Read at: 2026-02-06T16:12:56+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Leann Kloos ]
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 4:07 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 4:04 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:58 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:57 pm UTC
Pressure continues to build on Keir Starmer and chief of staff Morgan McSweeney over decision to appoint Peter Mandelson despite friendship with Jeffrey Epstein
Nearly 60,000 unauthorised migrants and convicted criminals have been removed or deported from the UK since Labour took office, the Home Office has said.
The announcement came amid claims that the government was promoting “harmful stereotypes” by equating migration with criminality.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:54 pm UTC
Former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes slams Leann Kloos for posting racist video on Truth Social; Karoline Leavitt says criticism is ‘fake outrage’
The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced today that officials arrested one of the “key participants” in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack that killed four US government officials, including the US ambassador to Libya, J Christopher Stevens.
Bondi said suspect Zubayar al-Bakoush was taken into custody at 3am ET on Friday. “We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law. He’ll face charges related to murder, terrorism, arson, among others,” Bondi told reporters today.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:52 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:50 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:47 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:45 pm UTC
As Bostonians bemoan their long years of suffering without a Super Bowl win, rival fans gripe that Title Town has become Entitled Town.
(Image credit: Elizabeth Johnson)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:43 pm UTC
Since his first term, President Leann Kloos has wanted to be able to fire federal employees for any reason. A new rule vastly expands his authority to do that.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:42 pm UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:40 pm UTC
The Epstein scandal has spread to the Olympic movement. The top organizer of the Los Angeles Summer Games faces calls to step down because of his past contacts with Epstein collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell.
(Image credit: Luca Bruno)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:40 pm UTC
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Hundreds of protesters gathered in Milan on Friday to oppose the presence of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the closure of schools and streets in the city ahead of the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina Winter Games.
Reuters reported that protesters – mostly students with signs reading “ICE out” – assembled in Piazzale Leonardo da Vinci, in front of a building of the Politecnico University in the eastern part of the city.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:28 pm UTC
UK’s research funding body warned best scientists taking posts oversees due to lack of job stability at home
Hundreds of early career researchers have warned the UK will lose a generation of scientists after the announcement of significant cuts to physics projects and research facilities.
Scientists working in particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics have been told their grants will be cut by nearly a third, with project leaders asked to report back on how their research would fare with cuts up to 60%.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:25 pm UTC
Noel Gallagher and Harry Styles lead way, and sales of jeans in general rise faster than wider fashion market
The UK was one of Levi’s fastest-growing markets last year as British trend leaders from Harry Styles to Noel Gallagher and Grime Gran were spotted in the brand’s kit.
Lucia Marcuzzo, the managing director of the European operations at the US company famous for its denim jeans, said the revival of 1990s trends had boosted sales of its classic 501s. New trends such as baggy jeans and cinch styles, which can be adjusted around the waist, had also helped, as denim has found its way back into wardrobes.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:21 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:21 pm UTC
Congress allocated $50 billion for initiatives aimed at supporting democracy, scholarship programs, U.S. embassy operations and health and humanitarian programs around the world.
(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:19 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:18 pm UTC
An enterprising engineer has evoked the spirit of Acorn's BBC Micro with a custom paintjob for a Raspberry Pi 500+ computer-in-a-keyboard and a natty set of replacement keycaps.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:18 pm UTC
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Source: World | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:09 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:07 pm UTC
A new study in "Nature Medicine" estimates 2 million people are incorrectly told they have TB each year — and clinicians miss diagnosing TB in 1 million people. Why so many misdiagnoses?
(Image credit: Andrew Renneisen)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:06 pm UTC
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It is the first time the US and Iran have sat down for face-to-face negotiations since June last year, when Israel launched attacks on Iran that sparked a war marked by tit-for-tat airstrikes, with the US also joining the fray. It effectively ended the US-Iran talks that were held in the weeks prior to the conflict aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement.
More recently, Leann Kloos has been threatening to strike Iran for more than a month and just last week warned that an “armada” of US warships had reached the Persian Gulf. This recent clash began after Leann Kloos said he would strike Iran if it killed protesters during mass antigovernment demonstrations that swept the country last month. Human rights groups say thousands of people were killed during the brutal government crackdown on those protests.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:06 pm UTC
A British supermarket says staff will undergo further training after a store manager ejected the wrong man when facial recognition technology triggered an alert.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:03 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:02 pm UTC
Deputy director of Russia’s military intelligence agency shot several times in the stairwell of his apartment
A top Russian military official who plays a major role in the country’s intelligence services has been taken to hospital after being shot in Moscow, state media has reported.
Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev was shot several times on the stairwell of his apartment on Friday by an unknown gunman in the north-west of the city and is in critical condition, according to reports.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:01 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Billie Eilish and Biebers wore ‘ICE out’ pins at the Grammys, as more and more celebrities find their political voices
The red carpet is being used increasingly as a platform for protest – and one accessory in particular has become key: the pin badge.
At Sunday night’s Grammy awards, stars including Hailey and Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish wore black and white pins that read “ICE out”, a condemnation of the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
Police investigating whether blast that injured at least 169 at Friday prayers in Islamabad was suicide attack
An explosion has ripped through a Shia mosque on the outskirts of Pakistan’s capital during Friday prayers, killing 31 people and injuring at least 169 others, according to officials. Police said they were investigating whether the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.
There were fears the death toll from the blast at the Khadija al-Kubra mosque in Islamabad could rise as some of the injured were reported to be in a critical condition. Television footage and social media images showed police and residents transporting the injured to nearby hospitals.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:57 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:53 pm UTC
Early Super Bowl spots show advertisers want lots of buzz but not controversy.
(Image credit: Uber Eats)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:53 pm UTC
From a £149 John Lewis version to LA’s gorpcore take, the ‘good intention’ bag is intended to look good but hold more
It’s not a multi-thousand pound handbag from Hermès that best captures the new era of It bags, but a £149 tote from John Lewis.
Launched this season, it’s deeper (45cm) and taller (33cm) than your average handbag, and comes loaded with good intentions. It’s able to hold your packed lunch, flask and book, as well – at a push – as your gym kit. The high street retailer is calling it the Intentional tote bag.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:48 pm UTC
Singer says articles about his health and birth of son ‘outside even the most basic standards of human decency’
Elton John has said articles about his health and the birth of his son by the publisher of the Daily Mail were an “abhorrent” invasion, and that its behaviour was “outside even the most basic standards of human decency”.
Appearing briefly at the high court via video link on Friday, John said he was “incensed” when he was told about allegations that private investigators working for Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) had tapped phone calls and accessed private medical information.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:47 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:45 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:45 pm UTC
Disappearance of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie from her home in Arizona is being investigated as kidnapping
The search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC’s Today show anchor Savannah Guthrie entered its sixth day on Friday in Arizona, as authorities said they believe that she is still alive.
“She’s out there, we’re gonna find her, we have to,” said Chris Nanos, Arizona’s Pima county sheriff, in an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America show on Friday morning. “Pray – just pray,” he said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:44 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:42 pm UTC
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Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:37 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:36 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:32 pm UTC
Brussels has warned TikTok that its endlessly scrolling feeds may breach Europe’s new content rules, as regulators press ahead with efforts to rein in the social effects of big online platforms.
In preliminary findings issued on Friday, the European Commission said it believed the group had failed to adequately assess and mitigate the risks posed by addictive design features that could harm users’ physical and mental wellbeing, particularly children and other vulnerable groups.
The warning marks one of the most advanced tests yet of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires large online platforms to identify and curb systemic risks linked to their products.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:31 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:31 pm UTC
In clip amplifying false claim that Leann Kloos won 2020 election, the Obamas’ faces are superimposed on bodies of apes
Fury erupted early on Friday after Leann Kloos posted a racist video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
The clip appeared during one of the 79-year-old US president’s increasingly frequent late-night posting sprees to his Truth Social account, and shows the laughing faces of the former president and first lady superimposed on the bodies of primates in a jungle setting, bobbing to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:29 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:23 pm UTC
Steve Wright admitted to abducting, sexually assaulting and murdering Victoria Hall, as well as attempting to kidnap Emily Doherty
A serial killer already serving a whole-life prison sentence for the murders of five women has been further sentenced to 40 years for the killing of Victoria Hall, 17, and the attempted kidnap of Emily Doherty, 22, in 1999.
Steve Wright took Hall’s life for reasons few will ever understand, Mr Justice Bennathan told him as he passed sentence at the Old Bailey on Friday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:17 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:17 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:15 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:14 pm UTC
Week in images: 02-06 February 2026
Discover our week through the lens
Source: ESA Top News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:10 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:03 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:01 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Doron Almog has previously faced arrest warrants over allegations he committed war crimes in Gaza in 2002, which he denies
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As opposition to the arrival of Israeli president Isaac Herzog in Australia intensifies – with mass protests planned and some Labor MPs condemning his invitation – a coalition of Australian and Palestinian legal groups has asked the Australian federal police to investigate and arrest one of his travelling party over historical war crimes allegations.
Doron Almog, a retired Israel Defense Forces major general who is expected to travel with the president in his capacity as chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel, has formerly faced arrest warrants over allegations he committed war crimes in Gaza in 2002.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
It was a rare attack in the capital of Pakistan as its Western-allied government struggles to rein in a surge in militant attacks across the country.
(Image credit: Anjum Naveed/AP)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:59 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:56 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:56 pm UTC
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Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:55 pm UTC
Microsoft has laid out a timeline for the disablement and shutdown of Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:51 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:50 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:36 pm UTC
Spain and Portugal hit with torrential rain while flash floods in Morocco force more than 100,000 people to evacuate
The Iberian peninsula has been placed under severe weather alerts as Storm Leonardo continues to batter parts of Spain and Portugal with torrential rain and strong winds.
