Reliance Jio used super-cheap plans and own-brand phones to conquer

India's top telco, Reliance Jio, has announced plans to spend $110 billion on datacenters to run AI workloads and says it will use them to deliver services with the same "extreme affordability" it brought to the mobile communications market.…

The good folks over at Adafruit are raising the alarm about a new New York State 3D printing law that could greatly imperil the public's freedom to tinker and could generally make life way more annoying for the schools, libraries, hospitals, small businesses, hobbyists, and garages that utilize 3D printers.

New York's 2026-2027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005) includes language requiring that all 3D printers operating in the state need to include software or firmware that scans every print file through a "firearms blueprint detection algorithm" and then locks the hardware up so it refuses to print anything it flags as a potential firearm or firearm component.

As Adafruit's Phillip Torrone notes, the key problem here is it's largely impossible to detect firearms from geometry alone:

"A firearms blueprint detection algorithm would need to identify every possible firearm component from raw STL/GCODE files, while not flagging pipes, tubes, blocks, brackets, gears, or any of the millions of legitimate shapes that happen to share geometric properties with gun parts. This is a classification problem with enormous false positive and false negative rates."

NY's new law would apply to open source firmware like Marlin, Klipper, and RepRap, which are generally maintained by volunteers without the resources for compliance. As well as office printers that never touch the internet, or CNC milling machines that can basically generate any shape you can imagine.

Torrone goes on to explain how the bill could be dramatically improved by exempting open source firmware, and focusing more concretely on the intent to create fire-arms, instead of waging an impossible enforcement war on ambiguous shapes. They're also recommending limited liability for retailers, schools, and libraries, and the elimination of mandatory file scanning:

"But the answer to misuse isn't surveillance built into the tool itself. We don't require table saws to scan wood for weapon shapes. We don't require lathes to phone home before turning metal. We prosecute people who make illegal things, not people who own tools.

The Open Source 3D printing community probably does not know about this. OSHWA and other open source advocacy orgs have ignored many of the things we really need their help with. That needs to change. This bill is in early stages — the working group hasn't even convened yet. There's time to work together, in the open, for amendments that make sense."

Random aside: it's worth reminding folks that this proposal comes on the heels of a recently passed New York State "right to repair" law (supposed to make it easier and cheaper to repair technology you own) that Governor Kathy Hochul basically lobotomized at lobbyist behest after it was passed, ensuring it doesn't actually protect anybody's freedom to tinker.

MIT CSAIL's 2025 AI Agent Index puts opaque automated systems under the microscope

AI agents are becoming more common and more capable, without consensus or standards on how they should behave, say academic researchers.…

$300 a month buys you a backdoor that looks like legit software

Researchers at Proofpoint late last month uncovered what they describe as a "weird twist" on the growing trend of criminals abusing remote monitoring and management software (RMM) as their preferred attack tools.…

Formula 1 has been receiving star treatment from Apple for awhile, and now the racing series will literally be getting even bigger. Apple is partnering with IMAX to show five races from the 2026 season. The Miami Grand Prix on May 3, the Monaco Grand Prix on June 7, the British Grand Prix on July 5, the Italian Grand Prix on September 6 and the United States Grand Prix on October 25 will be aired live at select IMAX theaters in the US. 

Apple landed a five-year deal for the US broadcast rights to Formula 1 last fall and there's already a dedicated channel for the car races on Apple TV ahead of the season's start. It also got the rights for a splashy feature film about the racing league, which amassed more than $630 million at the global box office, including with some IMAX screenings. It's unclear if IMAX will be paying to host more live F1 races at its theaters in future years, but it should be a fun way for fans to get the most immersive experience possible short of actually attending the racetrack.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/apple-inks-deal-for-imax-screenings-of-live-formula-1-races-234003582.html?src=rss

Meta is formally sectioning off Horizon Worlds, the closest thing it has to a metaverse, from its Quest VR platform, according to a new blog post from Samantha Ryan, Meta's VP of Content, Reality Labs. While the decision runs counter to Meta's original plan to own an immersive virtual world that could serve as the future home for all online interaction, it fits with the recent cuts it made to its costly Reality Labs division, and Mark Zuckerberg's public commitment to focus the company on AI hardware like smart glasses going forward. 

"We're explicitly separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform in order to create more space for both products to grow," Ryan writes in the blog post. "We're doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile. By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we'll be better able to clearly focus on each."

Meta has been developing mobile and web versions of Horizon Worlds in parallel with its VR app since at least 2023. Switching Worlds to being a mobile-first software platform isn't good for VR diehards, but it does make it a more natural competitor to something like Roblox or Fortnite, which also offer user-created and monetizable worlds and games. It's also a business Meta believes it can more easily scale because of its ability to connect games to "billions of people on the world's biggest social networks."

While Meta shuttered several of its own VR game studios earlier this year, it still wants to support third-party developers publishing games on its platform. The company says new monetization tools, better discoverability, a "Deals" tab and more ways for developers to talk to their customers should help make a difference. Maintaining the Quest's library of games could also be critical going forward. Business Insider reported in December 2025 that Meta was working on a gaming-focused Quest headset, and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth confirmed earlier this February that the company still had multiple Quest devices on its roadmap.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/metas-metaverse-is-going-mobile-first-233030532.html?src=rss

Fresh from the conflict with Venezuela last month, the USS Gerald R. Ford — America's newest and largest aircraft carrier — is speeding through the Mediterranean and toward a potential war with Iran. Another aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln is already deployed to the Middle East. The military pressure campaign, which could allow the U.S. to begin sustained attacks in a matter of days, is part of the Trump administration's multipronged effort to pressure Iran to cease a nuclear program whose key sites, according to President Donald Trump, were "completely and fully obliterated" in U.S. attacks last year.

America's latest gunboat diplomacy gambit comes as Trump's two main envoys, his friend Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, have engaged in indirect talks with Iranian diplomats in Geneva. The talks are taking place even though Trump previously said no agreement with Iran was necessary. "I don't care if I have an agreement or not," he announced last June. "I could get a statement that they're not going to go nuclear." Trump added: "They're not going to be doing it anyway."

Trump reversed himself late last month imploring Iran to "quickly 'Come to the Table'" or face more strikes. On Thursday, at a gathering of his self-styled Board of Peace in Washington, Trump reiterated his call for a deal. "Now is the time for Iran to join us on a path that will complete what we're doing," he said. "If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. But bad things will happen if it doesn't."

"A massive Armada is heading to Iran," Trump announced on Truth Social.

The United States has, in fact, spent weeks moving military assets into place for a potential resumption of the war on Iran. The Ford alone can carry more than 75 aircraft, including F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters and F/A-18 Super Hornets, as well as EA-18 Growler radar-jamming jets. The Lincoln is accompanied by three warships that are equipped with Tomahawk missiles, which were used to strike two of Iran's nuclear facilities last June. In addition to destroyers, cruisers, and submarines at sea, the U.S. has moved additional air assets needed for sustained conflict across the Atlantic including a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, dozens of refueling tankers, scores of additional fighter jets, and critical E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System jets, which can provide advanced radar, communications, and sensors to track and thwart planes, drones, and cruise missiles.

The massive accumulation of military forces in preparation for a potential war with Iran dwarfs even the monthslong build-up that proceeded the U.S. coup in Venezuela that saw its leader Nicolás Maduro deposed and power transferred to a U.S.-backed puppet regime.

Related Would-Be Iran Monarch Reza Pahlavi Declares a Civil War in Iran

Three U.S. officials with long experience in the Middle East told The Intercept that they do not believe Trump has made a final decision to launch a new attack on Iran but the chances of it are high. All said that the U.S. attacks could possibly destabilize the Iranian regime, spur a grave humanitarian crisis, and have major impacts across the region. None thought the Trump administration had anything but vague plans to deal with such blowback.

All three officials believed that sufficient U.S. military assets were in place for a sustained military campaign. One said that Tehran may see the second major U.S. attack in a year as an existential crisis and respond by launching a more formidable counterattack than its ineffectual strikes on America's Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in 2025.

Over the past month, the U.S. military has moved critical air defense equipment — including Patriot missile batteries and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems, also known as THAAD — to the region to protect U.S. troops and allies from Iranian ballistic missiles.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said he believes reports that Trump administration officials think there's a 90 percent chance the president will order strikes on Iran. He said that such a war would be "catastrophic" and lead to counterattacks that put U.S. troops in the region at risk.

Iran has repeatedly warned of retaliatory strikes on U.S. troops and allies in response to any American attack. Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week to conduct military exercises. 

Khanna announced on Thursday that he and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., would attempt to force a vote on a war powers resolution regarding Iran next week. "I am confident we can win this vote and assemble a bipartisan coalition," Khanna told The Intercept. Khanna believes they can force the vote before Trump attacks Iran, but one of the government officials expressed concern that strikes could come as early as Sunday or Monday. Another speculated that Trump might be convinced not to conduct an attack during Ramadan — the Muslim holy month that began Wednesday — or at least wait for a "decent interval" in deference to other U.S. allies in the Middle East.

Trump is also delivering his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday with a reported focus on messaging around domestic issues ahead of fall midterm elections, which may impact his decision. The conclusion of the Winter Olympics on Sunday might also play a role in the timing of the attacks as the notion of an Olympic truce, or "Ekecheiria," dates back millennia.

The White House did not reply to a request for comment.

For a president who ran for office promising to keep the United States out of wars, came into office claiming to be a "peacemaker, and has consistently campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump has proven to be a warmonger. During his second term Trump has already launched attacks on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name and has also threatened Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland, and Mexico.

The post Trump Menaces Iran With Massive Armada Capable of Prolonged War appeared first on The Intercept.

Wikipedia celebrated its 25th birthday last month. Given the centrality of Wikipedia to so much activity online, it is hard to remember (or to imagine, for those who are younger) a time without Wikipedia. The latest statistics are impressive:

• Wikipedia is viewed nearly 15 billion times every month.
• Wikipedia contains over 65 million articles across more than 300 languages.
• Wikipedia is edited by nearly 250,000 editors every month around the world. Editors are defined by one edit or more every month; only editors with a username are counted.
• Wikipedia is accessed by over 1.5 billion unique devices every month.

That's testimony to the global nature of Wikipedia. But there's something else, not mentioned there, that is of great relevance to this blog: the fact that every one of those 65 million articles is made available under a generous license - the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, to be precise. That means sharing and re-use are encouraged, in contrast to most material online, where copyright is fiercely enforced. Wikipedia is living proof that giving away things by relying on volunteers and donations - the "true fans" approach - works, and on a massive scale. Anil Dash puts it well in a post celebrating Wikipedia's 25th anniversary:

Whenever I worry about where the Internet is headed, I remember that this example of the collective generosity and goodness of people still exists. There are so many folks just working away, every day, to make something good and valuable for strangers out there, simply from the goodness of their hearts. They have no way of ever knowing who they've helped. But they believe in the simple power of doing a little bit of good using some of the most basic technologies of the internet. Twenty-five years later, all of the evidence has shown that they really have changed the world.

However, Wikipedia is today facing perhaps its greatest challenge, which comes from the new generation of AI services. They are problematic for Wikipedia in two main ways. The first, ironically, is because it is widely recognized that Wikipedia's holdings represent some of the highest-quality training materials available. In a post explaining why, "in the AI era, Wikipedia has never been more valuable", the Wikimedia Foundation writes:

AI cannot exist without the human effort that goes into building open and nonprofit information sources like Wikipedia. That's why Wikipedia is one of the highest-quality datasets in the world for training AI, and when AI developers try to omit it, the resulting answers are significantly less accurate, less diverse, and less verifiable.

