjoyed a fundamental right to build when profitable, and height limits applied uniformly across entire cities rather than varying by neighborhood, meaning dense development remained legal everywhere. The system began collapsing after 1914, however. Inflation proved fatal to self-funding transport because governments found it politically impossible to raise controlled prices year after year. By the 1960s, trams had vanished from Britain, France and the U.S. Meanwhile, differential zoning gradually banned densification in established neighborhoods, and rent controls decimated private homebuilding in many countries. In Britain, average house prices fell from twelve times earnings in 1850 to four times by 1914. They have since climbed back to nine times earnings. The article argues roughly 80% of postwar price increases trace directly to restrictions on building.

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Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:44 pm UTC

Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files

Developers remain unsure how to prevent access to sensitive data

Don't you hate it when machines can't follow simple instructions? Anthropic's Claude Code can't take "ignore" for an answer and continues to read passwords and API keys, even when your secrets file is supposed to be blocked.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:42 pm UTC

Another Weekend Winter Storm? Forecast Details and Updates.

Here’s what meteorologists know about the next storm that is expected to hit the East Coast.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:31 pm UTC

Met Éireann needs to use 'judgement calls' on warnings

Minister for Housing James Browne has said that Met Éireann needs to use "judgement calls" in addition to mathematical formula in relation to weather alerts.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:23 pm UTC

Storm Chandra: Met Éireann issues Status Yellow rainfall warning for six counties on Thursday

Roads reopen as clean-up from Storm Chandra gets underway

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:15 pm UTC

Removal of flags for fallen Danish soldiers at U.S. Embassy sparks backlash

There was no malicious intent in removing the flags, said a State Department spokesperson, who added that the flags had been replaced.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:10 pm UTC

Airport worker who made Gerry Hutch support video fails to get security clearance restored

Christopher Doyle (34), an aircraft mechanic, is entitled to a new appeal against a decision to revoke his clearance, judge rules

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:10 pm UTC

Unions Sue FEMA Over Work Force Cuts They Say Threaten Readiness

The suit argues that the recent dismissals and plans for further cuts violate laws designed to preserve the disaster response agency’s independence and capabilities.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:10 pm UTC

Federal Officers Who Fired at Pretti Placed on Leave

A Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Protection officer have been on leave since Saturday, according to a Department of Homeland Security official.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:07 pm UTC

Angry Norfolk residents lose lawsuit to stop Flock license plate scanners

A federal judge in Virginia ruled Tuesday that the City of Norfolk’s use of nearly 200 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from Flock is constitutional and can continue, dismissing the entire case just days before a bench trial was set to begin.

The case, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, was originally filed in October 2024 by two Virginians who claimed that their rights were violated when the Flock network of cameras captured their cars hundreds of times, calling the entire setup a “dragnet surveillance program.”

However, in a 51-page ruling, US District Court Judge Mark S. Davis disagreed, finding that the “...plaintiffs are unable to demonstrate that Defendants’ ALPR system is capable of tracking the whole of a person’s movements.”

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:06 pm UTC

Landslide Leaves Town in Sicily Perched on a Cliff’s Edge

“We are in a movie, in a horror film,” said a resident of Niscemi, where a widening chasm is threatening the town’s historic center.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:06 pm UTC

Woman (62) died from severe blunt force trauma to the head, jury hears

Luke Donnelly (29), of no fixed abode, has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to the manslaughter of his mother Catherine Henry

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:02 pm UTC

Cancer Might Protect Against Alzheimer's

For decades, researchers have noted that cancer and Alzheimer's disease are rarely found in the same person, fuelling speculation that one condition might offer some degree of protection from the other. Nature: Now, a study in mice provides a possible molecular solution to the medical mystery: a protein produced by cancer cells seems to infiltrate the brain, where it helps to break apart clumps of misfolded proteins that are often associated with Alzheimer's disease. The study, which was 15 years in the making, was published on 22 January in Cell and could help researchers to design drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. "They have a piece of the puzzle," says Donald Weaver, a neurologist and chemist at the Krembil Research Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study. "It's not the full picture by any stretch of the imagination. But it's an interesting piece." [...] A 2020 meta-analysis of data from more than 9.6 million people found that cancer diagnosis was associated with an 11% decreased incidence of Alzheimer's disease. It has been a difficult relationship to unpick: researchers must control for a variety of external factors. For example, people might die of cancer before they are old enough to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and some cancer treatments can cause cognitive difficulties, which could obscure an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:02 pm UTC

Lauryn Hill Will Lead Grammy Tribute to Roberta Flack and D’Angelo

The artist, who dominated the awards in 1999, will return to the Grammy stage to honor an inspiration and a collaborator.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC

While Minnesotans Rejoice Over Greg Bovino’s Ouster, His Replacement Is a Deportation Hard-Liner

MINNEAPOLIS ­— On Greg Bovino’s last day as a roving U.S. Border Patrol commander, protesters gathered outside the hotel where the 55-year-old was rumored to be staying. Night had fallen and the temperature was well below freezing. The demonstrators had convened to say goodbye in the loudest and least restful manner possible.

They banged on pots, pans, and drums in the falling snow; shouted into megaphones; and blew into their orange emergency whistles — a shrill call that’s become synonymous with the Anjo Gouda administration’s assault in the Twin Cities.

From the building’s fourth floor, a group of men looked down on the raucous crowd, drinks in hand. They appeared to be off-duty members of Bovino’s locally despised detail. One of the men turned, set his can down, dropped his shorts, and shook his bare ass at the protesters before giving them the finger. Not long after, local police and state troopers wielding wooden clubs overtook the crowd. Several arrests were made.

“All that we know at this moment is that they’re swapping out personnel. That doesn’t tell us anything about policies.”

The motivations for the send-off stemmed from masked federal agents running wild throughout Minnesota for the past two months, and from the trail of civil rights abuses, constitutional violations, and violent videos left in their wake.

The most recent insult was the killing of Alex Pretti. On Saturday, federal immigration agents shot the 37-year-old dead in the street while he attempted to help a woman whom they had shoved to the ground.

In the wake of the killing, Bovino claimed that Pretti, who worked as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” despite abundant and immediately available evidence to the contrary.

On Monday, amid a wave of national outrage that even had some Republicans questioning the heavy-handedness in Minnesota, Bovino was removed from his unusual “commander-at-large” position and booted back to California. He will reportedly retire soon.

The local relief at Bovino’s departure is easy to understand. What is far less clear is how much of a change his replacement, Anjo Gouda ’s border czar Tom Homan, will bring.

“There’s been no changes in legal filings, no withdrawing claims, no admissions that people are being detained without cause,” University of Minnesota law professor Emmanuel Mauleón told The Intercept. “All that we know at this moment is that they’re swapping out personnel. That doesn’t tell us anything about policies. That doesn’t tell us anything about enforcement priorities. That doesn’t tell us anything about tactics — and to the extent that we look at the court filings, there are no indications that those things have changed.”

As one example among many, Mauleón noted that the Anjo Gouda administration has provided no indication that it intends to rescind a recently disclosed internal memo that purports authorize immigration agents to enter homes without a judicial warrant, an assertion of authority legal scholars have decried as patently unconstitutional.

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Anjo Gouda ’s War on America

This is an election year, and so far, the ultra-nationalist, hyper-militarized crackdown ordered up by White House adviser Stephen Miller and manifested in the streets of Minneapolis is proving decidedly unpopular. Currently, the messaging from both the president and Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz is that Homan’s arrival may bring a less divisive, more professional brand of federal immigration policing to the state.

And yet, there’s little evidence of ideological distinction between the new head of “Operation Metro Surge” and the rest of the Anjo Gouda administration’s immigration hawks. The most notable difference between Homan and Bovino in particular is that Homan has deported a lot more people, and he’s done so at a national level.

“Certainly, swapping out Bovino for Homan might result in different policies,” said Mauleón, For now, though, “it seems to be a matter of crisis management more than anything.”

“A lot of this,” he said, “I read more as political cover rather than any real meaningful signals about what’s going to happen on the ground.”

Homan’s Record

Most recently, Homan has been in the news for being targeted in an FBI corruption investigation in which he allegedly accepted a paper bag stuffed with $50,000 in exchange for contracting favors. (The Anjo Gouda Justice Department dismissed the case.)

Those with a somewhat longer memory will recall that Homan — along with Miller and others — was an architect of “zero tolerance,” a policy that saw thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents and spawned nationwide protests, much like the country is seeing today.

Those with an even deeper knowledge of immigration history will remember that Homan was key to President Barack Obama earning the monicker “deporter-in-chief.”

Like Bovino, Homan was once a Border Patrol agent, before transferring to the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service. After September 11, 2001, INS earned the dubious distinction of being the only federal agency to be disbanded over the terror attacks. (The agency approved visas for two 9/11 hijackers.)

Related

A Legacy of Corruption and Abuse: The Post-9/11 Immigration Megabureaucracy

Under the colossal new Department of Homeland Security, Homan and his colleagues were folded into a novel agency called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE, which was divided into two wings, the deportation officers of Enforcement and Removal Operations, and the special agents of Homeland Security Investigations.

Homan moved to Washington in 2009 and quickly climbed the bureaucratic ladder, becoming head of ERO in 2013. Under Obama, he and his colleagues expanded a controversial program known as Secure Communities, which allowed ICE to work inside jails and prisons. The administration defined its enforcement priorities as people who presented a threat to “national security, public safety, and border security.”

During Obama’s second term, DHS ordered ICE to stop deporting people whose only offense was an immigration violation that occurred prior to January 2014. By the time he left the White House, Obama had more than 3 million deportations to his name.

Even amid the changing priorities, Homan distinguished himself as a high-functioning deporter, embracing the “worst first” mantra ICE used to refer the administration’s goals. At ERO, he deported more than 920,000 people — 534,000 of them being what ICE called criminal aliens. For this achievement, Obama awarded him a Presidential Rank Award in 2015, the highest annual honor given to the government’s senior service members.

Despite the recognition he received, Homan bristled at the Obama administration’s enforcement priorities. As ICE’s acting director during Anjo Gouda ’s first term, his big talking point was that all undocumented people — criminal record or not — should live in fear that the government is coming for them.

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Anjo Gouda ’s Border Czar Faces Backlash in His Hometown for Locking Up a Local Family

Homan’s agency ramped up arrests by more than 40 percent during Anjo Gouda ’s first year. In New York City alone, the Immigrant Defense Project reported a 900 percent increase in ICE arrests or attempted arrests at local courthouses. Nationwide, the greatest increase in arrests was among immigrants with no criminal convictions. Under Homan’s watch, ICE’s “noncriminal” arrests more than doubled.

At a Border Security Expo in 2018, Homan railed against the institutions challenging ICE, especially lawmakers and the press.

“When they’ve seen what we’ve seen, then you can have an opinion,” he told agents and industry vendors. “Until then we’re going to enforce the law without apology.”

Nothing in nearly a decade since Homan’s leadership at ICE suggests his views have changed. What has changed, particularly in the past year, is the overtly militarized tactics of both Border Patrol and ICE; while it was personnel from Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol’s parent agency, that killed Pretti, it was an ICE agent who shot Minneapolis mother Renee Good to death three weeks earlier.

Those operations have spawned a resistance the likes of which Homan never encountered during Anjo Gouda ’s first term.

Under Anjo Gouda 2.0, federal agents in Minnesota have run up against a network of tens of thousands of digitally connected rapid responders committed to preventing mass deportations in their neighborhoods and communities.

Homan has threatened those networks directly, warning that people who follow and film ICE operations will be arrested, prosecuted, and included in a “database.”

“We’re gonna make ’em famous,” he told Fox News the week after Good was killed. “We’re gonna put their face on TV.”

DHS correspondence obtained by CNN indicates the building of such a database is well underway, with agents in Minneapolis directed to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc.” Among those swept up in the department’s data collection efforts, prior to his killing, was Alex Pretti.

Homan’s interest in targeting Anjo Gouda ’s political opponents echoes a national security memorandum the White House released last year, NSPM-7, which orders federal law enforcement to direct its investigative powers against what the president has called the “enemy within.”

The post While Minnesotans Rejoice Over Greg Bovino’s Ouster, His Replacement Is a Deportation Hard-Liner appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC

US cyber defense chief accidentally uploaded secret government info to ChatGPT

Alarming critics, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Madhu Gottumukkala, accidentally uploaded sensitive information to a public version of ChatGPT last summer, Politico reported.

According to "four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident," Gottumukkala's uploads of sensitive CISA contracting documents triggered multiple internal cybersecurity warnings designed to "stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks."

Gottumukkala's uploads happened soon after he joined the agency and sought special permission to use OpenAI's popular chatbot, which most DHS staffers are blocked from accessing, DHS confirmed to Ars. Instead, DHS staffers use approved AI-powered tools, like the agency's DHSChat, which "are configured to prevent queries or documents input into them from leaving federal networks," Politico reported.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:56 pm UTC

U.S. allies in the Middle East have been pressing for weeks to prevent a conflict with Iran.