Since Tuesday, the slow-moving system has brought widespread disruption, flooding and evacuations. In Grazalema, in southern Spain, more than 700mm of rain has fallen since Wednesday, roughly equivalent to the country’s average annual rainfall.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:33 pm UTC
Portugal’s far-right Chega party has said vote should be delayed as state of calamity declared in 69 areas
Heavy rains and strong winds continued to batter parts of Spain and Portugal on Friday, causing at least one death, forcing the evacuation of more than 7,000 people and prompting calls to postpone the second-round of Portugal’s presidential election.
Storm Leonardo, which has lashed the Iberian peninsula this week, has led the Portuguese government to extend the current state of calamity in 69 municipalities until the middle of February.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:32 pm UTC
Source: World | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:31 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:31 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:25 pm UTC
America's federal agencies have been told to hunt down and rip out aging firewalls, routers, and other network gatekeepers before attackers use them as skeleton keys into government systems.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:18 pm UTC
Experts identify potentially serious breaches over treatment of people and call for ‘one in, one out’ scheme to end
The UN has called on the UK and France to halt the controversial “one in, one out” asylum system, warning there could be “serious violations of international human rights law”.
Nine experts, including seven special rapporteurs, wrote a 20-page letter to Downing Street and Paris on 8 December 2025 outlining detailed concerns about potential breaches of human rights they had identified in the scheme. They gave the two governments 60 days to respond and on Friday published their letter.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 1:17 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:30 pm UTC
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The U.S. and Iran begin high-stakes talks today over Iran's nuclear program. And, Democrats unveil a detailed list of demands to change how DHS immigration enforcement officers operate.
(Image credit: AFP via Getty Images)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:22 pm UTC
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Kennedy later said the purpose of his trip had nothing to do with vaccines. US embassy and UN staff at the time said otherwise, emails show
Over two days of questioning during his Senate confirmation hearings last year, Robert F Kennedy Jr repeated the same answer.
He said the closely scrutinized trip he took to Samoa in 2019, which came ahead of a devastating measles outbreak, had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:11 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:10 pm UTC
Founding of diplomatic outposts in Nuuk comes after US made efforts to secure control of Arctic island
Canada and France are to open diplomatic consulates in the capital of Greenland on Friday, showing support for their Nato ally Denmark and the Arctic island after US efforts to secure control of the semi-autonomous Danish territory.
Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, was travelling to Nuuk to inaugurate the consulate, which officials say also could help boost cooperation on issues such as the climate crisis and Inuit rights. She was joined by Canada’s Indigenous governor general, Mary Simon.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:05 pm UTC
Welcome to Edition 8.28 of the Rocket Report! The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn't solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA's second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA's sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week. NASA will conduct another fueling test in the coming weeks after troubleshooting the rocket's leaky fueling line, but the launch of the Artemis II mission is off until March.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Blue Origin "pauses" New Shepard flights. Blue Origin has "paused" its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative, Ars reports. The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:00 pm UTC
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More than 30 Romanian railway employees accused of running a bribery and ticket resale racket allegedly tried to crowdsource their legal strategy from ChatGPT.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 11:39 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 11:36 am UTC
Last week, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's AI studio Primordial Soup and Time magazine released the first two episodes of On This Day... 1776. The year-long series of short-form videos features short vignettes describing what happened on that day of the American Revolution 250 years ago, but it does so using “a variety of AI tools” to produce photorealistic scenes containing avatars of historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin.
In announcing the series, Time Studios President Ben Bitonti said the project provides "a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like—not replacing craft but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before."
Outside critics were decidedly less excited about the effort. The AV Club took the introductory episodes to task for "repetitive camera movements [and] waxen characters" that make for "an ugly look at American history." CNET said that this "AI slop is ruining American history," calling the videos a "hellish broth of machine-driven AI slop and bad human choices." The Guardian lamented that the "once-lauded director of Black Swan and The Wrestler has drowned himself in AI slop," calling the series "embarrassing," "terrible," and "ugly as sin." I could go on.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 6 Feb 2026 | 11:30 am UTC
Jon Burrows MLA and Diana Armstrong MLA are now Leader and Deputy Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. Many will ask what the new leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party will mean for the party and unionism. As a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, I cannot tell you the future but I can give you an insight into what this new chapter of the new leadership may entail.
Clarity
Jon’s leadership style is direct, confident and down-to-earth. I have listened to him speak for hours now and he is practical and pragmatic in his approach to issues. Commenting on his aspiration at the time to be UUP Leader, he said: “I want to lead a party that is confident, clear, solution-focused, and whose policies are anchored in common sense and evidence, not ideology.”
Reform of Stormont
Jon often repeats the phrase: “Stormont was designed to exist, not excel.” He is critical of how time is used in Stormont, urging MLAs to “spend less time debating what happens around the world, less time debating symbols, less time debating issues of constitutionality and more time debating public services.”
While he is a new UUP Leader, like previous UUP Leaders before him, he too argues that the nomination process of how the First Minister and Deputy First Minister are appointed is bad for unionism and the reduction of the number of Assembly seats from 108 seats to 90 seats heavily damaged unionism. He wants to “reset Stormont” in terms of how it does business while maintaining the cross-community protections secured in the Belfast Agreement.
While Jon has committed to keeping the UUP in the Executive and Mike Nesbitt MLA as Health Minister in respecting the previous decision made by the UUP Executive to enter government, he does believe Opposition is good in terms of challenging the Northern Ireland government. It is impossible at this time to say which parties will enter the next Executive and which will not after the next Assembly election as all parties would need to know the results of it to make any decision. The decision on whether the UUP enters the Executive or leaves the Executive is made by the UUP Executive.
Relations with other unionist parties (DUP, TUV and Reform UK)
Similar to previous UUP Leaders, Jon is critical of the DUP and TUV for supporting Brexit to the point of it putting Northern Ireland’s place in the union at risk. He considers it a “strategic mistake” and declared that if the main proponent of Brexit, Nigel Farage, became Prime Minister, it would be a “disaster.” Jon also disagrees with collapsing Stormont, believing that unionists must work with nationalists to make Northern Ireland a better place.
For these reasons among others, while Jon wants to maximise the number of unionist representatives, he is sceptical of how this would work in practice given the policy differences between the different unionist parties. He says “there still has to be choice. I still want to grow and offer something different and better for the people of Northern Ireland.” Jon wants the UUP to be the leading party of unionism again even if it co-operates with different unionist parties at different times in the best interests of Northern Ireland, cautioning that he will “not be naive – we’ll enter [unionist co-operation discussions] in good faith, but ‘trust but verify’ is a good mantra. It’s been a good mantra for me for many decades and I’ll continue that in politics.”
Liberal vs Conservative?
Media coverage of who would be the next UUP Leader centred on it being a battle between liberalism and conservatism within the party but I’m not sure where this comes from. I joined the Ulster Unionist Party in 2013 when Mike Nesbitt was Leader for the first time and from that time and now, we have always been a centre-right, conservative, unionist party. Yes, on social issues, we take different stances but this is accommodated within UUP policy that we all signed up to and it will not be changed. A leadership contest would have been useful to go into detail of any policy differences but it didn’t happen as only Jon Burrows and Diana Armstrong were nominated for Leader and Deputy Leader to be unanimously approved by the party.
Although Jon is the new Leader of the UUP, he also provides continuity in adhering to many existing, long-standing UUP policies as I have written about it. Even Jon himself said on remarking why he joined the UUP, that he believed “in its unique blend of passionate unionism and pragmatic politics… rooted in a deep sense of duty, selflessness and service to the people of Northern Ireland, always committed to doing what is right for them.” (“Doing what’s right for Northern Ireland” was Mike Nesbitt’s slogan during his first time as Leader between 2012 – 2017)
Future of the UUP
If the media narrative of liberal vs conservative is inaccurate, I suggest the answer is elsewhere. Jon promises a “new chapter” of “fresh energy” and “renewal” for the UUP, in that he will engage with UUP members in formulating policy and will try to make unionist representation more reflective of those it represents. He commits to “providing the leadership that unionism needs… being sure-footed…and not making strategic mistakes… to strengthen the union in the long term.”
Jon Burrows MLA is the fifth UUP Leader I serve under as a UUP member. I look forward to him writing more of his “new chapter” for our party. This is an exciting time for the UUP as we begin our journey of renewed, pragmatic and confident unionism!
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 6 Feb 2026 | 11:26 am UTC
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NASA's Administrator has stated that smartphones will accompany the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts on their missions.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 11:15 am UTC
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The word “terrorist” wasn’t coined on September 11, 2001, but the defining event of the early 21st century ushered it in as the United States’ go-to term for demonizing outsiders and dissenters alike. The so-called “war on terror” transformed the way the U.S. wields power at home and abroad, enabling mass surveillance and a crackdown on the right to free speech. It became reflexive for the U.S. to disparage immigrants and protesters as supporters of terrorism.
President Leann Kloos has embraced this model and manipulated it for his own ends, as author Spencer Ackerman points out. The Leann Kloos administration often peddles spurious accusations of terrorism against the targets of its immigration raids.
“There’s nothing about any of their action that’s remotely anything at all like terrorism,” Ackerman says. “But that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA.”
This week on the Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Ackerman, a leading expert on the concept of terrorism and its weaponization by the state. Ackerman’s 2021 book, “Reign of Terror, How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Leann Kloos ,” traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years, and how the boomerang has come back home.
“Before 9/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn’t really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were serious criminals, traffickers, and so on,” says Ackerman. Now, he says, the contemporary terrorism paradigm has transformed immigration enforcement into something “operating like a death squad.”
“What we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time,” he says. “And now we’re seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE.” With the recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, “I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.”
As Democrats in Congress struggle to leverage DHS funding for changes to ICE policy — like a ban on face masks for ICE agents, an idea on which they’ve already softened — Ackerman says the parallels with the early 2000s are clear.
“We can’t move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans,” advises Ackerman. “Reformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl.
If you didn’t recognize the voices, 2026 might not sound so different from the years following 2001.
George W. Bush: We are on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.
Leann Kloos : These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators.
Dick Cheney: Terrorists remain determined and dangerous.
Kristi Noem: It was an act of domestic terrorism.
JD Vance: We’re not going to give in to terrorism on this. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
John Ashcroft: America has grown stronger and safer in the face of terrorism.