That recognition is welcome, but comes at a price. It means that every AI company as a matter of course wants to download the entire Wikipedia corpus to be used for training its models. That has led to irresponsible behavior by some companies, when their scraping tools download pages from Wikipedia with no consideration for the resources they are using for free, or the collateral damage they are causing to other users in terms of slower responses.

Trying to stop companies drawing on this unique resource is futile; recognizing this, Wikimedia Foundation has come up with an alternative approach: Wikimedia Enterprise, "a first-of-its-kind commercial product designed for companies that reuse and source Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects at a high volume". In 2022, its first customers were Google and the Internet Archive, and last month, Wikimedia Enterprise announced that Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity have also signed. That's important for a couple of reasons. It means that many of the biggest AI players will download Wikipedia articles more efficiently. It also means that the Wikipedia project will receive funding for its work.

This new money is crucial if Wikipedia is to remain a high quality resource. And that is precisely why every generative AI company that uses Wikipedia posts for training should - if only out of self-interest - pay to do so. What is happening here echoes something this blog suggested back in May 2024: that AI companies should pay artists to create new works, and give away the results, because fresh training material is vital. Helping to pay for Wikipedia to create more high-quality articles that are freely available to all is a variation on that theme.

The other problem that generative AI causes Wikipedia is more subtle. The Wikimedia Foundation explains that alongside financial support, the project needs proper attribution:

Attribution means that generative AI gives credit to the human contributions that it uses to create its outputs. This maintains a virtuous cycle that continues those human contributions that create the training data that these new technologies rely on. For people to trust information shared on the internet, platforms should make it clear where the information is sourced from and elevate opportunities to visit and participate in those sources. With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.

Without fresh volunteers, Wikipedia will wither and become less valuable. That's terrible for the world, but it is also bad for generative AI companies. So, again, it makes sense for them to provide proper attribution in their outputs. That requirement has become even more pressing in the light of a new development. According to tests carried out by the Guardian:

The latest model of ChatGPT has begun to cite Elon Musk's Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers, raising concerns about misinformation on the platform.

That's potentially problematic because of how Grokipedia creates its entries. Research last year found that:

Grokipedia articles are substantially longer and contain significantly fewer references per word. Moreover, Grokipedia's content divides into two distinct groups: one that remains semantically and stylistically aligned with Wikipedia, and another that diverges sharply. Among the dissimilar articles, we observe a systematic rightward shift in the political bias of cited news sources, concentrated primarily in entries related to politics, history, and religion. These findings suggest that AI-generated encyclopedic content diverges from established editorial norms-favouring narrative expansion over citation-based verification.

If leading chatbots starts drawing on Grokipedia routinely for their answers, it is less likely that there are independent sources where the information can be checked, something generally possible with Wikipedia. It therefore becomes even more urgent for generative AI systems to provide attribution, so at least users know where information is coming from, and whether there are likely to be further resources that confirm a chatbot's claims. Not everyone will want to do that, but it is important to offer it as an option.

Wikipedia at 25 is an amazing achievement in multiple ways, one of which includes serving as a demonstration that material can be given away for free, supported directly by users, and on a global scale. It would be a tragedy if the current enthusiasm for generative AI systems led to that resource being harmed and even destroyed. A world without Wikipedia would be a poorer world indeed.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Republished from Walled Culture.

In Washington, the first session of what has been dubbed the 'Peace Council' was held at the Trump Peace Institute. The event was dominated by US President Donald Trump, who positioned himself as the architect of Gaza's next phase.

The layout of the podium, the tone of the opening remarks, and the messaging all signalled an attempt to shape a new political and security framework for the post-war period.

Gaza — Declaring the end of the war and tying reconstruction to security

Trump opened by declaring the end of the war in Gaza. He set firm conditions for the next phase, foremost among them the surrender of Hamas's weapons. He warned of severe consequences if the movement failed to comply. Trump then linked any political or economic progress in Gaza to Hamas's commitment to the new security arrangements. According to Trump, the international community is "waiting for Hamas" as the main obstacle to implementation.

At the same time, he acknowledged the group's role in certain humanitarian efforts, including the recovery of hostages' bodies. However, he stressed that Gaza's future requires governance reform and the creation of a stable civil administration.

He ruled out deploying US troops to Gaza and said Washington sees no need for direct military intervention.

Trump also announced the allocation of $10 billion to support the Peace Council and reconstruction efforts as part of a wider international funding package.

'The only option'

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the initiative as the only viable path to prevent a return to war. He stated there is "no alternative plan for Gaza." Rubio argued that traditional international institutions had failed to contain the conflict. He expressed hope that the new approach could serve as a model for managing other global crises.

These statements suggest Washington aims to frame Gaza as a test case for a new conflict management model led by the United States, with regional and international backing.

Arab commitments: Gaza funding and engagement

Several Arab countries announced financial, political and logistical commitments:

• Qatar: Reaffirmed mediation efforts and pledged $1 billion.
• United Arab Emirates: Committed $1.2 billion and linked its support to the broader regional vision under the Abraham Accords.
• Morocco: Offered to send security and police forces, establish a field hospital, and support coexistence programmes.
• Egypt: Reiterated support for Palestinian self-determination, rejected West Bank annexation, and called for a new phase of coexistence.
• Saudi Arabia: Pledged $1 billion to ease Palestinian suffering.
• Kuwait: Announced $1 billion in contributions over the coming years.

International stabilisation force and transitional arrangements

Council Executive Director Nikolay Mladenov said the plan centres on disarmament in Gaza and the creation of a transitional security force. Around 2,000 people have reportedly applied to join a temporary police force, and recruitment has begun in coordination with Palestinian and Israeli authorities.

The commander of the international stabilisation force announced that Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo and Albania have pledged troops. Jordan and Egypt will train Palestinian police officers.

Indonesia's president confirmed a commitment to send more than 8,000 personnel.

Multilateral funding efforts

Beyond the US pledge of $10 billion, nine Council members committed an additional $7 billion for emergency relief. The UN Office for Humanitarian Assistance will seek to raise $2 billion.

FIFA is contributing $75 million for sports projects in Gaza. Additional funding is expected from China and Russia. The session outlined a transition phase tied closely to security conditions. Reconstruction funding is explicitly linked to disarmament and governance reform.

With Washington setting the political and security parameters, the Peace Council marks the beginning of a multilateral but US-led effort to reshape Gaza's future.

Featured image via France24

By Alaa Shamali

Keir Starmer has now — 19 February — appointed Antonia Romeo, formerly a senior diplomat in New York, as the next leader of the UK civil service. She's the first woman ever to hold the position of Cabinet Secretary.

However, the rumours of the appointment also brought numerous previous allegations of bullying against Romeo back into the spotlight.

Somewhat predictably, this has led to warring factions among the upper echelons of the UK's professional political gossipmongers. Either Antonia Romeo is a forceful and gifted leader attacked by rampant misogynists, or else a serial bully at the center of a Home Office coverup.

Without further ado, let's go wallow in the mud, shall we?

'Doing the due diligence'

The furor kicked off last week, with ex-head of diplomatic service Simon McDonald's appearance on Channel 4 News. McDonald stated that:

Due diligence is vitally important, the Prime Minister has recent bitter experience of doing the due diligence too late. It would be an unnecessary tragedy to repeat that mistake… if [Romeo] is the one, in my view, the due diligence has some way still to go.

Fighting words, given that the other recent example of Starmer's failed diligence is Epstein's mate/Labour peer Peter Mandelson.

However, the government has claimed repeatedly that the investigation into the single complaint against Romeo has already been closed. Matthew Rycroft, ex-UK representative to the UN, and Rupert McNeil, former head of human resources, both made this 'single complaint' claim.

The three allegations in the complaint, which relate to bullying and the misuse of expenses, apparently had "no case to answer".

Several ex-officials who worked alongside Romeo called the Cabinet Office's 'single complaint' story "disingenuous". Rather, sources told the BBC that several individuals lodged complaints against the former diplomat during her stint in New York.

Cue the political muck-raking/ Home Office coverup, depending on your vantage point.

Antonia Romeo — '25-year record'

The new Cabinet Secretary certainly doesn't lack for admirers. Even the colleagues who voiced complaints also acknowledged her as "smart, dynamic and really talented" and an "extremely intelligent, innovative thinker". Starmer himself gave a glowing review:

outstanding public servant, with a 25‑year record of delivering for the British people […]

Since becoming prime minister, I've been impressed by her professionalism and determination to get things done.

Robert Buckland, a former colleague at the Department for Justice, said of Romeo:

I think she is an extremely impressive person. She's not a conventional backroom figure; she's not scared of publicly projecting herself, but that shouldn't be a block on her becoming first female cabinet secretary.

She confounds some of the old nostrums of the civil service. Seen not heard, be aware of the hierarchy. As a politician, I didn't have time for that. Running a department during Covid, I needed flat structures and quick decisions.

Addressing the allegations against Romeo directly, Dave Penman — FDA (civil servant's union) general secretary — told the House magazine that:

[Romeo is] an ambitious woman who doesn't mind a bit of publicity. A lot of underlying rumours around her are an example of sexist, misogynistic culture. Lord McDonald's talk around vetting is nonsense. She's been vetted within an inch of her life already; she can see documents that cabinet ministers don't have access to.

'The allegations were dismissed'

However, it should be noted that those allegations were serious enough that the government flew Tim Hitchens — ex-ambassador to Japan — to New York to investigate. Hitchens looked into accusations of:

bullying behaviour, financial probity, and putting her private objectives above those of the wider Consulate-General or government.

However, the BBC revealed that the reported "no case to answer" statement referred to the accusations of expense irregularities. On the contrary, there was indeed a case to answer for Romeo regarding her bullying behaviour.

A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office stated that:

Antonia Romeo is an outstanding leader with 25 years of public service. She has been appointed to three different Permanent Secretary roles and has led hundreds of thousands of public servants to deliver for governments of all stripes.

As we have repeatedly said, one formal complaint was raised nine years ago which was thoroughly investigated. The allegations were dismissed on the basis that there was no case to answer.

It is entirely inappropriate to resurface dismissed HR proceedings almost a decade later.

Antonia Romeo — 'Very demanding, very disrespectful, very threatening'

In a survey covering a year including 3 months of Antonia Romeo's tenure in New York, 47% of staff reported bullying in the workplace. Comparable surveys would normally report bullying levels below 10%.

In documents seen by the BBC, plaintiffs described Romeo as being "unreasonable", "degrading", and "demeaning" towards staff.

The majority of the complaints came from other women, with one individual branding Romeo:

very demanding, very disrespectful, very threatening.

And also adding that:

I'm used to big egos but this was something else. The minute she heard the word 'no' she'd say I'll go to your boss. But it was worse than that. She would go to your boss's boss and your boss's boss's boss.

Another source stated:

If you don't say 'yes' to her she's not only going to screw your career, but she'll screw all of those around you.

Yet another accuser charged Romeo with being overly self-promoting:

She's a diplomat, not a D-list celebrity. My 15-year-old, social-media-obsessed, brother is less shameless in his self-promotion.

Likewise, one member of staff stated that Romeo had them:

frame articles in Vogue and the New Yorker about her and place them in the Residence guest bathroom directly in the line of sight at all angles so that regardless of, um, how you use the bathroom, you have to stare at a photo of her in a magazine spread staring back at you.

'Selective excerpts'

Regarding the renewed attention to the complaint documents, a Whitehall spokesperson stated that:

The fact that selective excerpts are now being resurfaced, almost a decade on, to substantiate vexatious anonymous briefings from disgruntled individuals is frankly unconscionable.