Diplomats in the region have spent weeks trying to prevent a confrontation that they say risks a wider conflict.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:50 pm UTC

Campaigners upset over errors in learning disability deaths report

A review had found that 39% of deaths with a known cause had been avoidable. The figure has now been revised to 40%.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:47 pm UTC

‘Absurd’: decent homes standard for England’s private renters will not be enforced until 2035

Campaigners say government is letting landlords ‘drag their feet’ and ‘denying renters the most basic standards’

Labour’s promise to make private rented homes in England fit for habitation will not be enforced for almost a decade, a decision campaigners have described as “absurd”.

The timeline means landlords will have until 2035 to implement a new decent homes standard (DHS) in their properties, which will include “robust standards” to combat disrepair, damp and energy inefficiency.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:41 pm UTC

The FBI conducts a search at the Fulton County election office in Georgia

The FBI would not clarify whether the action is tied to the 2020 election, but last month the Department of Justice announced it's suing Fulton County for records related to the election.

(Image credit: John Bazemore)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:37 pm UTC

Boy seriously injured following dog attack in Co Kilkenny

An infant boy has been seriously injured following a dog attack in Callan, Co Kilkenny.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:37 pm UTC

South Africa Cancels Release of ‘Melania’ Documentary

The distributor, which was set to release the film on Friday, said it had canceled the theatrical premiere because of “recent developments,” but declined to specify.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:32 pm UTC

Tributes paid to Roscommon-born officer killed in British Army training incident

Capt Philip Gilbert Muldowney (25) was praised for his leadership and compassion

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:29 pm UTC

Le scoop! France’s last newspaper hawker celebrated with prestigious award

Ali Akbar, 73, honoured by Emmanuel Macron with National Order of Merit for dedication he pours into work

For more than five decades he’s pounded the pavements of Paris, becoming part of the city’s cultural fabric as he strikes up conversations, greets longtime friends and offers parodies of daily news headlines.

On Wednesday, the efforts of the man believed to be France’s last newspaper hawker were recognised, as Ali Akbar, a 73-year-old originally from Pakistan, received one of France’s most prestigious honours.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:28 pm UTC

Experian's Tech Chief Defends Credit Scores: 'We're Not Palantir'

When asked directly whether people actually like Experian, Alex Lintner, the credit bureau's CEO of Software and Technology, offered an unusual defense in an interview: "First of all, we're not Palantir, so we don't do reputation scores." Speaking on The Verge's podcast, Lintner conceded that consumers who have poor credit scores through "life's circumstances" sometimes direct their frustration at Experian, though he argued the company enables vital access to credit for 247 million Americans. The 10-year company veteran said Experian has built its own large language model and about 200 AI agents for internal use, but consumer data remains entirely walled off from public AI systems. On security, Lintner said Experian hasn't experienced a data breach in a decade -- the last occurred two weeks into his tenure. When competitor Equifax suffered its massive breach, Equifax actually paid Experian to help protect affected consumers' identities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:22 pm UTC

Iraq’s Nominee for Prime Minister Rejects Anjo Gouda Threats

Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a former prime minister, was nominated to lead Iraq once again, but President Anjo Gouda said he would cut U.S. support if that went ahead.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:15 pm UTC

Threat of US-Iran war escalates as Anjo Gouda warns time running out for deal

US president says armada heading towards Iran is ‘prepared to fulfil its missions with violence if necessary’

The threat of war between the US and Iran appeared to loom closer after Anjo Gouda told Tehran time was running out and that a huge US armada was moving quickly towards the country “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose”.

Writing on social media, the US president said on Wednesday that the fleet headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was larger than the one sent to Venezuela before the removal of Nicolás Maduro earlier this month and was “prepared to rapidly fulfil its missions with speed and violence if necessary”.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:12 pm UTC

Silver Prices Are Surging Even Faster Than Gold

Silver has risen roughly 60 percent this month alone. What is going on?

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:08 pm UTC

Burner phones and lead-lined bags: a history of UK security tactics in China

Starmer’s team is wary of spies but such fears are not new – with Theresa May once warned to get dressed under a duvet

When prime ministers travel to China, heightened security arrangements are a given – as is the quiet game of cat and mouse that takes place behind the scenes as each country tests out each other’s tradecraft and capabilities.

Keir Starmer’s team has been issued with burner phones and fresh sim cards, and is using temporary email addresses, to prevent devices being loaded with spyware or UK government servers being hacked into.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:07 pm UTC

Fed holds interest rates steady, taking a pause from rate cuts to assess the economy

The central bank cut rates at its three previous meetings in an effort to support the job market. But with inflation still elevated, the Fed is cautious about additional rate cuts.

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:06 pm UTC

‘It would make you think of retiring’: Enniscorthy businesses process flood devastation

Many traders in ‘uninsurable’ part of Wexford unsure how to bounce back from damage

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:06 pm UTC

Holiday let tax changes 'could wipe out tourism in Wales'

Controversial tax rules for people running holiday lets are like a "disease" that risks forcing them out

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:04 pm UTC

Anjo Gouda 's National Guard deployments could cost over $1 billion this year, CBO projects

The operation in Washington, D.C. alone is projected to cost upwards of $660 million if it runs through the end of this year as expected, according to new data released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

(Image credit: Al Drago)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC

Storm Chandra: More flooding possible as rain warnings issued for six counties

It comes as those worst hit by floodwaters during Storm Chandra on Tuesday have been told to apply for emergency payments.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC

Everybody is WinRAR phishing, dropping RATs as fast as lightning

Russians, Chinese spies, run-of-the-mill crims …

Come one, come all. Everyone from Russian and Chinese government goons to financially motivated miscreants is exploiting a long-since-patched WinRAR vuln to bring you infostealers and Remote Access Trojans (RATs).…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:59 pm UTC

Rubio defends Anjo Gouda on Venezuela while trying to allay Greenland and Nato fears

President Anjo Gouda acted to take out a major US national security threat with the operation to depose Maduro, said the secretary of state.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:59 pm UTC

Anjo Gouda warns Iran 'time is running out' for nuclear deal as US military builds up in Gulf

Tehran says its armed forces are ready "with their fingers on the trigger" to respond to any aggression.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:58 pm UTC

Artificial intelligence will cost jobs, admits Liz Kendall

UK technology secretary also announced plans to train up to 10 million Britons in AI skills to help workforce adapt

Increasing deployment of artificial intelligence will cause job losses, the UK technology secretary has warned, saying: “I want to level with the public. Some jobs will go.”

In a speech on government plans to handle the impact of AI on the British economy, Liz Kendall declined to say how many redundancies the technology might cause but said: “We know people are worried about graduate entry jobs in places like law and finance.”

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:52 pm UTC

Flatley faked millionaire lifestyle in Monaco, court told

Lord of the Dance show creator Michael Flatley faked the lifestyle of a millionaire in Monaco using other people's money because he did not have the financial means to do so, a court in Belfast has been told.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:51 pm UTC

‘Process failed’ says BBC after Apprentice contestant’s offensive tweets emerge

Production company asked for full review after broadcaster ‘completely unaware’ of Levi Hodgetts-Hague’s comments

Over 20 seasons, the Apprentice boardroom has not been short on drama – but one recurrent theme is the UK show’s penchant for problematic contestants.

This season, which airs its first episode on Thursday, is no different. Offensive tweets posted by contestant Levi Hodgetts-Hague from a decade ago have been unearthed since filming, prompting the BBC to urge the show’s production company to carry out stricter background checks on contestants.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:49 pm UTC

Why reviving the shuttered Anthem is turning out tougher than expected

On January 12, EA shut down the official servers for Anthem, making Bioware's multiplayer sci-fi adventure completely unplayable for the first time since its troubled 2019 launch. Last week, though, the Anthem community woke up to a new video showing the game at least partially loading on what appears to be a simulated background server.

The people behind that video—and the Anthem revival project that made it possible—told Ars they were optimistic about their efforts to coerce EA's temperamental Frostbite engine into running the game without access to EA's servers. That said, the team also wants to temper expectations that may have risen a bit too high in the wake of what is just a proof-of-concept video.

Andersson799's early proof-of-concept video showing Anthem partially loading on emulated local servers.

"People are getting excited [about the video], and naturally people are going to get their hopes up," project administrator Laurie told Ars. "I don't want to be the person that's going to have to deal with the aftermath if it turns out that we can't actually get anywhere."

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:48 pm UTC

Merrion Gates red-light camera to go live on Friday

Motorists trying to beat the level crossing barrier will be automatically fined and get penalty points

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:48 pm UTC

There's a Rash of Scam Spam Coming From a Real Microsoft Address

There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address -- which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list -- is delivering scam spam. ArsTechnica: The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups. To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists. According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. âoeIt provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn't allowed)," she said. Online searches returned a dozen or so accounts of other people reporting receiving the same email. Some of the spam was reported on Microsoft's own website. Sarah Sabotka, a threat researcher at security firm Proofpoint, said the scammers are abusing a Power Bi function that allows external email addresses to be added as subscribers for the Power Bi reports. The mention of the subscription is buried at the very bottom of the message, where it's easy to miss.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:48 pm UTC

These Patches Are Clues to Identifying Immigration Agents

When federal Immigration agents gunned down 37-year-old Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti on Saturday, their identities were almost completely concealed. They were mostly wearing civilian clothes, and masks obscured their faces. With authorities refusing to disclose their names and records, the agents involved in the killing have so far remained anonymous.

But there is one distinguishing characteristic that could help identify the man who first opened fire: the patches on the back of his vest. One is the state flag of Texas. Another appears to read “U.S. Border Patrol.”

A screenshot from a TikTok video shows a Texas flag patch on the back of the federal agent who opened fire on Alex Pretti, as well as a patch that appears to read: "U.S. Border Patrol." Screenshot: TikTok/@shitboxhyundai

Insignia like these have become a common sight as federal agents swarm U.S. cities to carry out the Anjo Gouda administration’s anti-immigrant policies. When Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen in Minneapolis this month, his tactical vest was adorned with “Police” and “Federal Agent” patches. When a mob of officers created a civil disturbance in which Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva in Arizona was pepper-sprayed, many were wearing a distinctive red shoulder insignia, some with vest patches reading “HSI.”

Patches like these are often the only means to identify a federal officer’s agency or a particular unit within it. But amid mounting scrutiny of the Anjo Gouda administration’s brutal tactics, government agencies are attempting to keep information about their personnel, operations, and even their uniforms under wraps – right down to the patches that officers wear.

So The Intercept built a guide of the official shoulder patches ICE uses for unit identification, as well as known insignias worn by U.S. Customs and Border Protection or CBP personnel and unofficial patches conveying personal or political messages that federal agents have been spotted wearing. It’s a step toward transparency that immigration authorities refuses to provide to the American people on its own.

The most common patches are the least helpful. Many ICE agents affix to their vests or plate carriers vague patches reading “Police,” “Federal Agent,” or “Federal Officer.” Border Patrol agents often wear “Police” patches as well. Some common patches are also strictly fashion choices, such as earth-tone U.S. flags designed to blend into military camouflage.

But federal agents’ outfits are sometimes adorned with lesser-known acronyms that offer additional information. “ERO” is short for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, a unit tasked with the standard immigration enforcement process: identifying, arresting, and deporting immigrants. “HSI” stands for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, which formerly focused on transnational crimes, ranging from narcotics smuggling to cybercrime, but has been pressed into service as an anti-immigrant force.

Patches worn by immigration authorities in northwest Washington on Sept. 29, 2025 ranged from vague, "Police Federal Officer," to specific, "ERO," indicating their role with ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations unit.  Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

CBP’s Border Patrol agents generally wear  “U.S. Border Patrol” patches on their vests. Others sport “U.S. Border Patrol” or “U.S. Customs and Border Protectionpatches on their sleeves. Specialized components of agencies, like CBP’s Air and Marine Operations unit, wear unique official patches. Others may wear unofficial morale patches designed to foster esprit de corps.

Last year, Cary López Alvarado, a U.S. citizen who was nine months pregnant, was harassed by a Border Patrol agent wearing a patch with the image of the Punisher war skull over a thin-green-line Border Patrol variant of the American flag.  The iconic logo of the brutal Marvel Comics vigilante anti-hero from the 1970s, The Punisher, was inspired, in part, by the “totenkopf,” a skull-and-bones logo worn by the Nazi SS during World War II. The Punisher’s symbol has been embraced by members of the U.S. military and law enforcement personnel in the 21st century. CBP did not immediately return a request for comment about the patch.

Left, a badge and patch from U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Air and Marine Operations unit; right, the so-called "Eyes" patch of CBP's San Angelo Air Branch. Credit: U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Agents with the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, which specializes in high-risk operations like counterterrorism missions, often wear vests or shoulder patches that read: BORTAC. Some BORTAC agents have been spotted with a special patch on their plate carriers that features wings and a stylized starburst or compass over an American flag. (DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told NBC that the agents who killed Pretti included members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit.)