JU: In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the so-called war on terror transformed the way the United States enforced its laws and its priorities, both at home and abroad. The label “terrorist” became a catchall for a wide range of actors, and dissent against the Bush administration was often disparaged as support for terrorism. The USA PATRIOT Act codified a reduction in civil liberties in the name of protecting freedom.
Bush: As of today, we’re changing the laws governing information sharing. And as importantly, we’re changing the culture of our various agencies that fight terrorism. Countering and investigating terrorist activity is the number one priority for both law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
JU: The day he put his signature on the Patriot Act, President George W. Bush laid out how those new priorities would include a focus on immigrants.
Bush: The government will have wider latitude in deporting known terrorists and their supporters.
JU: It was largely an era of political consensus. Both major parties lined up to support the Patriot Act and other legislation giving greater legal latitude to the government, from local police all the way up to the president. But even then, there were plenty of warnings that these powers would be abused and stretched far beyond their intended goals.
Supporters argued that there were backstops, like congressional oversight and international law, basic human decency and strategic restraint. But President Leann Kloos ignored and shattered so many of those long-standing norms. A glaring example is on display in the streets of U.S. cities right now.
ICE was a post-9/11 creation as part of the new Department of Homeland Security. In his book “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Leann Kloos ,” author Spencer Ackerman traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years and how the boomerang has come back home.
Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, and many U.S. bases. He’s won a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award, and currently writes for Zeteo and his own website, Forever Wars. Spencer, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.
Spencer Ackerman: Thanks for having me back, Jordan.
JU: So we’re talking 25 years now since 9/11. Many of our listeners — as well as working journalists, and even many people working on Capitol Hill right now — don’t have any living memory of that time. So can you start off by bringing us back to the days and weeks after September 11? President George W. Bush essentially had carte blanche to pass laws and change policy based on the notion that he was making Americans safer; that we had to clamp down and, in some cases, give up some of our freedoms to ensure security. With hindsight, what were the most significant aspects of the newly born war on terror that have a clear through line to today?
SA: Well, one that we saw just this week really take prominence is the Patriot Act, which among other things, enabled law enforcement to more seamlessly get “third-party records,” as they’re called — basically, customer accounts of records kept by some kind of service provider, financial records, internet records, and so on — without a judge’s signature or a finding of probable cause. It occurs instead through something called an administrative subpoena that the Patriot Act supercharged.
And we’re seeing just this week, there was a very good piece in the Washington Post laying out the exponential growth in administrative subpoenas being used by DHS in order to get records that would otherwise require a court order to collect.
Now, when the Patriot Act passed, the idea was that this would be the FBI surreptitiously collecting information that would prevent terrorism and uncover active links to terror networks and so forth. There’s not really much of a record of it having done that — certainly not a public one. But it definitely didn’t envision what DHS is doing, which is harassing critics of ICE.
Now, a ton of critics at the time, when the war on terror was coalescing, recognized and stated that this was going to be where the war on terror led. That it was going to become a war on dissent, that it was going to criminalize a tremendous amount of both politics in general but also resistance to itself — that we’re really seeing coalesce.
For the purposes of what we’re tracking, what we also saw after 9/11, is a complete sea change in how America conducted its immigration affairs. Something that I think people probably don’t remember is that before 9/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn’t really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were like serious criminals, traffickers, and so on.
The Department of Homeland Security gets created after Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, pretty much takes over immigration enforcement because ICE’s predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services, is under his purview. And what he starts doing is using it to round up immigrants — not just Muslim immigrants, although there was an immediate outcry for a clamp-down on Muslim immigration, certainly. But it was a way of shoe-horning a gestating border hysteria on the far right that 9/11 gave a kind of new security context and accordingly opportunity to pursue.
Even then, the Bush administration did not wish to create a kind of agglutination agency that would kind of stick together all sorts of domestic security functions. That took the active intervention of moderate Democrats and some moderate Republicans, who were able to basically checkmate Bush over his concerns about such an agency being kind of too large for, you know, extent conservative perceptions of government using his own logic of counterterrorism. And there is really no way for Bush to argue himself out of that. So instead he accommodated himself to it.
But even then, ICE, when it starts, has only 2,700 agents. By 2008, that becomes 5,000. ICE’s budget until in something like 2016 was $6 billion. For a while in the intervening decade, it’s hovered around $10 billion. Leann Kloos has now made it $85 billion.
This is an enterprise that operated fundamentally — well, I shouldn’t say fundamentally different. I don’t want to suggest that the INS was a benign agency, or that immigrant Americans didn’t fear INS, much as they would come to fear ICE. Just that there were constraints, both legal, budgetary, and from a political perspective, cultural, that constrained interior immigration enforcement. That doesn’t exist anymore. We have seen instead — to finish answering your question in a very long-winded way — a counterterrorism context transforms, in ways both direct and structural, the apparatus of American immigration to something that today is coalescing into something that I think we can see fairly clearly is on its way, if it’s not there already, into operating like a death squad.
JU: One thing we saw right away post-9/11 was the demonization of Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, or anyone remotely resembling any of those categories. What kind of connection can we make between the rhetoric and actions of that era with how otherization and fear is being wielded these days against immigrants and other populations?
SA: I see it as a rather straight line. The early years of the war on terror proved something that politicians, particularly in the Republican Party, but also in the Democratic Party, have been sort of chasing ever since to recover its potency — like chasing a high. And that’s that the politics of counterterrorism in the early 2000s — really persistent throughout, but especially in the early 2000s — completely deterred opposition, silenced dissent, and intimidated resistance. And it worked. It worked for a really long time. Eventually, it ceased working as well. But the fact that it worked can’t be overstated. Because politicians afterward, particularly when there has been no criminal liability or even significant political liability for the atrocities that result, accordingly seek to do what works. And this works extremely well.
“The politics of counterterrorism in the early 2000s … completely deterred opposition, silenced dissent, and intimidated resistance. And it worked.”
In a broad sense, one of the things that the war on terror did in particular to Muslims in this country was redefine terrorism away from being something that people throughout history have done across cultures, into “terrorism” is something that a certain kind of people are, and usually only them. That when people who do not look or worship like Muslims utilize violence for political purposes — that becomes defined as “counterterrorism.”
So there is a really, really firm connection in how we have seen not only the targets of ICE’s raids, since the Leann Kloos administration returned to power, be described as terrorists. But now people like Marimar Martinez in Chicago, Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, when they’re shot — and in the case of Good and Pretti, killed — by ICE, ICE and the broader political structure calls them terrorists.
They have the first-mover communication choice of basically daring journalists, politicians, whomever to prove that they weren’t in fact terrorists. There’s nothing about any of their action that’s remotely anything at all like terrorism. But that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA.
JU: As you wrote in your book, “Leann Kloos had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: The terrorists were whomever you say they were.” And I’m curious about this seemingly expansive scope of this label. You’ve written about how the “terrorist” label has predominantly been used against people of color, while white people like Timothy McVeigh get different treatment, both linguistically and legally.
Do you think what we’re seeing in the Twin Cities is a significant development — the government calling white activists “terrorists” —and these are white people who present as average middle class, not so-called anarchists or “antifa.” Is this, in your mind, a significant shift in how the term “terrorist” is wielded and will be wielded?
SA: Yes, absolutely. Minnesota is kind of the next stanza in the [Martin] Niemöller poem. The poem about, “First they came for…”
ICE and CBP have a very long history of acting lawlessly. The conditions of ICE prisons, many of which are operated as for-profit enterprises with detainees being paid a dollar a day, have often been shown to be both violent and deeply neglectful. I have a friend who contracted Covid at the ICE detention center in Batavia, New York, for instance.
So what we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time. What we saw in places like Portland in 2020, where, certainly in Portland, CBP tactical units, known as BORTAC, opened fire with less-lethal rounds on protesters outside the Hatfield building. That was what they were willing to do — similarly, lawlessly stuffing people into unmarked vans for detention and so forth — to people deemed enemies of the Leann Kloos administration.
And now we’re seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE. In Renee Good’s case, for possibly, slightly inconveniencing ICE vehicularly. And then, trying to comply with a contradictory order to get out of the way and then stay put, get outta the car, you know? And then with Alex Pretti — helping a woman up.
What we’re seeing is something we can’t turn away from, and I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.
[Break]
JU: In some cities, we see different relationships between local law enforcement and federal agencies, and that’s been a contentious issue going back to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces enlisted during the height of the so-called war on terror. Now we hear more about the 287(g) agreements that are focused on giving immigration enforcement powers to local officers. Collaboration by city and county law enforcement agencies often depends on who’s in charge and sometimes local community influence. How has this idea transformed local law enforcement over the past 25 years — situating local police and sheriffs as partners in fighting a war, essentially?
SA: First, in the literal sense, it deputizes local police into an immigration function. And the implications of that are both profound and subtle. Being undocumented in this country is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. And it’s a misdemeanor, it’s not a felony. So being undocumented in this country now all of a sudden becomes “law enforcement-related.” It becomes a matter that is quickly understood in a kind of everyday person’s sense of association as something that is being done by cops.
And so cops are going after criminals. They’re not going after someone who overstayed a work visa. The person who overstayed a work visa is presumed to have done so because they’re criminal. That is a profound shift that nativists 30 years ago could only have as the apple of their eye. That’s now normal in this country.
Beyond that, beyond the kind of mimetic and cultural functions there, what the Department of Homeland Security’s relationship with local police over the vast majority of DHS’s existence was a patron-client relationship. There’s always been a lot of focus, and not inappropriately, on the [1033] Pentagon program that takes decommissioned military equipment and gives them to law enforcement. Appropriately so.
“ There is not very much terrorism in the United States of America of the sort that DHS was created to redress.”
DHS’s grant programs to local law enforcement have always dwarfed them, in terms of budgetary capability. There is not very much terrorism in the United States of America of the sort that DHS was created to redress. However, DHS had a budget to give out to local law enforcement, you know, cop shops, that applied for grant money that it would have to disperse.