So, there's your whistle-stop tour of praise and criticism of the new leader of the UK civil service. Of course, even if she does turn out to be a bully of the highest order, she'd probably fit right in with the pack of tax-dodgers, expenses-fiddlers, genocide-defenders, and bigots that make up the current UK government. Watch this space.

Featured image via the Canary

By Alex/Rose Cocker

Billionaire-funded Reform UK is fracturing, with much of its original support having broken away to establish another party, Restore.

Since the split, the two parties have been at war with one another. This signals, yet again — to quote the famous words of Martin Luther — that hate begets hate.

You just called Restore Britain 'neo-nazi'.

It's that sort of rhetoric that got Charlie Kirk shot in the neck - you should be ashamed of yourself.

We will not tolerate it. Our legal team is now involved.

— Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) February 18, 2026

Wealthy at war with each other

We wrote recently about the emergence of Restore and the backing it's received from far-right billionaire Elon Musk. In the words of our own Willem Moore:

One of the biggest criticisms of Reform is that it's just a rebrand of the Tory Party. Now, ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe has created his own spinoff party, and it's shaping up to be…a rebrand of a rebrand.

Adding that:

Lowe himself has said, he's open to attracting talent from the Tories, Reform, Advance — basically any reactionary party you can think of. Furthermore, Rupert Lowe seems intent on expanding his political circle.

Lowe's flip-flopping makes it apparent the man wasn't getting the adulation he so desperately wanted from his Reform pals.

This just goes to further reveal the priorities of these politically ambitious and privileged men — i.e. the size of their…bank accounts.

Moore wrote:

The timeline of Lowe leaving Reform is messy. The TLDR is:

• Lowe began criticising Farage (seemingly in coordination with Elon Musk).
• Farage suggested Lowe wouldn't be anywhere near office without Nigel's cult of personality (a.k.a. Reform).
• Reform suspended Lowe and reported him to the police for 'verbal threats' and "serious bullying" of female staffers.
• Lowe described the accusations as "vexatious".
• Several months of back and forth ensued.

With someone like Lowe, it's better to have them on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in. Now, Farage is going to learn why that saying exists.

The infighting is proving that Moore was bang on the money:

Far-right Reform UK (led by far-right multimillionaire Nigel Farage) calls far-right Restore Britain (led by far-right multimillionaire Rupert Lowe, who left far-right Reform) 'neo-nazi'. Far-right billionaire Elon Musk defends far-right Restore, calling far-right Reform 'Nazis'. pic.twitter.com/qDqwtfJjPY

— GET A GRIP (@docrussjackson) February 18, 2026

A message to Restore Britain members…

Be ready. They are going to come for us. The establishment. Reform. The other parties. The entire rotten lot.

It's already started.

We are not in this to make friends. We are in this to fundamentally change how our country is governed.…

— Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) February 18, 2026

Lowe's post reads in full:

A message to Restore Britain members…

Be ready. They are going to come for us. The establishment. Reform. The other parties. The entire rotten lot.

It's already started.

We are not in this to make friends. We are in this to fundamentally change how our country is governed.

We are in this to Restore Britain.

That will mean pissing people off, and we already are.

Good.

That means we're making progress.

There will be insults, there will be unpleasant names.

Ride it out, stay the course. Eyes on the prize.

I will promise you two things - we are going to stay true to our beliefs, and we are going to be honest.

Who knows where that will end up taking us.

They've skipped the ignoring and laughing part, going straight to fighting.

We all know what comes next.

First they came for the fascists… https://t.co/9UEJOAgYCx

— ali (@ali__samson) February 18, 2026

Far right parties tearing chunks out of each other https://t.co/MqhwwRB2zq pic.twitter.com/JVQ2PcIkbt

— Dobby Club (@DobbyClub06) February 18, 2026

Musk has long defended Lowe, of course, stirring the pot of British domestic politics — having abandoned his support for Nigel Farage whose party he has called UK "Nazis."

A national strike by unions in Argentina has left the streets of capital Buenos Aires near-empty. A drone video showing the scene has been posted with the text:

Who moves the world?
Who moves Argentina?
Who moves Buenos Aires?
Workers and Workers.

¿Quién mueve el mundo?
¿Quién mueve Argentina?
¿Quién mueve Buenos Aires?
T R A B A J A D O R E S Y T R A B A J A D O R A Spic.twitter.com/FWwP2iDKCi

— Celeste Murillo (@rompe_teclas) February 19, 2026

Argentina's unions called the general strike in protest at far-right president Javier Milei's assault on workers' rights. Milei's 'reforms' — that camouflaging word loved by the right — to abolish overtime pay, cut redundancy payments and ban most strikes, among a host of measures aimed at impoverishing the working class, triggered immediate protests when Argentina's senate passed them. However, the general strike applies far more concerted pressure ahead of a key vote today on the legislation in Argentina's 'lower' legislative house, the Chamber of Deputies. Public sector workers, bank staff and transport workers are among those staying away or joining protests.

Around 40% of Argentina's workforce belong to a union. It's well past time for UK workers to wise up and take similar action against the endless uniparty war on their rights.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

Slay the Spire 2 will launch in early access next month. This sequel to the hugely popular 2019 roguelike deckbuilder hits early access on Steam beginning March 5, 2026. Along with releasing the teaser trailer above, developer Mega Crit shared some details about its goals for this phase ahead of the game's official release.

"Slay the Spire requires a lot of player feedback so we can balance content, add quality of life features, and make sure the game runs without issues," the developers explained. "Early Access is also a chance for us to test experimental features, try exotic designs, identify niche problems, and helps us make sure the game is headed in the right direction." Slay the Spire 2 is expected to be in early access for a year or two, or more generally "until the game feels great."

Mega Crit has also revealed that it will be introducing a new co-op mode where up to four people can team up. This gameplay option will feature some unique cards just for multiplayer as well as some team-wide synergies. 

Some of the characters from Slay the Spire will be returning for the sequel alongside new ones. For anyone who hasn't yet experienced the original game, Slay the Spire is available on iOS, including as part of Apple Arcade. It's also on consoles and PC.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/slay-the-spire-2-will-enter-early-access-on-march-5-210338514.html?src=rss

Warning: This article discusses suicide and some research regarding suicidal ideation. If you are having thoughts of suicide, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or visit this list of resources for help. Know that people care about you and there are many available to help.

When someone dies by suicide, there is an immediate, almost desperate need to find something—or someone—to blame. We've talked before about the dangers of this impulse. The target keeps shifting: "cyberbullying," then "social media," then "Amazon." Now it's generative AI.

There have been several heartbreaking stories recently involving individuals who took their own lives after interacting with AI chatbots. This has led to lawsuits filed by grieving families against companies like OpenAI and Character.AI, alleging that these tools are responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. Many of these lawsuits are settled, rather than fought out in court because no company wants its name in the headlines associated with suicide.

It is also impossible not to feel for these families. The loss is devastating, and the need for answers is a fundamentally human response to grief. But the narrative emerging from these lawsuits—that the AI caused the suicide—relies on a premise that assumes we understand the mechanics of suicide far better than we actually do.

Unfortunately, we know frighteningly little about what drives a person to take that final, irrevocable step. An article from late last year in the New York Times profiling clinicians who are lobbying for a completely new way to assess suicide risk, makes this painfully clear: our current methods of predicting suicides are failing.

If experts who have spent decades studying the human mind admit they often cannot predict or prevent suicide even when treating a patient directly, we should be extremely wary of the confidence with which pundits and lawsuits assign blame to a chatbot.

The Times piece focuses on the work of two psychiatrists who have been devastated by the loss of patients who gave absolutely no indication they were about to harm themselves.

In his nearly 40-year career as a psychiatrist, Dr. Igor Galynker has lost three patients to suicide while they were under his care. None of them had told him that they intended to harm themselves.

In one case, a patient who Dr. Galynker had been treating for a year sent him a present — a porcelain caviar dish — and a letter, telling Dr. Galynker that it wasn't his fault. It arrived one week after the man died by suicide.

"That was pretty devastating," Dr. Galynker said, adding, "It took me maybe two years to come to terms with it."

He began to wonder: What happens in people's minds before they kill themselves? What is the difference between that day and the day before?

Nobody seemed to know the answer.

Nobody seemed to know the answer.

That is the state of the science. Apparently the best we currently have in tracking suicidal risk is asking people: "Are you thinking about killing yourself?" And as the article notes, this method is catastrophically flawed.

But despite decades of research into suicide prevention, it is still very difficult to know whether someone will try to die by suicide. The most common method of assessing suicidal risk involves asking patients directly if they plan to harm themselves. While this is an essential question, some clinicians, including Dr. Galynker, say it is inadequate for predicting imminent suicidal behavior….

Dr. Galynker, the director of the Suicide Prevention Research Lab at Mount Sinai in New York City, has said that relying on mentally ill people to disclose suicidal intent is "absurd." Some patients may not be cognizant of their own mental state, he said, while others are determined to die and don't want to tell anyone.

The data backs this up:

According to one literature review, about half of those who died by suicide had denied having suicidal intent in the week or month before ending their life.

This profound inability to predict suicide has led these clinicians to propose a new diagnosis for the DSM-5 called "Suicide Crisis Syndrome" (SCS). They argue that we need to stop looking for stated intent and start looking for a specific, overwhelming state of mind.

To be diagnosed with S.C.S., Dr. Galynker said, patients must have a "persistent and intense feeling of frantic hopelessness," in which they feel trapped in an intolerable situation.

They must also have emotional distress, which can include intense anxiety; feelings of being extremely tense, keyed up or jittery (people often develop insomnia); recent social withdrawal; and difficulty controlling their thoughts.

By the time patients develop S.C.S., they are in such distress that the thinking part of the brain — the frontal lobe — is overwhelmed, said Lisa J. Cohen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai who is studying S.C.S. alongside Dr. Galynker. It's like "trying to concentrate on a task with a fire alarm going off and dogs barking all around you," she added.

This description of "frantic hopelessness" and feeling "trapped" gives us a glimpse into the internal maelstrom that leads to suicide. It also highlights why externalizing the blame to a technology is so misguided.

The article shares the story of Marisa Russello, who attempted suicide four years ago. Her experience underscores how internal, sudden, and unpredictable the impulse can be—and how disconnected it can be from any specific external "push."

On the night that she nearly died, Ms. Russello wasn't initially planning to harm herself. Life had been stressful, she said. She felt overwhelmed at work. A new antidepressant wasn't working. She and her husband were arguing more than usual. But she wasn't suicidal.

She was at the movies with her husband when Ms. Russello began to feel nauseated and agitated. She said she had a headache and needed to go home. As she reached the subway, a wave of negative emotions washed over her.

[….]

By the time she got home, she had "dropped into this black hole of sadness."

And she decided that she had no choice but to end her life. Fortunately, she said, her attempt was interrupted.

Her decision to die by suicide was so sudden that if her psychiatrist had asked about self-harm at their last session, she would have said, truthfully, that she wasn't even considering it.

When we read stories like Russello's, or the accounts of the psychiatrists losing patients who denied being at risk, it becomes difficult to square the complexity of human psychology with the simplistic narrative that "Chatbot X caused Person Y to die."

There is undeniably an overlap between people who use AI chatbots and people who are struggling with mental health issues—in part because so many people use chatbots today, but also because people in distress seek connection, answers, a safe space to vent. That search often leads to chatbots.

Unless we're planning to make thorough and competent mental health support freely available to everyone who needs it at any time, that's going to continue. Rather than simply insisting that these tools are evil, we should be looking at ways to improve outcomes knowing that some people are going to rely on them.

Just because a person used an AI tool—or a search engine, or a social media platform, or a diary—prior to their death does not mean the tool caused the death.