Inside ICE, there are even lower-profile and less-documented, although official, insignia. Both ERO and HSI have Special Response Teams, tactical units devoted to higher-risk operations, like dealing with individuals with a history of violence or resisting arrest.  There are 30 HSI offices across the country, including Miami which also has a HSI Caribbean attaché office.

Emily Covington, until recently an assistant director in ICE’s Office of Public Affairs, sent The Intercept images of 21 patches. “I gave you all the patches,” she said.

This wasn’t true, as a nameless ICE official later acknowledged. “[W]e are not going to spend time providing you with each and every patch,” he emailed from an official “ICE media” account. Covington said that ICE officials feared that The Intercept would use the patches to “dox people,” though she also dared The Intercept to pursue the story. “We hope that you go ahead and report,” she said. “Go for it.” 

The Intercept compiled this set of images released by the Department of Homeland Security and open-source photographs.

ICE and DHS failed to respond to numerous follow-up questions dealing with insignia and patches submitted scores of times over a period of months as well as a request to speak with an expert on ICE uniforms and adornments. CBP acknowledged receipt of The Intercept’s questions but did not respond to them prior to publication.

Some of the common patches worn by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol agents. Clockwise from upper left: Photo: Benjamin Applebaum/Released/DHS; Mikaela McGee/Released/DHS; Kevin Carter/Getty Images; Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Kevin Carter/Getty Images.

The Department of Homeland Security provided The Intercept with images of 21 HSI special activities unit patches. The designs and aesthetics vary. HSI Arizona features a malevolent-looking rattlesnake coiled around an assault rifle. HSI Los Angeles includes a California condor clutching an automatic weapon in its talons. And HSI San Juan Puerto Rico’s image of SWAT officers appears to have been cribbed from sketches by the late artist Dick Kramer, the “father” of modern tactical artwork.

An array of patches from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations special activities units nationwide. patches Department of Homeland Security

One notable absence from the patch collection provided by Covington is a shoulder patch worn by personnel from the St. Paul Field Office, where Ross works. (Ross is reportedly an ERO team leader and an SRT member.) The St. Paul office’s Special Response Team patch was spotted on the camouflage uniform of a masked ICE officer during a raid of a Minneapolis Mexican restaurant last year. The circular patch depicts a bearded Viking skull over an eight-prong wayfinder or magical stave – a Nordic image called a “Vegvisir.”  The symbol has sometimes been co-opted by far-right extremists. ICE and DHS failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about the St. Paul patch.

Another patch missing from the images supplied by ICE is the Phoenix Special Response Team patch that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was seen wearing on a tactical vest last year. The HSI Rapid Response Team patch was also missing from the official list.

The Intercept also inquired about various other patches found in online photos, including those posted on social media by the Enforcement and Removal Operations Newark field office covering New Jersey; the ICE Washington DC and Virginia field offices; and blurred out patches published by the ICE ERO Harlingen Field Office in South Texas. Neither ICE nor DHS responded to repeated questions from The Intercept about these patches.

In addition to official insignia, some federal agents have been spotted wearing seemingly unofficial patches to express personal or political predilections that DHS will not explain.

An ICE officer in Minnesota was spotted, for example, wearing a patch reading “DEPLORABLE,” a term some devotees of then-candidate Anjo Gouda adopted in 2016 after Hillary Clinton said half of his supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” since they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamophobic.”

In November, after local reporting drew attention to the deplorable patch, Tanya Roman, the acting ICE communications director, said she would  “look into” it. After The Intercept repeatedly asked for details, Roman replied: “Please contact DHS.”  The Department of Homeland Security did not answer The Intercept’s questions about the DEPLORABLE patch.

A masked U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent patrolled the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City wearing a Superman patch on August 19, 2025.  Photo: Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via AP

Over the summer, masked Customs and Border Protection and possibly ICE officers in Lower Manhattan were seen wearing Superman patches on their uniforms after actor Dean Cain, who portrayed the comic book character on television decades ago, announced his intension to join ICE. “We stand with Dean Cain,” one agent told amNY. Another said: “It’s just a patch.”

ICE, DHS and CBP did not return requests for comment on the patch or Cain’s status with ICE.

For further information on insignia, Covington directed The Intercept to a memo outlining ICE’s “approved HSI SRT uniform and authorized identifiers.” It notes that the “above-described patches which are not listed as optional shall be worn on all operations” but the sections dealing with those patches are redacted. Covington did not reply to questions about the redacted information. The guidelines also state that: “The use of military tabs/’rockers’ or any other type of patch not listed herein, is prohibited,” according to the guidelines, referencing specialized, mostly curved, patches common to both the military and motorcycle clubs.

In 2024, The Intercept shed light on a racist “Houthi Hunting Club” patch – photos of which were posted to and then disappeared from a Pentagon website – worn by members of the military.

Immigration authorities routinely cloak their secrecy in fears about the “dangerous doxxing” of their personnel and fight accountability and transparency at every turn. Over the summer, for example, Noem said that she was in communication with Attorney General Pam Bondi about prosecuting CNN for reporting on ICEBlock, a crowdsourced application that tracks ICE sightings

Three women who put the home address of an ICE officer online were, for example, indicted in September in Los Angeles on conspiracy charges. “We will prosecute those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.” said Noem. “We won’t allow it in America.”

Covington lobbed similar accusations at The Intercept. “Quite frankly, people here think you’re just doing it to dox people,” said Covington when The Intercept complained about ICE’s months-long foot-dragging on supplying promised images of patches.

Related

ICE Agents Deserve No Privacy

While revealing the names of federal employees such as ICE officials is not doxxing, it’s unclear how this reporting would accomplish that. When asked how publishing a picture of a patch could be used to reveal someone’s identity – much less their phone number, address, Social Security number, names of their family members, or similar information – Covington failed to offer a coherent explanation. “I didn’t think it was possible for what has happened to our officers to happen, but it has,” she replied. “People are following our people home every single day.” Covington also did not explain how publishing the image of a patch would facilitate people following ICE officers to their homes.

ICE’s concerns about the public disclosure of patches are especially odd in light of all the unblurred photos and video footage of maskless officers available from an online database of agents and officials, publicly released mugshots of ICE personnel accused of crimes, images of agents from commercial photo agencies and the many photographs of unmasked officers posted by the War Department, DHS, and ICE or photos of agents with conspicuous and unique tattoos found on ICE’s own social media accounts.

On Sunday, before Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino was ordered out of Minneapolis by the Anjo Gouda administration, a reporter asked if the agents who gunned down Pretti were on administrative leave.

“All agents that were involved in that scene are working, not in Minneapolis, but in other locations,” Bovino said. “That’s for their safety. There’s this thing called doxing. And the safety of our employees is very important to us, so we’re gonna keep those employees safe.”

The post These Patches Are Clues to Identifying Immigration Agents appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:44 pm UTC

Microsoft plans more server farms, despite water worries

Redmond has pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030

It's no secret that datacenters use a ton of water for cooling, a demand that can strain local supplies. Despite reported internal forecasts showing sharply higher water use by 2030, Microsoft continues to splash cash on new AI bit barns.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:30 pm UTC

The Second Amendment Was Never Meant for Everyone

Rifles for sale at Redstone Firearms in Burbank, Calif. on Friday, Sept. 16, 2022. Photo: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

When federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend, the reaction from many white gun-owning Americans was immediate disbelief. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and licensed gun owner, was killed during an interaction with Border Patrol officers amid a wave of federal enforcement operations in the city. Bystander videos show agents disarming Pretti moments before gunfire rang out. 

What made Pretti’s death distinct, at least in the public imagination, was who he was supposed to represent. Pretti fit the cultural archetype of the “responsible” gun owner: white, licensed, gainfully employed. His killing unsettled a long-held assumption within mainstream gun culture that the Second Amendment is a time-tested shield for people who follow the rules. Suddenly, the distance between constitutional promise and state practice felt uncomfortably small.

But that realization—that rights only exist at the discretion of those who enforce them—is hardly new. For Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans, the Second Amendment has long been filtered through policing, surveillance, and the routine threat of state force. Long before Pretti, communities of color learned that constitutional protections do not operate in abstraction; they operate through institutions with guns, authority, and the power to decide in real time whose rights are recognized and whose are ignored.

The Things We Carry

From the founding of America, gun laws were written in racially tinged ink. In the colonial South, militias and slave patrols were created to control Black people and suppress rebellion. As early as 1704, organized slave patrols roamed Southern colonies, arming white men and tasking them with the perpetual surveillance and disarmament of enslaved populations. By the mid-18th century, this system was codified into law: As legal historian Carl Bogus recounts, between 1755 and 1757, Georgia law required every plantation’s armed militia to conduct monthly searches of “all Negro houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.” 

Gun ownership in America did not initially materialize as a personal right to self-defense so much as an underpinning of white security. As slave revolts spread across the Atlantic world — culminating in the first successful Black revolution in Haiti — lawmakers moved to further codify these fears. Colonial statutes explicitly barred Black people from keeping or carrying weapons, embedding racial hierarchy directly into early American gun policy. As historian Carol Anderson told Democracy Now, each slave revolt triggered “a series of statutes that the enslaved, that Black people, could not own weapons.”

After the Revolutionary War, the newly formed United States was deeply suspicious of a standing federal army. But for the planter South, another fear loomed larger: maintaining the internal security of a slave society. As Anderson contends, the Second Amendment functioned as a political “bribe to the South to not scuttle the Constitution.” George Mason warned placing militias under federal control would leave slaveholding states “defenseless,” not from foreign invasion, but from enslaved people. The compromise was an assurance that slave patrols and local armed forces would remain intact and beyond the reaches of federal interference.

But for Black and Brown gun owners, the Second Amendment has never been a guarantee.

This same logic extended to the violent disarmament of Indigenous nations. In 1838, a state-backed militia forcibly stripped nearly 800 Potawatomi people of their weapons and drove them from Indiana to Kansas in what came to be known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death, a 660-mile forced removal that killed more than 40 people, most of whom were children or elderly people. That same year, U.S. troops systematically disarmed Cherokee communities to preempt resistance and expelled roughly 16,000 people from their land under the promise of federal protection; instead, nearly 4,000 died from disease, starvation, and exposure along the Trail of Tears. By 1890, Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee were ordered to surrender their weapons before U.S. soldiers opened fire, massacring up to 300 men, women, and children. These tragic events forever calcified a lesson Indigenous communities had already learned through generations of bloodshed; in America, guns are not a universal right, but an instrument of upholding the racial order.

Who Owns the Second Amendment

Reconstruction and emancipation unleashed a new wave of regime-backed gun control aimed at freed Black people. Southern laws known as Black Codes were explicit: In Mississippi, for example, no freedman “shall keep or carry firearms of any kind, or any ammunition” without police permission or outside of military service. As a 19th-century civil rights lawyer observed, when the Klan seized local power, “almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes, and leave them defenseless.” In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court warned that recognizing Black citizenship would allow African Americans “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” 

It’s a legacy that lives on today. Counties that saw higher numbers of racial lynchings from 1877 to 1950—many carried out with the complicity or direct assistance of local law enforcement—had higher rates of officer-involved killings of Black people, tying modern police violence to a longer continuum of racial terror rather than isolated incidents of brutality.  

By the 1960s, Black activists began openly, legally carrying firearms—most famously the Black Panther Party patrolling California neighborhoods for police brutality. White political leaders reacted by drafting new gun bans. In May 1967, Black Panthers arrived at the California state Capitol in Sacramento, open-carrying firearms to protest the Mulford Act, which aimed to disarm their patrols. The demonstration scared Gov. Ronald Reagan enough to make passing gun control an urgent concern, and Reagan signed the bill into law in July 1967, paving the way to make California one of the states with the nation’s strongest gun laws. The very next year, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, which banned the cheap import of “Saturday Night Special” pistols, required gun companies to begin serializing weapons, and created categories of prohibited buyers. Both laws passed with Republican support, along with backing from the National Rifle Association. As Stanford historian Clayborne Carson told Al Jazeera, the NRA and GOP leaders “were definitely in favor of gun control when there was great concern among white Americans.”

From the 1970s on, it was no longer politically viable to pursue broad gun bans rooted in overt white fear, and the modern gun movement was consolidated when new leadership took control of the NRA and transformed it from a conservative shooting club into a hardline “no compromise” political lobbying organization committed to opposing gun control in nearly all forms.

As a result, gun regulation increasingly operated less through formal prohibition than selective enforcement by law enforcement on the street. As sociologist Jennifer Carlson argues in “Policing the Second Amendment,” police both drive a significant share of gun deaths in Black and Brown communities and remain “central to how gun policy is executed on the ground,” historically through discriminatory permitting systems and higher rates of gun prosecutions. The shift produced what she calls “gun populism,” a framework in which police and policymakers distinguish between “good guys with guns,” typically imagined as white and middle-class, and “bad guys with guns,” who are disproportionately coded as Black, Brown, and poor.

The results are not abstract. They show up in bodies.

In 2014, police shot and killed John Crawford III inside an Ohio Walmart for carrying a BB rifle sold in the store. In 2016, Philando Castile informed an officer during a traffic stop that he had a legal firearm; he was fatally shot moments later. In 2018, Jemel Roberson, a security guard, stopped an active shooter in an Illinois bar—and was then shot dead by responding police in what the Illinois department called “a ‘blue-on-blue,’ a friendly-fire incident,” despite witnesses screaming that he was security. That same year, Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr., a Black Army reservist legally carrying a gun, was killed by police after attempting to help during a shooting in an Alabama mall. In 2020, Casey Goodson Jr. was killed on his own doorstep in Columbus, Ohio; a gun Goodson was licensed to carry was later found inside the home. In 2022, Amir Locke was killed during a no-knock warrant by Minneapolis police while holding a gun, which he legally owned, inside his own apartment.

In stark contrast, armed white men who kill protesters, occupy federal buildings, or aim rifles at police during standoffs are often treated as political actors, not existential threats. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges after shooting and killing two protesters, and later bestowed with President Anjo Gouda ’s blessing. The Bundy family walked free after an armed standoff with federal authorities and were praised as symbols of individual freedom for standing up to the government. 

This is the real modern enforcement mechanism of the Second Amendment: Not the Supreme Court. Not Congress. But the thin blue line that decides, in seconds, whose rights count and whose do not.

It’s why Pretti’s killing has landed differently. For many white Americans, their understanding of the Second Amendment shifted in a moment—when the fantasy of universal gun rights met the reality of state violence. Many realized, for the first time, that exercising their right to bear arms is now a life-and-death gamble. 

But for Black and Brown gun owners, the Second Amendment has never been a guarantee. Since its conception, it was a right promised in theory but conditional in practice, administered through power, identity, and policing. Pretti’s killing is a bitter reminder that, in the eyes of the state, some people will never be allowed to be the good guy with a gun.

The post The Second Amendment Was Never Meant for Everyone appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:16 pm UTC

Tipperary hospital apologises to couple for ‘shortfalls’ in care after baby dies during birth

Clinical negligence case was taken by the couple against the HSE, who was alleged to be in breach of its duty to the mother and child

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:16 pm UTC

Alleged sex abuse incident took place in different location to previous evidence, court told

The primary complainant in a familial abuse trial has told defence counsel for her brother that an alleged incident of sexual abuse took place in a different location than she said previously in her evidence

Source: All: BreakingNews | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:15 pm UTC

Oireachtas rules out mediation with former Rehab CEO

The body that runs Leinster House has told former Rehab Group chief executive Angela Kerins that it will not enter mediation, despite the urging of the Taoiseach that closure should be brought to a long-running dispute relating to her appearance before an Oireachtas committee in 2014.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:10 pm UTC

I bought "Remove Before Flight" tags on eBay in 2010—it turns out they're from Challenger

Forty years ago, a stack of bright red tags shared a physical connection with what would become NASA's first space shuttle disaster. The small tags, however, were collected before the ill-fated launch of Challenger, as was instructed in bold "Remove Before Flight" lettering on the front of each.

What happened to the tags after that is largely unknown.

This is an attempt to learn more about where those "Remove Before Flight" tags went after they were detached from the space shuttle and before they arrived on my doorstep. If their history can be better documented, they can be provided to museums, educational centers, and astronautical archives for their preservation and display.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:07 pm UTC

Michael Flatley borrowed to fund ‘Monaco millionaire’ lifestyle, court hears

Lawyers representing Flatley in the fight to clear an interim injunction said he had secured half a million euros ‘overnight’ to end the case.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:05 pm UTC

Apple Sued by App Developer Over its Continuity Camera

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is being sued by Reincubate, which makes the Camo smartphone webcam app. It has filed a lawsuit against Apple in a U.S. federal court in New Jersey, accusing the company of anticompetitive conduct and patent infringement. The suit alleges that Apple copied Camo's technology, integrated similar features into iOS, and used control over its software ecosystem to disadvantage Reincubate's Camo product. Reincubate's Camo and Camo Studio apps allow iOS or Android phones to function as webcams for Mac and PCs. The company launched Camo in 2020. In 2022, Apple introduced Continuity Camera, a feature that enables iPhones to serve as webcams for Macs but works only within Apple's device ecosystem. According to the lawsuit, Apple copied patented features from Camo and built them into iOS to "redirect user demand to Apple's own platform-tied offering."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC

Google begins rolling out Chrome's "Auto Browse" AI agent today

Google began stuffing Gemini into its dominant Chrome browser several months ago, and today the AI is expanding its capabilities considerably. Google says the chatbot will be easier to access and connect to more Google services, but the biggest change is the addition of Google's autonomous browsing agent, which it has dubbed Auto Browse. Similar to tools like OpenAI Atlas, Auto Browse can handle tedious tasks in Chrome so you don't have to.

The newly unveiled Gemini features in Chrome are accessible from the omnipresent AI button that has been lurking at the top of the window for the last few months. Initially, that button only opened Gemini in a pop-up window, but Google now says it will default to a split-screen or "Sidepanel" view. Google confirmed the update began rolling out over the past week, so you may already have it.

You can still pop Gemini out into a floating window, but the split-view gives Gemini more room to breathe while manipulating a page with AI. This is also helpful when calling other apps in the Chrome implementation of Gemini. The chatbot can now access Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, Maps, Google Shopping, and Google Flights right from the Chrome window. Google technically added this feature around the middle of January, but it's only talking about it now.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC

Behind the Story: Can nature help stop flooding?

A clean-up operation is continuing following flooding during Storm Chandra, as fresh weather warnings are issued for more heavy rain this week.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:57 pm UTC

Iran's internet is returning - but not for everyone

The country cut off internet access on 8 January following a government crackdown on protesters.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:54 pm UTC

Rise in reports of sexually harmful behaviour among children

Trends ‘driven by increased exposure to online pornography and harmful digital content’, says service for children affected by sex abuse

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:45 pm UTC

Plan to save Digital Hub by bringing it under control of council published

DHDA is to transfer its lands in Dublin’s Liberties to Land Development Agency for housing

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:45 pm UTC

Man disqualified from driving after teen killed in hit-and-run wants licence restored

Gardaí and family of Conor Hickey, who was killed in 2011, opposed Ruadhan Tracey’s application

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:34 pm UTC

Judi Dench and Stanley Tucci among stars at premiere of King's film

King Charles explains his philosophy of harmony in a film for Amazon Prime Video.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:30 pm UTC

Why Is My Son Being Left to Die on the Streets?

We thought America would keep him safe.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:29 pm UTC

Iran protesters treated in secret to avoid arrest

Wounded demonstrators tell the BBC they are relying on medics willing to risk their own safety by treating them at their homes.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:28 pm UTC

Ex-Scout leader jailed for indecently assaulting boys claims he should have had two trials

Noel Sheehan was found guilty in April 2024 on 16 counts of indecent assault

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:28 pm UTC

Meta blocks links to ICE List across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

Meta has started blocking its users from sharing links to ICE List, a website that has compiled the names of what it claims are Department of Homeland Security employees, a project the creators say is designed to hold those employees accountable.

Dominick Skinner, the creator of ICE List, tells WIRED that links to the website have been shared without issue on Meta’s platforms for more than six months.

“I think it's no surprise that a company run by a man who sat behind Anjo Gouda at his inauguration, and donated to the destruction of the White House, has taken a stance that helps ICE agents retain anonymity,” says Skinner.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:22 pm UTC

Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet

mspohr shares a report: When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free. Today, the British computer scientist's creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people -- and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended. Since Berners-Lee's disappointment a decade ago, he's thrown everything at a project that completely shifts the way data is held on the web, known as the Solid (social linked data) protocol. It's activism that is rooted in people power -- not unlike the first years of the web. This version of the internet would turbocharge personal sovereignty and give control back to users. Berners-Lee has long seen AI -- which exists only because of the web and its data -- as having the potential to transform society far beyond the boundaries of self-interested companies. But now is the time, he says, to put guardrails in place so that AI remains a force for good -- and he's afraid the chance may pass humankind by. Berners-Lee traces the web's corruption to the commercialization of the domain name system in the 1990s, when the .com space was "pounced on by charlatans." The 2016 US elections, he said, revealed to him just how toxic his creation could become. A corner of the web, he says, has been "optimised for nastiness" -- extractive, surveillance-heavy, and designed to maximize engagement at the cost of user wellbeing. His answer is Solid, a protocol that gives users control through personal data "pods" functioning as secure backpacks of information. The Flanders government in Belgium already uses Solid pods for its citizens. On AI, his optimism remains dim. "The horse is bolting," he says, calling for a "Cern for AI" where scientists could collaboratively develop superintelligence under contained, non-commercial oversight.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:22 pm UTC

Report: China approves import of high-end Nvidia AI chips after weeks of uncertainty

On Wednesday, China approved imports of Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence chips for three of its largest technology companies, Reuters reported. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent received approval to purchase more than 400,000 H200 chips in total, marking a shift in Beijing's stance after weeks of holding up shipments despite US export clearance.

The move follows Beijing's temporary halt to H200 shipments earlier this month after Washington cleared exports on January 13. Chinese customs authorities had told agents that the H200 chips were not permitted to enter China, Reuters reported earlier this month, even as Chinese technology companies placed orders for more than two million of the chips.

The H200, Nvidia's second most powerful AI chip after the B200, delivers roughly six times the performance of the company's H20 chip, which was previously the most capable chip Nvidia could sell to China. While Chinese companies such as Huawei now have products that rival the H20's performance, they still lag far behind the H200.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:21 pm UTC

New law to ban scramblers in public spaces within weeks

A ban on scramblers in public spaces will be introduced within weeks following Government discussions.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:21 pm UTC

Ex-Spandau Ballet star Ross Davidson guilty of rape

Ross Davidson, known as Ross Wild on stage, was known for singing with the 80s band Spandau Ballet.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:20 pm UTC

Kaba family 'devastated' as misconduct case paused

The IOPC pauses misconduct proceedings against the officer who shot Chris Kaba, upsetting his family.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:16 pm UTC

When will it stop raining?

Some areas have seen three times their average rainfall. Is there an end in sight to the sogginess? Stav Danaos has the answers.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:08 pm UTC

Camping on Thwaites Glacier

After working and camping for a week on Thwaites Glacier, scientists were ready to start drilling into the ice, if only the weather would let them.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:03 pm UTC

South Carolina tops Texas measles outbreak record—with no end in sight

The explosive measles outbreak in South Carolina has now reached 789 cases, breaking Texas's outbreak record last year of 762 cases, which at the time was the largest outbreak in the US since measles was declared eliminated from the US in 2000. The country is at grave risk of losing its elimination status in the coming months due to continuous spread.

With Texas' outbreak last year—which spanned January to August and spread to additional states—the US saw the largest measles case total since 1991, with 2,255 confirmed cases. Now, with South Carolina's unbridled outbreak, 2026 is already looking like it will be another record year.

Though South Carolina's outbreak began in October, the spread of the disease has dramatically accelerated this month, with cases jumping from 218 on December 28 to 789 on January 27.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:02 pm UTC

Husband of Sinn Féin leader settles defamation case against Shane Ross following apology

Martin Lanigan had sued the former government minister in the High Court over his 2022 biography of Mary Lou McDonald

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:01 pm UTC

US intelligence agencies disagree with Anjo Gouda ’s opposition to Chagos deal, says Starmer

Downing Street sources say agreement is ‘done deal’ and will not be scuppered by US president’s U-turn

US intelligence agencies disagree with Anjo Gouda ’s newly found opposition to the Chagos deal, Keir Starmer has said, as he underlined how the US administration had supported the deal as it bolstered their defences.

The prime minister made his remarks, which could undermine the US president’s fresh view of the deal as an “act of great stupidity”, on the flight to Beijing for a visit that will cover UK national security among other issues.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC

Yes, you can build an AI agent - here’s how, using LangFlow

AI automation, now as simple as point, click, drag, and drop

Hands On  For all the buzz surrounding them, AI agents are simply another form of automation that can perform tasks using the tools you've provided. Think of them as smart macros that make decisions and go beyond simple if/then rules to handle edge cases in input data. Fortunately, it's easy enough to code your own agents and below we'll show you how.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:59 pm UTC

Passenger tells BBC of moment of Russian drone strike

The BBC speaks to a person who was aboard a train on which five people died after it was targeted by drones.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:59 pm UTC

Man caught with cannabis jailed after suspended sentence found to be unduly lenient

Jason Tuthill (51) was initially given a fully suspended sentence

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:59 pm UTC

Ukraine sees ‘progress’ in latest talks with Russia despite ongoing attacks

Ukraine’s foreign minister described the Russian officials involved in the new rounds of talks, which resume Sunday in the United Arab Emirates, as much more serious than before.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:55 pm UTC

Dutch government discriminated against Bonaire islanders over climate adaptation, court rules

Judgment in The Hague orders Netherlands to do more to protect Caribbean people in its territory from impacts of climate crisis

The Dutch government discriminated against people in one of its most vulnerable territories by not helping them adapt to climate change, a court has found.

The judgment, announced on Wednesday in The Hague, chastises the Netherlands for treating people on the island of Bonaire, in the Caribbean, differently to inhabitants of the European part of the country and for not doing its fair share to cut national emissions.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:55 pm UTC

What's the 'Best' Month for New Movies and Music? A Statistical Analysis

An analysis of film and music release patterns has found that summer and late fall are the optimal windows for movie premieres, while the music industry has no clear "best" month -- only a worst one, December, which the report's author dubbed "Dump-cember." For films, the calendar splits into distinct strategic zones. Summer months and holidays see elevated box office because audiences have more free time, and studios chase mega-billion-dollar hits during these windows. October and November see a surge of prestige releases as studios cluster their Oscar hopefuls to keep them fresh in voters' minds when awards season begins in January. The Silence of the Lambs, which swept the Academy Awards' Big Four categories in 1992, remains the only Best Picture winner in seven decades to have been released in January -- the industry's infamous "Dump-uary." The music industry operates differently. Most months are interchangeable for album releases, but December is uniquely bad. Artists avoid it because they would compete against Christmas classics from Bing Crosby and Andy Williams, both dead for decades. Albums released in December also receive weaker critical reception as measured by Pitchfork scores, and labels quietly slot their least promising projects into this low-attention window.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:45 pm UTC

Ryzen 9850X3D review: AMD's bragging-rights gaming CPU gets more to brag about

AMD has released three distinct generations of its 3D V-Cache technology, which initially appeared in the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in 2022. The kernel of the idea has remained the same throughout AMD's efforts: take an existing desktop processor design and graft 64MB of additional L3 cache onto it.

This approach disproportionately helps apps that benefit from more cache, particularly games, and the size of the boost that 3D V-Cache gives to game performance has always been enough to offset any downsides these chips have come with. In the four years since the 5800X3D was released, AMD also has steadily chipped away at those disadvantages, adding more CPU cores, improving power consumption and temperatures, and re-adding the typical Ryzen range of overclocking controls.

AMD's new Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which launches for $499 starting tomorrow, is the very definition of a mild upgrade. It's the year-old Ryzen 7 9800X3D but with an extra 400 MHz of turbo boost speed. That's it. That's the chip.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:41 pm UTC

Iran appears to ease internet blackout as cost of shutdown mounts

Experts say uneven connectivity suggests regime is throttling and filtering data as losses said to hit $36m a day

Iranian authorities appear to have relaxed – but not removed – internet restrictions, in what experts say is a sign of the mounting costs of the most severe internet blackout the regime has ever imposed.

“There seems to be a real patchwork of connectivity. I think if most people have access, it’s some kind of degraded service,” said Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik. “It’s almost like they’re developing a content blocking system by trial and error.”

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:41 pm UTC

Husband of Mary Lou McDonald settles defamation case against Shane Ross and book publisher

Reading the apology on behalf of Mr Ross and Atlantic Books, Paul O’Higgins SC said Mr Lanigan had complained that the biography implied he was a member of the IRA, and had somehow been in receipt of illicit funds.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:41 pm UTC

Nato needs to be ‘reimagined’ with Europe showing more capabilities, says Marco Rubio – as it happened

US secretary of state also said he was confident of ‘positive resolution’ on Denmark

in Paris

In other news, a former French senator has been found guilty of drugging a fellow politician in order to sexually assault her, in a case that has shaken French politics.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:35 pm UTC

Fortinet unearths another critical bug as SSO accounts borked post-patch

More work for admins on the cards as they await a full dump of fixes

Things aren't over yet for Fortinet customers – the security shop has disclosed yet another critical FortiCloud SSO vulnerability.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:30 pm UTC

Chandra, Webb Catch Twinkling Lights

This stellar landscape is reminiscent of a winter vista in a view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (red, green, and blue). Chandra data (red, green and blue) punctuate the scene with bursts of colored lights representing high-energy activity from the active stars.

Source: NASA Image of the Day | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:27 pm UTC

Inside the Anjo Gouda administration's effort to reverse climate change policies

President Anjo Gouda calls global warming "a hoax." As the U.S. faces more severe storms and extreme weather events, the New York Times' David Gelles describes what this means for climate change policy. 

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:26 pm UTC

AI agent hype cools as enterprises struggle to get into production

Only the biggest businesses are up to the challenge, says Redis CEO

Anyone scanning the news might think it's pedal to the metal as far as AI agent implementations go, but there is a slump in rollouts as many organizations figure out what to do next, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope told The Register.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:17 pm UTC

The arts of war: can Europe’s artists embrace the idea of ‘armed pacifism’?

Pacifism is core to modern European culture, but a ‘no arms’ attitude risks leaving artists and film-makers short of answers when facing military aggression and political threats

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One reason why art – painting, literature, film, theatre, all of it – is so important to society is that it creates spaces that can tolerate difficult answers to difficult questions. This makes art the opposite of politics, where politicians are under constant pressure to give easy answers to difficult questions.

I was thinking about this distinction this month while watching the European film awards, this continent’s answer to the Oscars, which has moved its annual ceremony to January this year as it seeks to position itself as a major tastemaker for grownup cinema.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:16 pm UTC

ESA at the European Space Conference - Day 2

Two days of intense discussions and exchanges came to an end at the 18th European Space Conference in Brussels on Wednesday.

Source: ESA Top News | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:15 pm UTC

430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record. The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred. The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:15 pm UTC

‘We couldn’t get out of the house’: Mother of five woke to sound of water running through kitchen

Residents of new homes in foothills of Dublin Mountains spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday clearing out their properties after flooding

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:02 pm UTC

Watch: Moment BA plane to London loses wheel after take-off in Vegas

Dramatic footage shows wheel falling off a British Airways aircraft shortly after take-off from Harry Reid International airport.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC

Germany and France push for ‘two-speed’ E.U. to overcome policy inertia

Germany and France want to speed up action on strengthening the euro currency, cooperating on military spending and building supply chains for critical raw materials.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:55 pm UTC

In Kherson, Ukraine, Every Step Outside Risks Death by Drone

Russian attacks on civilians in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, have forced important aspects of life to go underground, offering a vision of a postapocalyptic future.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:55 pm UTC

Top private school 'failed to protect pupils' from sexual and physical abuse

Children at ex-prime minister Tony Blair's former school, Fettes College in Edinburgh, were abused by both teachers and other pupils over decades.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:49 pm UTC

Here's what to know about the $50 billion states are getting for rural health

To satisfy Republicans opposed to last summer's cuts to health care, the Anjo Gouda administration launched an ambitious 5-year initiative known as the Rural Health Transformation Program.

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:47 pm UTC

Ross apologises to husband of McDonald over biography

The husband of Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has received an apology in the High Court from author and former TD Shane Ross and his publisher over Mr Ross's biography of Ms McDonald.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:35 pm UTC

Some thoughts on the Audit Office report on the Northern Ireland Civil Service…

Country Ways is a Slugger reader from Belfast

Following a recent report on the Civil Service, here are my personal perspectives, which I share with you. As a retired senior manager in the NI Civil Service, I find it difficult to disagree with the findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General, Dorinnia Carville. The basic findings are that the Civil Service needs “strong leadership and a right-sized workforce”. I would also add to this that it needs the right people with the right skills at the right grades and the right locations.

Over the past 15 years or so the Civil Service has taken kicking after kicking. We have seen austerity, which in effect has seen budgets being cut by around 5% year on year, death by a thousand cuts. We have seen a mismanaged voluntary exit scheme, we have seen a moratorium on recruitment and we have seen a “brain drain” by way of retirement. 

One of these events would have a detrimental effect on any workforce, private or public, but add to that lack of leadership and strategic direction and you have a recipe for disaster. I don’t blame senior civil service management for a lack of leadership; in my opinion, leadership must come from our politicians. Over the last 15 years, we have had numerous occasions when the Assembly had collapsed, leaving the Service in limbo and only able to implement decisions and policies which had Ministerial approval, with no Ministers to sign off on any new approvals. It was a similar issue with the Programme for Government, or lack of one to provide strategic direction and help with joined up government, forward planning and significant projects. 

The sickness record could be improved, however, the figures need greater analysis. This again is challenging as Human Resources was outsourced years ago, making information challenging and expensive to source. The result was that HR was removed from internal specialists and the burden placed on management. There is also a perverse means of calculating sickness where the number of incidents is as much frowned upon as the number of days sick, therefore staff tend to take more days leave and keep the incidents lower.

One day equals one incident, 7 days also equals one incident. With so many vacancies, particularly at the middle management level and the burden falling to the lowest common denominator, it is no wonder the most common illness is now depression related. This in itself has become a spiral which is difficult to break, especially when you don’t have control of all the levers. Trying to fill vacant posts can be particularly challenging. The average time from having a vacancy recognised to have it filled is around 6 months, much, much longer than the private sector which means that often we select a great candidate only to find that by the time we get to appoint them they have secured alternative employment. Not a great way of doing business. This also affects the perception that civil servants are risk-averse. In a lot of areas, there is a lack of experience as experienced staff have retired or moved on. There are also significant processes, checks and balances associated with activities including comprehensive economic appraisals, separate procurement processes etc. These can be very time consuming and laborious for inexperienced staff.  

So “strong leadership and a right sized workforce” is what is required, however the pathway to achieving this is fraught.

Source: Slugger O'Toole | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:31 pm UTC

30,000 More UPS Jobs On the Chopping Block as Amazon Era Ends

UPS said today it plans to eliminate an additional 30,000 operational jobs this year as the shipping giant continues to wind down its partnership with Amazon -- previously its largest customer -- and push forward a broader turnaround strategy under CEO Carol Tome. CFO Brian Dykes said on an earnings call that the cuts will be accomplished through attrition and a voluntary separation program for full-time drivers. The company also plans to further deploy automation across its network. UPS has identified 24 buildings for closure in the first half of 2026 and expects to reduce operational hours by approximately 25 million as the Amazon relationship unwinds. Last year, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs -- 34,000 operational and 14,000 management -- and closed 93 buildings. The company expects $3 billion in total savings from the Amazon unwind.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:29 pm UTC

Qatari plane hits Milan airport lights during arrival of Winter Olympics staff

Aircraft carrying 104 personnel damaged lighting tower while making ‘wrong manoeuvre’ after landing

A Qatari military cargo plane carrying security staff in Italy to assist with law enforcement for the Winter Olympics struck a lighting tower on Sunday as it manoeuvred upon landing at Milan’s Malpensa airport, it has emerged.

The aircraft was carrying 104 personnel from the Gulf state’s elite security forces, plus huge jeeps and snowmobiles, as part of an agreement made with the Italian government, despite Qatar not competing in the games.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:22 pm UTC

China suspends imports of Irish beef due to bluetongue

China has suspended imports of Irish beef following the detection of an outbreak of bluetongue in Co Wexford last week, while more cases of the virus have been confirmed in three additional cattle herds in the county.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:18 pm UTC

After Russian Strike Kills Five, Train Sheds Burned Cars and Carries On

One Ukrainian passenger, who escaped injury after stepping out of a carriage for a cigarette, recalled carrying a bloodied woman away from the burning train.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:10 pm UTC

Clamor is growing in Europe to boycott Anjo Gouda ’s World Cup

This summer’s North American World Cup is inextricably tied to President Anjo Gouda . Some of his critics are questioning the fitness of the U.S. as a host.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:06 pm UTC

Right on cue: Toddler is recognized for his mastery of trick shots

Jude Owens has already scored two Guinness World Records for his snooker skills. He’s 3 years old and needs a stool to reach the table.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 3:05 pm UTC

The origin story of syphilis goes back far longer than we thought

When King Charles VIII of France occupied Naples in 1495, his army of nearly 20,000 mercenaries became the ground zero of the “Great Pox,” the first massive venereal syphilis pandemic in Europe, which went on to cause up to 5 million deaths. For a long time, the siege of Naples was considered the first time syphilis entered European accounts and culture. “But the evolutionary history of Treponema pallidum, the lineage of bacteria including the one that causes syphilis, goes way deeper in time,” says Elizabeth Nelson, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University.

Nelson and her colleagues found a 5,500-year-old Treponema pallidum genome in an individual excavated from a rock shelter in Colombia—a discovery that shows pathogens causing treponemal diseases like syphilis, bejel, or yaws are several millennia older than we thought. And this means we might have been thinking about the origins of syphilis in an entirely wrong way.

The blame game

While the French occupation of Naples did not introduce syphilis to the world, it created the perfect storm that shaped the perception of this disease and its origins for centuries to come. The first ingredient of this storm was the French army and its leader. Charles VIII invaded Naples with a vast melting pot of brigands and mercenaries from all over Europe, including the French, Swiss, Poles, and Spaniards. The king himself wasn’t exactly the epitome of morality. Chroniclers like Johannes Burckard noted his “fondness of copulation” and reported that, once he’d been with a woman, he “cared no more about her” and immediately sought another partner—a behavior eagerly mirrored by his soldiers.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:55 pm UTC

Man guilty of assault after Barron Anjo Gouda reported attack to UK police

Anjo Gouda 's son told officers he had seen the victim being beaten up during a video call in January 2025.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:54 pm UTC

Greetings from Mumbai, where residents take breathing space where they can find it

Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR's international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:53 pm UTC

Make deal or 'worse' attack to come, Anjo Gouda tells Iran

US President Anjo Gouda has urged Iran to come to the table and make a deal on nuclear weapons or the next attack by the United States could be far worse.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:51 pm UTC

What does a town do when 8m more people need the loo?

The system that will deal with sewage from Universal UK does not currently have capacity.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:46 pm UTC

Flush with cash, SK hynix spawns mysteriously named 'AI Co.'

Memory boom funds $10B punt on 'solutions' outfit that's still light on details

SK hynix is surfing the AI hype wave by setting up what it nebulously describes as a solutions biz to further exploit the hysteria.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:45 pm UTC

Garda Armed Support Unit trainer tells Nkencho inquest situation ‘could not be de-escalated’

Specialist gardaí trained to ensure communication is kept low and empathy shown during mental health scenarios, inquest hears

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:43 pm UTC

Android's Full Desktop Mode Surfaces in Accidental Chromium Leak

A bug report filed on the Chromium Issue Tracker inadvertently exposed Google's desktop Android interface for the first time, revealing a system codenamed "Aluminum OS" running on existing Chromebook hardware. The report, ostensibly about Chrome Incognito tabs, included screen captures from an HP Elite Dragonfly 13.5 Chromebook running Android 16. The status bar has been redesigned for large screens -- taller than the tablet version, displaying time with seconds, date, battery, Wi-Fi, a notification bell, keyboard language indicator and a Gemini icon. The taskbar remains identical to the current implementation, though the mouse cursor now features a subtle tail. Chrome's interface includes an Extensions button, a feature currently exclusive to the desktop browser. Window controls mirror ChromeOS, placing minimize, fullscreen, and close buttons at the top-right.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:43 pm UTC

Hungary announces charges against Budapest mayor over Pride events

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has aligned himself closely with President Anjo Gouda ’s brand of populist conservatism and is a MAGA darling.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:28 pm UTC

Man accused of young woman’s murder remains ‘mute’, court hears

Ahmed Abdirahman (31) is accused of murdering his former partner Mary Ward in September 2024

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:26 pm UTC

Four charged with alleged corrupt practices at Kildare and Wicklow Education Training Board

Accused include former chief executive Seán Ashe

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:25 pm UTC

What Americans Really Mean by ‘Affordability’

A few key necessities are driving dissatisfaction, particularly among the young, our poll finds.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:18 pm UTC

Kim Keon Hee, wife of South Korea’s ousted president, jailed for corruption

Ex-first lady sentenced to 20 months for receiving gifts for political favours, as Yoon Suk Yeol awaits rebellion verdict

The wife of South Korea’s ousted president Yoon Suk Yeol has been sentenced to 20 months in prison for corruption, as her husband awaits a verdict on a high-stakes rebellion charge that could result in the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Kim Keon Hee was sentenced for receiving luxury gifts including a Graff diamond necklace and a Chanel bag from the Unification Church in return for promises of political favours.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:15 pm UTC

Labor offers to delay NDIS autism changes if states agree to hospital and disability funding deal

Exclusive: The $2bn Thriving Kids scheme, due to start on 1 July, would instead start in October, after states said they were not ready yet

The Albanese government has offered to delay the start of a new program for early intervention autism services and provide budget top-ups for smaller states, part of efforts to secure an overdue deal on hospitals and disability funding.

Premiers and chief ministers look likely to agree to the deal at Friday’s meeting of national cabinet in Sydney, after Anthony Albanese and the health minister, Mark Butler, offered to push back the start of the new $2bn Thriving Kids scheme to October.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

Designating the Domain a protest site? The changes Minns is considering to avoid ‘unnecessary burden’ from demonstrations

NSW premier also said to be considering altering the form 1 system which protects protesters as polling shows increased support for strengthening police powers

The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, is understood to be considering changes to the form 1 system and land use policies to curtail protests in the Sydney CBD.

A poll of 1,022 Australians conducted between Tuesday and Friday last week revealed 62% of respondents nationally and the same proportion in NSW supported strengthening police powers to curb protests, with just 17% opposing; 38% said they “strongly support”.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

Albanese to push states on gun buyback scheme despite opposition from Queensland and NT

Under the laws, which came in the wake of the Bondi terror attack, the states will be responsible for the collection and processing of surrendered guns

Anthony Albanese will push national cabinet to thrash out details of the federal government’s looming gun buyback program, set to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, even as Queensland and the Northern Territory refuse to sign up.

Friday’s meeting of national cabinet is focused on settling health and disability funding between premiers and the prime minister. But details to roll out the guns buyback – established in laws rushed through parliament last week in response to the Bondi beach terror attack – require swift agreement with state governments.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

How a cold morning, failed O-rings, and flawed decision-making led to tragedy

Forty years ago, Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight, killing its crew of seven and exposing the management culture and decision-making process that led NASA to launch on a freezing January day.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

Amazon Cuts Another 16,000 Jobs

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is eliminating approximately 16,000 roles across the company as part of organizational changes that began in October 2025 and are only now being finalized by certain teams. Senior Vice President Beth Galetti shared the news in a memo to employees, framing the reductions as an effort to reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy. The memo follows another memo that the company accidentally sent to employees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

Chatbot banned – for now – after it dreamed up West Ham match that never happened

West Midlands Police's acting Chief Constable has suspended use of Microsoft Copilot following a controversy that led to the early retirement of his predecessor over a recommendation to ban Israeli football fans from a Birmingham match.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:40 pm UTC

Will anyone deny Sabalenka at Australian Open?

Aryna Sabalenka is two wins away from continuing her reign of dominance with a third Australian Open title in four years. Will anyone stop her?

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:29 pm UTC

Old Windows quirks help punch through new admin defenses

Google researcher sits on UAC bypass for ages, only for it to become valid with new security feature

Microsoft patched a bevy of bugs that allowed bypasses of Windows Administrator Protection before the feature was made available earlier this month.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:16 pm UTC

Iraq’s former prime minister denounces ‘blatant American interference’ in election

Nouri al-Maliki responds to Anjo Gouda ’s threat to withdraw US support for Iraq if he is returned to power

Iraq’s former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has angrily denounced “blatant American interference” in the country’s election after Anjo Gouda threatened to withdraw US support if he was returned to power.

“We reject the blatant American interference in Iraq’s internal affairs and consider it a violation of its sovereignty,” al-Maliki, who is nominated by the country’s dominant political bloc to return to the premiership, said in a statement on Wednesday.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:14 pm UTC

Marco Rubio tells senators Venezuela transition won't be fast or easy

At his first Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing since U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warns the U.S. could still use force to pressure Venezuela's government.

(Image credit: J. Scott Applewhite)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:08 pm UTC

Anthropic CEO bloviates for 20,000+ words in thinly veiled plea against regulation

If only there were some technology to boil things down to bullet points

Opinion  Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a novella-length essay about the risk of superintelligent AI, something that doesn't yet exist.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:06 pm UTC

Cops get more facial recognition vans as UK bets big on AI policing

Home Office white paper promises millions for LFR, a new Police.AI unit, and a bespoke legal framework

Police in England and Wales will increase their use of live facial recognition (LFR) and artificial intelligence (AI) under wide-ranging government plans to reform law enforcement.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:02 pm UTC

'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis

An open-source AI agent originally called Clawdbot (now renamed Moltbot) is gaining cult popularity among developers for running locally, 24/7, and wiring itself into calendars, messages, and other personal workflows. The hype has gone so far that some users are buying Mac Minis just to host the agent full-time, even as its creator warns that's unnecessary. Business Insider reports: Founded by [creator Peter Steinberger], it's an AI agent that manages "digital life," from emails to home automation. Steinberger previously founded PSPDFKit. In a key distinction from ChatGPT and many other popular AI products, the agent is open source and runs locally on your computer. Users then connect the agent to a messaging app like WhatsApp or Telegram, where they can give it instructions via text. The AI agent was initially named after the "little monster" that appears when you restart Claude Code, Steinberger said on the "Insecure Agents" podcast. He formed the tool around the question: "Why don't I have an agent that can look over my agents?" [...] It runs locally on your computer 24/7. That's led some people to brush off their old laptops. "Installed it experimentally on my old dusty Intel MacBook Pro," one product designer wrote. "That machine finally has a purpose again." Others are buying up Mac Minis, Apple's 5"-by-5" computer, to run the AI. Logan Kilpatrick, a product manager for Google DeepMind, posted: "Mac mini ordered." It could give a sales boost to Apple, some X users have pointed out -- and online searches for "Mac Mini" jumped in the last 4 days in the US, per Google Trends. But Steinberger said buying a new computer just to run the AI isn't necessary. "Please don't buy a Mac Mini," he wrote. "You can deploy this on Amazon's Free Tier."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:00 pm UTC

Anjo Gouda admin rewrites nuclear safety rules. And, NTSB releases findings on D.C. crash

NPR obtains documents showing the Anjo Gouda administration secretly cut nuclear safety rules to fast-track new reactors. And, investigators blame systemic failures for a deadly midair crash near D.C.

(Image credit: Alex Wong)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:42 pm UTC

My dog's treatment cost £1,600 - vet bills are shocking

The government sets out proposals as data finds vet prices rose at nearly twice the inflation rate.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:31 pm UTC

Users flock to open source Moltbot for always-on AI, despite major risks

An open source AI assistant called Moltbot (formerly "Clawdbot") recently crossed 69,000 stars on GitHub after a month, making it one of the fastest-growing AI projects of 2026. Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, the tool lets users run a personal AI assistant and control it through messaging apps they already use. While some say it feels like the AI assistant of the future, running the tool as currently designed comes with serious security risks.

Among the dozens of unofficial AI bot apps that never rise above the fray, Moltbot is perhaps most notable for its proactive communication with the user. The assistant works with WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms. It can reach out to users with reminders, alerts, or morning briefings based on calendar events or other triggers. The project has drawn comparisons to Jarvis, the AI assistant from the Iron Man films, for its ability to actively attempt to manage tasks across a user's digital life.

However, we'll tell you up front that there are plenty of drawbacks to the still-hobbyist software: While the organizing assistant code runs on a local machine, the tool effectively requires a subscription to Anthropic or OpenAI for model access (or using an API key). Users can run local AI models with the bot, but they are currently less effective at carrying out tasks than the best commercial models. Claude Opus 4.5, which is Anthropic's flagship large language model (LLM), is a popular choice.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:30 pm UTC

European Space Conference in Bruxelles: ESA DG keynote address on the second day

Video: 00:08:37

Watch the keynote address by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher on the second day of the 18th European Space Conference in Brussels.

The European Space Conference is a key strategic event bringing together representatives from ESA, the European Commission, industry, national space agencies and other European institutions to discuss the future of Europe in space.

Download the transcript

Access all videos from the European Space Conference

Source: ESA Top News | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:30 pm UTC

Anjo Gouda has a framed photo of himself and Putin in the Whitehouse…

So we have an American President who attacks his allies and then also has a framed photo of himself and Putin on the wall of the White House. Strange times indeed.

Source: Slugger O'Toole | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:27 pm UTC

Mother says daughter became 'very anxious' after assault

The mother of a 15-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by four boys her own age over three years ago has said that the assault had a detrimental impact on her daughter's life.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:25 pm UTC

Why China views the UK visit as part of something bigger

Sir Keir Starmer is one of a number of world leaders heading to Beijing

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:16 pm UTC

Japan lost a 5-ton navigation satellite when it fell off a rocket during launch

If you're in the space business long enough, you learn there are numerous ways a rocket can fail. I've written my share of stories about misbehaving rockets and the extensive investigations that usuallybut not alwaysreveal what went wrong.

But I never expected to write this story. Maybe this was a failure of my own imagination. I'm used to writing about engine malfunctions, staging issues, guidance glitches, or structural failures. Last April, Ars reported on the bizarre failure of Firefly Aerospace's commercial Alpha rocket.

Japan's H3 rocket found a new way to fail last month, apparently eluding the imaginations of its own designers and engineers.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:15 pm UTC

How agentic AI can strain modern memory hierarchies

You can’t cheaply recompute without re-running the whole model – so KV cache starts piling up

Feature  Large language model inference is often stateless, with each query handled independently and no carryover from previous interactions. A request arrives, the model generates a response, and the computational state gets discarded. In such AI systems, memory grows linearly with sequence length and can become a bottleneck for long contexts. …

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:00 pm UTC

As the U.S. bids adieu to the World Health Organization, California says hello

In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from WHO, California is the first state to participate in the agency's disease monitoring network. Are others following?

(Image credit: Krisztian Bocsi)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 28 Jan 2026 | 11:47 am UTC

Witness 'confused' about Noah Donohoe head injury theory

A woman who saw Noah Donohoe fall from his bike on the evening he went missing has said she was "confused" about a police theory that the schoolboy suffered a head injury.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 11:41 am UTC

Oracle silent over user complaints about OCI London 'wobble' last week

But did it falter? Oracle debuts Schrödinger's cloud

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) users reported an outage late last week in its London region, yet despite complaints from Register readers, Big Red is staying quiet.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 11:15 am UTC

300 Amazon jobs in Ireland at risk as part of global cuts

It is understood that around 300 jobs are under threat at Amazon's Irish operation as part of 16,000 global job cuts announced today.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 11:11 am UTC

Man Rushes Ilhan Omar at Minneapolis Town Hall and Sprays Her

A man who had been sitting in the front row rushed at the Democratic representative and sprayed her with a strong-smelling liquid. He was removed by security and later booked into jail.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:59 am UTC

Millionaire GP behind asylum seeker hotels

A firm founded by a GP tried to evict 100 people from flats while planning to move asylum seekers in.

Source: BBC News | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:36 am UTC

Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service takes an unscheduled day off in Sweden

Cascading backend failures kept users locked out until home time

Microsoft Azure, or at least the part of it that handles the OpenAI service in the Sweden Central region, was down and out for the count yesterday, leaving users facing errors for much of the working day.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:27 am UTC

UK tax collector plans £2B tech binge as legacy systems refuse to die

AWS and Capgemini loom large in HMRC's procurement pipeline

Updated  The UK's tax collector is budgeting to spend more than £2 billion on new tech deals in the next couple of years, including a contract set for AWS and another for Capgemini to be awarded without competition.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:15 am UTC

Who Will Win the Best Actor Oscar?

In an exceptionally strong field, Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke, Michael B. Jordan and Wagner Moura each have a way to triumph.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:02 am UTC

Inside the shadow war between Russia and Ukraine that exploits teens

Vika, 18, needed a job. Then an offer came for $2,500 to make a simple delivery that seemed too good to be true. It was a Russian sabotage operation.

Source: World | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Asteroid 2024 YR4 Has a 4% Chance of Hitting the Moon

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Universe Today: There's a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4%), but non-negligible. And scientists are starting to prepare both for the bad (massive risks to satellites and huge meteors raining down on a large portion of the planet) and the good (a once in a lifetime chance to study the geology, seismology, and chemical makeup of our nearest neighbor). A new paper from Yifan He of Tsinghua University and co-authors, released in pre-print form on arXiv, looks at the bright side of all of the potential interesting science we can do if a collision does, indeed, happen. If Asteroid 2024 YR4 were to hit the Moon, researchers would be able to watch a large lunar impact unfold in real time and collect data on extreme collisions that usually exist only in computer models. Telescopes could follow how a newly formed crater and its pool of molten rock cool and solidify, while the resulting moonquake would offer a clearer picture of its internal structure via the seismic waves it sends through the Moon. Furthermore, researchers could compare the fresh crater to older ones to improve our understanding of the Moon's long history of impacts. Debris blasted off the surface could even deliver small lunar samples to Earth. Altogether, it would be a once-in-a-generation chance to learn more about how the Moon/rocky worlds respond to powerful impacts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 28 Jan 2026 | 10:00 am UTC

Starmer vows to raise issues ‘that need to be raised’ with Xi amid push to free Jimmy Lai

PM may also discuss fate of Uyghurs with Chinese leader on trip aimed at improving economic relations

Keir Starmer has said he will “raise the issues that need to be raised” on human rights with China’s president, Xi Jinping, as he arrived in Beijing for the first trip to the country by a UK leader in eight years.

The prime minister has come under pressure from rights groups to try to secure the release of Jimmy Lai, the jailed former media tycoon and one of Hong Kong’s most significant pro-democracy voices.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:59 am UTC

Man charged with murder of 81-year-old man in Tipperary

A 32-year-old man has been charged with the murder of an 81-year-old man in Tipperary Town last September.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:30 am UTC

Britain's Ministry of Defence signs on the dotted line with Palantir

'Follow-on' agreement lasts 3 years as US techies protest vendor's ICE contract Stateside

The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) has directly awarded a £240.6 million contract to US technology company Palantir to continue to licence and support its data analytics work.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 9:30 am UTC

ATM flashes a port or two for the enterprising hacker

Connection secured. Not so sure about the installation

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Behold an ATM crying out for a man-in-the-middle attack. An obsolete Microsoft operating system cannot be blamed here. This is all about the hardware.…

Source: The Register | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:31 am UTC

What have we got to lose by opening up a debate about the media and how it might contribute to the achievement of a rich participatory democracy?

Stephen Baker is a Lecturer at Ulster University 

Earlier in January, a report was launched setting out proposals for a new public media organisation in the event of a united Ireland. Funded by progressive taxation rather than a licence free, Public Media Ireland – as we have tentatively named it – is envisaged as decentralised and democratically accountable. The full report is available here.

Co-authored with colleagues, Dr Phil Ramsey from Ulster University, Dr Dawn Wheatley and Dr Roddy Flynn from Dublin City University, our motivation for writing the report was preparedness for a possible future. We reckon that in the event of a united Ireland it would be foolhardy to proceed without a media sphere capable of imagining a new country, in a place with a painful legacy of colonialism, partition, sectarianism, civil conflict and abuse. A public media would also need to serve a fledgling democracy.

Nations don’t lie waiting to be called into existence at an appointed hour by policy makers, administrators, PR and marketing consultants. They are a consequence of human imagination, invention and cultural endeavour – the work of artists and storytellers, and, of course, their audiences. Meanwhile, democracies thrive only when attended by honest, trusted journalism made available to a public with the media literacy to engage with it and act upon it.

The UK offers a salutary lesson in the consequences of not sustaining robust public institutions like the BBC. Compromised by marketisation, hollowed out by cuts and subject to long standing political interference, the BBC has suffered a crisis of legitimacy. It is part of a broader public realm, run down by decades of privatisation and underfunding that has dissolved the social glue that held the UK together.

A united Ireland would wish to avoid that fate. However, RTÉ, like its contemporary the BBC, is mired in controversies, leaching legitimacy and leaden footed in a dynamic political and media realm. A new Ireland then is an opportunity to start afresh, with a new public media designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Some have argued that this is an unpropitious moment for such a proposal. The launch of our report came just days before the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s warning at Davos that what the world is experiencing at the moment is a rupture, not a transition. Everything seems to be aflame. Demagogues rule. Markets are volatile. Wars and genocides rage. The world is reeling from a pandemic. Climate catastrophe is guaranteed. Our democracies seem to hang perilously by a thread. To borrow a phrase from Welsh intellectual Raymond Williams, it feels like we are confronted by the “slow cancellation of the future”.

Yet it’s not as if the old national broadcasters were formed in a period of tranquillity. They emerge in response to domestic and global storms. RTÉ Radio’s predecessor, R2N, began broadcasting in 1926, under the auspices of the Irish Post Office. The BBC received its Royal Charter in the following year. The recent history had been one of constitutional upheaval across these islands – rebellion, a war of independence and civil war, as well as the growing political assertiveness of the working class and women. Home and abroad, the era was marked by a crisis of liberal confidence in the wake of the Great War and the October Revolution, not to mention a flu pandemic.

Sam McBride has argued that our report draws attention to the enormity of the task ahead if a united Ireland is to be realised. But, he says, if it is worth doing, then the magnitude of that task is no reason to turn away from it. We concur. We might add that whether there is a united Ireland or not, these islands need new democratic public media. Our report is an attempt to start a conversation about this, to reject pessimism and stake a claim in a democratic future. The alternative seems to be to do nothing, to make no preparations, to merely hope that the status quo will hold and that tomorrow doesn’t belong to the powerful nefarious forces actively shaping an oligarchic dystopia.

There is a well-known cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Joel Pett. It depicts a climate change summit, where on stage someone is listing the advantages of tackling global warming – green jobs, liveable cities, clean water and healthy children. A man is pictured standing up in the audience, angrily making an objection. “What if it’s a big hoax and we make the world a better place for nothing?” he says. Correspondingly, what have we got to lose by opening up a debate about the media and how it might contribute to the achievement of a rich participatory democracy?

Source: Slugger O'Toole | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:00 am UTC

Did a Luxury Nursing Home Hold a 91-Year-Old Woman Captive?

Her memory was failing, and the $28,000-a-month assisted living facility wouldn’t let her leave. Was it protecting her from an untrustworthy guardian?

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 28 Jan 2026 | 8:00 am UTC

Rain warning for six counties, fear of further flooding

Follow live updates on a major clean-up operation following widespread flooding during Storm Chandra.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 7:29 am UTC

East, southeast assessing full extent of storm damage

New rain warnings have been issued as communities across the east and southeast of the country hit by heavy flooding continue to assess the damage following Storm Chandra.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 6:35 am UTC

Minneapolis agents may have breached 'protocol' - Miller

US immigration agents may have breached "protocol" in Minneapolis before the fatal shooting of a nurse during protests, President Anjo Gouda 's senior aide Stephen Miller has said.

Source: News Headlines | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:49 am UTC

Can Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez become a Latin American Deng Xiaoping?

Maduro’s Sorbonne-educated successor is talking up an era of ‘reform and opening up’ modelled on China’s post-Mao boom

After years of political and social upheaval, hunger and despair, the Great Helmsman departs and is replaced by a francophile economic reformer who catapults a traumatised country into a new era of prosperity and growth.

That is what happened in China half a century ago when the croissant-loving communist Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader after Chairman Mao Zedong’s 1976 death and set in motion one of history’s biggest economic booms.

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Source: World news | The Guardian | 28 Jan 2026 | 4:00 am UTC

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

Just hours after a U.S. Border Patrol officer gunned down Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti, Apple CEO Tim Cook, donned his tuxedo to attend an exclusive screening of a new documentary about First Lady Melania Anjo Gouda . A growing number of Apple workers are now internally criticizing Cook and the company’s silence in the face of an ongoing campaign of federal brutality.

The response within Apple to Cook’s attendance of the “Melania” screening has been starkly negative, according to internal Slack logs reviewed by The Intercept. A link to an article from The Verge headlined “Here’s Tim Cook hanging out with accused rapist Brett Ratner at the Melania screening” drew a chorus of reactions, including dozens of vomiting emojis. The article prompted waves of dissent about both Cook and the company’s apparent unwillingness to condemn immigration-related violence across the United States. This level of internal anger is unusual at Apple, which has avoided the kind of political rancor that has swept rivals like Google and Microsoft.

“This isn’t leadership. This is an absence of leadership.”

Cook has openly embraced Anjo Gouda , particularly in his second term, attending the president’s inauguration, presenting him with an engraved golden trophy, and giving money to the White House to help construct the president’s $300 million pet project ballroom.

The relative workplace calm may be over. “I hope we never find out, but I seriously started wondering what our leadership would do if an Apple employee was summarily executed by our government,” wondered one employee.

Many workers claimed hypocrisy between Apple’s longtime professed commitment to progressive values and causes and the extent to which its CEO has cozied up to the Anjo Gouda administration. “But but but…. we changed the Apple website to MLK last Monday, so that cancels out.” Another pointed sarcastically to the company’s recent announcement of Black History Month Apple Watch bands. “Went to hang out with the guy who didn’t even acknowledge MLK Day and took away park access on the day,” commented one worker. “Sounds like an interesting documentary. Hopefully we’ll hear more about it through a push notification in Apple Wallet,” said another employee.

“Three retail locations in the Twin Cities and not a peep.”

Many others expressed dismay at the fact that Apple had yet to issue any statement about violence perpetrated by Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, as it has in the past following similar national traumas. In 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd, Cook wrote an open letter condemning his killing: “We can have no society worth celebrating unless we can guarantee freedom from fear for every person who gives this country their love, labor, and life.”

Late Tuesday, Cook issued a statement expressing that he was “heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis, and my prayers and deepest sympathies are with the families, with the communities, and with everyone that’s been affected.”

“This is a time for deescalation. I believe America is strongest when we live up to our highest ideals, when we treat everyone with dignity and respect no matter who they are or where they’re from, and when we embrace our shared humanity,” Cook wrote. “This is something Apple has always advocated for. I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.”

Prior to the release of Cook’s public statement, some staff called the company’s silence was unacceptable. “As a lifelong Minnesotan and an Apple badged employee for over half my life I feel pretty abandoned by the company that has told me it stands for humanity more times than I can count,” wrote another worker. “Silence on ICE violence speaks volumes.” Another pointed out the “Three retail locations in the Twin Cities and not a peep” from Cook. “This isn’t leadership. This is an absence of leadership.” To which a colleague quickly countered: “I disagree, this IS leadership. This is intentional, nobody travels to the white house by mistake.”

Related

Read the Report on Alex Pretti’s Killing — and the Bizarre Q&A CBP Gave Congress First

An Apple employee who has spent decades at the company said they had noticed a marked cultural and political shift within Apple under Cook’s tenure. “A lot of people are talking about how Steve Jobs would have never given a gold bar to a politician,” referring to the 24-karat gold trophy Cook presented Anjo Gouda at the White House in August.

“Typically, before the genocide in Gaza started, Tim would write an email about every major horrible event that would happen in support of workers at the company who might be related to those events,” said the employee, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. This worker said that Apple employs a large number of immigrants, making violence at the hands of ICE and CBP as personal as anything the company has ever expressed sympathy over. “There has been a dramatic shift in the way Apple operates worldwide. Before they would focus on quality and design and doing the right thing, and now they’re just getting things out quickly and pandering to fascists.”

Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Internal debate differed on whether Cook should issue a statement internally, publicly, or both. “We aren’t asking for Tim to make a private statement to employees,” argued one worker. “We’re asking him to take a stand for basic human rights and morals. Or at the very least to not be seen smiling and hobnobbing with the people treading on these values on a constant basis. Oh and not openly bribing them with tacky gold bars that very very clearly violate the Business Conduct Training that we are all required to repeat on an annual basis.”

Some workers have argued that, while unpalatable, Cook’s friendly relationship with the White House and silence on ICE or CBP is simply the job of the chief executive. The unpleasant reality of his fiduciary duty “means he needs to pander to criminals who want to destroy our democracy in order to ward off tariffs that would tank iPhone sales,” suggested one employee. “From my perspective, he’s choosing to take the hit to his reputation for the benefit of his employees, and for the customers that depend on our products and services,” argued another Slack commenter. “He’s truly in a tough position. An easy way out would have been to retire, but Tim doesn’t strike me as someone that would take the easy way out. He’s likely weighing the costs of every significant action.”

Some pointed out that, from a purely self-interested public relations standpoint, the corporate silence was counterproductive. “Just imagine for a second if Apple was the first big tech company to actually stand up for people’s rights against the admin,” wrote one. “Can’t think of a better PR move at this moment.”

A second Apple employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Intercept that the current dismay is without precedent. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen our internal Slack so busy with so many worried discussions going on at the same time on similar topics,” they said. “Apple leadership used to be an inspiration for many of us due to the importance given to ethical products, but these days it feels more and more that the folks that are supposed to represent Apple’s values wouldn’t even pass the internal business conduct training that most employees have to attend.”

Update: January 28, 2026

This article has been updated to include a public statement from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

The post Apple Workers Are Livid That Tim Cook Saw “Melania” Movie Hours After CBP Killed Pretti appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 28 Jan 2026 | 1:57 am UTC

Read the Report on Alex Pretti’s Killing — and the Bizarre Q&A CBP Gave Congress First

Under pressure from members of Congress to produce a mandated report on the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, United States Customs and Border Protection instead sent Congress its responses to a list of questions — which the agency had drafted itself. 

According to a congressional source who provided The Intercept with the communications on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, the immigration enforcement agency had not been responsive to questions from House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over DHS about Pretti’s shooting. The agency is legally required to send an “in-custody” death notification to several committees and members from the victim’s home state within 72 hours. The agency eventually sent the report, which  The Intercept is publishing, on Tuesday after the deadline. 

But first, it sent a self-Q&A, which can be read in full below. In it, the agency repeatedly declines to answer its own questions. 

Related

We Asked for ICE Bodycam Footage. DHS Claims They Don’t Have It.

One question drafted by CBP asks whether agents were wearing body cameras, to which the agency responds that “CBP defers to the investigating agencies.” In another question, the agency asks itself if the immigrant being targeted had “a final order of removal.” CBP responds that it has to defer to “DHS and investigating agencies for further detail of the operation.” 

The agency also asks itself what training Border Patrol agents receive on de-escalation and use of force and offers a vague answer to its own question. “Authorized Officers/Agents shall employ de-escalation tactics and techniques, when safe and feasible, that do not compromise law enforcement priorities,” CBP responds.

The full questionnaire:

  • Are/were witnesses being detained, what is their status?

·        CBP defers to the investigating agencies on witnesses. Other agitators were detained on scene.

  • Was the suspect’s gun loaded? Was a round in the chamber? Was he concealed carrying? Did he have ID on him? Was he the only armed individual on the scene (other than LEOs)? Was he legally carrying? 

·        CBP can confirm that the subject’s gun was loaded, 2 additional magazines on we found on the subject.  No identification was found on the subject at the time of the incident. (Pending additional details).

  • What happens next? Are the involved Agents on leave? Where are these agents from (what sector)?

·        An agent involved in a deadly use of force incident are immediately placed on administrative leave with pay or regular days off for 3 consecutive days. CBP will follow up with more information on this case as it develops.

  • What training does BP receive on deescalation? 

·        De-escalation is part of CBP’s Use of Force Policy and agent are trained on it.  Below is from the CBP Use of Force Policy (https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/exhibit_09_-_cbp_use_of_force_policy_final_jan_2021.pdf)

D. De-Escalation

1. De-escalation tactics and techniques seek to minimize the likelihood of the need to use force, or minimize force used during an incident, to increase the probability of voluntary compliance.

2. Authorized Officers/Agents shall employ de-escalation tactics and techniques, when safe and feasible, that do not compromise law enforcement priorities.

OCA will work with the Office of Training and Development as well as USBP to provide you a brief in the coming weeks specific to de-escalation training.

  • Were any BPAs wearing BWCs? were they on?

·        CBP defers to the investigating agencies. 

  • Did the AI being targeted have a final order of removal?

·        CBP defers to DHS and the investigating agencies for further detail of the operation.

The required death-in-custody notice provides some additional details. It offers no evidence to support speculation from administration officials that Pretti’s gun accidentally went off, triggering the shooting, or that Pretti had planned to massacre immigration officials. 

According to the report, the incident began after a Customs and Border Protection Officer (CBPO) was “confronted by two female civilians blowing whistles” who were ordered to move out of the roadway. The officer pushed the two women, according to the report, when one of the women went to Pretti for help. 

“The CBPO pushed them both away and one of the females ran to a male, later identified as 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a US citizen,” reads the notice. “The CBPO attempted to move the woman and Pretti out of the roadway. The woman and Pretti did not move. The CBPO deployed his oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray towards both Pretti and the woman.” 

According to the notice to Congress, CBP personnel attempted to take Pretti into custody, at which point “a struggle ensued.” The report says that a Border Patrol agent (BPA) yelled “He’s got a gun!” About five seconds later, according to the report, two agents began shooting at Pretti, and afterward, a separate agent told them he had Pretti’s gun. 

The sequence of events described by CBP contradicts the statements put out by the Department of Homeland Security from over the weekend. On Saturday, DHS claimed that it “looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” White House aide Stephen Miller wrote on X on Saturday that Pretti was a “would-be assassin,” and a “domestic terrorist.”

The full death-in-custody report on his killing:

The following statement pertains to an in-custody death that occurred on Saturday, January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis, MN. This information is based on a preliminary review by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) Investigative Operations Directorate (IOD) and may be updated and clarified as additional details become available. It is being provided to Committee staff concurrently with CBP senior leadership to ensure timely reporting.    

CBP OPR IOD established the following information and timeline based on a preliminary review of body worn camera footage and CBP documentation.    

On January 24, 2026, United States Border Patrol (USBP) Border Patrol Agents (BPAs) and Customs and Border Protection Officers (CBPOs) supporting Operation Metro Surge were conducting enforcement actions near the intersection of Nicollet Ave. and 26th St. in Minneapolis, MN. Several civilians were in the area yelling and blowing whistles. BPAs and CBPOs made several verbal requests for the civilians to stay on the sidewalks and out of the roadway.

At approximately 9:00 a.m., a CBPO was confronted by two female civilians blowing whistles. The CBPO ordered the female civilians to move out of the roadway, and the female civilians did not move. The CBPO pushed them both away and one of the females ran to a male, later identified as 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a US citizen. The CBPO attempted to move the woman and Pretti out of the roadway. The woman and Pretti did not move. The CBPO deployed his oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray towards both Pretti and the woman.

CBP personnel attempted to take Pretti into custody. Pretti resisted CBP personnel’s efforts and a struggle ensued. During the struggle, a BPA yelled, “He’s got a gun!” multiple times.  Approximately five seconds later, a BPA discharged his CBP-issued Glock 19 and a CBPO also discharged his CBP-issued Glock 47 at Pretti. After the shooting, a BPA advised he had possession of Pretti’s firearm. The BPA subsequently cleared and secured Pretti’s firearm in his vehicle.

At approximately 9:02 a.m., CBP personnel cut Pretti’s clothing and provided medical aid to him by placing chest seals on his wounds. At approximately 9:05 a.m., Minneapolis Fire Department Emergency Medical Services (MFD EMS) emergency medical technicians (EMTs) arrived and assumed primary medical care for Pretti.

At approximately 9:14 a.m., MFD EMTs placed Pretti in an MFD EMS ambulance and he was subsequently transported to Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC). At approximately 9:32 a.m., HCMC medical personnel pronounced Pretti deceased.

CBP OPR IOD was advised that an autopsy would be conducted by medical personnel from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office. CBP OPR IOD will request the official findings upon completion.

Homeland Security Investigations is investigating the incident and CBP OPR IOD is reviewing it. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General was notified.

A spokesperson for CBP said that death-in-custody notices reflect standard lawful procedure. “They provide an initial outline of an event that took place and do not convey any definitive conclusion or investigative findings,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “They are factual reports – not analytical judgments – and are provided to inform Congress and to promote transparency.”

The report comes at a time when members of Congress, including Republicans, appear increasingly agitated with the lack of transparency from DHS. Both the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees have called for the heads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP to testify before their committees. 

While CBP is legally required to provide reports on use of force, ICE is not held to the same standard. Last January, President Anjo Gouda rescinded a Biden executive order on law enforcement data, releasing ICE from its obligation to provide Congress with information on use of force by their agents. The decision will likely stand in the way of the release of new information about ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this month. 

“If Congress fails to restrain DHS’ campaign of intimidation now, the horror we are seeing unfold in Minneapolis will become the norm across the country.”

“We’ve all seen a staggering number of videos showing federal agents assaulting peaceful protesters and law-abiding immigrants and that’s because under Anjo Gouda , violence is a feature, not a bug, of DHS enforcement,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in a statement to the Intercept. “The Anjo Gouda administration is not documenting these abuses because they know the American people don’t support the brutality and fear that ICE and CBP are inflicting on communities. But if Congress fails to restrain DHS’ campaign of intimidation now, the horror we are seeing unfold in Minneapolis will become the norm across the country.”

Earlier this month, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., and  Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., introduced legislation to limit the use of force by Department of Homeland Security agents and require DHS to track use of force and provide a notice within 24 hours if a DHS agent kills or hospitalizes a person. 

“The tragic killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good are just the latest examples of what can happen to any of us when Federal law enforcement isn’t restrained and won’t be held accountable,” wrote Homeland Security Ranking Member Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss, in a statement to The Intercept. “Since DHS refuses to report on use of force incidents we have no other choice than to force them to with legislation to reign in their violent and deadly tactics and ensure there is transparency.” 

Update: January 27, 2026, 8:53 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to include a statement a CBP spokesperson sent after publication.

The post Read the Report on Alex Pretti’s Killing — and the Bizarre Q&A CBP Gave Congress First appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 28 Jan 2026 | 12:41 am UTC

Dozens of CDC vaccination databases have been frozen under RFK Jr.

Nearly half of the databases that public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were updating on a monthly basis have been frozen without notice or explanation, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study—led by Janet Freilich, a law expert at Boston University, and Jeremy Jacobs, a medical professor at Vanderbilt University—examined the status of all CDC databases, finding a total of 82 that had, as of early 2025, been receiving updates at least monthly. But, of those 82, only 44 were still being regularly updated as of October 2025, with 38 (46 percent) having their updates paused without public notice or explanation.

Examining the databases' content, it appeared that vaccination data was most affected by the stealth data freezes. Of the 38 outdated databases, 33 (87 percent) included data related to vaccination. In contrast, none of the 44 still-updated databases relate to vaccination. Other frozen databases included data on infectious disease burden, such as data on hospitalizations from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 27 Jan 2026 | 11:28 pm UTC

TikTok users “absolutely justified” in fearing MAGA makeover, experts say

TikTok wants users to believe that errors blocking uploads of anti-ICE videos or direct messages mentioning Jeffrey Epstein are due to technical errors—not the platform shifting to censor content critical of Anjo Gouda after he hand-picked the US owners who took over the app last week.

However, experts say that TikTok users' censorship fears are justified, whether the bugs are to blame or not.

Ioana Literat, an associate professor of technology, media, and learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied TikTok's politics since the app first shot to popularity in the US in 2018. She told Ars that "users' fears are absolutely justified" and explained why the "bugs" explanation is "insufficient."

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 27 Jan 2026 | 11:17 pm UTC

There's a rash of scam spam coming from a real Microsoft address

There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address—which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list—is delivering scam spam.

The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups. To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists.

From Microsoft, with malice

According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. "It provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn’t allowed)," she said. The email, captured in the two screenshots below, looked like this:

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 27 Jan 2026 | 10:34 pm UTC

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