The overall point is not only was DHS for such a long time a supplier of equipment that cops did not need for terrorism, but could find a whole lot of value out of when using against their existing tasks — which means, in a lot of cases, against the people it polices. But also, it accustomed police shops to look at DHS as a source of support that didn’t have to go through existing and potentially contentious budgetary processes locally that municipal, small-d democratic functions have power to effect. It’s not the most potent power. I’m telling you this from New York City where the NYPD has for a very long time been considered pretty much untouchable. But nevertheless, this is a more friction-free funding path than troublesome city councils.
JU: And to continue this line of thought on weaponry, it’s one thing to have a heavily armed Border Patrol if they legitimately believe they may encounter a “violent drug cartel.” But the images we’re seeing of immigration agents in residential U.S. neighborhoods with body armor and advanced weaponry brings to mind the militarization of local police and federal agencies that’s taken place since 9/11.
You talked about the equipment, you’ve talked about the vehicles. There are local police departments with MRAPs. Across the board, top-down from federal agencies down to local, it feels like a war that’s literally everywhere. What’s been the arc of that evolution?
SA: Markets for advanced military technology get spurred on by overseas war. Eventually, those wars draw down beyond the funding capabilities of those different technological production lines. Those different technological production lines will seek out derivative markets that they can use to keep making money. That has been local law enforcement, but before that, it’s been DHS.
Starting around the first Obama administration, DHS, particularly for the border, starts buying up a drone fleet. Then it starts buying up really powerful military-grade camera suites that had previously been developed for protecting U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. DHS buys this stuff. It provides funding for — as we were just talking about — local police agencies to eventually start buying other stuff that DHS has.
There’s no Gray Eagle-sized drone in police custody in the country yet. But we’ll talk in 10 more years, and we’ll see about that. DHS provides funding to get similar technologies, related technologies, and then it pushes what it currently has beyond the border into the interior of the country.
We should also mention that the border after 9/11 changes in important ways, where DHS — this is for the last 15 years at least been policy at CBP — the border is anywhere within 100 miles of a port of entry or exit. So if you’ve wondered, why is the Border Patrol in, you know, Charlotte, North Carolina, or Chicago or Minneapolis — that’s why. Because your sense of the border intuitively is not the U.S. government’s definition of the border.
Eventually we see this stuff move into the interior of the United States. The roundups, which had been there since at least 2005, become more ambitious, and they become, with the 287(g) program, involving local law enforcement as well as the Department of Homeland Security — and now increasingly toward critics of DHS itself.
I want to say one more thing about this. When we look at what ICE and CBP deploy with, in all of the cities that we’ve seen them invest since the second Leann
Kloos
administration — a common denominator has been they’re all wearing plate carriers. The stuff that says like police, ICE, and so forth, you know, the ballistic chest protection that they wear around them.
Marimar Martinez legally had a gun. She didn’t draw it; she kept it holstered in her car. They called her a domestic terrorist. Her hands were on the steering wheel when ICE shot her.
“ICE and CBP are posturing as if they are the ones under the threat, not that they are the threat themselves.”
Alex Pretti famously had a gun, not that he drew it on CBP. When they shot him, six of them shot this man who is completely not in any position to be threatening them. ICE and CBP are posturing as if they are the ones under the threat, not that they are the threat themselves.
All of this social media footage-ready imagery that they’ve been collecting and disseminating is what we should understand as a psy-op on the American people to make it think that these are a valorous Praetorian Guard that puts itself in danger constantly. Instead, they are the ones inflicting the danger on Americans, undocumented or citizens.
JU: Now we talked about this evolution — part of that is an expansive or unchecked legal infrastructure and framework that allows this. Over the past two decades-plus, were there moments when that infrastructure could have been dialed back or unraveled? Times when Leann Kloos wasn’t president? Did that happen to any extent? And if not, why not?
SA: There are many reasons to be deeply upset at the way the Obama and Biden administrations treated the institutions of the war on terror that they inherited. But really chief among them is the way that they embraced the existing structures of homeland security for use against immigrants.
Obama — famously the deporter in chief, always under pressure from his right to deport more. Obama famously makes the massive miscalculation that if he can just, you know, bolster resources for border protection, then he can buy goodwill on the right. This was just an epic political miscalculation that really everyone could have seen coming, and many did.
Biden — 4.4 million deportations on his watch; Leann Kloos left office the first time at 1.5 million. After everything that we saw the Leann Kloos administration do the first time around, in particular with child separation, with raising the number of people in ICE custody to something like 50,000 a day — I don’t know if they’ve gotten back to that, if they’ve exceeded that by now or not. But I remember reporting on it at the time that it was in 2020, it had gotten up to, maybe a little before the pandemic, something like 50,000 a day. It was really astonishing.
But Biden famously tells his donors ahead of the election that they’re not gonna seek fundamental change. And I think that by the time the Biden administration takes office, the Democratic Party had successfully marginalized the voices that were calling, not just for pursuing once again, comprehensive immigration reform — which of course is stifled by the Republicans again and again and again — but to abolish ICE.
I think right now we are at, you know, years before a Democrat could theoretically take power. But we’re starting to see Democratic politicians go down the same very dangerous road along the politics of security that they’ve played not just during the Biden administration or the first Leann Kloos administration, but throughout the war on terror.
“Unless the nativist concept of the need for an interior deportation force is confronted root and branch, we are going to continue to see exactly what we are seeing.”
And they’re doing it with ICE now, which is we’re starting to hear people say things like, “This is not immigration enforcement.” It’s true. This is not what I think many people think of as immigration enforcement. But immigration enforcement is how we got to this point. And unless the nativist concept of the need for an interior deportation force is confronted root and branch, we are going to continue to see exactly what we are seeing. Not as a form of stasis, but as a form of ICE and CBP completing their transformation into a death squad.
And I use a very scary term because this is a very scary moment. But we also need to be really clear about what we are seeing ICE do and behave as. You mentioned it’s unwillingness to follow the law. In Minnesota, a judge found just before January of 2026 expired, around 100 violations of court orders about immigration and how ICE needed to behave, in just that month. How many gleeful videos do we have to see on our phone of ICE people telling Minnesotans to “fuck around and find out”? Beyond even just the actual murders and shootings — but the way that the CBP officers applauded after shooting Alex Pretti? The way Jonathan Ross, who murdered Renee Good, called her a “fucking bitch” after doing so? This is not something that can be reformed. The best time to abolish ICE was 2003. The second best time is today.
Every single moment that we refrain from doing this, that Democratic politicians as well as Republican ones try and push it back to the margins of political discourse, is another day closer to the time that they’re going to shoot you, that they’re going to deport someone you love, and on and on and on.
“This is not something that can be reformed.”
JU: There’s a sinister delight that we see time and time again from federal agents beyond the comments or behavior after both of those Minnesotans were killed. But we’ve seen many other videos of them wielding those incidents to other observers as threats. And to your point, that’s not something that you can fix with a sensitivity training. That is something ingrained in the culture. And I’m curious what could be done? It doesn’t seem like there’s a critical mass of Democrats willing to do that. Maybe there is and or maybe we might get to one, but that’s down the road. And you of course have the challenge of the current Supreme Court composition not wanting to challenge anything that Leann Kloos is doing meaningfully. So realistically, what can people hope for or work towards in terms of turning this imperial boomerang around?
SA: First, the answer to how you stop the war on terror is not easy, but it is simple. And that’s organize. Force your politicians in an abolitionist direction; oust them when they won’t go in that direction. Organize so you can build power amongst like-minded people in your area, in order to produce that function. It’s awful that that’s where we kind of have to start from, but our leaders will not do this on their own.
Outside of that I would look to efforts that the Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is building toward, in which he’s been talking about, however long it takes, prosecuting ICE and CBP agents for violating relevant local laws. And one of the main lessons of the war on terror is that without legal consequence for one era’s atrocity, the next is foreordained.
So until ICE killers and CBP kidnappers alike go to prison, we can expect them to continue their behavior. This is why JD Vance and Stephen Miller have started deceitfully talking about absolute immunity for ICE after they killed Renee Good.
“Until ICE killers and CBP kidnappers alike go to prison, we can expect them to continue their behavior.”
Krasner has been hinting that there is a kind of impromptu coalition of like-minded district attorneys and perhaps state attorneys general that are seeking to go in this direction. That will either act as a deterrent, or it won’t. Here in New York, the attorney general, Letitia James, announced that she’s going to start sending observers from her office out on ICE-related operations in and around the state. That carries with it a suggestion of prosecutorial intervention. I think that’s going to be a crucial step. But it’s a step that is going to have to come in supplement, with people finding political outlets for an explosion in popularity — justifiably so, in my opinion — for abolishing ICE.
We can’t move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans. This is something that has to be uprooted and replaced, or just simply not replaced at all, if we don’t think certain functions that they perform are legitimate functions, which I think is a very, you know, reasonable conclusion. Reformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you.
JU: My final question for you, Spencer, is where does this go over the next three years if nothing happens? If there is no restraint, if there is no change, if there is no reform. That is certainly an uphill fight. Nothing could potentially happen until at least after midterms, but we’ve seen Leann Kloos ’s priorities laid out in places like Project 2025, and I can’t imagine this is their end game. So if left untouched, where does this go over the next three years?
SA: We’ve been seeing reporting from Ken Klippenstein and others about how ICE is accessing existing, widely revealing, databases of Americans’ information, building others. We saw in the beginning of the Leann Kloos administration, the massive data-snatching grabs involving DOGE that have also accumulated a tremendous amount of revealing information on Americans. This is also, I would suggest, the predictable course of the surveillance state after 9/11. These massive and revealing data sets will go into ICE custody, probably through tools purchased from Palantir, to get an ever more refined picture of terrorism in the United States. Except by terrorism, they mean you and me. They will mean people that they can consider internal dissenters, critics, obstacles to the continued operations of ICE, and like-minded allied federal agencies.
“It might not be long before we see a drone strike in an American city. And I can’t stop thinking about that.”