When we rush to blame the technology, we are effectively claiming to know something that experts in that NY Times piece admit they do not know. We are claiming we know why it happened. We are asserting that if the chatbot hadn't generated what it generated, if it hadn't been there responding to the person, that the "frantic hopelessness" described in the SCS research would simply have evaporated.

There is no evidence to support that.

None of this is to say AI tools can't make things worse. For someone already in crisis, certain interactions could absolutely be unhelpful or exacerbating by "validating" the helplessness they're already experiencing. But that is a far cry from the legal and media narrative that these tools are "killing" people.

The push to blame AI serves a psychological purpose for the living: it provides a tangible enemy. It implies that there is a switch we can flip—a regulation we can pass, a lawsuit we can win—that will stop these tragedies.

It suggests that suicide is a problem of product liability rather than a complex, often inscrutable crisis of the human mind.

The work being done on Suicide Crisis Syndrome is vital because it admits what the current discourse ignores: we are failing to identify the risk because we are looking at the wrong things.

Dr. Miller, the psychiatrist at Endeavor Health in Chicago, first learned about S.C.S. after the patient suicides. He then led efforts to screen every psychiatric patient for S.C.S. at his hospital system. In trying to implement the screenings there have been "fits and starts," he said.

"It's like turning the Titanic," he added. "There are so many stakeholders that need to see that a new approach is worth the time and effort."

While clinicians are trying to turn the Titanic of psychiatric care to better understand the internal states that lead to suicide, the public debate is focused on the wrong iceberg.

If we focus all our energy on demonizing AI, we risk ignoring the actual "black hole of sadness" that Ms. Russello described. We risk ignoring the systemic failures in mental health care. We risk ignoring the fact that half of suicide victims deny intent to their doctors.

Suicide is a tragedy. It is a moment where a person feels they have no other choice—a loss of agency so complete that the thinking brain is overwhelmed, as the SCS researchers describe it. Simplifying that into a story about a "rogue algorithm" or a "dangerous chatbot" doesn't help the next person who feels that frantic hopelessness.

It just gives the rest of us someone to sue.

Earlier this month, the FBI decided it was going to help Donald Trump steal back the election he's claimed for half-a-decade was stolen from him. The state whose Secretary of State was asked directly by the outgoing president in January 2021 to "find 11,780 votes" was raided by Trump 2.0, who still somehow thinks he can win the election he lost back in 2020.

It's not just revenge Trump is seeking. He's also hoping to find anything that will allow him to cast doubt on midterm election results now that it seems entirely possible the GOP might lose its majority in the legislature.

The FBI walked off with tons of stuff after its raid of the Fulton County election hub in Georgia. The raid — which was attended by the current DNI Tulsi Gabbard for no apparent reason — saw the Trump government seize as many 2020 ballots and voter records as possible. The stated reason for this raid was to collect evidence related to two alleged crimes: not retaining election records long enough and attempts to "intimidate voters or procure false votes/false voter registration."

One of several glaring problems with this raid is the fact that some of the criminal acts alleged have already surpassed the five-year statute of limitations. The rest of the glaring problems are far less subtle. Like Trump using the FBI and DOJ to engage in vindictive prosecution. And the FBI appearing to have deliberately mislead the magistrate judge to get this search warrant approved.

This declaration [PDF] by Ryan Macias, a project manager for the voting system used in Fulton County who also served as the Acting Director of the Voting System Program during the 2020 election, points out multiple flaws in the FBI's warrant affidavit — all of which it would be safe to assume were deliberate "errors."

The Affidavit asserts that there were five "deficiencies or defects with the November 3, 2020, election and tabulation of the votes thereof." The Affidavit concludes that "[i]f these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of" Title 52 U.S.C. §§ 20511 (Criminal Penalties) and 20701 (Retention and Preservation of Records of Elections).

In all five areas identified by Special Agent Evans' Affidavit, there are a multitude of false or misleading statements and omissions. In fact, there are, as set forth below, over a dozen omissions of critical parts of the reports and related materials that I identified in paragraph 4 above. This is in addition to the absence of any recognition that much of what the Affidavit references as concerning are widely known as benign and common election practices. As noted there, all of those materials are publicly available and could have been referenced by Special Agent Evans. Even when Special Agent Evans cites to one of these sources, he repeatedly omits crucial facts and findings inconsistent with his characterizations. Once the statements and omissions in the Affidavit are corrected and based on my experience administering elections in accordance with the statutes cited in the Affidavit, the Affidavit loses any basis in reality.

The whole thing needs to be read, but here are just a couple of the things we're going to generously call "errors," even though they're really deliberate omissions. The criminal allegations allege ballot images weren't retained in violation of the law. But, as this declaration points out, the retention of images wasn't mandated by law in Georgia until 2021, which would be after the 2020 election. If images weren't retained, it was likely because election staffers obviously didn't think it was necessary to do so.

Second, the affidavit claims something is shady about the audits performed by county officials, insinuating that this somehow resulted in votes mysteriously swinging the state in Biden's direction. This declaration states the actual truth: "risk limiting audits" only aid in determining whether or not a recount might be warranted. Only official counts and recounts can actually alter voting results.

Fulton County's challenge [PDF] of the search contains even more information that indicates the FBI's search warrant application was crafted to basically trick a judge into authorizing an illegal search (all emphasis in the original):

First, the Fourth Amendment demands "probable cause"—not "possible cause." The Affidavit fails that constitutional requirement. Despite years of investigations of the 2020 election, the Affidavit does not identify facts that establish probable cause that anyone committed a crime. Instead, FBI Special Agent Evans (the "Affiant") all but admits that the seizure will yield evidence of a crime only if certain hypotheticals are true. See, e.g., Aff. ¶ 10 ("If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law[.]"); ¶ 85 ("If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, the election records . . . are evidence of violations[.]"). Unsupported by probable cause and dependent on unsubstantiated hypotheticals, Respondent's seizure violated the Fourth Amendment.

There's more (emphasis mine):

Second, instead of alleging probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, the Affidavit does nothing more than describe the types of human errors that its own sources confirm occur in almost every election—without any intentional wrongdoing whatsoever. Mislabeling an expected margin of error as "deficiencies" or "defects" cannot establish probable cause, let alone for a seizure of this magnitude.

Third, the Affidavit omits numerous material facts—including from the very reports and publicly-disclosed investigations that the Affiant cites—that confirm the alleged conduct was previously investigated and found to be unintentional. Moreover, the Affidavit not only fails to allege that any particular witness is reliable or credible; it omits discrediting information about those witnesses that was obviously available to the Affiant. These omissions are serious. The ex parte warrant process would be rendered a nullity if the government were permitted to hide material and probative facts that refute probable cause from a magistrate judge and nevertheless retain the fruits of its misconduct.

It then goes on to note that even if the affidavit wasn't more about what was deliberately left out of it, rather than what Kash Patel's FBI decided to include, it would still suck, constitutionally-speaking:

Fourth, even if the Affidavit established probable cause, the seizure of original election materials would be unreasonable and in callous disregard of the Fourth Amendment because (1) the statutes of limitation have lapsed on the only crimes under investigation; (2) the warrant violates Georgia's state sovereignty by effectively enjoining a pending state court proceeding and preventing Georgia from performing its constitutionally-mandated role in administering its elections; and (3) the Respondent improperly used the criminal warrant process to circumvent a pending civil lawsuit in which it requested the same records.

That last sentence is a particularly spicy zinger. It shows the administration will do anything to rack up a few rabble-rousing "victories," no matter how fleeting or Pyrrhic. This is a fully-cooked collection of gassed-up bigots and conspiracy theorists (or both!) who have managed to turn their extremely online "own the libs" bullshit into a 24/7 attack on the Constitution, the system of checks and balances, and anything else that stands in the way of their autocratic wet dreams.

What's standing between us and further destruction of the stuff that makes America great is a court system that doesn't actually seem to know what to do when it has to deal with an entire administration that refuses to play by the rules that have held this nation together for more than two centuries. It's time for the courts to dig deep and start breaking the glass on every judicial tool labeled "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY." Giving any of these fuckers the benefit of a doubt only allows them to dig in deeper.

The Complete Big Data and Power BI Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn how to effectively sort, analyze, and visualize all of your data. Courses cover Power BI, Power Query, Excel, and Access. It's on sale for $40.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Plenty of blame to go around, says Isaacman

NASA has released the findings from its investigation of the ill-fated crewed Boeing Starliner mission of 2024, and while it still isn't sure of the root technical causes, it's admitted that trusting Boeing to do a thorough job appears to have been a mistake. …

AI model said to show improved reasoning capabilities

If you want an even better AI model, there could be reason to celebrate. Google, on Thursday, announced the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro, characterizing the model's arrival as "a step forward in core reasoning."…

Sony is closing Bluepoint Games, the studio behind the Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls remakes, Bloomberg reports. Bluepoint's last major project was God of War: Ragnarok from 2022, which it co-developed with Sony Santa Monica. 

According to Bloomberg, Sony decided to shut down the studio following "a recent business review." Around 70 employees will lose their jobs as part of the studio closure, which will officially happen in March. "Bluepoint Games is an incredibly talented team and their technical expertise has delivered exceptional experiences for the PlayStation community," Sony said in a statement to Bloomberg. "We thank them for their passion, creativity and craftmanship."

Following their work on Ragnarok, Bluepoint was reportedly tasked with developing a live-service game set in the God of War universe. That title was cancelled in 2025, alongside another game from Bend Studio. In the context of Sony's other live-service failures, the decision wasn't surprising. Sony shut down the servers for multiplayer shooter Concord just two weeks after its release. Not long after, it also closed Firewalk Studios, the developer behind the game.

Bluepoint Games was originally acquired by Sony in 2021, when it seemed like the studio's expertise in remaking and remastering classic PlayStation games could be a major asset going forward. Why that changed isn't entirely clear, but Sony's mismanagement of its pivot into and out of publishing premium online multiplayer games may have played a role. Some of Sony's studios are still experimenting with live-service mechanics. Guerilla Games recently announced an online co-op game set in its Horizon universe. Destiny 2 developer Bungie is also releasing its extraction shooter Marathon in March.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/sony-is-shutting-down-the-studio-behind-the-demons-souls-remake-195234213.html?src=rss

A newly-leaked Labour Together report shows that the Starmeroid sabotage group continued to monitor the Canary for years after trying to destroy it. And, Skwawkbox was monitored too - although the geniuses at the shady group failed to spell it correctly. One thing is very clear: Labour Together have been running scared of journalists reporting on their connections and movements.

Evidently, any attention on what they got up to in pursuit of their aims - and how they funded it - clearly made Morgan McSweeney and company fearful of discovery. This is flagged in the preamble of the leaked report, which says that:

recent articles and blog posts…have contained more information than ever before, raising questions and concerns about the sources of the information.

Labour Together's dossier

The Morgan McSweeney faction's frank terror of left media, especially the Canary, was well and truly exposed in Paul Holden's excellent book The Fraud. That fear triggered McSweeney and his partner in crime Imran Ahmed to try to "destroy" the Canary.

The faction's fear of left media clearly didn't stop when the propaganda groups they set up managed to topple Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader by sabotaging the 2019 general election - and came close to forcing the Canary to close.

McSweeney resigned in early February 2026 as Keir Starmer's chief of staff after years - as Holden exposed - of running covert campaigns against the left and its media. The immediate cause of his resignation was McSweeney's closeness to disgraced string-puller Peter Mandelson. It was a doomed attempt to protect McSweeney's boss Keir Starmer - but the scandals have just kept on oozing out ever since.

This week, Rupert Murdoch's Times 'broke' the news that McSweeney's outfit Labour Together paid tens of thousands to private investigators to spy on two Times hacks. It wasn't breaking; it wasn't even news. The Canary and others had already reported on it - and had reported six months earlier on Labour Together's spying on a number of left-wing journalists, as well as on author Paul Holden and former Mandela minister Andrew Feinstein.

Something bothering you, lads?

The newly-leaked report shows just how much Labour Together was discomfited by what the Canary and others were digging up. The memo begins with some anxiety over who is watching their every move:

For both left- and right-wing influencers, Labour Together and CCDH sit at the centre of a nexus of conspiracy theories that involve government attempts to suppress free speech, increasing state censorship, the sabotaging of left- and right-wing leaders, and pro-Israel advocacy, among many other accusations.

Conspiracy theories? What is it about the Canary and other independent journalists that so bothers Labour Together? Perhaps that we're not in the pockets of billionaires or politicians, and actually report the truth as we find it?

The memo also confirms that the McSweeney group continued to monitor the Canary - with particular attention to how it exposed Imran Ahmed's sock-puppet groups. This was going on long before Holden's book was published, though Holden features too:

The report was prepared for Labour Together in December 2023, marked "Strictly Private and Confidential". Oh well. After introducing the Canary as one of the main outlets paying attention to Labour Together's actions from the start of Starmer's diseased tenure as Labour leader, and to Labour Together's links with the Israel lobby, it then turns to the exposure of McSweeney and Ahmed's shamelessly named fake-news campaigns [emphases added]:

December 2020: The far-left website The Canary published an article which focused on the Stop Funding Fake News campaign following its successful campaign urging corporations to stop advertising on The Canary website.

The article focused on the connection between SFFN and Morgan McSweeny [sic]. McSweeney was identified as one of the directors, alongside Imran Ahmed, and as Keir Starmer MP's Chief of Staff at the time. The article noted celebrity Rachel Riley's support for both SFFN and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

The article accused CCDH of being linked to a "number of figures on the Labour right" and suggested that McSweeney and Ahmed had been operating both campaigns for longer than the organisations were "willing to admit".

Labour Together is briefly mentioned as an organisation that shares its address with CCDH and is accused of being a grouping of Blue Labour and Labour Right figures - including Lisa Nandy at the time.

Who is Imran Ahmed?

Like McSweeney, Imran Ahmed is one of the most shadowy figures on the Labour right. Initially a staffer for right-wing Labour horror Angela Eagle and desperate to protect Eagle from deselection by angry party members, Ahmed was at the centre of fake claims that left-wingers threw a brick through Eagle's office window. The whole thing was made up. The window was not Eagle's. There was never any evidence the left had anything to do with it. There was never even a brick. But following a pattern that was soon to become characteristic of Labour Together's operations, the corporate and state press were more than happy to amplify the false claims fed to them.

Ahmed then went on to co-found the Orwellian smear factory 'Stop Funding Fake News' (SFFN) to target the Canary. When that was no longer needed, SFFN morphed into the equally misnamed 'Centre for Countering Digital Hate' (CCDH). Ahmed moved to the US and touted CCDH's services to the anonymous wealthy and powerful to attack their opponents using similar tactics to those used against the Canary. He also specifically courted Israel and its donors, eager to target Palestine and the anti-genocide movement. Author Paul Thacker has accused Ahmed of working with or for UK intelligence services.

Given Ahmed's links to nefarious groups and his closeness to McSweeney, it's clear - and no surprise - that any scrutiny was unwelcome.

Shit out of luck

The Canary features numerous times in the memo, each time as a thorn in the McSweeney-Ahmed axis's side. In each case, the information exposed by our journalists about Labour Together's activities and personnel has subsequently been proven to be true, particularly by Holden's book, which was serialised by the Canary in the autumn of 2025.

When Jeremy Corbyn was still leader of the Labour party and the left media were central to his prospects of success, Morgan McSweeney told his fellow saboteurs, "kill the Canary before the Canary kills us". They came close, but they are now disgraced relics while the Canary is thriving more than ever. And, for good measure, so is Sk(w)awkbox.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

The Church of England should speak out and call on the prime minister to stop Rosebank. That's the demand from Christian Climate Action (CCA). The group held a 'die-in' outside St Paul's Cathedral on 18 February, which was Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

Ministers also used symbolic 'oil' instead of traditional ash to anoint activists with the sign of the cross as part of the peaceful vigil.

Archbishops urged to campaign against Rosebank

CCA has also written to the archbishops of Canterbury and York calling for their support in urging the government to refuse permission for the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea, stating:

As part of our Stop Crucifying Creation campaign, CCA is urging the Church of England to be a prophetic voice in this existential crisis and speak out against the fossil fuel companies that are driving the Climate Emergency.

Rev James Grote explained:

Climate change is crucifying creation through flood and drought, heat and storms. We must speak up with those who are suffering the loss of everything in our one and only planet.

If we are to continue to live in hope we have to act now, move away from fossil fuels, call out the oil and gas giants and stop Rosebank. The UK government must give us hope.

On Ash Wednesday, they held a 'die-in' where protesters shrouded themselves under white sheets, with banner messages that included "Don't Crucify Creation" and "Stop Rosebank," at the foot of the steps to the main entrance of St Paul's Cathedral.

Rev Helen Burnett said:

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, which is the season of repentance and reflection. A time when Christians consider their commitment to living within the limits of the gospel which frees us to live in ways that bring justice and peace.

That's why we have chosen today to urge the Church to speak out against fossil fuel extraction and here in the UK that means stopping the Rosebank oil field from being developed.

The Church of England can 'Speak Truth to Power' and be a prophetic voice on climate, calling out oil and gas companies and government inaction on the climate and nature crisis.

Rosebank, the UK's largest undeveloped oil field, is back on the government's desk. It received approval in 2023, before Scottish courts ruled it unlawful. Norwegian state oil company Equinor reapplied for drilling permission in September 2025.

Following the completion of the Adura joint venture deal between Equinor and Shell in December, Adura has now assumed majority ownership of the field.

An application to develop Rosebank has been resubmitted, which will now be subject to the government's new climate test. This requires oil firms to account for the climate impact of burning the oil and gas they plan to extract.

Stop Rosebank campaigner Lauren MacDonald said:

We cannot open new North Sea oil and gas projects if we are to stay within the 1.5ºc threshold set out in the Paris Agreement, to which the UK is a signatory. In fact, Rosebank's vast CO2 emissions from burning oil and gas, would equate to what more than 700 million people living in the world's poorest countries produce in a year.

It's simply not possible to drill at Rosebank and uphold our climate commitments.

Not only this, Rosebank is a very bad deal for the UK. It won't lower bills and will do almost nothing to boost energy security, given that most of it is oil destined for export. It could also lead to a net loss to the Treasury of hundreds of millions of pounds, thanks to the enormous tax breaks for new drilling in the UK.

It is fantastic to see activists such as Christian Climate Action taking this issue to the highest level. It demonstrates how the Stop Rosebank campaign brings people from all walks of life together in unity and hope to save our planet.

Featured image via Angela Christofilou / Christian Climate Action

By The Canary

Former PM Gordon Brown has said that he dobbed former prince Andrew into "several UK police forces".

Brown wrote a five-page letter to various forces, including the Met, Sussex and Thames Valley, which he says contained "new and additional" information from the Epstein files. The ex-royal was arrested this morning on suspicion of 'misconduct in public office' — which carries a potential life sentence but does nothing for Andrew's and Epstein's victims.

Brown doesn't seem to have been asked quite why he had information from the Epstein files not previously available to police. Keir Starmer has helpfully added 'What the king said', insisting like Chuck that the "law must take its course".

The whole establishment now seems to be getting in on the Andrew act as some kind of ritual hand-washing of its own metastatic part in Epstein's decades of child-rape, trafficking and spying for Israel. Which isn't how they're describing it, of course — especially the Israel bit.

For more on the Epstein Files, please read the Canary's article on the way that the media circus around Epstein is erasing the experiences of victims and survivors.

Featured image via the ScottishGreens

By Skwawkbox

Meta is shutting down the standalone Messenger website, according to a company help page. The website will disappear in April, though web users will still be able to send and receive messages within Facebook.

"After messenger.com goes away, you will be automatically redirected to use facebook.com/messages for messaging on a computer," the help page reads. "You can continue your conversations there or on the Messenger mobile app."

Users will be able to restore their chat history after switching to the app by entering a PIN number. This is the same PIN that was used to initially create a backup on Messenger. It can be reset for those who simply don't have the bandwidth to remember yet another six-digit code.

Many users have expressed discontent over the decision to shut down the standalone website, according to a report by TechCrunch. This is particularly true for those who have deactivated their Facebook accounts but continued to use Messenger.

This comes just a few months after Meta shut down Messenger's standalone desktop apps. At that time, Meta directed existing users to Facebook to continue using the service and not the dedicated Messenger website. In other words, the writing has likely been on the wall since October.

Messenger has had a long and storied history. The platform first launched as Facebook Chat all the way back in 2008. Facebook Messenger became a standalone app in 2011. The company has long-tried to make Messenger a thing outside of Facebook. It removed messaging capabilities from the main Facebook app in 2014 and began directing users to the Messenger app. Meta began reintegrating Messenger back into the Facebook app in 2023 and now here we are.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/meta-is-shuttering-messengers-standalone-website-which-is-a-thing-that-exists-191808134.html?src=rss

Wants SLAs, revamped contracts for cloud ops

The US Congress' spending watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has pressed the National Science Foundation's CIO to improve how the agency plans, manages, and procures technology.…

Toy Fair 2026 just wrapped earlier this week and while I would have liked to spend even more time there, I have my own kids (and all their toys and trinkets) to look after. That said, there were a ton of cool new products on display at the Javits Center in New York City that set the stage for the rest of the year, so here's a quick look at some of the most interesting releases from the largest toy show in the Western Hemisphere. 

Transformers: The Movie 40th anniversary figures ($28 to $60)

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Transformers: The Movie, Hasbro is launching an apology tour to make up for traumatizing theatergoers with the death of the most beloved Autobot back in 1986. To kick things off, Hasbro is releasing a handful of new figures alongside re-releases for some popular bots including Astrotrain, Skywarp, Snarl and Shockwave. I want to give a special shout-out to the model for Kranix, which looks incredibly accurate, as if he just leapt off the movie screen. And even though his duck-billed spaceship alt-mode might look a bit awkward, I wouldn't have it any other way. 

The crown jewel of the line might be a near-life-size version of The Matrix of Leadership, which measures more than 15 inches wide and even plays Stan Bush's iconic song "The Touch" with the push of a button. Unfortunately, the appeal of the Matrix is so powerful that it's already sold out, including at third-party retailers like Big Bad Toy Store, which thankfully is still taking pre-orders for the rest of the lineup after the initial stock from Hasbro dried up.

F1 Hot WheelsA collection of some of the new F1 Hot Wheels cars for 2026. Sam Rutherford for Engadget

Hot Wheels has big plans for 2026 including a new line of Pantone-colored cars, Brick Shop models like the Elite Series Aston Martin (which comes with its own 1:64 scale car) and a Monster Truck Mutant Chaos set with actual slime. However, I'd argue the company's new F1 offerings are the cream of the crop. Not only are there a bunch of incredibly detailed 1:64 scale racecars with metal bodies, real rubber tires and accurate livery for all the big teams, there's also a new Downhill Circuit Race course that comes with three official vehicles (Mercedes, Haas and Ferrari) featuring multiple levels and the ability to overtake or crash into other cars. If you're like a lot of Americans who have recently fallen down the F1 rabbit hole due to Netflix's Drive to Survive, these new officially licensed miniatures are sure to hit the spot. 