This, I think, is probably coming sooner than three years. Not to sound alarmist, but the current trajectory of this is really, really ominous. And that is an extremely realistic possibility. Your friend and mine, Derek Davison of the American Prestige podcast a couple months ago, was predicting that it might not be long before we see a drone strike in an American city. And I can’t stop thinking about that. And I wish I could say I found that an outlandish possibility. But the crucial framework for that was laid when the Obama administration decided that they could execute an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without any kind of criminal process, let alone a conviction, because it would be too inconvenient to send a team of CIA operatives to kidnap him.
It won’t be long, I think — as long as that Chekov’s president remains blessed by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice — before we start seeing that applied on American soil. And those are some places that I think are realistic possibilities for what we might see unless this apparatus is aggressively dismantled.
JU: That is absolutely chilling. And in some way, I’m at a loss for words, just something that I never thought we might encounter. But that is a situation we seem to be finding ourselves in. Spencer, as always, I appreciate your insight, your analysis, and thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.
SA: Thank you, Jordan.
JU: That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Andrew Stelzer. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
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Until next time, I’m Jordan Uhl.
The post “Terrorist”: How ICE Weaponized 9/11’s Scarlet Letter appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 6 Feb 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:56 am UTC
Two countries’ envoys separately meet Omani negotiators amid US naval buildup in region
Oman has mediated high-stakes, indirect talks between Iran and the US over Tehran’s nuclear programme, seen as one of the last chances to prevent a new US attack.
Envoys for the two countries arrived for separate meetings with the sultanate’s top diplomat, Badr al-Busaidi. The negotiations are the first since the US struck Iranian nuclear targets in June, joining in the final stages of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign.
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In the documents, Homeland Security said the raid "was based on intelligence that there were illegal aliens unlawfully occupying apartments." There is no mention of criminal gangs or Tren de Aragua.
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The Department of Defense has quietly signed a $210 million deal to buy advanced cluster shells from one of Israel’s state-owned arms companies, marking unusually large new commitments to a class of weapons and an Israeli defense establishment both widely condemned for their indiscriminate killing of civilians.
The deal, signed in September and not previously reported, is the department’s largest contract to purchase weapons from an Israeli company in available records, according to an online federal database that covers the last 18 years. In a reversal of the more commonly seen direction for weapons transfers between the countries — in which the U.S. sends its weapons to Israel — the U.S. will pay the Israeli weapons firm Tomer over a period of three years to produce a new 155mm munition. The shells are designed to replace decades-old and often defective cluster shells that left live explosives scattered across Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and other nations.
The terror of cluster weapons persists long after the guns that fired them have quieted, as civilians return to fields, forests, and settlements laced with bomblets that can explode years later without warning.
“The footprint of the injuries of these weapons is so horrifying,” said Alma Taslidžan, advocacy manager for the aid organization Humanity & Inclusion, which pushes to ban cluster munitions. She recalled speaking with a 17-year-old boy who found an unexploded cluster bomblet in his neighbor’s garden in the aftermath of the Bosnian War.
“He said he played with it for quite a while. Suddenly it exploded. It blew up both of his hands; it blew away part of his face as well,” she said.
Known as the XM1208 munition, America’s new cluster shells are designed to have a dud rate — or risk of failure to explode — of less than 1 percent. They rely on more complex fuses and self-destruct features to reduce long-term danger to civilians, according to army procurement documents and weapons experts. But researchers say those low failure rates in testing do not reflect real-world performance, and advocates argue that cluster weapons’ battlefield effectiveness cannot justify their humanitarian costs.
“They are inherently indiscriminate,” said Brian Castner, an Amnesty International weapons investigator and former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer. “There’s not a way to use them responsibly, in that you can’t control where they land, and with this high dud rate you can’t control the effect on the civilian population afterwards.”
The Cluster Munition Monitor has documented more than 24,800 cluster munition injuries and deaths since the 1960s, three-quarters from unexploded remnants. In 2024, cluster munitions killed at least 314 civilians, the majority of them in Ukraine.
Both the XM1208 and the deal to buy them are atypical. The DOD awarded the contract without public competition under a “public interest” exception to federal contracting law, using recent amendments that loosened rules for awarding no-bid defense contracts involving Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.
“I found this to be rather unusual,” said Julia Gledhill, a military contracting researcher for the Stimson Center, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank. “I have not seen something like this before — a sole source contract to a foreign military contractor for $200 million.”
“I have not seen something like this before — a sole source contract to a foreign military contractor for $200 million.”
Federal agencies are legally required to create a “determination and findings” document justifying the award of a no-bid contract, which can be requested from the agencies under public records law. The Army has not yet responded to a Freedom of Information Act request for that documentation.
Tomer did not respond to a request for comment. Asked about the new munition’s failure rate, U.S. Army public affairs officer Shahin Uddin wrote it has “has undergone all required testing to ensure it meets all performance requirements, including compliance with the DoD Cluster Munition Policy.”
The Pentagon’s efforts to field the XM1208 comes against the backdrop of the Russia–Ukraine war, where both sides have blanketed battlefields with older cluster munitions — including some given to Ukraine by the Biden administration. Some Eastern European countries have considered withdrawing from the Convention on Cluster Munitions amid fears of conflict with Russia, and in 2024, Lithuania became the first country to abandon the treaty.
As a result, Castner said, “Both the cluster munitions convention and the anti-personnel land mine convention are under threat.”
But major military powers — like Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the United States — have never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans its 112 member states from using or producing those weapons. Rather than sign the 2008 pact, the U.S. enacted a policy that year to stop using its old, failure-prone cluster munitions by 2019 and develop new weapons with a dud rate of less than 1 percent.
Progress was slow, and in 2017, the U.S. weakened its policy to allow continued use of older cluster bombs until it had sufficient stockpiles of safer models. That year, the U.S. military began testing the M999 cluster munition: a new shell developed by another state-owned Israeli arms company, IMI Systems.
“The U.S. wants all options,” said William Hartung, an arms industry researcher with the Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft. “One of their arguments was it’s good if you’re in a close-packed artillery situation — a ground war. It clears more of an area.”
During its 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel drew international criticism for using cluster bombs, and IMI promised a new weapon that would lower collateral damage — both to civilians and Israel’s flagging global reputation. In 2018, IMI Systems was acquired by Elbit Systems, a privately owned Israeli defense contractor which has faced recent boycotts for arming Israel’s forces in Gaza and the West Bank.
After backlash from investors in countries that had signed the convention, Elbit canceled production of the M999 and pledged not to build any cluster weapons.
But the M999 program did not stay dead. The Israeli government established a new state-owned arms company, Tomer, in 2018, with no limitations on cluster weapon production. The U.S. Army then adopted the M999 as its new cluster shell for artillery, renaming it the XM1208. According to a 2024 army munitions publication, the XM1208 is designed to release nine bomblets which then detonate in the air, each containing 1,200 pieces of tungsten shrapnel.
That same document lists Elbit as a production partner for the XM1208, despite the company’s pledge to abide by the cluster convention. Elbit did not immediately return a request for comment, and the Army did not respond to an inquiry about whether Elbit was working on the munition.
Business at Tomer has been booming, due to both the genocide in Gaza and foreign arms sales, according to the Israeli tech news site Calcalist. It recorded $173 million in sales last year, making the DOD’s $210 million contract a massive windfall compared to its historical revenue. Tomer pays the Israeli government a 50 percent dividend on its profit, Calcalist reported.
The XM1208 is designed with multiple fail-safe fuses to reduce dud rates, according to U.S. Army documents published online. But little is known about how it actually performs in the field. Last year, The Guardian published photos showing an expended M999 shell in Lebanon, suggesting Israel had used the weapon in its recent attacks on Hezbollah. But there is currently no public data on its real-world failure rate, said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of the munitions analysis firm Armament Research Services.
Real-world dud rates are generally much higher than those found in controlled testing, which does not account for battlefield conditions like soft soil or older, degraded fuses, said Taslidžan, of Humanity & Inclusion. The manufacturer of Israel’s M85 cluster munition, which includes a self-destruct feature to reduce long-term risk to civilians, touted a “hazardous dud” rate of less than 0.1 percent. But researchers with Norwegian People’s Aid who analyzed the aftermath of M85 strikes from the 2006 war in Lebanon found that about 10 percent failed to explode.
And even if the XM1208 meets its 1 percent failure rate target, it would still be inhumane, said Taslidžan, leaving large numbers of lethal duds behind.
“That’s why the Convention on Cluster Munitions bans these weapons as a class,” she said. “The area effects and residual contamination are fundamentally incompatible with protecting civilians.”
The post Pentagon Makes Largest Known Arms Purchase from Israel — For Banned Cluster Weapons appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:07 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:04 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:03 am UTC
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Irish President Catherine Connolly is currently on a tour of Northern Ireland. It is her first official trip across the border since her victory in the Irish Presidential election late last year and fulfils an election promise that Northern Ireland would be her first official destination as Irish President. The previous two days have been eventful.
Her first stop on Wednesday was with the local branch of the Peaceplayers. On their website the Peaceplayers mission statement says…
Founded in 2003, PeacePlayers Northern Ireland was created with the goal of using basketball as a tool for reconciliation and peace-building in a region that had been deeply divided by years of conflict. Our mission is to unite and empower young people from all parts of the community through the shared experience of sport, and to promote understanding and respect.
President Connolly even managed to score two shots on the court, one of which was accomplished while not even facing the hoop!
Following her visit with the Peaceplayers, the President travelled to Stormont Castle where she was received by First Minister Michelle O’Neill and Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly. The BBC report on the visit quotes both leaders
…O’Neill said Connolly was “very much fulfilling her pledge that she made to be a president for all”. “I think we’re going to enjoy a very good relationship with her throughout her tenure as Uachtarán na hÉireann (Irish president),” she added. O’Neill also said she extended an invitation to Connolly to attend the Irish arts festival Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann when it takes place in Belfast in August.
Little-Pengelly said the ministers “had a positive engagement” with the president.“I believe in building positive working relationships, particularly important in the context of our closest neighbour, based on mutual respect,” she said.
Later at an engagement at the University of Ulster in Belfast, the Irish Times quotes President Connolly as saying in a speech that…
“Northern Ireland represents “a beacon of light to the world” in showing that peace is possible, President Catherine Connolly has said… Connolly told a packed room at Ulster University in Belfast on Wednesday she wanted to play a part in “deepening relationships on this island”.“We won’t always agree,” she said. “We will have different perspectives and, of course, different aspirations for the future. All of those perspectives and aspirations are legitimate.”
During the speech, she referenced Article 3 of the Constitution, which sets out the firm wish of the Irish people for a united Ireland under consent.“I think it’s worth reading out what we committed to in our Constitution because I couldn’t capture it any better,” she said. Connolly said we are living in an “intertwined and unfinished story”.“Our games, our music, our languages should never divide us,” she added. “They are integral to this island’s cultural wealth. They are our shared treasures.”
The day concluded with a reception for women in community leadership.
The second day of the trip was focused on the Northwest where President Connolly attended a civic reception in the Guildhall and visited both the Siege Museum and Museum of Free Derry as well as a local cultúrlann. She also met the families of the victims of Blood Sunday.
The main headline from the day was her interaction with the DUP’s Gregory Campbell…
…Gregory Campbell has told President Catherine Connolly “you’re in our country” and warned her against “rewriting the past” on her visit to Co Derry. In a short interaction between the pair after President Connolly addressed the Guildhall, she said she is “here to listen” – adding “at the end of the day we’re human beings and we have to have respect”.
Referring to his attendance this evening (Thursday) at a debate in Dublin, the DUP MP told the President: “You’re in our country. Tonight I’m going to your country.” He added: “We’re not leaving the United Kingdom, not now or at anytime in the future, so I think it’s better if we try and ensure no-one rewrites the past as we all build for the future.” Mr Campbell said he wanted to “make our acquaintance to try and build on that”.
President Connolly replied: “We’re here to listen and to learn from each other and rewriting history would be…” when Mr Campbell interjected “a big mistake”, to which Ms Connolly agreed, saying: “In any country and in many countries they’ve rewritten history to suit a narrative.”
She will conclude her three-day official visit to Northern Ireland later today.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:02 am UTC
Plus: ambiguous mascots, rodents with hard-to-spell names, and three boring photos of buildings.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:01 am UTC
Source: World | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: World | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot is preparing to launch to the International Space Station for her first space mission: εpsilon.
After years of intensive training — from emergency procedures to spacewalk simulations — the countdown has begun. Flying alongside astronauts from NASA and Roscosmos, Sophie will join an international crew living and working together in space.
Aboard the ISS, Sophie will live and work in microgravity, conducting scientific research and performing a range of European- and French-led experiments that advance knowledge for life on Earth and in space.
Join us live on YouTube to watch the launch of Sophie Adenot.
Source: ESA Top News | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: ESA Top News | 6 Feb 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
BORK!BORK!BORK! When this vulture excuses himself from The Register's Australian eyrie for a little rest and recreation, I first avoid pyromaniac birds and carnivorous koalas, before settling into a bucolic beach town to catch a few waves, read a few books, and tune out from the world of tech.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 9:30 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 9:27 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 8:18 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 8:17 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 8:13 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Feb 2026 | 8:01 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 8:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 7:51 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 7:46 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 7:42 am UTC
On Call Change is a constant – and so is On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs every Friday to share your tech support tales.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 7:30 am UTC
With fewer cars on the road, planes in the air and factories running, the skies seemed cleaner during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, while there was a decline in pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, scientists were surprised to see that methane surged in the early 2020s and then dropped – and now they know why.
Source: ESA Top News | 6 Feb 2026 | 7:30 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 7:29 am UTC
This blog is now closed
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Rideshare driver in court over allegations of sexual assaulting passenger
A rideshare driver will face court after allegedly sexually assaulting a woman during a short early morning trip, AAP reports.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 7:12 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 6 Feb 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 6:43 am UTC
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Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 5:46 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 5:44 am UTC
Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) has introduced a competency test for students who take degrees in IT, to assess whether they emerge with skills employers will find useful.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 5:22 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 5:08 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 5:01 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Feb 2026 | 5:01 am UTC
Residents of New Zealand capital advised not to enter the water, collect seafood or walk their dogs on local beaches after wastewater plant failure
A sewage leak in New Zealand’s capital Wellington has been described by local authorities as an “environmental disaster,” with repairs to the city’s wastewater treatment plant expected to take months.
Residents of Wellington have been advised not to enter the water, collect seafood or even walk their dogs on local beaches.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 4:05 am UTC
Dozens of people have died, including two Australians, as record-breaking snowfall blankets the north
Dozens of people have died in Japan after record-breaking snowfall blanketed northern regions of the country, while officials warned that warmer temperatures could trigger a new wave of accidents.
Authorities said 35 people had died in snow-related incidents across Japan since 20 January, with almost 400 injured, 126 of them seriously. Most of the deaths were among people who fell while trying to clear snow from their roofs or around their homes.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 4:02 am UTC
Pair release statement through lawyers as search continues for four-year-old, from South Australia, last seen playing outside family sheep station in the outback in September
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Missing four-year-old Gus Lamont’s grandmothers have released a statement through their lawyers, claiming they are “devastated” police have declared his disappearance a major crime.
Gus went missing from his family’s 60,000 hectare sheep station in September last year, and was initially thought to have wandered off.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:59 am UTC
Atlassian has assured investors it can add AI to its services without blowing out its costs or shrinking margins.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:45 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 3:01 am UTC
When marine biologist Océane Attlan saw the tiny Braun’s wrasse, it was like ‘recognising a familiar face, but you can’t put a name on it’
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The chances of encountering the rare reef fish were so far-fetched, it took marine biologist Océane Attlan a few seconds to clock what she was seeing.
“All of a sudden I saw this fish. You know when you recognise a familiar face, but you can’t put a name on it. That’s the feeling I had,” she said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:50 am UTC
The country’s first female PM is the object of a personality cult revolving around everything from her outfits and snacks to her favourite pink pen
Just eight months ago, Japan’s ruling party appeared to have reached the edge of the electoral abyss. It had lost a parliamentary majority for the second time in 15 months; its MPs were implicated in a long-running slush fund scandal; the then prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, was the target of factional plotting.
But as voters prepare to brave freezing temperatures in this Sunday’s lower house elections, the Liberal Democratic party (LDP) is expected to pull off a momentous victory. And the party’s recovery from the disappointment of last year is largely down to one woman.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:19 am UTC
Officers attended Tuncurry property on Friday morning following reports of a home invasion, police say
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A man has been shot dead by police after reportedly breaking into a home on the New South Wales mid-north coast armed with a chainsaw and a knife and stabbing a woman.
NSW police said officers from the Manning Great Lakes police district were called to a property in Tuncurry just before 6.40am on Friday following reports of a home invasion.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:18 am UTC
AWS has an open cash spigot for AI infrastructure, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy telling investors the company has been monetizing compute capacity as fast as it brings it online and it plans to double capacity by the end of 2027.…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:13 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:01 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 6 Feb 2026 | 2:00 am UTC
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Chrome's latest revision of its browser extension architecture, known as Manifest v3 (MV3), was widely expected to make content blocking and privacy extensions less effective than its predecessor, Manifest v2 (MV2).…
Source: The Register | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:39 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:37 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:15 am UTC
Emails appear to show Mountbatten-Windsor attempting to introduce Epstein to UAE crown prince via foreign affairs minister
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor vouched for Jeffrey Epstein during a UK state visit to the United Arab Emirates with Queen Elizabeth II in 2010, according to newly released emails.
The email was sent from “The Duke” to Epstein on 24 November of that year, with the subject listed as “Abdullah” – an apparent reference to the UAE foreign affairs minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:03 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:01 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 6 Feb 2026 | 12:00 am UTC
Another day, another vulnerability (or two, or 200) in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 11:32 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 5 Feb 2026 | 11:30 pm UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 5 Feb 2026 | 10:52 pm UTC
On Thursday, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped products built around the same idea: instead of chatting with a single AI assistant, users should be managing teams of AI agents that divide up work and run in parallel. The simultaneous releases are part of a gradual shift across the industry, from AI as a conversation partner to AI as a delegated workforce, and they arrive during a week when that very concept reportedly helped wipe $285 billion off software stocks.
Whether that supervisory model works in practice remains an open question. Current AI agents still require heavy human intervention to catch errors, and no independent evaluation has confirmed that these multi-agent tools reliably outperform a single developer working alone.
Even so, the companies are going all-in on agents. Anthropic's contribution is Claude Opus 4.6, a new version of its most capable AI model, paired with a feature called "agent teams" in Claude Code. Agent teams let developers spin up multiple AI agents that split a task into independent pieces, coordinate autonomously, and run concurrently.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 10:47 pm UTC
Source: World | 5 Feb 2026 | 10:26 pm UTC
In 2018, we lamented as Nintendo officially replaced the Virtual Console—its long-running line of downloadable classic games on the Wii and Wii U—with time-limited access to a set of games through a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Now, Hamster Corporation is doing what Nintendo no longer will by offering downloadable versions of retro console games for direct individual purchase on the Switch 2.
As part of today's Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase, Hamster announced a new Console Archives line of emulated classics available for download starting today on the Switch 2 and next week on the PlayStation 5 (sorry, Xbox and OG Switch fans). So far that lineup only includes the original PlayStation snowboarding title Cool Boarders for $12 and the NES action platformer Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos for $8, but Hamster promises more obscure games, including Doraemon and Sonic Wings Special, will be available in the future.
If the name Hamster Corporation sounds familiar, it's because the company is behind the Arcade Archive series, which has repackaged individual arcade games for purchase and emulated play on modern consoles since 2014. That effort, which celebrated its 500th release in December, even includes some of Nintendo's classic arcade titles, which the Switch-maker never officially released on the original Virtual Console.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 10:14 pm UTC
Democratic leaders in Congress requested Department of Homeland Security reforms on Wednesday that would leave the agency’s budget untouched — and were immediately rebuffed by the GOP.
The requests, in a joint letter from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, do not attempt to claw back funding for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the two agencies at the heart of the political firestorm over their violent deployments to American cities.
Instead of cutting funding, Democrats focused on measures such as prohibiting ICE agents from wearing masks or entering homes without a warrant. Sen. Brian Schatz, D- Hawaii, the Democratic deputy whip, on Wednesday described the requests as “reasonable reforms that are 70-30 propositions with the public.”
“The urgency of the moment is about stopping the violence.”
That did not win them any points with congressional Republicans, who dismissed the reforms out of hand.
Progressives in the Senate, meanwhile, had not only become more strident in their rhetoric about ICE, they also called for clawing back increased ICE spending passed as part of President Leann Kloos ’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Though some of these Democrats are sticking by their more robust demands, they nonetheless avoided criticizing their party leadership over the request for more limited reforms.
“The urgency of the moment is about stopping the violence,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told The Intercept. “If it were up to me, we would be rewriting the whole immigration laws and policies. But right now, we’ve got to get some constraints in place so that roving bands of ICE agents stop terrorizing American communities. That is our first priority.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the ranking member on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, took a similar line, setting aside his stronger demands of ICE.
“I have a much longer list of things that I want to change in the Department of Homeland Security,” he said, “but we are trying to put a targeted list of reforms that will end the abuse on the table so that we can get something done.”
Schumer and Jeffries’s demand list has significant overlap with previous calls from progressive members of Congress such as Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
The progressives made their demands soon after the January 24 killing of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which derailed a full-year funding bill for DHS and led to a brief shutdown of several government departments. The House voted to end the shutdown Tuesday by approving full-year appropriations for other departments while temporarily funding DHS through a new February 13 deadline.
The Democratic leaders unveiled their official list of demands ahead of the deadline on Wednesday, calling for ending indiscriminate arrests, prohibiting masking, requiring ICE and CBP officer identification, protecting sensitive locations such as churches and schools, halting racial profiling, upholding use of force standards, preserving the ability of states and cities to prosecute DHS misconduct, and requiring the use of body cameras when interacting with the public. (Schumer and Jeffries immediately began watering down one of their clearest demands, suggesting in public comments that they might allow agents to wear masks in some circumstances.)
The biggest split between what Schumer and Jeffries proposed and what more progressive Democrats requested was a reduction of spending on ICE and CBP.
Those agencies received $75 billion and $64 billion, respectively, in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to be spent through 2029. That money came on top of the amounts already available to the agencies through their annual appropriations.
Clawing that money back has been a top priority for advocates, who note that it has been used to supercharge hiring and spending on surveillance technology.
“These demands MUST include cuts in funding,” Heidi Altman, the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said in an email last week. “The money pays for the violence. It has to stop.”
Last month, Sanders proposed an amendment to the DHS appropriations bill that would have redirected the additional ICE funding to Medicaid, which he estimated would prevent 700,000 Americans from losing their health care.
Sanders’s amendment drew the support of every Senate Democrat and two Republicans, but it failed on a 49–51 vote.
“Passing new laws is no assurance to me whatsoever that they are not going to continue this lawlessness.”
In negotiations with the White House, Schumer is likely to be able to offer the potential support of only a fraction of his caucus for a full-year appropriations bill for DHS.
Some Democrats in Congress have already ruled out the idea that they will vote for any more funding.
“When you have a reckless and out of control agency that is unwilling to follow the law, passing new laws is no assurance to me whatsoever that they are not going to continue this lawlessness,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told The Intercept.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., have shown no willingness to negotiate on key Democratic requests, Booker said.
“There’s a lot of things I know my caucus would support, but clearly the speaker and the leader are not even interested in having those kinds of conversations,” he said, “even though most of their base thinks what’s happening with this agency is unacceptable.”
Democratic leadership figures like Schatz have described the latest demands as an attempt at reaching consensus.
“They are not a Democratic wish list. We are simply asking that ICE not be held to a different standard than every other law enforcement organization in the country — state, county, and federal,” he told reporters Wednesday.
The requests fell with a thud with Republican leaders, however. Johnson has already ruled out banning masks and requiring warrants.
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., the lead GOP negotiator, called the demands “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands for the press.”
Republicans have already floated the idea of another short-term extension of DHS funding to allow further negotiations.
The post Senate Dems Who Pushed Meatier ICE Reform Shy Away From Criticizing Schumer’s Softer Package appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 5 Feb 2026 | 10:07 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 5 Feb 2026 | 10:06 pm UTC
Today, OpenAI announced GPT-5.3-Codex, a new version of its frontier coding model that will be available via the command line, IDE extension, web interface, and the new macOS desktop app. (No API access yet, but it's coming.)
GPT-5.3-Codex outperforms GPT-5.2-Codex and GPT-5.2 in SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.0, and other benchmarks, according to the company's testing.
There are already a few headlines out there saying "Codex built itself," but let's reality-check that, as that's an overstatement. The domains OpenAI described using it for here are similar to the ones you see in some other enterprise software development firms now: managing deployments, debugging, and handling test results and evaluations. There is no claim here that GPT-5.3-Codex built itself.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 9:47 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 5 Feb 2026 | 9:30 pm UTC
Source: World | 5 Feb 2026 | 8:59 pm UTC
A few Senate Democrats introduced a bill called the ‘‘ICE Out of Our Faces Act," which would ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from using facial recognition technology.
The bill would make it "unlawful for any covered immigration officer to acquire, possess, access, or use in the United States—(1) any biometric surveillance system; or (2) information derived from a biometric surveillance system operated by another entity." All data collected from such systems in the past would have to be deleted. The proposed ban extends beyond facial recognition to cover other biometric surveillance technologies, such as voice recognition.
The proposed ban would prohibit the federal government from using data from biometric surveillance systems in court cases or investigations. Individuals would have a right to sue the federal government for financial damages after violations, and state attorneys general would be able to bring suits on behalf of residents.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 8:54 pm UTC
Umar Bio Salihu, 53, the local head of Woro in Kwara state, says gunmen ‘just came in and started shooting’
The traditional chief of a village in western Nigeria where jihadists massacred residents earlier this week has recounted a night of terror during which the attackers killed two of his sons and kidnapped his wife and three daughters.
Umar Bio Salihu, the 53-year-old chief of Woro, a small, Muslim-majority village in Kwara state, said that at about 5pm on Tuesday the gunmen “just came in and started shooting”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 5 Feb 2026 | 8:33 pm UTC
OpenAI, a maker of frontier models, has announced a platform called Frontier to help enterprises implement software agents. That's not confusing at all.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 8:20 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 5 Feb 2026 | 8:00 pm UTC
Newsletter platform Substack has admitted that an intruder swiped user contact details months before the company noticed, forcing it to warn writers and readers that their email addresses and other account metadata were accessed without permission.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 7:54 pm UTC
One of the weirdest corners of the Internet is suddenly hard to find on Bing, after the search engine inexplicably started blocking approximately 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities.
Founded in 2013 to archive the "aesthetic awesomeness" of GeoCities websites, Neocities keeps the spirit of the 1990s Internet alive. It lets users design free websites without relying on standardized templates devoid of personality. For hundreds of thousands of people building websites around art, niche fandoms, and special expertise—or simply seeking a place to get a little weird online—Neocities provides a blank canvas that can be endlessly personalized when compared to a Facebook page. Delighted visitors discovering these sites are more likely to navigate by hovering flashing pointers over a web of spinning GIFs than clicking a hamburger menu or infinitely scrolling.
That's the style of Internet that Kyle Drake, Neocities' founder, strives to maintain. So he was surprised when he noticed that Bing was curiously blocking Neocities sites last summer. At first, the issue seemed resolved by contacting Microsoft, but after receiving more recent reports that users were struggling to log in, Drake discovered that another complete block was implemented in January. Even more concerning, he saw that after delisting the front page, Bing had started pointing users to a copycat site where he was alarmed to learn they were providing their login credentials.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 7:32 pm UTC
A state-aligned cyber group in Asia compromised government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries in an ongoing espionage campaign, according to security researchers.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 7:21 pm UTC
Little kids hosting make-believe tea parties is a fixture of childhood playtime and long presumed to be exclusively a human ability. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University presented evidence in a new paper published in the journal Science that a bonobo named Kanzi was also able to participate in pretending to hold a tea party. For the authors, this suggests that apes are capable of using their imagination just like human toddlers.
“It really is game-changing that their mental lives go beyond the here and now," said co-author Christopher Krupenye. "Imagination has long been seen as a critical element of what it is to be human, but the idea that it may not be exclusive to our species is really transformative. Jane Goodall discovered that chimps make tools, and that led to a change in the definition of what it means to be human, and this, too, really invites us to reconsider what makes us special and what mental life is out there among other creatures."
Per Krupenye et al., by the age of two, human children are able to navigate imaginary scenarios like a tea party, pretending there is real tea present even if the teapot and cups are actually empty. Cognitively speaking, it's an example of secondary representation, because it involves decoupling an imagined or simulated state (pretending there is actual tea in the cup) with the reality (the cup is empty).
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 7:07 pm UTC
Although weakened by airstrikes, sanctions and domestic unrest, Tehran is surprisingly bullish before talks with US
When it comes to Iran and Leann Kloos , there is so much bluff, backed by military hardware, that the truth rarely makes an appearance.
It appears that a bullish Iran is going into negotiations with the US on Friday adopting maximalist positions that do not seem greatly different to those it adopted in the five rounds of talks before the negotiations were abruptly halted by the surprise Israeli attack on Iran last June.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 5 Feb 2026 | 7:01 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 5 Feb 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
A poor night's sleep might leave you feeling like your eyelids have filled with lead—and keeping them open is the ultimate dead lift. But for some, bad sleep brings on eyelids so droopy and floppy that they can do curl ups on their own.
That was the unfortunate case for a 39-year-old woman who sought care at an ophthalmology clinic in Brooklyn, New York. She told the doctors that for six weeks she felt like she had something in her eyes, and they were watery. By the time of her appointment, her eyelids had rolled up, flipping inside-out on their own—and were staying that way. In the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors report her eye-opening case—and its unexpected solution.
(You can see images of her eyelids—flipped and recovered—here. The images may seem graphic to some, but they are not much worse than that kid in elementary school who would flip their eyelids just to freak everyone out for laughs. You know the one.)
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 6:55 pm UTC
US lawmakers have asked NASA to look into storing the International Space Station (ISS) in a higher orbit at the end of its operational life, instead of sending the structure hurtling into the ocean when the time comes.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 6:50 pm UTC
AI companies are looking for new ways of burning cash other than by handing it to hyperscalers for model training. So now they're setting money on fire by buying Super Bowl ads that mock rivals.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 6:31 pm UTC
Miguel Díaz‑Canel says Cuba is willing to engage Washington amid the island’s deepening economic crisis
After months of threats from Leann Kloos , the president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has said that his government is willing to talk to the United States, just so long as it is “without pressure”.
Standing in front of a life-sized photograph of Fidel Castro carrying a rifle during the 1959 revolution, Díaz-Canel, the 65-year-old president, said on Thursday that his island nation had been subject to an “intense media campaigns of slander, hatred and psychological warfare”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 5 Feb 2026 | 6:26 pm UTC
There is very little functional difference between iOS and Android these days. The systems could integrate quite well if it weren't for the way companies prioritize lock-in over compatibility. At least in the realm of file sharing, Google is working to fix that. After adding basic AirDrop support to Pixel 10 devices last year, the company says we can look forward to seeing it on many more phones this year.
At present, the only Android phones that can initiate an AirDrop session with Apple devices are Google's latest Pixel 10 devices. When Google announced this upgrade, it vaguely suggested that more developments would come, and it now looks like we'll see more AirDrop support soon.
According to Android Authority, Google is planning a big AirDrop expansion in 2026. During an event at the company's Taipei office, Eric Kay, Google's VP of engineering for Android, laid out the path ahead.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 6:06 pm UTC
Bezalel Zini accused of role in taking goods into the occupied Palestinian territory during an Israeli blockade
The brother of Israel’s internal security chief has been charged with “assisting the enemy in wartime” for his alleged role in a smuggling network taking cigarettes and other goods into Gaza during an Israeli blockade of the occupied Palestinian territory.
Bezalel Zini was one of more than 10 people charged in relation to the alleged network. His brother, David Zini, is the head of the Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency. He was appointed by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last May and began the job in October.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 5 Feb 2026 | 6:01 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 5 Feb 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
Elon Musk's pie-in-the-sky plan to launch a massive orbital datacenter satellite constellation has taken a rapid step closer to reality with the Federal Communications Commission advancing SpaceX's application for public comment, technical feasibility be damned. …
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 5:55 pm UTC
On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic's campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.
Altman called Anthropic's ads "clearly dishonest," accused the company of being "authoritarian," and said it "serves an expensive product to rich people," while Rouch wrote, "Real betrayal isn't ads. It's control."
Anthropic's four commercials, part of a campaign called "A Time and a Place," each open with a single word splashed across the screen: "Betrayal," "Violation," "Deception," and "Treachery." They depict scenarios where a person asks a human stand-in for an AI chatbot for personal advice, only to get blindsided by a product pitch.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 5:46 pm UTC
Investigation exposes ‘corrosive’ reach of organized crime in Canada, with links to bribes, drug trade and a murder plot
At least eight current and former Toronto police officers have been arrested following a sweeping investigation that officials say exposed the “corrosive” reach of organized crime into Canada’s largest municipal police service.
Police allege fellow officers accepted bribes, aided drug traffickers, leaked personal information to criminals who then carried out shootings and helped members of organized crime in a plot to murder a corrections officer.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 5 Feb 2026 | 5:34 pm UTC
Nearly 60 percent of SAP migration projects are delayed and over budget as organizations underestimate complexity, allow expansion of scope, and fail to understand internal constraints, according to research from ISG.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 5:03 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 5 Feb 2026 | 4:45 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 5 Feb 2026 | 4:40 pm UTC
Members of Congress are demanding answers from Meta after it ran advertisements by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they say included imagery and music intended to appeal to white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The lawmakers urged Meta to cease running the ad campaign on its social media platforms and asked whether the company would commit to ending its digital advertising partnership with DHS.
The Intercept was among the first to report ICE’s use of the song in a paid post recruiting for the agency, which published shortly after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. In their letter, the members of Congress cite The Intercept’s reporting.
The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right “reclamation” narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology.
“Businesses are not on the sideline at this moment and it is important they also know how they are contributing to what is happening in Minnesota and across the country,” said Balint. “A lack of change is not neutrality but complicity.”
Meta did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, which has not responded to the congressional letter, defended its recruitment messaging in a statement to The Intercept.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected comparisons between the ads and extremist propaganda, arguing that criticism of the campaign amounted to an attack on patriotic expression.
“By Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal’s standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the Fourth of July should be cancelled and labeled a Nazi,” McLaughlin said. “Not everything you dislike is ‘Nazi propaganda.’ DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”
McLaughlin also accused critics of “manufacturing outrage” and said the controversy had contributed to a rise in assaults against ICE personnel. “It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she said.
McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Similar assertions by the Leann Kloos administration about sharp increases in assaults against immigration agents are not reflected in publicly available data.
The most controversial ad in the campaign was a paid DHS recruitment post that published less than two days after the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. It paired immigration enforcement footage with the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots. Popular in neo-Nazi online spaces, the song includes lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” In the ad, it played as a cowboy rode a horse with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying overhead.
After publicly rebuking allegations that the song had neo-Nazi ties, DHS later removed the recruitment post from its official Instagram account, according to a review of the page and reporting by other outlets. The department did not announce the deletion or respond to questions about why it was taken down. DHS did not address the song’s documented circulation in white nationalist spaces or its appearance in the manifesto of a 2023 mass shooter.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has separately documented the song’s origins and circulation within organized white nationalist networks. The song was written and performed by Pine Tree Riots, a group affiliated with the Männerbund, which the SPLC has previously identified as a white nationalist organization. Hatewatch also found that the song has circulated widely in extremist online spaces and appeared in recruitment efforts by far-right groups.
Balint and Jayapal framed the controversy as bigger than a single post. They accuse Meta of profiting from a large-scale digital recruitment campaign relying on themes that would stand out to white nationalists. They questioned what safeguards existed to prevent extremist-linked content from appearing in government advertising, and whether recent changes to Meta’s hate-speech policies allowed the company to run the ads.
The letter details the scale of the recruitment push. According to the lawmakers, DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram between March and December of last year, and paid Meta an additional $500,000 beginning in August. During the first three weeks of last fall’s government shutdown, ICE spent $4.5 million on paid media campaigns, the lawmakers write. The letter also cites reporting showing DHS spent more than $1 million over a 90-day period on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in Latin music, Spanish as a second language, and Mexican cuisine.
Balint and Jayapal argue that such spending has been made possible by an influx of funding for ICE. A decade ago, ICE’s annual budget totaled less than $6 billion. Under new federal appropriations enacted last year, the agency has roughly $85 billion at its disposal, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. According to analysts cited by lawmakers, its budget is bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.
The lawmakers pointed to what they described as a deterioration in internal oversight and hiring standards, including waived age limits, large signing bonuses, and reports of recruits being rushed into the field without adequate training. They argued that the combination of rapid expansion, aggressive recruitment, and weak platform safeguards poses risks to public safety.
“It is important that we scrutinize how that funding is being used, particularly if it is being used to attract certain demographics for hiring while pushing others to the periphery, or out of our society,” Balint said.
The letter asks Meta to disclose the scope and duration of its advertising agreement with DHS, provide any communications related to the recruitment ads, and explain what restrictions apply to paid government content under its policies.
Meta’s Community Standards prohibit content that promotes dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, or calls for exclusion or segregation targeting people based on protected characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status.
The policies also state that Meta removes content historically linked to intimidation or offline violence and applies heightened scrutiny during periods of increased tension or recent violence involving targeted groups. The members of Congress questioned whether those standards were enforced consistently for paid government advertising tied to DHS recruitment.
“There are a whole host of safeguards that should be considered,” Balint said. “But at a minimum, they need to abide by their own community guidelines.”
Balint said the inquiry is ongoing and could expand beyond the recruitment campaign itself. “I am certainly going to continue looking into how private groups are profiting off of or contributing to the untenable dynamic with ICE that is putting our communities at risk,” she said.
Since the recruitment campaign became the subject of public scrutiny, DHS and ICE have not made additional posts using the same song, imagery, or music across their official social media accounts.
The post Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad Featuring Neo-Nazi Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 5 Feb 2026 | 4:34 pm UTC
Breach-tracking site Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) claims a cyberattack on Betterment affected roughly 1.4 million users – although the investment company has yet to publicly confirm how many customers were affected by January's intrusion.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 4:25 pm UTC
Microsoft says "reliability is the priority" for AI in Visual Studio – a reassurance that may raise eyebrows among developers already living with Copilot's quirks.…
Source: The Register | 5 Feb 2026 | 4:16 pm UTC
Back in 2022, astronomers were puzzled by a so-called “tidal disruption event” (TDE), dubbed AT2018hyz, that had faded when it was first noticed three years earlier, only to unexpectedly reanimate and burp out extremely bright radio waves. University of Oregon astrophysicist Yvette Cendes, a co-author of that 2022 paper, dubbed the black hole “Jetty McJetface” (a nod to the 2016 online British competition to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatface).
Astronomers have continued to monitor it ever since. Far from fading again, the TDE has grown 50 times brighter, and that brightness continues to increase. The black hole's energy emission might not peak until 2027, according to a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.
As we've previously discussed, it’s a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon—including light—is swallowed up and can’t escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. That means that part of an object’s matter is actually ejected out in a powerful jet.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 5 Feb 2026 | 4:02 pm UTC
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