The first five-pack set of cars is available now, with more arriving later this spring before the Downhill Circuit Race course drives by sometime this fall. 

Lego Star Wars with Smart Bricks ($40 to $160)Darth Vader's TIE fighter is an all-in-one set, which means it comes included with one of Lego's Smart Bricks, which isn't true for every kit. Lego

We've been eagerly awaiting the first batch of playsets featuring Lego's nifty Smart Brick after it debuted at CES. But now that the company has detailed eight new sets featuring its latest innovation, we're even more intrigued. For me, the three standout kits are the Millennium Falcon, Luke's Red Five X-Wing and Darth Vader's TIE fighter because acting out the Death Star trench run complete with reactive lights and sounds will never get old. I also have a soft spot for the Ewok minifigs that come with the AT-ST set. Alternatively, the Mos Eisley Cantina kit seems like a great way to highlight the smart brick's ability to play music or kick out some rowdy droids. The one thing to look out for, though, is the tag on the set that says whether it's Smart Play compatible or if it's an all-in-one set, because the former will need Smart Bricks from other kits to deliver Lego's newfound interactivity. 

Pre-orders for these are live now, with sets slated to ship on March 1. 

All the new K-pop Demon Hunters toysThe HUNTR/X Battle Rumi Deluxe Fashion Doll (right) might be my favorite of the bunch. Sam Rutherford for Engadget

Rumi, Mira and Zoey may have been the biggest breakout stars of 2025 and Mattel is looking to keep that momentum going with a ton of new toys and figures for everyone's favorite demon hunters. There are three new singing dolls that can belt out the trio's hit "Golden" at the touch of a button and a deluxe figure of Rumi complete with her Four Tiger Sword. There are also a ton of other dolls and miniatures showcasing HUNTR/X, the Saja Boys and more. The one downside is that these products aren't coming out until the fall, so you'll have to tide yourself over with other K-pop-themed products for now. 

Hatchin' Yoshi ($50)If Rosalina isn't careful, Yoshi will become the biggest draw of the new Mario movie. Spin Masters

Yoshi seems poised to steal the spotlight from Rosalina in the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy Movie and this release from Spin Masters is only reinforcing the lovable green dino's aura. From inside his shell, Yoshi can burst out with his signature yell. After that, you can pat his nose to make his eyes light up or get him to rock when he's really happy. But if you want one, you're going to have to be vigilant. Pre-orders are already sold out, so you'll need to keep a close eye on retailers like Walmart when he officially goes on sale on February 20. 

Thames and Kosmos SolarFlowersNot only do the SolarFlowers look great, they're educational too. Thames & Kosmos

Technically, these went on sale last month, but Thames & Kosmos' SolarFlowers caught my eye again at Toy Fair due to their combination of art and science. Available in four different styles, each kit features a model that you can build yourself or with your kids (recommended age 8+) that turns into a lasting showpiece. After putting the kinetic sculpture together, you can connect the included solar panel to bring the whole kit to life (no batteries required) and make the flowers spin for perpetual entertainment. 

Honorable mentionsUpcoming Masters of the Universe figuresSome upcoming figures from Mattel's line of Masters of the Universe figures. Sam Rutherford for Engadget

As someone who grew up during the 80s and 90s, I'm trying to be optimistic about He-Man's return to the big screen later this summer and Mattel's new line of figures is certainly helping. To help prime people for the movie, there's a big range of upcoming toys highlighting He-Man, Skeletor, Battle Cat and more, all of which I would have absolutely loved as a kid. Those will be available later this spring.

Fisher-Price Super Mario Little People collectionJust look how cute these are. Sam Rutherford for Engadget

It's hard to gauge the excitement of toys aimed at one-year-olds when they can't read or get into Toy Fair. But as the parent of a toddler, I adore the partnership between Fisher-Price and Nintendo that has resulted in a line of Mario-themed Little People. All the big names are here, including Peach, Luigi and Bowser and there's even a couple of super cute playsets to go with them. But perhaps the best part is that a six-pack of figures and Bower's Airship costs under $25, which means your kid could be in for hours of fun without you spending a ton of money.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/here-are-my-favorite-things-from-toy-fair-2026-183356720.html?src=rss

Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were "related to DEI."

That's what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.

There were plenty of early reports that the DOGE bros Elon Musk brought into government—operating on the hubristically ignorant belief that they understood how things worked better than actual government employees—were using AI tools to figure out what to cut. Now we have the receipts.

The bros in question here are Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox who appeared all over the place in the early DOGE days, destroying the US government.

Cavanaugh was appointed president of the U.S. Institute of Peace after DOGE took over, though that position is affected by this week's court ruling. Shortly after being named the acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness — one of the agencies Trump's budget proposal calls for eliminating — Cavanaugh placed its entire staff on administrative leave.

Cavanaugh first emerged at GSA in February, where he met with many technical staffers and software engineers and interviewed them about their jobs, according to four GSA employees who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.

Since then, he's also been detailed to multiple other agencies, according to court filings, including the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF), the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Minority Business Development Agency.

Cavanaugh's partner in much of the small agency outreach is Justin Fox, who most recently worked as an associate at Nexus Capital Management, according to his LinkedIn profile.

As far as I can tell, Cavanaugh is a college dropout who founded a startup to do IP licensing management, that has gone through some trouble. We've mentioned Cavanaugh here before, for the time when he was head of the US Institute for Peace, and Elon and DOGE falsely labeled a guy who had worked for USIP a member of the Taliban, causing the actual Taliban to kidnap the guy's family. Fox, as noted, was a low rung employee at some random private equity firm. Neither should have any of the jobs listed above, and don't seem to know shit about anything relevant to a government role.

Anyway, as the Authors Guild figured out in discovery, when these two inexperienced and ignorant DOGE bros were assigned to cut grants in the National Endowment for the Humanities, apparently Fox just started feeding grant titles to ChatGPT asking (in effect) "is this DEI?" From the complaint:

To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: "Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with 'Yes.' or 'No.' followed by a brief explanation. Do not use 'this initiative' or 'this description' in your response." He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT's interpretation of "DEI" as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT's interpretation of "DEI" matched his own.

Cool.

Then, actual staff at the NEH, including experts who might have been able to explain to these two interlopers what the grants actually did and why they were worth supporting, were blocked from challenging the termination of these grants.

Grants identified this way were slated for termination—with only a handful of exceptions, staff at NEH, including the Acting Chair, were not permitted to remove them from the termination list.

It seems to me that two ignorant DOGE bros cancelling humanities grants based solely on "yo is this DEI?" ChatGPT prompts, kinda shows the need for actual diversity, equity, and inclusion in how things like the National Endowment for the Humanities should work. Instead, you have two rando dweebs who don't understand shit asking the answer machine to justify cancelling grants that sound too woke.

It really feels like these two chucklefucks should be asked to justify their jobs way more than any of these grant recipients should have to justify their work. But, nope, the bros just got to cancelling.

See if you notice a pattern.

For instance, Fox searched each grant's description for the use of key words that appeared in a "Detection List" that he created. Those key words included terms such as "LGBTQ," "homosexual," "tribal," "immigrants," "gay," "BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color)," "native," and so on. Terms like "white," "Caucasian," and "heterosexual" did not appear in the Detection List.

Fox also organized certain grants into a spreadsheet with lists that he labeled "Craziest Grants" and "Other Bad Grants." Among the grants on those lists were those Fox described as relating to "experiences of LGBTQ military service," "oral histories of LatinX in the mid-west," "social and cultural context of tribal linguistics," and a "book on the 'first gay black science fiction writer in history.'"

Fox also used the Artificial Intelligence ("AI") tool ChatGPT to search grant descriptions that purportedly related to DEI, but Fox did not direct the AI tool that it should not identify grants solely on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or similar characteristic. The AI searches broadly captured all grants that referred to individuals based on precisely those characteristics. For example, the AI searches flagged a grant described as concerning "the Colfax massacre, the single greatest incidence of anti-Black violence during Reconstruction," another concerning "the untold story of Jewish women's slave labor during the Holocaust," another that funded a film examining how the game of baseball was "instrumental in healing wounds caused by World War I and the 1980s economic standoff between the US and Japan," another charting "the rise and reforms of the Native Americans boarding school systems in the U.S. between 1819 and 1934," and another about "the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), the first female pilots to fly for the U.S. military during WWII" and the "Black female pilots who . . . were denied entry into the WASP because of their race."

So, yeah. This kid basically fed any grant that might upset a white Christian nationalist into ChatGPT, saying "justify me cancelling this shit for being woke" and then he and his college dropout "IP licensing" buddy cancelled them all.

Cavanaugh worked closely with Fox in selecting which grants to terminate using this selection criteria.

Fox and Cavanaugh sorted grants in lists labeled "to cancel" or "to keep."

No grant relating to DEI as broadly conceived of by Fox and Cavanaugh appeared on the "to keep" list. Grants that Fox and Cavanaugh considered "wasteful" and thus slated for termination could be moved to the "to keep" list by Defendant McDonald only if they related to "America 250" or the "Garden of Heroes" initiatives based on the views of Defendants McDonald, Fox, Cavanaugh, and NEH staff member, Adam Wolfson

The complaint notes that almost immediately Cavanaugh and Fox sent out mass emails to more than 1,400 grant recipients, from a private non-government email server, telling them their grants had been terminated.

Even though the emails stated that the grant terminations were "signed" by the acting director of NEH, Michael McDonald, he admitted he had nothing to do with them. It was all Fox, Cavanaugh… and ChatGPT based on a very stupid prompt.

McDonald appeared to acknowledge that he did not determine which grants to terminate nor did he draft the termination letters. First, he stated that he had explained NEH's traditional termination process but that "as they said in the notification letter…they would not be adhering to traditional notification processes" and "they did not feel those should be applied in this instance." Further, in response to a question about the rationale for grant terminations, he replied that the "rationale was simply because that's the way DOGE had operated at other agencies and they applied the same methodology here." McDonald also said that any statement about the number of grants terminated would be "conjecture" on his part, even though he purportedly signed each termination letter

DOGE bros gone wild.

So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly "woke" words, then asking ChatGPT "yo, tell me this is DEI" and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director's signature.

This is what "government efficiency" looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn't tell you which grants got cut or why.

The cruelty isn't incidental. But neither is the incompetence. These are people who genuinely believe that being good at vibes-based pattern matching is the same as understanding how institutions work. And the wreckage they leave behind is the entirely predictable result.

FBI warns these cyber-physical attacks are on the rise

Thieves stole more than $20 million from compromised ATMs last year using a malware-assisted technique that the FBI says is on the uptick across the United States.…

From AI conflation to thin evidence, a new report calls many climate claims greenwashing

Some AI advocates claim that bots hold the secret to mitigating climate change. But research shows that the reality is far different, as new datacenters cause power utilities to burn even more fossil fuels to meet their insatiable demand for energy.…

Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has indicated that the company's controversial Search Party feature might not always be just for lost dogs, according to emails obtained by 404 Media. A creepy surveillance tool being used to surveil. Who could have predicted that?

"I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission," Siminoff wrote in an email to staffers. "You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started."

The Ring<->Flock partnership is even worse than imagined, it was setup to be a AI powered mass surveillance system from the start. See this email from the Ring Founder, Jamie Siminoff (https://t.co/kLbZdR6Is1) pic.twitter.com/W9TFQpriRh

— Maricopa County Libertarian Party (@LPMaricopa) February 18, 2026

The words "zero out crime in neighborhoods" are particularly troubling. It is, however, worth noting that this is just an email and doesn't necessarily indicate a plan by the company. Siminoff wrote the email back in October when Search Party first launched, which was months before the public backlash started. He did end the thread by noting he couldn't "wait to show everyone else all the exciting things we are building over the years to come."

One of those things could be the recently-launched "Familiar Faces" tool, which uses facial recognition to identify people that wander into the frame of a Ring camera. It seems to me that a combination of the Search Party tech, which uses the combined might of connected Ring cameras, with the Familiar Faces tech could make for a very powerful surveillance tool that excels at finding specific individuals.

Siminoff also suggested in an earlier email to staffers that Ring technology could have been used to catch Charlie Kirk's killer by leveraging the company's Community Requests feature. This is a tool that allows cops to ask camera owners for footage, thanks to a partnership with the police tech company Axon.

Here's that Ring #SuperBowl commercial: pic.twitter.com/1gAxIJATdz

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) February 9, 2026

Ring had planned an expansion of this program via a partnership with a surveillance company called Flock Safety. The companies canceled this partnership after a Super Bowl ad spotlighting the Search Party tool triggered public outcry. Ring didn't cite public sentiment for this decision, rather saying the integration would require "significantly more time and resources than anticipated."

Ring has responded to 404 Media's reporting, saying in an email that Search Party "does not process human biometrics or track people" and that "sharing has always been the camera owner's choice." This response did not provide any information as to what the future will hold for the company's toolset.

The organization has been friendly with law enforcement since inception. "Our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods has been at the core of everything we do at Ring," founding chief Jamie Siminoff said when Amazon bought the company for $839 million back in 2018. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/ring-could-be-planning-to-expand-search-party-feature-beyond-dogs-175805706.html?src=rss

YouTube's "Ask" button is making its way to the living room. The Gemini-powered feature is now rolling out as an experiment on smart TVs, gaming consoles and streaming devices. 9to5Google first spotted a Google support page announcing the change.

Like on mobile devices and desktop, the feature is essentially a Gemini chatbot trained on each video's content. Selecting that "Ask" button will bring up a series of canned prompts related to the content. Alternatively, you can use your microphone to ask questions about it in your own words.

The "Ask about this video" feature on desktopYouTube

Google says your TV remote's microphone button (if it has one) will also activate the "Ask" feature. The company listed sample questions in its announcement, such as "what ingredients are they using for this recipe?" and "what's the story behind this song's lyrics?"

The conversational AI tool is only launching for "a small group of users" at first. Google promises that it will "keep everyone up to speed on any future expansions."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/youtube-is-bringing-the-gemini-powered-ask-button-to-tvs-173900295.html?src=rss

Rivian suggests that vehicle owners can leave their phone at home (or perhaps in a glove box) and instead control some aspects of their EV using a new Apple Watch app. With a tap of your watch, you can unlock and lock the doors, sound the alarm and vent the windows. After the digital key is set up, R1S and R1T Gen 2 owners can unlock their vehicle automatically simply by walking up to it thanks to the passive car key feature.

It's possible to set the cabin temperature and a target state of charge by turning the digital crown on an Apple Watch. You also can choose four quick controls to put front and center in the app and add a battery status indicator to your watch face if you so wish. Rivian says it will update its Apple Watch app with new features in the future.

Rivian first enabled digital car key support on Apple, Google Pixel and Samsung devices back in December. Apple started supporting digital car keys on iPhone and Apple Watch in 2020 and a boatload of automakers have adopted the tech. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/rivian-rolls-out-an-apple-watch-app-with-vehicle-controls-and-digital-key-support-172642545.html?src=rss

Keir Starmer's endless — and knowing — cosiness with sex pests and paedophiles has become a byword in politics. So much so that women Labour MPs demanded a special meeting with Starmer to inform him that the public considers Labour the "party of paedos". They forgot to mention the victims, of course.

Starmer is still reeling from his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as his senior adviser — and ambassador — knowing Mandelson had remained close to the convicted serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson protégé Morgan McSweeney resigned in February 2026 as Starmer's chief of staff but failed to take the heat off his boss.

That heat is white-hot. Under Starmer, Labour has a deep and ongoing paedophile and sex offender problem. And now Starmer has been rocked by yet another 'appointed him and knew' scandal.

Starmer and Brendan Cox

Charity leaders and others are "dismayed" at his close relationship with Brendan Cox, the widower of murdered centrist MP Jo Cox and a keen 'both-sideser' of Israel's genocide in Gaza. Allegations against Cox of sexual assault and other sexually improper behaviour have long been public and have forced his resignation from no fewer than three charities. Despite this, according to inside sources, Starmer chose to use Cox as an 'informal consultant', though both he and Cox now deny it. Of course they do — yet Cox's latest charity, the 'Together Initiative', received almost £1.3m from Starmer's culture department over a two-year period.

Number 10 claims its consultations with Cox's outfit are no different from its talks with other charities, but presumably not all of the 'others' received more than £600,000 a year from the government.

Cox was first — at least publicly — accused of sexual harassment at 'Save the Children' more than a decade ago. He denied the allegations at the time, but resigned. He later apologised for his conduct. In 2018, he also resigned from both charities he had set up in memory of his late wife. Now, according to the New Statesman, there is "serious and high-level concern" about the closeness between Cox and Starmer's regime.

Another unnamed figure in the charity sector was more blunt:

What the fuck are they doing?

And Starmer knew, a former colleague of Cox insists:

No 10 cannot pretend that they did not know about it or that it did not come up in their due diligence checks. They know it and they have decided that it doesn't matter because he is useful to them.

Yet Cox has been allowed to give "the impression that he was briefing [the charity sector] on the government's behalf", apparently endorsed by Starmer's new chief of staff Vidhya Alakeson and with the participation of a Number 10 special adviser. Alakeson — a former Tory think-tanker — took over after the disgraced McSweeney's resignation.

Starmer's 'Party of paedos'

The Cox scandal is just the latest in a long, long list of related outrages, many involving Starmer personally and all involving the pro-Israel Labour right. Starmer followed his Mandelson fiasco with another 'Labour nonceberg' scandal over his decision to award a peerage to his former adviser Matthew Doyle. He knew, when he recommended Doyle, that Doyle had campaigned for the election of notorious Scottish Labour paedophile Sean Morton.

Starmer also:

• Welcomed the London MP Neil Coyle back under the Labour whip despite Coyle being found by Parliament to have sexually harassed a staffer, as well as racially abusing a Chinese-British man.
• Turned a blind eye to then-Chester MP Chris Matheson's sexual harassment: neither Starmer nor the party machine suspended him pending the outcome of the investigation, as would be usual practice to protect the women around him.
• Protected at least two further alleged sex pests on his front bench.

As head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Starmer oversaw repeated refusals to prosecute offenders, including the notorious serial rapist Jimmy Savile. And perhaps most seriously, in terms of Starmer's provable direct involvement, he and his then-sidekick David Evans covered up Jewish whistleblower Elaina Cohen's allegations of serial abuse of women by a party staffer.

They did nothing

Cohen repeatedly warned Starmer and Evans that a staffer working for then-Perry Barr MP Khalid Mahmood — and allegedly Mahmood's lover — was engaged in 'sadistic' and 'criminal' abuse of vulnerable Muslim women. The victims were fleeing domestic violence, allegedly inflicted through the now-defunct domestic violence 'charity' that she ran. Starmer and Evans did nothing. Mahmood remained on Starmer's front bench and Cohen was sacked from her role as parliamentary aide.

One of the victims gave evidence at Cohen's successful wrongful dismissal tribunal. She spoke of the horrific abuse she and others suffered. This included blackmail and sexual exploitation. Her evidence was not challenged by Mahmood or his lawyers. At the tribunal, Mahmood admitted under oath that he'd personally made sure that Starmer was aware of Cohen's allegations.

Defining characteristic

Labour's 'paedophile friends of Israel' is also so widespread as to be a defining characteristic of the Zionist Labour right to which Starmer belongs:

• Starmer's cadre knew, when they approved Zionist organiser Tom Dewey to stand for election as a Hackney councillor, that Dewey had been charged with possessing the most disgusting and severe child-rape images. Dewey was subsequently convicted, but when local women members wanted to discuss it, it locked them out of its systems to prevent them doing so. In February 2026 the party deselected three Hackney councillors for demanding an investigation.
• 'Friend of Israel' Liron Velleman has just been convicted of repeated sex crimes against a 13-year-old girl.
• In January 2025, former Blair minister Ivor Caplin was arrested in a sting operation as he allegedly attempted to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex. Local police went after local left-winger Greg Hadfield for exposing the explicit content Caplin posted on his X feed — Hadfield defeated the 'vexatious' charge in November 2025. However, no charges have yet been brought against Caplin and a court did not impose bail conditions after his initial bail expired.
• In March 2025 Sam Gould, another Jewish Labour Movement activist who worked for Starmer's health secretary Wes Streeting, quit as a Redbridge councillor after being convicted on two separate counts of indecent exposure to a 13-year-old girl.
• The following month Dan Norris MP, an ally of Keir Starmer, was arrested over allegations of rape, child sex offences and child abduction.  Avon and Somerset Police says its investigation is still ongoing.
• The same Dan Norris was arrested again in February 2026 for alleged rape and sexual assault.

Another one bites the dust

It seems like every week a new Starmer sex offender scandal oozes out into the public domain. And that's not even counting the way that 'mainstream' media still stubbornly refuse to probe why several Ukrainian rent boys set fire to Starmer's property last year.

No wonder the survivors of serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein, ignored by Starmer, refuse to accept his recent non-apology and describe him as a barrier to justice for the victims of paedophiles.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) is celebrating the legal victory, with another huntsman brought to justice. Northampton magistrate's court has found Philip Saunders guilty of illegal hunting on Wednesday 18 February. Saunders is one of the arsehole huntsman for criminal gang, the Pipewell Foot Beagles.

Leg it lads, we've been seen Another one?

The conviction is the second time these bloodthirsty arseholes have been caught out illegally hare-hunting.

And it beautifully landed just before the 21st anniversary of the Hunting Act.

The court heard how Saunders led his pack to kill a hare at the Boughton Estates on Kettering. Richard Scott is the current Duke of Buccleuch and one of the largest land owners in Scotland. It's no shock that he would allow an illegal hunt to take place on 'home turf.'

Courageous wildlife photographer Emma Reed was on the scene and captured the entire incident.

Rumbled again

Reed's video clearly shows Saunders encouraging the hounds to kill. The huntsman was heard growling "Get onto it!" at the dogs. This is a specific hunting term which incites animal cruelty and it proves the hunt intended to pursue the hare.

A previous victim of the hunt

As per usual, the HSA provided names to the police at the time, but they failed to act on the evidence. Again.

Losing the horn

The magistrate fined Saunders £1,000 for his role in the illegal hunt. He also has to pay £3,600 in costs and a £400 victim surcharge.

In the landmark move, the court also ordered the destruction of Saunders' hunting horn. Saunders must surrender it to the police by 5pm Thursday 19 Feb.

Destroying the horn is beautifully symbolic as this is the primary tool a huntsman uses to control the hounds. The HSA believe this should be common practice in all cases as it effectively strips the bloodthirsty wankers of the ability to lead.

Reed expressed her satisfaction with the guilty verdict stating:

"I am pleased with the guilty verdict as justice has been served. The judge was strong in his summing up of sending a message to the hunting community that these illegal actions will not be tolerated and are totally unacceptable."

Justice for wildlife

The Judge was strong in his summing up of the case, making it clear that illegal hunting of hares is totally unacceptable and it sends a clear warning to the hunting community.

Simon Russell, chair of the HSA spoke to the Canary about this landmark victory:

Hare Hunts always pack up and go home when sabs find them, this is what they are really doing when they're not under observation, killing our public wild Hares. A good hunting horn is hard to come by, the really decent ones rack in at £300 plus and we would suggest that future convictions have the horns donated to the Hunt Saboteurs Association. We would put them to good use saving wildlife.

Images via Emma Reed

By Antifabot

An American attack on Iran appears imminent. US president Donald Trump has deployed massive military force to the Persian Gulf while negotiations between the two counties seem to have stalled. Media reports the attack could start as soon as Saturday 21 February.

Iran's leadership has said that the principles of the negotiations — centring on Iran's nuclear plans (or lack thereof) — were understood but that no agreement had been reached. The US has said military options are very much 'on the table' while Iran now says it's open to international nuclear inspections.

Iran closed large areas of its airspace on 19 February. It's aviation authority said it was:

to allow a planned missile launch exercise tomorrow. It specified danger zones where flying will be completely banned due to military activity.

Anonymous Iranian security officials said it was a show of force, and the US aviation authority has followed suit:

warning that uncoordinated missile launches could pose catastrophic risks, including endangering civilian flight paths.

The closure was enough to active alarm bells for some countries. Poland urged its citizens to leave Iran. Prime minister Donald Tusk said:

In a few, a dozen, or several dozen hours, evacuation may no longer be possible.

Behind the scenes, US military aircraft have been moving into the region for days.

Tankers inbound

Sky News reported that American refuelling planes have passed through the UK as part of the build-up. Starmer's Britain, it appears, is happy to serve as checkpoints for Trump's march to war.

Military expert professor Michael Clarke was on Sky on 18 February. Using open source air traffic mapping, he showed how on 16 February six US tankers passed through the UK on their way to Greece. On 18 February, a further ten tankers passed through the UK on their way towards the Mediterranean:

You can hear his analysis from around 1.55 in this report:

And Drop Site News journalists Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Huzzain reported:

the largest buildup of firepower in the Middle East since President Donald Trump authorized a 12-day bombing campaign against Iran last June that killed more than 1,000 people.

One anonymous former Trump insider told the investigative outlet that:

based on his discussions with current officials, he assesses an 80-90% likelihood of U.S. strikes within weeks.

And retired Lt. Col. Daniel Davis said the level of build-up:

harkens back to what I saw ahead of the 2003 Iraq war.

Davis warned:

You don't assemble this kind of power to send a message. In my view, this is what you do when you're preparing to use it. What I see on the diplomatic front is just to try to keep things rolling until it's time to actually launch the military operation. I think that everybody on both sides knows where this is heading.

And a key US command and control aircraft is now in the region…

Critical command and control aircraft

Former US Marine and State Department whistleblower Matthew Hoh said the presence of the E-3 command and control aircraft was an indicator Trump intended to pull the trigger:

The E3 is an incredibly important aircraft. For those unfamiliar, it is the large airplane that looks like an airliner, but with a revolving radar disc on top.

The airplane is loaded with an air crew whose job is to observe, manage and control the airspace in its area. It is especially important for directing fighters and ground/sea based missile interceptors against Iranian missiles and drones.

This is the strongest indication to me of the seriousness of the US threat to Iran. The US has deployed more than 2/3 of its available E3 command/control aircraft to Europe and the Middle East.

The E3 is an incredibly important aircraft. For those unfamiliar, it is the large…

— Matthew Hoh (@MatthewPHoh) February 19, 2026

Renowned international relations scholar John Mearsheimer reminded us that barring UAE - which has close ties with the settler-colonial pariah state - the only country absolutely determined to have a war with Iran was Israel:

 

Drop Site broke down the scale of the build-up:

Two carrier strike groups—each built around one aircraft carrier, several guided‑missile destroyers armed with Tomahawk missiles, and at least one submarine—are also being stationed nearby, along with several additional U.S. destroyers and submarines in regional waters near Iran to defend against ballistic missile attacks, as well as more than 30,000 U.S. military personnel and numerous Patriot and THAAD anti-missile batteries spread across regional military bases.

The USS Gerald R. Ford is on its way to the Gulf from the Caribbean. The ship took part in Trump's last 'spectacular' - the Caracas raid which snatched Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on 3 January. The Ford is the biggest and most advanced carrier in the world.

Former Pentagon official Jasmine El-Gamal told Drop Site.

This is not a dress rehearsal. This is it. This is not the negotiations of last year or the year before or the year before that. They're backed into a corner. There's no off ramp.

El-Gamal said:

The fact that that carrier is there tells me that this isn't just a routine kind of, 'Hey, let's flex some muscle.' He didn't need that. He didn't need to send that second carrier to flex muscle.

But what would a US-Iran war actually look like?

Short intense war?

With negotiations deadlocked, one expert said that Iran and US might favour a short intense war followed by a return to talks.

Swedish-Iranian scholar Trita Parsi told Democracy Now:

We have a very dangerous situation, because both sides actually believe that a short, intense war may improve their negotiating position.

The US believes its overwhelming military capability will:

be able to take out Iran militarily rather quickly and then force it to capitulate.

Parsi said the Iranians have other plans:

They believe that they have the ability to inflict significant damage on the United States in the short term, including on civilian oil installations in the region, closing down the Strait of Hormuz, that would shoot up oil prices…

The Iranians were calculating that:

the initial cost of this to the United States would be so immense, and the United States would recognize that it would have to go for a longer war, which it cannot afford, and as a result, it would get the United States to back off.

Yes another Middle east war is looming. It would be a war which is not at all separate to the current genocide in Gaza and the legacies of the Iraq war. In fact, it would compound both. The best case scenario is that it doesn't happen at all. Next best? The sort of 'limited' bombing we've seen in the past.

The third, most terrifying and not at all unlikely outcome is that the war escalates into something altogether more existential with profound impacts for the region and the world, and which sends violent shocks through the global economy. A number of experts and insiders are saying we'll find out sooner rather than later.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

Disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, has finally been arrested in connection with revelations from the Epstein files.

Among those who have responded are the family of Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre accused Windsor of sexual abuse:

Statement from the family of Virginia Giuffre:

"At last.

Today, our broken hearts have been lifted at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty.

On behalf of our sister, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, we extend our gratitude to the UK's Thames Valley Police for their… pic.twitter.com/bgtHZtb2qO

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) February 19, 2026

Nevertheless, it hasn't escaped attention that the arrest is regarding misconduct in public office and apparently not in connection with Giuffre's allegations.

Andrew arrest: 'at last'

On 19 February 2026, Thames Valley Police arrested Andrew on suspicion of misconduct in public office. This came after they reviewed documents from the Epstein files which suggest he shared information from his time as a UK trade envoy with the late convicted paedophile.

Mountbatten-Windsor is currently in police custody amid searches of multiple properties as part of the criminal inquiry. The Epstein files have raised serious concerns about the scale of this sinister web of elitist men. This has prompted widespread demands for full transparency and accountability for sexual abuse against women and girls.

However, this pattern underscores how far more precedence is given to economic interests and institutional power over justice for victims and accountability for abusive men.

The statement from Giuffre's family reads in full:

At last.

Today, our broken hearts have been lifted at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty.

On behalf of our sister, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, we extend our gratitude to the UK's Thames Valley Police for their investigation and arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

He was never a prince.

For survivors everywhere, Virginia did this for you.

Virginia Giuffre

Virginia Giuffre accused Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was just 17 years old. She became a prominent advocate fighting against sex trafficking, in light of her own experience being sexually exploited by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. She died by suicide in April 2025 leaving her loved ones and survivors across the world devastated and heartbroken. Giuffre's push for accountability has been continued by advocacy groups across the West. Many have joined the call in demanding powerful men face consequences for the abuse they have evidently inflicted.

We wrote about Andrew's arrest shortly after it happened:

If former royal, and mate of serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was hoping for any public sympathy after his arrest this morning - on his birthday - he's going to be sorely disappointed.

The family of Virginia Giuffre, Andrew's most well-known victim, welcomed the arrest as a sign that no one is above the law:

"At last, today, our broken hearts have been lifted at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty," Giuffre's family said in the statement given to CBS News."

However, Windsor was arrested on suspicion of 'misconduct in a public office'. Knowing the British state, this was more likely linked to his leaking of secrets to Epstein than his abuse of trafficked and potentially under-age girls. But the offence carries a potential life sentence, so there's that.

Giuffre had long pursued seeing the suspected paedo-prince face accountability for his abuse against her. Obviously, Andrew has always denied these claims, which is no surprise as it's damn rare to find a man actually hold his hands up in disgust at the abuse he has inflicted.

Because of this, she was denied the justice she deserved over the allegations against Windsor, after Epstein and Maxwell allegedly trafficked her to him. Giuffre also shared in her memoir even more sinister allegations against former Israeli PM Ehud Barak.

We wrote in October:

Virginia Giuffre, one of the most prominent survivors (but now a victim) of serial child rapist and trafficker - and almost certain Israel intelligence asset - Jeffrey Epstein, was repeatedly left battered and bloodied after being beaten and raped by a man she describes, in a new memoir published after her death earlier this year, as a "well-known prime minister".

Adding:

Giuffre said that she called the man 'the Prime Minister' and did not name him, because she was afraid he would come after her and cause her harm if she did. Before Epstein's death, however, she named former Israeli PM Ehud Barak - also a close friend of Epstein's ardent fan Peter Mandelson - as one of the many men to rape her, an accusation he has denied.

Virginia Giuffre wrote in horrific detail about the violence inflicted on her by the 'PM', whom she met when she was just eighteen:

"He repeatedly choked me until I lost consciousness and took pleasure in seeing me in fear for my life. Horrifically, the Prime Minister laughed when he hurt me and got more aroused when I begged him to stop. I emerged from the cabana bleeding from my mouth, vagina, and anus. For days, it hurt to breathe and to swallow… [He] raped me more savagely than anyone had before."

King's 'concern'

The King chose his words carefully - and choice matters here, because men can choose to amplify victims' voices and examine allegations critically. Rather than doing so, he voiced his "deepest concern" about his brother's arrest and stated that "the law must take its course," adding:

What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities.

This statement is reported to have the full support of Will and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales. Queenie Camilla had nothing to offer but a wave when asked for her feelings on the arrest. We can't help but feel the Royal family's concern here lies solely with Andrew, the man-child sex-pest, rather than the countless victims across the world who fell victim to powerful, privileged men and their sick fancies.

How the mighty have fallen, thus proving that powerful men can be brought to task if the political will is there:

'Do you know who I was?' #Andrew #AndrewWindsor pic.twitter.com/Gp6Eu5NuD9

— The Rev. Anton Mittens

In his 2019 BBC Newsnight interview, former prince Andrew notoriously claimed that Virginia Giuffre's allegations against him couldn't be true because he's unable to sweat.

He's likely to have discovered a few sweat glands since his arrest this morning.

All too typically for the British establishment, the arrest was not for sexually abusing trafficked and potentially under-age girls. Instead it was for 'misconduct in public office', after an Epstein files release revealed Mountbatten-Windsor was allegedly bunging sensitive secret information to the serial child-rapist while a UK trade envoy.

That fact is a disgusting betrayal of Epstein's and Andrew's victims. It's also a detail that is likely to have 'prince of darkness' and former Starmer adviser Peter Mandelson joining Windsor in a sweat bath. The same release of Epstein files also revealed 'Mandy' repeatedly doing the same thing: sending sensitive, confidential and highly lucrative government information to Epstein. This information would have enabled Epstein and his mates to make a fortune in 'insider trading'.

The British establishment deciding to throw 'Randy Andy' under the bus for that instead of his alleged crimes against trafficked girls should have 'Mandy' in a lather too.

For more on the the Epstein Files and the betrayal of victims, please read the Canary's article on way that the media circus around Epstein is erasing the experiences of victims and survivors.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox