One of the more surprising tech developments in 2025 was Google bringing two-way support for Apple's AirDrop functionality to its Pixel 10 series of phones. At the time, Google said it intended to expand the feature to other devices at a later date, and that date could be just around the corner.

At a press briefing attended by Android Authority at Google's Taipei office, Eric Kay, Android's Vice President of Engineering, confirmed that AirDrop interoperability will expand in 2026. "We spent a lot of time and energy to make sure that we could build something that was compatible not only with iPhone but iPads and MacBooks," he said. "Now that we've proven it out, we're working with our partners to expand it into the rest of the ecosystem, and you should see some exciting announcements coming very soon."

Right now, Pixel 10 users can send and receive files and photos between Apple devices and Android using Quick Share. For an Android device to receive from an iPhone, they have to set their Quick Share visibility settings to "everyone for 10 minutes" and make sure they're in "receive" mode on the Quick Share page.

It's a similar story for an Android-to-Apple file share. You have to set your iPhone, iPad or Mac's Airdrop visibility to "anyone for 10 minutes," which enables someone from outside your contacts to use Quick Share on their Pixel 10.

When this feature launched, it wasn't clear how much involvement, if any, Apple had had, or if the infamous walled garden would once again banish Android-minded intruders in a subsequent software update. But that hasn't happened, and back in November, Qualcomm confirmed that devices powered by its Snapdragon chips would also soon be able to transfer files to iPhones using Quick Share, suggesting that Pixel exclusivity wouldn't last for much longer.

Google's own willingness to play nice with Apple gear is seemingly a move designed to make the lives easier of anyone thinking about making the jump from an iPhone to an Android device. As reported by Android Authority, Kay also said his company was committed to making it as simple as possible to transfer data when switching.

It wasn't that long ago that the idea of Apple and Google teaming up to make device-hopping more consumer-friendly was the stuff of fantasy, but in December it emerged that the longstanding rivals were working on a new simplified data transfer system. Each company already offers a method for swapping ecosystems, but a new build of Android Canary hinted at something that would work at the operating system level.

Last month, Apple and Google also released a joint statement confirming previous reports that the new version of Siri will utilise Google Gemini's models, effectively resulting in a Google-powered voice assistant on your iPhone.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/google-will-soon-offer-airdrop-support-on-more-android-devices-141523521.html?src=rss

Windows giant might try turning it off and on again to see who notices

Microsoft has laid out a timeline for the disablement and shutdown of Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online.…

Labour Together is part of the shady right-wing infrastructure that, along with Peter Mandelson, helped to undermine the left and boost Keir Starmer into power. And a new report reveals how Labour Together spent tens of thousands of pounds getting a dodgy company to investigate journalists looking into all this. This behaviour shows it's not just Mandelson that should never be near government again. It's the whole sinister machinery that put Starmer where he is today, including his right-hand man and Mandelson protege Morgan McSweeney.

"Dark shit" from the Labour right machine thanks to Morgan McSweeney

Journalists Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan have reported that Labour Together paid APCO Worldwide "at least £30,000" in 2023 to dig dirt on reporters who were uncovering Labour Together's actions. In the past, APCO has worked with companies like Israeli arms dealer Elbit and big tobacco firms.

To win the Labour leadership campaign in 2020, Keir Starmer's team hid where he'd been getting his support from. In particular, his backers in Morgan McSweeney's Labour Together had concealed donations to the value of £730,000 from 2017 to 2020.

Labour Together wanted to defeat the left via "soft branding that made them seem warm and cuddly". So funding from pro-Israel millionaires would not have been a good look. And when journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke revealed in 2023 the funding Labour Together hadn't declared, the shady group clearly panicked.

Now under Josh Simons (who is currently a minister), Labour Together got APCO to look at potential "leverage" they could exert over "significant persons of interest", from Pogrund and Yorke to other journalists (including Declassified and ex-Canary reporter John McEvoy). They clearly hoped to discredit this reporting.

A political think tank hiring private investigators to target journalists and their sources. Why? Because unlike those in our profession who enjoy cosying up to power, they chose to report the facts. This should be treated as a scandal.

— Taj Ali (@Taj_Ali1) February 5, 2026

While sources insist Morgan McSweeney didn't make the call, it appears he "was aware of it". None of the relevant parties responsible wanted to respond on record. But even former Labour Together member Jon Cruddas said:

This is dark shit.

And that wasn't the only time Labour Together did this either. Around the same time, it also hired investigators to look at Paul Holden - author of The Fraud - and Andrew Feinstein (who slashed Starmer's vote count in 2024).

"Deeply sinister"

Upon discovering that Labour Together had gone after him over his journalistic work, John McEvoy told the Canary:

The news that Labour Together, the brainchild of Keir Starmer's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, was paying a PR firm to investigate journalists including myself is deeply sinister. Even more so that McSweeney was reportedly aware of this operation.

This is a man who owes his political career to the disgraced Peter Mandelson, friend of the world's most notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

He represents the rot at the heart of the Labour Party, and should be nowhere near power.

Starmer apparently still has "full confidence" in McSweeney, despite the latter pushing for Mandelson's ongoing involvement despite his close friendship to Epstein. Starmer would have been nothing in Labour, of course, without McSweeney's shady operation.

I have just learned that Labour Together, the think tank run by Keir Starmer's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, paid a PR firm £30,000 to secretly investigate me alongside other journalists.

Deeply sinister news. McSweeney should be nowhere near power.https://t.co/pM1Fmuk22E pic.twitter.com/wsSKBHcliI

— John McEvoy (@jmcevoy_2) February 5, 2026

Labour Together, Starmer, McSweeney, and Mandelson: "the rot at the heart of the Labour Party"

Labour Together has funded countless right-wing politicians, as have numerous millionaires backing the organisation or sharing its aims. This includes figures right at the top of the Labour Party, from Starmer to Rachel Reeves, Shabana Mahmood to David Lammy, and Yvette Cooper to John Healey.

One Labour Together donor, pro-Israel lobbyist Trevor Chinn, has been a key funder of efforts to empower Starmer and his ilk. And Chinn has managed to advocate inside the government for Israel's genocidal regime as a result.

There is also significant overlap between politicians getting money both the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group and either Chinn or Labour Together.

We strongly recommend you remember the names of everyone with links to this operation. Because it is nothing short of a scandal. And until this stops and there's full transparency, the little democracy we have in the UK will continue to be severely compromised.

Thanks to Paul Holden's 'The Fraud', the Labour Right's vehicle Labour Together is in the spotlight again. Here's the core of its funding network constructed from Electoral Commission data. Donors blue, 'donees' red. pic.twitter.com/R3FD4beZ35

— Tom Mills (@ta_mills) October 30, 2025

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

Keen to divert attention away from the fact he's a massive fucking pedo, Donald Trump announced a new drugs initiative yesterday. TrumpRx will apparently give users "the world's lowest prices on prescription drugs". However, as with most of the pervert in chief's plans, this will benefit very few average Americans.

TrumpRx is too good to be true

TrumpRx is a direct-to-consumer marketplace that gives discounted drug prices direct from manufacturers. This is done using Most Favoured Nation pricing. This basically ensures a consumer gets the product at the lowest possible price in other countries. Customers get a coupon card which they can take to participating pharmacies.

The prices listed for drugs are, by all accounts, huge discounts, anything from 33-93% off. But as a British person, it also brings into stark focus just how much disabled Americans are expected to pay per month for vital medication. What do you fucking mean it's five hundred dollars a month for an asthma inhaler?!

There is, however, of course, a catch. The discounted drugs can only be purchased in cash. This means only those who can afford to buy the medication in the first place can access it. Most sick and disabled citizens rely on health insurance or government schemes such as Medicaid to afford their sky-high medication.

It's also not clear yet whether buying these drugs in cash will count towards health insurance deductibles in the way that traditional prescribing will. Which means patients could be shelling out what they think is a lower price every month, whilst facing higher-than-usual insurance bills.

This means that, once again, while Trump is appearing to help all Americans, he's only serving the wealthy few.

Trump stretching the truth again

The TrumpRX site boasts

Thanks to President Trump, the days of Big Pharma price-gouging are over. Leveraging the full weight and power of the United States of America, the President has ensured every American gets the lowest prices on prescription medications in the developed world.

This is, however, not true. According to Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker analysis, four other countries sell Ozempic for less than the $100 TrumpRx is boasting. These are also the manufacturer prices - not what the consumer often actually ends up paying. TrumpRx also has to warn that those with insurance could actually end up paying more than usual.

CNN pointed out that some of the medications listed are already available at the discounted prices Trump is bragging about

For instance, GoodRx lists multiple pharmacies where consumers can pick up Pfizer's Duavee, which is used to treat menopause symptoms, for $30.30 without insurance - the same price as on TrumpRx.

This isn't even Trump's idea, as many pharmacies and manufacturers already do this. As CNN also points out, Mark Cuban has been running Cost Plus Drug since 2022. Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk also has NovoCare, and Eli Lilly has Lilly Direct.

TrumpRx could drive up the drive of medication for those who need it most

There's also the fact that you don't require a prescription to purchase the drugs on TrumpRx. With a huge array of very popular and profitable drugs on offer, it could drive up the price for those who desperately need them. This could particularly be true in the case of Ozempic and other "weight loss" drugs, which are actually vital diabetes medications.

There are also fears that with these drugs being readily available at "knock-down" prices, greedy insurance companies might stop covering them. After all, if the government is claiming they're cheap, you don't need insurance for them, surely.

Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center told a briefing hosted by KFF [also in the CNN article linked]

Even when you have very large discounts provided for brand-name drugs, they still end up with prices that are not really that affordable to the average person. We know from research that once a price goes above about $100 a month, that a lot of people stop filling their drugs at that price point.

Let's face it - Trump doesn't serve the average American

The fact of the matter is, this won't make much difference to those actually struggling with the costs of medications. It won't do anything to ease the pressures of sick and disabled Americans who have to fight with insurance companies and their own government to get the medication they need to survive.

But it will once again benefit the rich, because let's not forget who Trump really cares about.

Featured image via the Canary

By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

Council leaders have warned that four in five local councils will soon face 'bankruptcy' from rising special educational needs and disability (SEND) costs. And private schools are compounding the issue.

Tens of billions to private schools

The approaching 'insolvency' is largely due to the amount private schools are charging for council budgets.

In 2024, 132,510 SEND pupils were at private schools - a 70% increase on 2016. The vast majority of SEND children have low or middle-income parents who rely on government funding for their school places. Very few are from affluent families who can afford these places for their SEND children.

It costs councils an average of £61,500 per pupil for SEND children to go to private school, because of Labour's failure to invest SEND capacity in state schools. That means private schools are earning £8.1bn per year from SEND pupils. And the majority of that is coming out of council budgets, with many local authorities demanding higher council tax rises to help pay off increasing deficits.

In fact, the Local Government Association (LGA) has said 95% of councils are operating SEND deficits. And they are cutting services or taking on more debt to pay for it.

Private schools' SEND places cost almost three times as much as state places. And fee-charging schools can charge over £250,000 to educate SEND children.

SEND pupils must "achieve their potential"

Amanda Hopgood, the chair of the LGA's children, young people and families committee, said:

Councils are committed to supporting every child and young person to achieve their potential and clearly what is important is that children and young people get the support they need. But under the current system, the rise in support need has left many councils buckling under the strain.

While many private schools are non-profit, they take high salaries and are generally only available to students who are born rich. Hence, they take resources and expertise away from those who attend public ones.

At the same time, neoliberals in government and profiteers in the corporate sector view state funding as a cash cow to be milked. It's the opposite of efficiency and prudence with state finances. Dressing it up as such is Orwellian.

And when it comes to SEND pupils in private schools, it's literally extraction to the point of insolvency for councils.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

Political prisoner Umer Khalid, one of 24 'Filton 24' prisoners jailed for up to 19 months and counting for opposing genocide, ended his hunger strike last month. His decision came after prison authorities agreed to review the punitive conditions in which he is being held. These included banning his religious observance and restricting visits.

But his family say little or nothing has changed and they're still being blocked from seeing him. In fact, it's worse than before as he's now deprived of meetings with his lawyer.

Umer Khalid: desperate situation

In a statement, they asked supporters not to call or visit the prison or risk anything outside "formal routes" that his family is pursuing. However, they say they can no longer remain silent over Umer Khalid's situation as they are "terrified for [his] life":

For now, we please request that nobody calls into the prison, tries to locate Umer, or escalates this beyond the formal routes being followed by Umer's legal team. Updates with actions you can take will follow as they are received.

We've stayed silent long enough, but now I'm terrified for my son's life. My son has been on remand for seven months. During this time, we have had daily contact. After a 17-day hunger strike and four days without water, he was hospitalised on Monday, 26 January.

Since then, the prison has kept him incommunicado. We have had zero contact for over 10 days now. They are blocking him from his family and, alarmingly, from his solicitor.

A mother should not have to wonder whether her son is alive or dead while he is in state care. Access to his solicitor and contact with his family are basic human rights — especially during a medical crisis. We are demanding answers and the right to hear his voice. Please share this and amplify our voices. We cannot let him be forgotten in that hospital bed.

The Starmer regime's political persecution of the Filton humanitarians has been further exposed and disgraced recently by the refusal of a jury to convict the first six to go on trial on any of the trumped-up charges against them. The trial exposed the lies of the state and of arms manufacturer Elbit to smear and criminalise them.

Yet despite this, the regime continues to hold the others - and even one of those acquitted - in prison without trial. This is as clear a case as could be of 'making the process the punishment' and Starmer wants to end jury trials to withhold justice. All of this is to protect Israel and its ethno-fascist genocide.

Enough is enough. It's long past time for Starmer's authoritarianism and collaboration in genocide to end. He and his cronies are the ones who should be behind bars.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

Well, Nigel Farage has officially lost the plot. The Reform UK leader has just revealed that Jeremy Kyle - the poverty-porn mogul - has a secret role within the party. Hilariously, he's media training Reform's candidates.

Jeremy Kyle lol, one of the most hated TV presenters of all time.

Well, expect reform politicians to bully their opponents until they top themselves. pic.twitter.com/apaxqRVLzL

— Inevitable Pinky

Ford may be discontinuing its F-150 Lightning pickup but it hasn't given up on electric cars. CEO Jim Farley just teased the automaker's electric pickup based on its new Universal Electric Vehicle platform that he called "one of the most audacious and important projects in Ford's history."

The Universal EV platform will be used on a family of affordable EVs sold around the world, but will start with a mid-sized pickup for the US built in Louisville, Kentucky. It's set to go on sale next year with a target price of $30,000.

An early peek at our brilliant team working on the Universal Electric Vehicle project - one of the most audacious and important projects in @Ford's history. American innovation is how we compete and win against China and the rest of the world.

➡️ The team is spending countless… pic.twitter.com/Un4eCe258L

— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) February 5, 2026

Farley discussed some of the tech going into the pickup, particularly the aerodynamics, a key aspect if Ford is to compete with rivals. "The team is spending countless hours getting every last drop of aero efficiency on the mid-size electric pickup," he noted. Farley also discussed the "simplified aluminum unicastings [that] condense over 146 parts into two" as a way to boost production efficiency.

Ford will invest $5 billion, including $2 billion at the Louisville factory on top of $3 billion already announced for its BlueOval battery plant. It will expand the Louisville facility by 52,000 square feet and "create or secure" nearly 4,000 direct jobs, the company said late last year.

Ford hasn't yet revealed the pickup's name or shown a photo, but it's supposed to have more interior room than a Toyota RAV4. Buyers will be able to lock bikes or surfboards into the pickup bed, mooting the need for roof or trailer hitch racks. It will have a low center of gravity from the battery, instant torque and a 0 to 60 mph time "as fast as a Mustang EcoBoost [around 4.5 seconds], with more downforce," Ford said.

Jim Farley famously imported a famously fast and high-tech Xiaomi SU7 EV from China and drove it daily, telling a podcaster he didn't want to "give it up." Hopefully, his experience will result in more tech-forward Ford EVs based on the Universal platform.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/ford-shows-off-the-tech-going-into-its-30000-electric-pickup-truck-140000509.html?src=rss

Apple is no longer launching an AI service that can "replicate" a doctor and act as a personal health coach, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The company has reportedly scaled back the unannounced initiative in recent weeks, following a recent organization reshuffling wherein services chief Eddy Cue took over the health division.

While Apple has never officially announced the AI health coach, it was reported last year that the company was working on developing the service that has been unofficially dubbed Health+. It was supposed to be able to help users track food and correct workout forms using their iPhone's camera, as well as to recommend lifestyle changes based on users' health data. Apple even reportedly produced videos for the service, including ones explaining medical conditions and some training guides.

Cue reportedly wanted Apple to move faster and be more competitive when it comes to its health-focused products, seeing as the most well-known names in the field like Oura are already offering a lot of compelling features on their iOS apps. He didn't think Apple's plans could compete, Bloomberg said.

Instead of rolling out an AI health coach as a whole package, Apple will instead release the individual features it has developed to its Health app over time. The videos it shot and the capability to make recommendations based on user data could be available early this year. Apple is also reportedly working on an AI health chatbot to answer wellness questions. It's just an interim solution, however, and the company's goal is to let its reported upcoming Siri chatbot handle those inquiries in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/apple-reportedly-axed-its-planned-ai-health-coach-133000941.html?src=rss

If you haven't heard, there's now a social network for AI: Moltbook, a site that purportedly features AI agents talking to each other. That includes OpenClaw, a personal AI agent (formerly called Clawdbot and Moltbot) that's open source and free for anyone to run on their systems. In this episode, Devindra and Senior Reporter Karissa Bell discuss the rise of these services, and the potential future that AI agents may have for all of us.

Subscribe!

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Topics

• What is Moltbook and OpenClaw? - 1:31

• Anthropic reinforces its commitment against ads with Super Bowl ad spots - 19:32

• SpaceX acquires xAI and plans for a mega IPO - 27:08

• Alexa + rolls out free for all Amazon Prime subscribers - 33:36

• Around Engadget: Reviews of the New AirTag and Switch Virtual Boy - 44:12

• Working on - 46:34

• Pop culture picks - 49:24

Credits

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Karissa Bell
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/engadget-podcast-so-theres-a-social-network-for-ai-agents-now-133000813.html?src=rss

TikTok's signature features that hooked users around the world are its algorithm and endless scroll. Now, though, the European Union has called those aspects of the app illegal and may order the company to alter them.

"Today, the European Commission preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act for its addictive design," the EU's regulator said in a press release. "This includes features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalized recommender system." It said that TikTok failed to put up safeguards to ensure that those "addictive" features don't "harm the physical and mental wellbeing of users," including minors.

"For example, by constantly 'rewarding' users with new content, certain design features of TikTok fuel the urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain of users into 'autopilot mode'. Scientific research shows that this may lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users' self-control," the regulators stated.

TikTok's current parental controls and features to limit screen time are insufficient, the Commission added, and TikTok may need to modify them. The platform may also be required to limit its infinite scroll and adjust its recommendation algorithms.

The EU Commission will give TikTok an opportunity to rebut the findings and the company said would use "any means available" to challenge them. "The commission's preliminary findings present a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of our platform," the company told The New York Times in a statement.

Europe opened its wide-ranging investigation against TikTok in February 2024 and has already found the company at fault for its data sharing practices and advertising transparency. If found guilty of violating the DSA, TikTok faces a fine up to six percent of its annual worldwide turnover.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/eu-says-tiktok-uses-addictive-design-and-must-change-131738425.html?src=rss

A year to replace end-of-support firewalls, routers, and VPN gateways

America's federal agencies have been told to hunt down and rip out aging firewalls, routers, and other network gatekeepers before attackers use them as skeleton keys into government systems.…

The Last of Us series co-creator Craig Mazin is teaming with Hasbro Entertainment to create an HBO series based on the popular (and spicy) Baldur's Gate 3 game, Deadline reported. The show will be simply be called Baldur's Gate and the story will resume where Baldur's Gate 3 left off. Mazin will reportedly have full creative control and act as co-creator, writer, executive producer and showrunner.

"It is a dream come true to be able to continue the story that [Baldur's Gate 3 developer] Larian and Wizards of The Coast created," Mazin said in a statement. "I am a devoted fan of DnD and the brilliant way that Swen Vincke and his gifted team adapted it. I can't wait to help bring Baldur's Gate and all of its incredible characters to life with as much respect and love as we can."

Larian, which won't be making the Baldur's Gate 3 sequel, said it wasn't involved in the creation of the show. However, Larian CEO Swen Vincke said that to his knowledge, Mazin is a "big fan" of the game and even requested to visit the studio (Mazin told Deadline that he has put about 1,000 hours into the game).

Mazin is best known for co-creating the Emmy-winning limited series Chernobyl as well as The Last of Us. The latter was widely praised for its first season but critics and fans were mixed on season 2, which deviated a bit more from the corresponding game.

The show will reportedly feature familiar and new characters, but no other details have been released. A Baldur's Gate 4 game is not currently in development, so the series creators will have no source material to draw from. That gives them a lot of freedom, but also puts the storytelling onus fully on Mazin and his team of writers. Wizards of the Coast story head Chris Perkins will reportedly act as a consultant on the show to ensure it doesn't stray from its DnD origins.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/hbo-is-making-a-baldurs-gate-3-tv-show-130000864.html?src=rss

A free trial to a virtual private network (VPN) can mean a few different things. Several of the best VPNs let you try them out without paying. A rare few, and only one on this list, let you try them without submitting payment information at all. Some VPNs have forever free plans that let you use them indefinitely without paying, as long as you're OK with some limits.

For the most part, though, your best chance to test a VPN for free is to pay for a subscription. Then, if you don't like the service, you can get your money back before the refund guarantee expires. This takes a bit more work, and some services have very tight turnarounds. However, it'll get you the most time with the most complete version of the VPN.

With that out of the way, let's talk about the best VPN free trials for each definition of "free trial." I'll start with VPNs that actually have free trials, most of which require a payment method and only work on mobile devices. The next section lists the best forever free plans. Finally, I'll share instructions for how to use a VPN money-back guarantee as a free trial.

Best VPNs with free trials

Best VPN forever free plans

Using VPN money-back guarantees as free trials

Although VPN free trials are great when you can get them, you'll enjoy a lot more flexibility by taking advantage of refund guarantees. Almost every provider has a money-back guarantee that doesn't require you to prove a specific problem. You'll probably have to deflect some upselling attempts before you actually get the refund, but most policies do promise you all your money back, with no pro-rating.

I like to download VPNs on their one-month plans so I can put the full service through my usual battery of tests. A 30-day money-back guarantee grants you enough time to learn whether you can use the VPN long-term. If you don't like the service, the standard method for getting a refund is to get in touch with customer support on the VPN provider's help page.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/best-vpns-with-free-trials-130000435.html?src=rss

NordVPN is offering a significant discount on its two-year plans, with 70 percent off its Complete tier and up to 78 percent off overall. For the Complete tier, the deal brings the total cost down to $130 for 24 months

NordVPN regularly appears on Engadget's list of the best VPN services thanks to its wide server network, strong security tools and consistent performance across devices. NordVPN's latest promotion puts one of its most comprehensive plans at a price that undercuts many competing premium VPN subscriptions.

The Complete tier includes full access to NordVPN's core VPN service, which encrypts internet traffic and masks a user's IP address to help protect online activity on public Wi-Fi networks and at home. Subscribers can use the service on multiple devices, including phones, tablets, laptops and smart TVs, with apps available for major operating systems. It also includes access to NordPass (more on that below), an ad blocker and 1TB of cloud storage. You'll find similar discounts on all of NordVPN's other plans: Basic, Plus and Prime.

Beyond the basics, NordVPN offers features like threat protection to help block malicious websites and trackers, as well as specialty servers designed for added privacy or faster performance in specific scenarios. In our NordVPN review, the service was praised for its evolving feature set and overall reliability, even as the VPN market becomes increasingly competitive.

Engadget regularly tracks VPN pricing trends and this offer compares favorably with other current promotions. It also appears alongside NordVPN deals featured in Engadget's ongoing roundup of the best VPN discounts available right now, which compares offers from multiple major providers.

Those looking for additional security tools may also want to note that NordVPN's Complete plan bundles in extra services beyond the VPN itself. One of those is NordPass, the company's password management app. NordPass is also discounted as part of a separate promotion, if you're primarily looking for a password manager rather than a VPN. The Premium tier is currently 50 percent off, bringing the price down to $36 for two years. NordPass Premium adds features such as cross-device password syncing, secure password sharing and breach monitoring, which alerts users if stored credentials appear in known data leaks.

Both offers are available for a limited time, though Nord has not specified an end date for the promotion. If you're still unsure whether NordVPN is right for you, it offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can change your mind and get a full refund.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/two-years-of-nordvpns-complete-plan-is-70-percent-off-123000301.html?src=rss

With over 155 million sold, Nintendo's Switch is officially the company's biggest console hit ever. It's been a long road to surpassing the DS, which reached 154 million consoles over its seven-year lifespan. The Switch, meanwhile, is a year shy of its 10-year anniversary. 

We've seen the original console, the non-hybrid Lite and the OLED versions of the Switch over the decade, but despite being replaced by Switch 2, the original is still selling at a strong pace: 1.36 million units in Q3. Just think how many Joy-Cons it sold/replaced?

Next goal: try to be the best-selling console of all time. Currently, that's the PlayStation 2. 

Nintendo is just shy of five million units to go. 

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Everything we know about Valve's new Steam Machine

• Apple AirTag (2026) review: Simply better 

• Presidents' Day sales 2026: The best tech deals from Apple, Sony, Roku and others 

• The best mesh Wi-Fi systems of 2026

Explained: Moltbook, the social network for AI agents

Are they talking about us behind our backs?

TMATMA

Moltbook is a "digital petri dish," a Reddit-style forum populated entirely by AI agents that post, follow and even gossip about their owners in dedicated submolts. Built using vibe coding, it's a surreal experiment in autonomous socialization — though there's no shortage of user-data security flaws. Is Moltbook a profound look at the dead internet theory or just a very loud AI echo chamber? Or something in the middle? Karissa explains it all. (Sorry, Karissa.)

Continue reading.

Nintendo's Virtual Boy is a niche slice of gaming history.

Lean in.

TMAEngadget

Nintendo's worst-selling console was probably the Virtual Boy. It sold less than 800,000 units, with only 22 games in Japan and 14 in North America. And it didn't even have the guts to launch in Europe or Australia.

But Nintendo doesn't care. It's brought the Virtual Boy back, baby, as an add-on for the Switch 2, in all its red monochrome '90s-tech glory. And we finally got to test it. 

It even includes the original bipod, which you use to prop it up and lean into it. Yes, you still can't just wear the thing like modern VR headsets. The Switch 2 console, sans Joy-Cons, then slides in, acting as display, battery and processor. 

It seems more of a historical nod than anything else. This is pretty much 30-year-old VR tech, as-is. But… I still want one as a gaming objet d'art. A hundred bucks is a fair chunk of change for that, though. Read on for our full impressions.

Continue reading.

Surprise! Google teases the Pixel 10a

Pre-orders open later this month.

TMAGoogle

Google posted a teaser video revealing its new entry-level smartphone, the Pixel 10a, in a lovely lilac colorway. We don't know much more, however. You can see it's another dual-camera Pixel, with that same flush body — which I like. (How does that already seem retro?) 

Leaks suggest a 6.3-inch display and a large 5,100 mAh battery. It otherwise looks and seems like the Pixel 9a, although Google promises that there's "more in store." Last year's A-series launched at $500 — will this land at a similar price? You can pre-order the Pixel 10a on February 18. 

Continue reading.

AMD suggests a 2027 launch for next-gen Xbox

Shouldn't Microsoft be saying this?

AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed on the company's latest earnings call that Microsoft's development of an Xbox with a semi-custom SOC from AMD is "progressing well to support a launch in 2027." Maybe Microsoft can chase that best-selling console crown too?

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-the-switch-is-officially-nintendos-most-popular-console-ever-121500738.html?src=rss

Nick Buckley MBE is the Advance UK candidate in the Gorton & Denton byelection. With the fight for the seat heating up, we thought it was time we shone a light on what Buckley actually stands for. And it's pretty dark:

This is what feminism has done to women - turned them into whores and made them unhappy - 20% of U.K. women are on antidepressants.

Feminism:%20Myths,%20Lies%20&%20Ungratefulness%3A%20Exploring%20Ground%20Zero%20Of%20The%20Woke%20Virus https://t.co/1vxHNVOYJ2

— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) October 26, 2024

Let's get it out of the way, you're going to see a lot of misogyny and racism, so buckle up.

Another woman-hating, racist wanker on the ballot

Buckley has been on some really fucking wild rants on Twitter.  Firstly, he states women shouldn't have tattoos, and we can't do anything right:

Female tattoos are just a trendy way to self abuse - just like cutting, not eating, gender ideology, abortion and always picking wrong men. https://t.co/su3L2sTgx4

— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) September 5, 2025

He fucking hates abortions and apparently all women do is hoof antidepressants and kill babies:

If we do not support women across the globe then how are they going abortion their babies, rely on antidepressants, neglect their children, hate men and contribute to the coffers of the multinationals??

— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) January 28, 2026

And comparing abortion to the holocaust is absolutely wild:

We are killing our babies almost as fast as we are making them. Abortion is out of control and a shame on our society like slavery and the holocaust. History will judge us and it will not be pleasant. https://t.co/XEAkgJ1mIB

— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) January 23, 2026

He really fucking hates abortion:

Feminism taught us that men and women are the same. Women are just as evil as men and commit horrendous acts - they just do it differently to men. pic.twitter.com/UgY75PFrVX

— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) January 15, 2026

And let's throw a little transphobia in there for good measure:

The Trans lunatics are back! The NHS, our NHS as we are constantly told, is going to be experimenting on kids - legally. All doctors involved should be stripped of their license and prosecuted for child abuse. pic.twitter.com/Q5ekCC2fJz

— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) November 26, 2025

Policing

Let's be honest, it's not shocking at all that Buckley is racist. It's almost a given with Advance UK:

This is a great example of the failures of DEI. We recruit rapists because we have to give blacks a job to ensure no one thinks we are racist. It started with feminism but ends with rapists. pic.twitter.com/3JXAQHU5Kq

— Nick Buckley MBE (@NickBuckleyMBE) January 8, 2026

One commenter was quick to point out the case of Wayne Couzens, a white copper who killed Sarah Everard:

That's never happened before. pic.twitter.com/8KRjEWrhgf

— catrellneff (@catrellnefff) January 9, 2026

The police literally ignored sexual harassment allegations made against him. Oh, and two other coppers shared racist and misogynistic messages with Couzens.

This isn't an issue of political correctness; it's an issue of the police ignoring the offences of its officers.

This disgustingly racist rhetoric is absolutely bullshit.

Currently, 97% of rape allegations are not even brought to charge in the UK; why the fuck isn't he screaming about that? 6 out of 7 assaults against women are carried out by someone they know.

Why the fuck are we bringing race into this when it's clearly just a man problem?

Advance UK throws another stereotype into the ring

Let's be honest, none of this is shocking from a far-right party endorsed by Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. But this sets a dangerous precedent for the trajectory of Advance UK. For a party that claims it's not far right, it definitely seems like it is. And the leader, Ben Habib seems to fully support Buckley:

I am delighted @NickBuckleyMBE will be standing for @_AdvanceUK in the Gorton and Denton by election.

Nick is a proud patriot, local to the area where he also based his charity, Mancunian Way. His MBE was for charitable work.

Nick offers real change, not the same old or the…

— Ben Habib (@benhabib6) January 31, 2026

Luckily, Advance UK's man seems somewhat irrelevant, but we need to be calling out these fascist wankers whenever we can, and Buckley is definitely one of them.

Featured image via Instagram

By Antifabot

At this point, the following shouldn't surprise anyone about Trump, and yet it is staggering to see:

BREAKING: Trump just posted an incredibly racist photo of the Obama's faces photoshopped on to the body of apes.

Every day is a new rock bottom for this ugly pig. pic.twitter.com/GlMM7Cfjoe

— Dean Withers (@itsdeaann) February 6, 2026

Pure, unfettered racism from Trump

Everyone accepted long ago that it's racist to depict black people as apes, and the video does literally nothing besides depicting the Obamas as apes.

There is no attempt to hide what his intent is here.

The only excuse you could make for Trump is that he's too stupid and/or unwell to understand what he posted.

If that's the case, WHY IS HE THE PRESIDENT?

A racist president is intolerable; a sick president with access to the nuclear button is potentially world ending.

Here's how people have reacted to Trump's latest hate crime:

This is the racist video Donald Trump posted.

This is where we're at. pic.twitter.com/kH49rMWfVH

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) February 6, 2026

Trump posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. Incredibly racist and disgusting. Beneath the office of the presidency, like everything he does.

Every American must condemn this. pic.twitter.com/vYbGgqqv09

— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) February 6, 2026

Global problem

Given how America throws its weight around, it's a problem for everyone in the world for there to be a racist and/or fascist president. It's an even bigger problem for us in the UK, because politicians like Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage, and Kemi Badenoch all think there job is to suck up to this man.

Starmer and Farage both drape themselves in flags but once again it's really clear where their loyalty really is.

It's Trump first. They will always be on the side of the super rich and powerful - no matter how heinous the crime.

This is not patriotism. It's subservience. https://t.co/M7sVgGLgMJ

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) January 3, 2026

Featured image via X

By Willem Moore

A Labour Party whistleblower has confirmed to the Canary that the disgraced Epstein associate Peter Mandelson, alongside then Director of Campaigns Morgan McSweeney, helped to vet Labour candidates for the 2024 general election.

Mandelson: the scandal continues

I have been investigating McSweeney's operations for the last six months, and have personally heard accounts from several party insiders of widespread corruption in the run-up to the election, with local candidates systematically dumped in favour of Mandelson-McSweeney picks with no apparent connection to the area.

Furthermore, I was contacted by a former Labour MP who served as a frontbencher under Ed Miliband. He claims that Mandelson and McSweeney worked together to "get rid of" him. He added:

Everyone has overlooked Megan McCann, [McSweeney's] former due diligence officer. She is his Achilles heel.

Megan McCann told me at a famous curry house meeting that when she had finished doing in candidates or getting them through, she built a dirty dossier on every MP. McCann takes instructions from McSweeney."

As it emerges that Peter Mandelson assisted McSweeney in building a covert network within the Labour Party to ensure their positions became policy, MPs who have defended the Epstein associate for so long are now moving to distance themselves.

We now know that as Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson passed classified government information to likely Israeli intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein, even messaging the notorious paedophile on the day former Prime Minister Gordon Brown "finally got him to go." But Mandelson had two deputies at the time, assisting him in his work: David Lammy and Pat McFadden.

Last year, Lammy, who was Foreign Secretary at the time, vehemently defended the appointment of Mandelson as US Ambassador, saying that he was "a man of considerable expertise". Not words many of us would use for a person who described a convicted paedophile as their "best pal".

Things get murkier when we take into account David Lammy's 2014 failed London mayoral nomination bid.

Murky

His campaign was led by a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel, David Mencer, who went on to become a spokesman for the Israeli government. You may have seen Mencer on television in recent months, defending the most heinous crimes of the Gaza genocide.

Life-long Israel lobbyist Trevor Chinn donated £30,000 to Lammy's the short-lived mayoral campaign. Chinn has funded both Conservative and Labour Friends of Israel throughout his life, and was personally awarded for "service to the state of Israel" by Israeli President and genocidaire Isaac Herzog.

But Chinn was also a director and major funder of Morgan McSweeney's "Labour Together Ltd." outfit. When McSweeney was found to have concealed £739,492 worth of donations to Labour Together, one of his excuses was that he trying "to protect Trevor".

Another of Lammy's financial backers is Lady Woodford-Hollick, the wife of Labour peer Clive Hollick. Clive Hollick was another funder of the Labour Together project, but he also previously served as a Special Adviser to Peter Mandelson.

From acting as his deputy in 2008 to defending him in interviews last year, the question needs to be asked: what did David Lammy know about the Mandelson-Epstein communications?

The McFadden link

Peter Mandelson's other deputy during his tenure as Business Secretary was Pat McFadden. McFadden has been described as "the most powerful Labour politician most have never heard of". He initially worked on Tony Blair's 1997 election campaign alongside Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell.

In 2008, he was made Mandelson's right-hand man. Indeed, in a fawning article printed by the Guardian in September 2023, Mandelson waxes lyrical on his former assistant, saying: "Pat has seen it all. He is a walking encyclopedia of political and policy knowledge, and experience in government." But had McFadden "seen" Mandelson's communications with Epstein?

During the 2024 general election campaign, McSweeney and McFadden's desks were "right in the middle of the room" at Labour HQ. His wife, Marianna McFadden, was already McSweeney's no. 2. Mandelson said that McFadden and McSweeney would complement each other, opining that "Pat is cautious…[whereas] Morgan is a hard-driven street fighter." High praise all round from the Epstein-informant.

Megan McCann is now a Special Adviser to Labour Chief Whip Jonathan Reynolds. Like former Mandelson deputy Pat McFadden, Reynolds is also a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, and both men have travelled on LFI-funded delegations. In 2019, Reynolds even accepted a £100 donation directly from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Israel connection and Labour Together

Recently, Starmer tabled an amendment to the motion to release the Mandelson Files, calling for an exemption for "papers prejudicial to UK national security or international relations". The amendment was signed by the PM and three other Labour MPs. Jonathan Reynolds was one of them.

Another signer of the failed amendment was fellow LFI supporter and Chief Secretary to the PM, Darren Jones. Jones, who received over £57,000 in donations from Labour Together, recently said that Starmer picked Mandelson "because we want to do things differently".

The third signer of the amendment to restrict the release of the Mandelson Files was Nick Thomas-Symonds. Thomas-Symonds received £35,521 from Labour Together.

Before working for Reynolds, McSweeney's former "due diligence officer" Megan McCann was on the staff of Labour MP Oliver Ryan. Another suspected McSweeney-Mandelson "pick", Ryan received £10,000 from Labour Together.

Tom Rutland, the new MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, was another member of Labour Together's "£10k club". A pattern is coming to the fore: the Mandelson-McSweeney cabal used not only Excel spreadsheets, but also the financial weight of Labour Together to ensure those loyal to them got elected.

Mark Sewards also received £10,000 from Labour Together. Last August, Sewards became the first Member of Parliament to create an "AI version of himself" to communicate with constituents, a disturbing move condemned by many for its potential detrimental effects on many of the most vulnerable in society.

Recently, Sewards travelled to meet with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Last November, her was announced as the new parliamentary chair of Labour Friends of Israel after previously accepting an LFI-funded trip to occupied Palestine in May 2025. These are the individuals waiting in the wings for Starmer's downfall.

Tony Blair as well

Another of the new crop of Labour MPs is Georgia Gould, a member of the Jewish Labour Movement who previously served on Camden Council. Whilst there, fellow Camden Labour councillor + JLM member Izzy Lenga posted a photograph on Facebook in which she is wearing an Israeli military uniform, holding an automatic weapon and draped in an Israeli flag. The photograph was subsequently deleted.

Before moving into politics, Gould worked for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. She has previously been described as a "Blairite heiress who could be Labour leader one day" and a "close ally and mentee" of Alistair Campbell, the third wheel in the Mandelson-McFadden team behind Blair's rise to power.

Marianna McFadden, Pat McFadden's wife, had her own links to the infamous war criminal, having previously worked at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. She was later appointed as Starmer's deputy campaigns director. The most unpopular Prime Minister ever is a continuation of Blair's legacy in more ways than one.

Georgia Gould is the daughter of two "peers for life". Her husband, Alex Zatman, was previously a Special Adviser to Liz Kendall, but is now a director at Teneo, a controversial lobbying firm with close links to the Clinton family. When Teneo was established in 2011, both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were named as members of their advisory board. Clinton, who departed in 2012, had a yearly salary of $2.5 million.

In one leaked e-mail from the Jeffrey Epstein files, Ghislaine Maxwell writes to his "best pal" Peter Mandelson:

Pete, what is wrong. I am here for you. Call me - Clinton sd he will do what you want at the conference…PS Don't be disgusting.

The e-mail is dated September 14th 2002. On October 2nd 2002, Clinton addressed the Labour conference in Blackpool. Ghislaine of course was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the now deceased member of the British House of Lords, media baron, and, according to ex-Israeli intelligence operative Ari Ben-Menashe, Mossad asset.

Mandelson's hands are all over the past 25 years

The extent of Epstein-informant Mandelson's influence on government policy, and further revelations over the next days and weeks will be devastating for the Starmer regime and all those who defended him.

When Morgan McSweeney initially joined Labour in 2001, not long after his stint on an Israeli "kibbutz", he was put to work on Mandelson's "Excalibur" database, used to gather information on "internal political rivals". The two have been close ever since, and the bullying tactics once employed by Mandelson are echoed by his political heir McSweeney today.

One prospective parliamentary Labour candidate in London, Sara*, spoke to me about being hauled in front of a now infamous three-person committee: Luke Akehurst, Sharma Tatler, and Anu Prashar. "I was given 5 minutes notice and then told I was not suitable, with no right to appeal", she said.

Tom*, a Labour member from east London, told me about a culture of fear surrounding McSweeney: "Everyone is so scared to speak, and people are getting suspended for anything." Sara told me: "You have to prove your loyalty by being mean and nasty…it's a cesspit."

The Mandelson-McSweeney-Starmer cabal has ruled Labour with an iron fist, but the house of cards is beginning to fall.

*Names have been changed to protect whistleblowers' identities.

Featured image via the Canary

By Jody McIntyre

The government has pledged £88m to recruit 10,000 new foster carers by the end of this parliament. Currently, there is a severe shortage of them in the foster care sector. This means local authorities are placing many children far from home in expensive residential settings.

According to the Local Government Association, councils currently spend £4.7bn per year on residential children's care.

According to the Guardian, the government has doubled its spending on residential care since 2020. Costs reached £3.1bn in 2023-24. This means that each place in a children's home costs over £300,000 a year.

Now, the government is aiming to attract a wider range of households to foster caring. It emphasises that carers don't have to be married, homeowners, or in full-time employment. This would reduce reliance on these expensive residential homes whilst also providing children with greater stability.

The £88m will also include £25m to help current foster carers extend or update their homes. This will allow them to accommodate more children. It will also pilot a new scheme which could mean potential foster carers help out on a part-time basis.

Profiteering from foster care

Additionally, Josh MacAlister, Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing, has said that the government will push private providers of child social care in England out of the system if they discover they're profiteering.

The Competition and Markets Authority found that in 2022, children's home owners in England, Scotland and Wales were making massively excessive profits. At the same time, they were also carrying too much debt. This was exposing both children and councils to unacceptable risks.

As it stands, more than 80% of residential children's homes in England are for-profit, which makes you question whether they really have the best interests of children at heart.

MacAlister also called for an equivalent of the Homes for Ukraine scheme to provide homes for tens of thousands of children in foster care.

However, the government's plan does not appear to address the increasing number of private foster care agencies.

These are known to pay foster carers far more than local authorities do, meaning the government then pays far more to use them. Because, of course, profit is vitally important when looking after vulnerable children.

Local authorities have reported struggling to compete. So when foster carers leave and turn to private companies, there are not enough carers, and the government has no choice but to rely on the private agencies.

Safe, stable, and secure foster care placements have the ability to change a child's life for the better.

But until the government puts a stop to profiteering private companies taking advantage of vulnerable children needing a home, their best interests are never going to be the primary goal of the foster care system.

Feature image via BBC Creative/Unsplash

By HG

Ever since Keir Starmer and his cronies blocked Andy Burnham from running, it's seemed like Labour stood no chance in the Gorton & Denton byelection. To make matters worse, Starmer has embroiled himself in one of the most unseemly scandals of this century. And as you'd expect, that's done nothing for Labour's chances in Gorton & Denton:

It's clear that #MandelsonGate is having an effect on the Gorton and Denton by-election.

Labour going down.

Greens going up.

It's Green vs Reform - Labour are out of the running. pic.twitter.com/aMxUlbHUaZ

— Darren Parkinson

Corruption probe takes detour as staff facing trial reportedly asked AI if seat-blocking scams caused financial damage

More than 30 Romanian railway employees accused of running a bribery and ticket resale racket allegedly tried to crowdsource their legal strategy from ChatGPT.…

It is just the beginning of 2026, and things are happening even faster than last year. Not only in technology, but also in regulations, laws, and in how we deal with all the information around us. As a person born in the 90s, social media was once an unknown land for me, a place that felt genuine in the beginning. It still had dangers, but it seemed less risky, or maybe our parents' rules were stricter. I don't want to go down the psychological path here, but I want to look at where we are headed with so much risk,…

This story continues at The Next Web

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The word "terrorist" wasn't coined on September 11, 2001, but the defining event of the early 21st century ushered it in as the United States' go-to term for demonizing outsiders and dissenters alike. The so-called "war on terror" transformed the way the U.S. wields power at home and abroad, enabling mass surveillance and a crackdown on the right to free speech. It became reflexive for the U.S. to disparage immigrants and protesters as supporters of terrorism.

Related Trump Calls His Enemies Terrorists. Does That Mean He Can Just Kill Them?

President Donald Trump has embraced this model and manipulated it for his own ends, as author Spencer Ackerman points out. The Trump administration often peddles spurious accusations of terrorism against the targets of its immigration raids.

"There's nothing about any of their action that's remotely anything at all like terrorism," Ackerman says. "But that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA."

This week on the Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Ackerman, a leading expert on the concept of terrorism and its weaponization by the state. Ackerman's 2021 book, "Reign of Terror, How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump," traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years, and how the boomerang has come back home.

"Before 9/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn't really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were serious criminals, traffickers, and so on," says Ackerman. Now, he says, the contemporary terrorism paradigm has transformed immigration enforcement into something "operating like a death squad."

"What we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time," he says. "And now we're seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE." With the recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, "I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism."

As Democrats in Congress struggle to leverage DHS funding for changes to ICE policy — like a ban on face masks for ICE agents, an idea on which they've already softened — Ackerman says the parallels with the early 2000s are clear.

"We can't move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans," advises Ackerman. "Reformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you."

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript 

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I'm Jordan Uhl. 

If you didn't recognize the voices, 2026 might not sound so different from the years following 2001. 

George W. Bush: We are on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory.

Donald Trump: These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators. 

Dick Cheney: Terrorists remain determined and dangerous.

Kristi Noem: It was an act of domestic terrorism.

JD Vance: We're not going to give in to terrorism on this. And that's exactly what's happening.

John Ashcroft: America has grown stronger and safer in the face of terrorism.

JU: In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the so-called war on terror transformed the way the United States enforced its laws and its priorities, both at home and abroad. The label "terrorist" became a catchall for a wide range of actors, and dissent against the Bush administration was often disparaged as support for terrorism. The USA PATRIOT Act codified a reduction in civil liberties in the name of protecting freedom.

Bush: As of today, we're changing the laws governing information sharing. And as importantly, we're changing the culture of our various agencies that fight terrorism. Countering and investigating terrorist activity is the number one priority for both law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

JU: The day he put his signature on the Patriot Act, President George W. Bush laid out how those new priorities would include a focus on immigrants. 

Bush: The government will have wider latitude in deporting known terrorists and their supporters.

JU: It was largely an era of political consensus. Both major parties lined up to support the Patriot Act and other legislation giving greater legal latitude to the government, from local police all the way up to the president. But even then, there were plenty of warnings that these powers would be abused and stretched far beyond their intended goals.

Supporters argued that there were backstops, like congressional oversight and international law, basic human decency and strategic restraint. But President Trump ignored and shattered so many of those long-standing norms. A glaring example is on display in the streets of U.S. cities right now.

ICE was a post-9/11 creation as part of the new Department of Homeland Security. In his book "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump," author Spencer Ackerman traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years and how the boomerang has come back home.

Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, and many U.S. bases. He's won a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award, and currently writes for Zeteo and his own website, Forever Wars. Spencer, welcome to the Intercept Briefing. 

Spencer Ackerman: Thanks for having me back, Jordan. 

JU: So we're talking 25 years now since 9/11. Many of our listeners — as well as working journalists, and even many people working on Capitol Hill right now — don't have any living memory of that time. So can you start off by bringing us back to the days and weeks after September 11? President George W. Bush essentially had carte blanche to pass laws and change policy based on the notion that he was making Americans safer; that we had to clamp down and, in some cases, give up some of our freedoms to ensure security. With hindsight, what were the most significant aspects of the newly born war on terror that have a clear through line to today?

SA: Well, one that we saw just this week really take prominence is the Patriot Act, which among other things, enabled law enforcement to more seamlessly get "third-party records," as they're called — basically, customer accounts of records kept by some kind of service provider, financial records, internet records, and so on — without a judge's signature or a finding of probable cause. It occurs instead through something called an administrative subpoena that the Patriot Act supercharged.

And we're seeing just this week, there was a very good piece in the Washington Post laying out the exponential growth in administrative subpoenas being used by DHS in order to get records that would otherwise require a court order to collect.

Related Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist

Now, when the Patriot Act passed, the idea was that this would be the FBI surreptitiously collecting information that would prevent terrorism and uncover active links to terror networks and so forth. There's not really much of a record of it having done that — certainly not a public one. But it definitely didn't envision what DHS is doing, which is harassing critics of ICE. 

Now, a ton of critics at the time, when the war on terror was coalescing, recognized and stated that this was going to be where the war on terror led. That it was going to become a war on dissent, that it was going to criminalize a tremendous amount of both politics in general but also resistance to itself — that we're really seeing coalesce. 

For the purposes of what we're tracking, what we also saw after 9/11, is a complete sea change in how America conducted its immigration affairs. Something that I think people probably don't remember is that before 9/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn't really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were like serious criminals, traffickers, and so on.

The Department of Homeland Security gets created after Bush's attorney general, John Ashcroft, pretty much takes over immigration enforcement because ICE's predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services, is under his purview. And what he starts doing is using it to round up immigrants — not just Muslim immigrants, although there was an immediate outcry for a clamp-down on Muslim immigration, certainly. But it was a way of shoe-horning a gestating border hysteria on the far right that 9/11 gave a kind of new security context and accordingly opportunity to pursue.

Related How Post-9/11 Visions of an Imperiled Homeland Supercharged U.S. Immigration Enforcement

Even then, the Bush administration did not wish to create a kind of agglutination agency that would kind of stick together all sorts of domestic security functions. That took the active intervention of moderate Democrats and some moderate Republicans, who were able to basically checkmate Bush over his concerns about such an agency being kind of too large for, you know, extent conservative perceptions of government using his own logic of counterterrorism. And there is really no way for Bush to argue himself out of that. So instead he accommodated himself to it.

But even then, ICE, when it starts, has only 2,700 agents. By 2008, that becomes 5,000. ICE's budget until in something like 2016 was $6 billion. For a while in the intervening decade, it's hovered around $10 billion. Trump has now made it $85 billion. 

This is an enterprise that operated fundamentally — well, I shouldn't say fundamentally different. I don't want to suggest that the INS was a benign agency, or that immigrant Americans didn't fear INS, much as they would come to fear ICE. Just that there were constraints, both legal, budgetary, and from a political perspective, cultural, that constrained interior immigration enforcement. That doesn't exist anymore. We have seen instead — to finish answering your question in a very long-winded way — a counterterrorism context transforms, in ways both direct and structural, the apparatus of American immigration to something that today is coalescing into something that I think we can see fairly clearly is on its way, if it's not there already, into operating like a death squad.

JU: One thing we saw right away post-9/11 was the demonization of Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, or anyone remotely resembling any of those categories. What kind of connection can we make between the rhetoric and actions of that era with how otherization and fear is being wielded these days against immigrants and other populations?

SA: I see it as a rather straight line. The early years of the war on terror proved something that politicians, particularly in the Republican Party, but also in the Democratic Party, have been sort of chasing ever since to recover its potency — like chasing a high. And that's that the politics of counterterrorism in the early 2000s — really persistent throughout, but especially in the early 2000s — completely deterred opposition, silenced dissent, and intimidated resistance. And it worked. It worked for a really long time. Eventually, it ceased working as well. But the fact that it worked can't be overstated. Because politicians afterward, particularly when there has been no criminal liability or even significant political liability for the atrocities that result, accordingly seek to do what works. And this works extremely well.

"The politics of counterterrorism in the early 2000s … completely deterred opposition, silenced dissent, and intimidated resistance. And it worked."

In a broad sense, one of the things that the war on terror did in particular to Muslims in this country was redefine terrorism away from being something that people throughout history have done across cultures, into "terrorism" is something that a certain kind of people are, and usually only them. That when people who do not look or worship like Muslims utilize violence for political purposes — that becomes defined as "counterterrorism."

So there is a really, really firm connection in how we have seen not only the targets of ICE's raids, since the Trump administration returned to power, be described as terrorists. But now people like Marimar Martinez in Chicago, Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, when they're shot — and in the case of Good and Pretti, killed — by ICE, ICE and the broader political structure calls them terrorists.

They have the first-mover communication choice of basically daring journalists, politicians, whomever to prove that they weren't in fact terrorists. There's nothing about any of their action that's remotely anything at all like terrorism. But that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA.

Related Violent Far-Right Extremists Are Rarely Prosecuted as Terrorists

JU: As you wrote in your book, "Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: The terrorists were whomever you say they were." And I'm curious about this seemingly expansive scope of this label. You've written about how the "terrorist" label has predominantly been used against people of color, while white people like Timothy McVeigh get different treatment, both linguistically and legally.

Do you think what we're seeing in the Twin Cities is a significant development — the government calling white activists "terrorists" —and these are white people who present as average middle class, not so-called anarchists or "antifa." Is this, in your mind, a significant shift in how the term "terrorist" is wielded and will be wielded? 

SA: Yes, absolutely. Minnesota is kind of the next stanza in the [Martin] Niemöller poem. The poem about, "First they came for…"

ICE and CBP have a very long history of acting lawlessly. The conditions of ICE prisons, many of which are operated as for-profit enterprises with detainees being paid a dollar a day, have often been shown to be both violent and deeply neglectful. I have a friend who contracted Covid at the ICE detention center in Batavia, New York, for instance.

Related Federal Agents at Protests Renew Calls to Dismantle Homeland Security

So what we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time. What we saw in places like Portland in 2020, where, certainly in Portland, CBP tactical units, known as BORTAC, opened fire with less-lethal rounds on protesters outside the Hatfield building. That was what they were willing to do — similarly, lawlessly stuffing people into unmarked vans for detention and so forth — to people deemed enemies of the Trump administration.

And now we're seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE. In Renee Good's case, for possibly, slightly inconveniencing ICE vehicularly. And then, trying to comply with a contradictory order to get out of the way and then stay put, get outta the car, you know? And then with Alex Pretti — helping a woman up.

What we're seeing is something we can't turn away from, and I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.

[Break]

JU: In some cities, we see different relationships between local law enforcement and federal agencies, and that's been a contentious issue going back to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces enlisted during the height of the so-called war on terror. Now we hear more about the 287(g) agreements that are focused on giving immigration enforcement powers to local officers. Collaboration by city and county law enforcement agencies often depends on who's in charge and sometimes local community influence. How has this idea transformed local law enforcement over the past 25 years — situating local police and sheriffs as partners in fighting a war, essentially? 

SA: First, in the literal sense, it deputizes local police into an immigration function. And the implications of that are both profound and subtle. Being undocumented in this country is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. And it's a misdemeanor, it's not a felony. So being undocumented in this country now all of a sudden becomes "law enforcement-related." It becomes a matter that is quickly understood in a kind of everyday person's sense of association as something that is being done by cops.

And so cops are going after criminals. They're not going after someone who overstayed a work visa. The person who overstayed a work visa is presumed to have done so because they're criminal. That is a profound shift that nativists 30 years ago could only have as the apple of their eye. That's now normal in this country. 

Beyond that, beyond the kind of mimetic and cultural functions there, what the Department of Homeland Security's relationship with local police over the vast majority of DHS's existence was a patron-client relationship. There's always been a lot of focus, and not inappropriately, on the [1033] Pentagon program that takes decommissioned military equipment and gives them to law enforcement. Appropriately so. 

" There is not very much terrorism in the United States of America of the sort that DHS was created to redress."

DHS's grant programs to local law enforcement have always dwarfed them, in terms of budgetary capability. There is not very much terrorism in the United States of America of the sort that DHS was created to redress. However, DHS had a budget to give out to local law enforcement, you know, cop shops, that applied for grant money that it would have to disperse.

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The overall point is not only was DHS for such a long time a supplier of equipment that cops did not need for terrorism, but could find a whole lot of value out of when using against their existing tasks — which means, in a lot of cases, against the people it polices. But also, it accustomed police shops to look at DHS as a source of support that didn't have to go through existing and potentially contentious budgetary processes locally that municipal, small-d democratic functions have power to effect. It's not the most potent power. I'm telling you this from New York City where the NYPD has for a very long time been considered pretty much untouchable. But nevertheless, this is a more friction-free funding path than troublesome city councils. 

JU: And to continue this line of thought on weaponry, it's one thing to have a heavily armed Border Patrol if they legitimately believe they may encounter a "violent drug cartel." But the images we're seeing of immigration agents in residential U.S. neighborhoods with body armor and advanced weaponry brings to mind the militarization of local police and federal agencies that's taken place since 9/11.

You talked about the equipment, you've talked about the vehicles. There are local police departments with MRAPs. Across the board, top-down from federal agencies down to local, it feels like a war that's literally everywhere. What's been the arc of that evolution? 

SA: Markets for advanced military technology get spurred on by overseas war. Eventually, those wars draw down beyond the funding capabilities of those different technological production lines. Those different technological production lines will seek out derivative markets that they can use to keep making money. That has been local law enforcement, but before that, it's been DHS.

Starting around the first Obama administration, DHS, particularly for the border, starts buying up a drone fleet. Then it starts buying up really powerful military-grade camera suites that had previously been developed for protecting U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. DHS buys this stuff. It provides funding for — as we were just talking about — local police agencies to eventually start buying other stuff that DHS has.

There's no Gray Eagle-sized drone in police custody in the country yet. But we'll talk in 10 more years, and we'll see about that. DHS provides funding to get similar technologies, related technologies, and then it pushes what it currently has beyond the border into the interior of the country.

We should also mention that the border after 9/11 changes in important ways, where DHS — this is for the last 15 years at least been policy at CBP — the border is anywhere within 100 miles of a port of entry or exit. So if you've wondered, why is the Border Patrol in, you know, Charlotte, North Carolina, or Chicago or Minneapolis — that's why. Because your sense of the border intuitively is not the U.S. government's definition of the border.

Eventually we see this stuff move into the interior of the United States. The roundups, which had been there since at least 2005, become more ambitious, and they become, with the 287(g) program, involving local law enforcement as well as the Department of Homeland Security — and now increasingly toward critics of DHS itself.

I want to say one more thing about this. When we look at what ICE and CBP deploy with, in all of the cities that we've seen them invest since the second Trump administration — a common denominator has been they're all wearing plate carriers. The stuff that says like police, ICE, and so forth, you know, the ballistic chest protection that they wear around them.

Marimar Martinez legally had a gun. She didn't draw it; she kept it holstered in her car. They called her a domestic terrorist. Her hands were on the steering wheel when ICE shot her.

"ICE and CBP are posturing as if they are the ones under the threat, not that they are the threat themselves."

Alex Pretti famously had a gun, not that he drew it on CBP. When they shot him, six of them shot this man who is completely not in any position to be threatening them. ICE and CBP are posturing as if they are the ones under the threat, not that they are the threat themselves.

All of this social media footage-ready imagery that they've been collecting and disseminating is what we should understand as a psy-op on the American people to make it think that these are a valorous Praetorian Guard that puts itself in danger constantly. Instead, they are the ones inflicting the danger on Americans, undocumented or citizens.

JU: Now we talked about this evolution — part of that is an expansive or unchecked legal infrastructure and framework that allows this. Over the past two decades-plus, were there moments when that infrastructure could have been dialed back or unraveled? Times when Trump wasn't president? Did that happen to any extent? And if not, why not?

SA: There are many reasons to be deeply upset at the way the Obama and Biden administrations treated the institutions of the war on terror that they inherited. But really chief among them is the way that they embraced the existing structures of homeland security for use against immigrants.

Obama — famously the deporter in chief, always under pressure from his right to deport more. Obama famously makes the massive miscalculation that if he can just, you know, bolster resources for border protection, then he can buy goodwill on the right. This was just an epic political miscalculation that really everyone could have seen coming, and many did.

Related As Biden Continues Trump's War on Asylum, Danger Mounts in the Deadly Sonoran Desert

Biden — 4.4 million deportations on his watch; Trump left office the first time at 1.5 million. After everything that we saw the Trump administration do the first time around, in particular with child separation, with raising the number of people in ICE custody to something like 50,000 a day — I don't know if they've gotten back to that, if they've exceeded that by now or not. But I remember reporting on it at the time that it was in 2020, it had gotten up to, maybe a little before the pandemic, something like 50,000 a day. It was really astonishing.

But Biden famously tells his donors ahead of the election that they're not gonna seek fundamental change. And I think that by the time the Biden administration takes office, the Democratic Party had successfully marginalized the voices that were calling, not just for pursuing once again, comprehensive immigration reform — which of course is stifled by the Republicans again and again and again — but to abolish ICE.

I think right now we are at, you know, years before a Democrat could theoretically take power. But we're starting to see Democratic politicians go down the same very dangerous road along the politics of security that they've played not just during the Biden administration or the first Trump administration, but throughout the war on terror.

"Unless the nativist concept of the need for an interior deportation force is confronted root and branch, we are going to continue to see exactly what we are seeing."

And they're doing it with ICE now, which is we're starting to hear people say things like, "This is not immigration enforcement." It's true. This is not what I think many people think of as immigration enforcement. But immigration enforcement is how we got to this point. And unless the nativist concept of the need for an interior deportation force is confronted root and branch, we are going to continue to see exactly what we are seeing. Not as a form of stasis, but as a form of ICE and CBP completing their transformation into a death squad.

And I use a very scary term because this is a very scary moment. But we also need to be really clear about what we are seeing ICE do and behave as. You mentioned it's unwillingness to follow the law. In Minnesota, a judge found just before January of 2026 expired, around 100 violations of court orders about immigration and how ICE needed to behave, in just that month. How many gleeful videos do we have to see on our phone of ICE people telling Minnesotans to "fuck around and find out"? Beyond even just the actual murders and shootings — but the way that the CBP officers applauded after shooting Alex Pretti? The way Jonathan Ross, who murdered Renee Good, called her a "fucking bitch" after doing so? This is not something that can be reformed. The best time to abolish ICE was 2003. The second best time is today.

Related Senate Dems Who Pushed Meatier ICE Reform Shy Away From Criticizing Schumer's Softer Package

Every single moment that we refrain from doing this, that Democratic politicians as well as Republican ones try and push it back to the margins of political discourse, is another day closer to the time that they're going to shoot you, that they're going to deport someone you love, and on and on and on.

"This is not something that can be reformed."

JU: There's a sinister delight that we see time and time again from federal agents beyond the comments or behavior after both of those Minnesotans were killed. But we've seen many other videos of them wielding those incidents to other observers as threats. And to your point, that's not something that you can fix with a sensitivity training. That is something ingrained in the culture. And I'm curious what could be done? It doesn't seem like there's a critical mass of Democrats willing to do that. Maybe there is and or maybe we might get to one, but that's down the road. And you of course have the challenge of the current Supreme Court composition not wanting to challenge anything that Trump is doing meaningfully. So realistically, what can people hope for or work towards in terms of turning this imperial boomerang around? 

SA: First, the answer to how you stop the war on terror is not easy, but it is simple. And that's organize. Force your politicians in an abolitionist direction; oust them when they won't go in that direction. Organize so you can build power amongst like-minded people in your area, in order to produce that function. It's awful that that's where we kind of have to start from, but our leaders will not do this on their own.

Outside of that I would look to efforts that the Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is building toward, in which he's been talking about, however long it takes, prosecuting ICE and CBP agents for violating relevant local laws. And one of the main lessons of the war on terror is that without legal consequence for one era's atrocity, the next is foreordained.

So until ICE killers and CBP kidnappers alike go to prison, we can expect them to continue their behavior. This is why JD Vance and Stephen Miller have started deceitfully talking about absolute immunity for ICE after they killed Renee Good.

"Until ICE killers and CBP kidnappers alike go to prison, we can expect them to continue their behavior."

Krasner has been hinting that there is a kind of impromptu coalition of like-minded district attorneys and perhaps state attorneys general that are seeking to go in this direction. That will either act as a deterrent, or it won't. Here in New York, the attorney general, Letitia James, announced that she's going to start sending observers from her office out on ICE-related operations in and around the state. That carries with it a suggestion of prosecutorial intervention. I think that's going to be a crucial step. But it's a step that is going to have to come in supplement, with people finding political outlets for an explosion in popularity — justifiably so, in my opinion — for abolishing ICE. 

We can't move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans. This is something that has to be uprooted and replaced, or just simply not replaced at all, if we don't think certain functions that they perform are legitimate functions, which I think is a very, you know, reasonable conclusion. Reformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you.

JU: My final question for you, Spencer, is where does this go over the next three years if nothing happens? If there is no restraint, if there is no change, if there is no reform. That is certainly an uphill fight. Nothing could potentially happen until at least after midterms, but we've seen Trump's priorities laid out in places like Project 2025, and I can't imagine this is their end game. So if left untouched, where does this go over the next three years? 

SA: We've been seeing reporting from Ken Klippenstein and others about how ICE is accessing existing, widely revealing, databases of Americans' information, building others. We saw in the beginning of the Trump administration, the massive data-snatching grabs involving DOGE that have also accumulated a tremendous amount of revealing information on Americans. This is also, I would suggest, the predictable course of the surveillance state after 9/11. These massive and revealing data sets will go into ICE custody, probably through tools purchased from Palantir, to get an ever more refined picture of terrorism in the United States. Except by terrorism, they mean you and me. They will mean people that they can consider internal dissenters, critics, obstacles to the continued operations of ICE, and like-minded allied federal agencies.

"It might not be long before we see a drone strike in an American city. And I can't stop thinking about that."

This, I think, is probably coming sooner than three years. Not to sound alarmist, but the current trajectory of this is really, really ominous. And that is an extremely realistic possibility. Your friend and mine, Derek Davison of the American Prestige podcast a couple months ago, was predicting that it might not be long before we see a drone strike in an American city. And I can't stop thinking about that. And I wish I could say I found that an outlandish possibility. But the crucial framework for that was laid when the Obama administration decided that they could execute an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without any kind of criminal process, let alone a conviction, because it would be too inconvenient to send a team of CIA operatives to kidnap him.

It won't be long, I think — as long as that Chekov's president remains blessed by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice — before we start seeing that applied on American soil. And those are some places that I think are realistic possibilities for what we might see unless this apparatus is aggressively dismantled.

JU: That is absolutely chilling. And in some way, I'm at a loss for words, just something that I never thought we might encounter. But that is a situation we seem to be finding ourselves in. Spencer, as always, I appreciate your insight, your analysis, and thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

SA: Thank you, Jordan.

JU: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Andrew Stelzer. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I'm Jordan Uhl. 

The post "Terrorist": How ICE Weaponized 9/11's Scarlet Letter appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Defense has quietly signed a $210 million deal to buy advanced cluster shells from one of Israel's state-owned arms companies, marking unusually large new commitments to a class of weapons and an Israeli defense establishment both widely condemned for their indiscriminate killing of civilians.

The deal, signed in September and not previously reported, is the department's largest contract to purchase weapons from an Israeli company in available records, according to an online federal database that covers the last 18 years. In a reversal of the more commonly seen direction for weapons transfers between the countries — in which the U.S. sends its weapons to Israel — the U.S. will pay the Israeli weapons firm Tomer over a period of three years to produce a new 155mm munition. The shells are designed to replace decades-old and often defective cluster shells that left live explosives scattered across Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and other nations.

The terror of cluster weapons persists long after the guns that fired them have quieted, as civilians return to fields, forests, and settlements laced with bomblets that can explode years later without warning.

"The footprint of the injuries of these weapons is so horrifying," said Alma Taslidžan, advocacy manager for the aid organization Humanity & Inclusion, which pushes to ban cluster munitions. She recalled speaking with a 17-year-old boy who found an unexploded cluster bomblet in his neighbor's garden in the aftermath of the Bosnian War.

"He said he played with it for quite a while. Suddenly it exploded. It blew up both of his hands; it blew away part of his face as well," she said.

Known as the XM1208 munition, America's new cluster shells are designed to have a dud rate — or risk of failure to explode — of less than 1 percent. They rely on more complex fuses and self-destruct features to reduce long-term danger to civilians, according to army procurement documents and weapons experts. But researchers say those low failure rates in testing do not reflect real-world performance, and advocates argue that cluster weapons' battlefield effectiveness cannot justify their humanitarian costs.

"They are inherently indiscriminate," said Brian Castner, an Amnesty International weapons investigator and former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer. "There's not a way to use them responsibly, in that you can't control where they land, and with this high dud rate you can't control the effect on the civilian population afterwards."

Related The Indiscriminate Rain of Cluster Bombs

The Cluster Munition Monitor has documented more than 24,800 cluster munition injuries and deaths since the 1960s, three-quarters from unexploded remnants. In 2024, cluster munitions killed at least 314 civilians, the majority of them in Ukraine.

Both the XM1208 and the deal to buy them are atypical. The DOD awarded the contract without public competition under a "public interest" exception to federal contracting law, using recent amendments that loosened rules for awarding no-bid defense contracts involving Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.

"I found this to be rather unusual," said Julia Gledhill, a military contracting researcher for the Stimson Center, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank. "I have not seen something like this before — a sole source contract to a foreign military contractor for $200 million."

"I have not seen something like this before — a sole source contract to a foreign military contractor for $200 million." 

Federal agencies are legally required to create a "determination and findings" document justifying the award of a no-bid contract, which can be requested from the agencies under public records law. The Army has not yet responded to a Freedom of Information Act request for that documentation.

Tomer did not respond to a request for comment. Asked about the new munition's failure rate, U.S. Army public affairs officer Shahin Uddin wrote it has "has undergone all required testing to ensure it meets all performance requirements, including compliance with the DoD Cluster Munition Policy."

A Weapon for the Next War

The Pentagon's efforts to field the XM1208 comes against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, where both sides have blanketed battlefields with older cluster munitions — including some given to Ukraine by the Biden administration. Some Eastern European countries have considered withdrawing from the Convention on Cluster Munitions amid fears of conflict with Russia, and in 2014, Lithuania became the first country to abandon the treaty.

As a result, Castner said, "Both the cluster munitions convention and the anti-personnel land mine convention are under threat." 

Related With Ukraine's Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More

But major military powers — like Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the United States — have never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans its 112 member states from using or producing those weapons. Rather than sign the 2008 pact, the U.S. enacted a policy that year to stop using its old, failure-prone cluster munitions by 2019 and develop new weapons with a dud rate of less than 1 percent. 

Progress was slow, and in 2017, the U.S. weakened its policy to allow continued use of older cluster bombs until it had sufficient stockpiles of safer models. That year, the U.S. military began testing the M999 cluster munition: a new shell developed by another state-owned Israeli arms company, IMI Systems.

"The U.S. wants all options," said William Hartung, an arms industry researcher with the Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft. "One of their arguments was it's good if you're in a close-packed artillery situation — a ground war. It clears more of an area."

During its 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel drew international criticism for using cluster bombs, and IMI promised a new weapon that would lower collateral damage — both to civilians and Israel's flagging global reputation. In 2018, IMI Systems was acquired by Elbit Systems, a privately owned Israeli defense contractor which has faced recent boycotts for arming Israel's forces in Gaza and the West Bank.

After backlash from investors in countries that had signed the convention, Elbit canceled production of the M999 and pledged not to build any cluster weapons.

But the M999 program did not stay dead. The Israeli government established a new state-owned arms company, Tomer, in 2018, with no limitations on cluster weapon production. The U.S. Army then adopted the M999 as its new cluster shell for artillery, renaming it the XM1208. According to a 2024 army munitions publication, the XM1208 is designed to release nine bomblets which then detonate in the air, each containing 1,200 pieces of tungsten shrapnel.

That same document lists Elbit as a production partner for the XM1208, despite the company's pledge to abide by the cluster convention. Elbit did not immediately return a request for comment, and the Army did not respond to an inquiry about whether Elbit was working on the munition.

Related As Israel Bombed Gaza, Amazon Did Business With Its Bomb-Makers

Business at Tomer has been booming, due to both the genocide in Gaza and foreign arms sales, according to the Israeli tech news site Calcalist. It recorded $173 million in sales last year, making the DOD's $210 million contract a massive windfall compared to its historical revenue. Tomer pays the Israeli government a 50 percent dividend on its profit, Calcalist reported.

The XM1208 is designed with multiple fail-safe fuses to reduce dud rates, according to U.S. Army documents published online. But little is known about how it actually performs in the field. Last year, The Guardian published photos showing an expended M999 shell in Lebanon, suggesting Israel had used the weapon in its recent attacks on Hezbollah. But there is currently no public data on its real-world failure rate, said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of the munitions analysis firm Armament Research Services.

Real-world dud rates are generally much higher than those found in controlled testing, which does not account for battlefield conditions like soft soil or older, degraded fuses, said Taslidžan, of Humanity & Inclusion. The manufacturer of Israel's M85 cluster munition, which includes a self-destruct feature to reduce long-term risk to civilians, touted a "hazardous dud" rate of less than 0.1 percent. But researchers with Norwegian People's Aid who analyzed the aftermath of M85 strikes from the 2006 war in Lebanon found that about 10 percent failed to explode.

And even if the XM1208 meets its 1 percent failure rate target, it would still be inhumane, said Taslidžan, leaving large numbers of lethal duds behind.

"That's why the Convention on Cluster Munitions bans these weapons as a class," she said. "The area effects and residual contamination are fundamentally incompatible with protecting civilians."

The post Pentagon Inks Massive $200 Million Deal to Buy Controversial Cluster Weapons From Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Benefits system trials automation amid growing interest in universal basic income

AI-pocalypse Britain's welfare system is experimenting with AI to manage Universal Credit claimants - even as evidence piles up that artificial intelligence may soon be pushing more people onto benefits in the first place.…

If your Wi-Fi struggles to reach every corner of your house, it's probably not your internet plan that's the problem. A single router can only do so much, especially in larger spaces or homes with thick walls. That's where the best mesh Wi-Fi system comes in, replacing one overworked router with a Wi-Fi mesh network designed to deliver high-speed coverage across your entire home.

A whole home mesh Wi-Fi setup uses multiple nodes that act as shared access points, spreading your connection more evenly and reducing slowdowns as you move from room to room. Compared to basic range extenders, mesh systems handle traffic more intelligently, balance bandwidth between devices and usually offer easy setup through companion apps. Many support dual-band Wi-Fi and newer standards, making them better suited for households full of phones, laptops, TVs and smart home devices.

We've tested today's leading mesh systems to see which ones actually deliver consistent speeds and reliable coverage. Whether you're trying to eliminate dead zones in a small apartment or blanket a large, multi-floor house with fast, stable Wi-Fi, these are the mesh systems worth considering.

Best mesh Wi-Fi systems for 2026

What to look for in a mesh Wi-Fi system

Linksys' CEO Jonathan Bettino told Engadget why mesh systems are an "advancement in Wi-Fi technology" over buying a single point router. With one transmitter, the signal can degrade the further away from the router you go, or the local environment isn't ideal. "You can have a small [home], but there's thick walls [...] or things in the way that just interfere with your wireless signal," he said.

Historically, the solution to a home's Wi-Fi dead zone was to buy Wi-Fi range extenders but Bettino said the hardware has both a "terrible user experience" and one of the highest return rates of any consumer electronics product. Mesh Wi-Fi, by comparison, offers "multiple nodes that can be placed anywhere in your home," says Bettino, each acting as an access point that works together as part of a whole home mesh Wi-Fi system.

Rather than having one main router in your home, having a "router in every room" is the biggest selling point for mesh Wi-Fi given how reliant we all are on the internet. Each node is in constant contact with each other, broadcasting a single, seamless network to all of your connected devices. There's no separate network for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, just a single name that you connect to.

It's a good time to buy a mesh Wi-Fi system since the latest standard, Wi-Fi 6E, represents a big leap in the technology. Matt MacPherson, Cisco's Chief Technology Officer for Wireless, said Wi-Fi 6E is a big "inflection point," using much more of the wireless spectrum than its predecessors. "If you're using that spectrum with a Wi-Fi 6 [device]," he said, "you're going to get significant gains [in speed.]"

MacPherson added Wi-Fi 6E will likely "carry you for a long time" thanks to the fact its "top throughputs now typically exceed what people can actually connect their home to." In short, with a top theoretical per-stream speed of 1.2 Gbps, Wi-Fi 6E is fast enough to outrun all but the fastest internet service.

What do all these Wi-Fi numbers and letters mean?

I'm sorry folks, we need to get boringly technical for one paragraph, but I promise you it's worth it.

Wi-Fi is governed by International Standard IEEE 802.11, and every few years a letter gets added onto that name when the technology evolves and improves. Until 2019, routers were sold under their IEEE name, leaving users to pick through the word soup of a product labeled 802.11 b/g/a/n/ac and so on.

Mercifully, wiser heads opted to rebrand the letters as numbers, so rather than 802.11 b/g/a/n/ac, we have Wi-Fi 1, 2, 3 4 and 5. Right now, we're in the middle of one of those Wi-Fi generations, with most of the gear on sale right now supporting either Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E.

What's the difference between Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E?

Wi-Fi uses chunks of the radio frequency spectrum, with Wi-Fi 6 using the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands to pump data around. In fact, back in the old days, it was likely your home router would offer you the choice of the 2.4GHz or the 5GHz network, as separate bands to access. These days, all of the spectrums are tied together as one thing, and Wi-Fi 6E has the added ability to use the 6GHz band as well. That's a big chunk of extra wireless real estate that isn't as cluttered up as the 2.4 and 5GHz bands.

You're going to talk about wireless frequencies now, aren't you.

Each Wi-Fi band had tradeoffs, because the slower radio frequencies have greater range but less speed. 2.4GHz signals will travel a long way in your home but aren't quick, while 6GHz is blisteringly fast but can be defeated by a sturdy brick wall. A lot of Wi-Fi-enabled gear you own, like smart home products, only use the 2.4GHz band because the range is better and it's a lot cheaper. But it means that the band is also overcrowded and slow, making it great for your doorbell and robovac, but lackluster for Twitch streaming.

So, what am I looking for?

Right now, the market is full of mature Wi-Fi 6 and 6E devices, and most new systems available to buy are capable of taking advantage of the faster speeds they offer. This guide focuses on Wi-Fi 6E gear since it's what we think it's more than enough to satisfy almost everyone's at-home Wi-Fi needs.

What about Wi-Fi 7?

We're now seeing the first generation of Wi-Fi 7 devices available to buy, but we don't recommend you do so immediately. The Wi-Fi 7 standard is still so new that there's little to no reason for you to rush out and buy one for your home. The hardware is tremendously expensive and while Wi-Fi 7 will, eventually, offer some great benefits over 6E, it's not as transformative an upgrade as 6E. Not to mention, Wi-Fi 7 is so new that almost none of your home's devices will be able to take advantage of its big-ticket features. I'd estimate you won't need to worry about upgrading to Wi-Fi 7 for at least five years, if not longer.

Range and speed

All Wi-Fi routers boast a theoretical broadcast range and a theoretical top speed, and in some cases external antennas to boost signal directionality — but these figures don't mean much. After all, manufacturers can't control your ISP's real speed, the materials and layout of your home or where you put your Wi-Fi gear. Raw speed isn't everything, either, and you likely need less peak speed than your provider advertises. What matters more is consistent bandwidth and stable performance throughout your entire home. After all, Netflix needs just 15 Mbps to push a single 4K video stream to your home. As cool as it is to say you've got all these hundreds of Mbps, factors like latency and reliability are far more crucial to a happy internet life. And unless you have Gigabit internet that can reach speeds of up to 1 Gbps, you won't need a mesh router that offers that spec.

Backhaul

Mesh Wi-Fi systems work by connecting every hardware node to a single wireless network, letting them all communicate with each other. Imagine four people in a busy, noisy restaurant all trying to order their dinner from a weary staff member, all at once. Now imagine, while this is going on, that four more people at that same table are also trying to tell a funny anecdote. It's no surprise that it might take a long time for the right information to reach its intended destination.

To combat this, higher-end mesh routers offer dedicated wireless backhaul, allowing nodes to communicate without eating into the high-speed bandwidth your devices rely on. So rather than everyone talking at once in the same space, the conversations are essentially separated, reducing the invisible clutter in the air. Because there's less confusing cross-chatter, everything moves faster, offering a significant performance boost to those systems.

Connectivity

These days, even your washing machine can have a wireless connection, but that doesn't mean you should ignore the joys of wired internet. No matter how fast Wi-Fi is, a hard line will always be faster, and wired connections can significantly improve Wi-Fi mesh network performance when used for backhaul. Plenty of routers can also use these hard connections as backhaul, eliminating further wireless clutter.

It's convenient for spread-out systems and power users, but it will mean running more wires through your home. The most common standard is Cat 5e, or gigabit ethernet which, unsurprisingly, has a top speed of 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps). Since Ethernet cables are backward compatible, you should be able to easily find one that works with your system. However, to get the most out of your mesh routers, it's worth investing in an Ethernet cable that meets the standard your router uses — if it's Cat 5e, use a Cat 5e cable. You can check your router's specs via the manufacturer's website to be sure.

Flexibility and scalability

Mesh routers enable you to add (or subtract) modules from your home network to suit your needs. D-Link's Alan Jones said users should "check how scalable the prospective product is" before you buy. This sense of scale doesn't just apply to the number of nodes on the network, but how many simultaneous connections it can handle.

It's also worth looking at ASUS' AiMesh products, which can combine mesh Wi-Fi gear and its standard "spider" Wi-Fi routers. If you've got a tricky part of your home, you can bolt on an ultra-power standalone Wi-Fi router to a compatible mesh.

Placement

Mesh networks replace one big piece of hardware with a series of identical nodes that you scatter around your home, each acting as a shared access point to maintain coverage throughout the entire home. You connect one to your modem (usually over ethernet), and then scatter the rest around the place for the best coverage. A good rule of thumb is to place each node no more than two rooms away from the last one, rather than sticking them at the far ends of your home.

Bear in mind, every physical obstacle between a Wi-Fi node, its siblings and your devices will hurt your overall performance. You should aim to place them, at the very least, at waist height on furniture in open air, without too many obstructions. The reason many mesh Wi-Fi products are designed to look like an inoffensive white doodad is so you don't feel compelled to hide them behind your TV.

Other mesh Wi-Fi router systems we tested Amazon Eero Pro 7

Eero built its reputation on easy to use yet powerful mesh systems that offer a lot of good in a relatively small and affordable package. Setup is effortless, the app running things is clean and simple, and you get the added benefit of backwards compatibility with older hardware. Sadly, the issue with every Eero system is that so many basic management features, like parental controls, are paywalled behind the company's Eero Plus subscription for $100 a year.

Amazon Eero 6E

Eero Pro 6E is an "easy" device, the sort a total novice can set up on their own and thrive with for years on end. There's little brainwork required to get things set up, and the app has a clean UI with plenty of hand-holding. But, as with the Eero Pro 7, the fact that so many basic management tools are paywalled irks me, especially since you can get plenty of them for free with Google's rival offering.

Netgear Orbi 960

The Orbi 96T0 (RBKE963) is Netgear's flagship mesh Wi-Fi product, which the company calls the "world's most powerful Wi-Fi 6E system." It's also one of the most expensive consumer-level kits on the market, setting you back $1,499.99 for a three pack. It's a fantastic piece of gear, but it's worth saying that the subset of people who could, would or should buy it remains far smaller than you might expect. Ultimately, I feel that if you're paying luxury prices, you should expect a luxury product. There were plenty of times during testing that I went looking for a feature that was either only available via the web client, or behind a paywall. While, yes, much of your cash is going to the superlative hardware, but for this sort of money, the fact you have to pay extra for some table-stakes features is insulting. If you're looking for a new Wi-Fi system and aren't prepared to spend almost $1,500, it's worth considering our other top picks for the best Wi-Fi routers and mesh systems.

How we test Wi-Fi routers

My home covers around 2,200 square feet across three stories with the office on the third floor. It's relatively long and thin, with the living room at the front of the house, the kitchen at the back and the three bedrooms on the first floor. Its age means there are a lot of solid brick walls, old-school lathe and plaster as well as aluminum foil-backed insulation boards to help with energy efficiency. There are two major Wi-Fi dead zones in the house: The bathroom and the third bedroom behind it, since there's lots of old and new pipework in the walls and floors.

For mesh routers with two nodes, I place the first in my living room, connected via ethernet to my cable modem with the second on the first floor landing in the (ostensible) center of the house. For three-node sets, the third goes in my kitchen, which I've found is the optimal layout to get the bulk of my house covered in Wi-Fi. Fundamentally, my home poses enough challenges that if it succeeds here, it stands a very good chance of succeeding in your place.

Each mesh is judged on ease of setup, Wi-Fi coverage, reliability, speed and any additional features that it advertises. I look at how user-friendly each companion app is from the perspective of a novice rather than an expert given you shouldn't need to be a network engineer to do this sort of thing. Tests I do include checking for dead zones, moving from room to room to measure consistency of connectivity and streaming multiple videos at once to replicate common usage patterns.

Mesh Wi-Fi system FAQs

This is the section of our mesh Wi-Fi buyer's guide where we talk about the stuff that most people just glide past. If you're not familiar with technology, it can be intimidating if people talk about these things as if you're expected to already know. So here's a very simple, very basic rundown of some of the stuff you might have missed in very basic terms.

What's the difference between a Wi-Fi router and a mesh router?

A Wi-Fi router is a box that usually sits close to wherever the internet comes into your home and pumps out information over radio waves. A mesh router, meanwhile, is a set of smaller devices, one of which sits next to your internet connection while the rest are scattered around your home. A single Wi-Fi router is great if your home is small, your needs aren't too demanding, or if your home doesn't have many radio-blocking obstructions that mean those signals can't reach every corner of your home. But, much like standing next to a radio transmitter and then walking away from it in a straight line, after a while, the signal will degrade.

That's the problem a mesh system is designed to solve, since it will take the signal from your modem and pump to the other mesh devices, known as nodes, in your home. That way, instead of having one big router in one part of your home, you have several small ones that ensure you have good Wi-Fi connectivity all over. It also helps ensure that there's no risk of dropping your connection as you move around — a mesh router system makes it easy to, for instance, walk from room to room watching Netflix and know you won't miss a single frame.

What's the difference between a Wi-Fi extender and a mesh system?

Oh boy. Wi-Fi extenders, or repeaters, are small devices designed to push Wi-Fi a little further than your Wi-Fi router can stretch. They're cheap, compact and often come in the form of little boxes that sit on your plug sockets with the hope of pushing Wi-Fi to a signal-sparse corner of your home. They are, and I can't put this delicately enough, often a big pile of rubbish and are often not worth your time. Especially since the price of mesh routers has fallen to within most people's budgets.

What is a wireless backhaul?

As we explained above, mesh Wi-Fi systems work by connecting every hardware node to a single wireless network, letting them all communicate with each other. Imagine four people in a busy, noisy restaurant all trying to order their dinner from a weary staff member, all at once. Now imagine, while this is going on, that four more people at that same table are also trying to tell a funny anecdote. It's no surprise that it might take a long time for the right information to reach its intended destination.

To combat this, higher-end mesh routers offer dedicated wireless backhaul; a slice of the spectrum for node-to-node communication. So rather than everyone talking at once in the same space, the conversations are essentially separated, reducing the invisible clutter in the air. Because there's less confusing cross-chatter, everything moves faster, offering a significant performance boost to those systems.

Is it better to hard wire instead of using a mesh Wi-Fi system?

This is a great question that doesn't have a simple answer.

It is (almost) always preferable to connect devices with a wire, in this case Ethernet, than to use Wi-Fi. The speeds are faster, it's more reliable and your data is less vulnerable to the slings and arrows of the laws of physics. Hell, I spent about a year trying to work out how to build an iPhone to Ethernet connector back in the bad old days of Wi-Fi.

But your ability to do so depends on your level of DIY skills and / or how much money you want to spend on contractors. Wiring your home for Ethernet if you don't have the infrastructure already can be a costly and time-consuming process. Particularly if you don't want ugly wires running along your baseboards and under your carpets or across your hardwood floors.

If you're building your own home or can do some serious DIY, then hard wiring is a fantastic thing to have. It goes wonderfully hand-in-glove with mesh networks too, since you'll be able to hook up your nodes to the network for even better speeds.

But if I'm honest, advances in Wi-Fi technology mean I'd only go for hard wiring if I really believed I needed the sort of speed it offers. Unless you're a Twitch streamer running your own 24/7 content studio, it's probably overkill.

When we started renovating our 140-year-old home, I had Ethernet installed in the living room, the master and second bedroom and in my office, all at the front of the house. I can't use it for my mesh since I'd need to put the wiring through the middle of the house. If I ever had the wiring done again, I would do so as I know I'll instantly see a meaningful improvement in both my connection speed and reliability. But I wouldn't spend several thousand pounds to have it done just for the sake of it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/best-mesh-wifi-system-130028701.html?src=rss

West Sussex plans to triple use of property sales as ERP budget blows past original estimates

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London, TechEx Global 2026, one of Europe's biggest enterprise technology conferences, brought thousands of technology professionals together at Olympia London on 4 and 5 February. The event went beyond buzzwords, focusing on how emerging technologies, especially AI, are being applied in real business contexts.  TechEx Global combines several co-located expos, including AI & Big Data, Cyber Security & Cloud, IoT Tech, Intelligent Automation, and Digital Transformation. Over 200 expert speakers and 150 exhibitors offered insights into how organisations are using digital tools to solve real problems and make decisions, not just generate answers.  From talk to execution One recurring theme…

This story continues at The Next Web

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Echo chambers are generally bad. Any group making important decisions should have a certain level of diversity of thought to avoid groupthink. But I would argue that there are some stances that are so fundamental that it's good when everyone is on the same page about them. Vaccines, for instance. It would be just the best if everyone in the agencies that manage American health, all the way up to the top, believed in the power and benefit of vaccines. Sadly, that isn't the case.

RFK Jr. has fired many people for not agreeing with his stance that vaccines make people autistic, kill them, are bad because too many undesirables poison the gene pool, or whatever other crap he's spewing these days. He fired Susan Monarez after only weeks on the job, reportedly for not agreeing to rubber stamp changes to vaccine schedules he wanted to make. He fired literally everyone on the CDC's ACIP panel, the group that advises the CDC on those very same changes to vaccine schedules. There's probably been more, as well.

We'll have to see if NIH boss Jay Bhattacharya just started the countdown to his own termination, now that he has publicly broken with Kennedy on vaccines. In a Senate Committee hearing, Bhattacharya was grilled by Bernie Sanders.

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, 58, faced the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday. There, ranking member Bernie Sanders asked him point-blank, "Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?"

After trying to hedge and say he did not believe the measles vaccine causes autism, he finally admitted, "I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism."

Asked specifically about what his approach would be to the current measles outbreak in America, Bhattacharya was even more forceful.

Unlike his boss, Bhattacharya was vocally pro-vaccine during Tuesday's hearing. Discussing the measles outbreak in the United States, he said, "I am absolutely convinced that the measles epidemic that we are seeing currently is best solved by parents vaccinating their children for measles."

Reluctantly stated or not, those are sane comments that are completely at odds with Kennedy. Now, so there is no misunderstanding, Bhattacharya is still terrible. He made his name railing against COVID-19 policies and vaccine schedules. He's also engaged in some politically targeted attacks on elite universities when it comes to grant money and the like.

But on this, he's right. And that potentially puts his job at risk. RFK Jr. doesn't like dissenting opinions. He tends to avoid them through firings. On the other hand, I don't know if he can afford more chaos at HHS and its child agencies.

But when it comes to placing bets, betting against RFK Jr.'s ego is rarely a winner.

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Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation's Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week's round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• House Judiciary Releases EU X Fine Details (House Judiciary X Account)
• New Report Exposes European Commission Decade-Long Campaign to Censor American Speech (House Judiciary Committee)
• X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok (BBC)
• Hey Gavin Newsom! Investigating TikTok's Moderation Is Just As Unconstitutional As When Texas & Florida Tried It (Techdirt)
• Spain Aims to Ban Social Media for Children Under 16, Prime Minister Says (NY Times)
• TikTok Keyword Analysis (LinkedIn)
• Why newsrooms are taking comments seriously again (New_ Public)
• Whoops, Websites Realize That Killing Their Comment Sections Was A Mistake (Techdirt)

Play along with Ctrl-Alt-Speech's 2026 Bingo Card!

A new report from the National Audit Office (NAO) has found that delays and backlogs for the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) Access to Work scheme have more than doubled in the last four years.

Earlier this week, the DWP launched a call for evidence in relation to the Access to Work scheme. Ahead of the evidence session, the NAO have published a report on the scheme.

According to the NAO report:

The Access to Work scheme is intended to provide support for people's needs within the workplace over and above an employer's legal duty to make reasonable adjustments.

As the Canary previously reported:

Access to Work is, in theory, supposed to provide financial support to disabled people to help them get into and stay in work. The fund can be used towards specialist equipment, transport, and support workers. However, as the Canary has reported, the programme has, for a long time, been failing disabled people, and the department is quietly cutting it without any consultation and little transparency.

Of course, this means disabled people are struggling to get into work because of their accommodations can't be met.

Additionally, in November, we reported that:

The founder of an organisation that supports thousands of disabled people in navigating Access to Work has come forward about the underhanded process by which the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is making "drastic cuts" to the crumbling scheme.

Access to work came under fire recently after a disabled people's organisation came forward about the DWP making underhanded and "drastic" cuts to the scheme.

The DWP was attempting to limit funds for specialist equipment. It would also create stricter rules on support worker rates of pay and on awarding job aid support workers.

DWP — The numbers

In total, 74,200 people received help from Access to Work from 2024-25. This is a 97% increase from 37,700 in 2018-19. On 31 March 2025, 62,100 applications were awaiting a decision from the DWP, compared to only 21,700 on the same date in 2022. This figure has almost tripled in only three years.

Even more shocking is that outstanding payment requests more than quadrupled, from 6,900 to 31,700, over the same period.

The total number of Access to Work applications in 2024/25 was 157,000. This is more than double the number of applications (76,100) in 2018-19.

This means that only 47% of people who applied for access to work in 2024/25 actually received help.

The average time the DWP takes to process applications has also increased dramatically, from 66 working days in 2021-22 to 109 in 2024-25.

The report states:

While the scheme clearly has benefits, DWP recognises it does not know whether the scheme provides value for money.

The government is clearly attempting to push more disabled and chronically ill people into work. Meanwhile, it is failing to put the necessary measures in place to make sure that disabled people are actually able to work or keep their already existing jobs. Without these measures, disabled people will not be able to find or stay in safe, suitable, and rewarding work.

Featured image via National Audit Office

By HG

The end isn't nigh after all

Chrome's latest revision of its browser extension architecture, known as Manifest v3 (MV3), was widely expected to make content blocking and privacy extensions less effective than its predecessor, Manifest v2 (MV2).…

There's an 'intimate connection' between the workings of the US empire and the UK media. And they didn't just batter the left in the Jeremy Corbyn years. They also set us up with a cold, rotten dish of Keir Starmer, Peter Mandelson, and their ilk of soulless corporate stooges.

Filmmaker Victor Fraga made the film The Bad Patriots, which is now available on major streaming services. And to mark the occasion, he told us about how establishment propagandists got away with smearing prominent left-wingers Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn.

This is a film for everyone because, as Fraga asserted:

I'm not asking people to love Ken and Jeremy… It's not a film about their ideas. It's a film about misrepresentations.

He added:

We like to believe Britain is free, but it really isn't that free.

UK Media and legal collusion blocked the left

Having previously made a documentary about media enabling of countless coups in Brazil, Fraga followed up by looking at the same dynamic in the UK. Through his film about Loach and Corbyn, he said, a key focus was to show:

how the British media has consistently and promiscuously attempted to defame and degrade Ken and Jeremy, paint them as antisemitic, spineless, fruitcakes, too old, … not being patriotic enough

As an establishment mouthpiece, he stressed, the mainstream media played a "crucial role" in the propaganda war on the left that put the right back in charge of the Labour Party:

Keir Starmer would have never been elected without the support from the media. I mean, the Sun supported Keir Starmer and Tony Blair. That says a lot, doesn't it?

Imperialism and media bias, meanwhile, are "intimately connected". As he insisted:

You can talk about imperialism without talking about the media, but I don't think you can talk about the media without talking about imperialism. Obviously, the media attend to the interests of the few, not the many…

The objective of the media is not to inform people. It's to control people. And most mainstream media, virtually all of them, are owned by millionaires.

And the people the media smears target struggle to fight back because of how expensive it is in the UK, where the law favours obscenely wealthy actors over ordinary people. At the same time, the smears were so systemic in the case of Corbyn that it would have been almost impossible to challenge them legally. As Fraga asserted:

The legal costs are so high that even when you win, sometimes you lose…

So, yeah, the justice system is complicit.

And it's not just the legal system playing along. Because as the Canary has detailed previously, there is a whole infrastructure of repression against the left in the UK, including the political policing project that unjustifiably spied on hundreds of left-wing groups for decades.

This infrastructure isn't always obvious for everyone, because of the veneer of freedom and democracy that our establishment sells us. But there are times, like with the Peter Mandelson scandal (connecting into the whole anti-socialist offensive to put Keir Starmer in power), where the dark dealings of establishment politics and media come out into the light.

The interests behind the misrepresentations

The empire and its propagandists want to sell an upside-down view of the world — as we've seen during the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and the repression surrounding it. As Fraga stressed:

In the same way Keir Starmer purports to be left-wing (someone who supports foreign invasions, who's deeply xenophobic, and who shudders at the thought of anything vaguely socialist), Jeremy is painted as an extremist for wanting to nationalise rail and for policies which are widely implemented in France and Scandinavia. They paint a pacifist such as Jeremy Corbyn as an extremist, and a warmonger like Tony Blair as moderate. That's pretty sick.

Corbyn was certainly a concern for the US empire and its junior partner in the UK. Ex-CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo admitted as much when he promised to "push back" to undermine Corbyn's chances of winning the 2019 election. Figures in the British army and secret services also briefed against him.

And whether or not there was direct coordination, the establishment media was absolutely singing from the empire's hymn sheet. It played a key role in smearing Corbyn and ensuring his loss in the 2019 election. And even the biggest supposedly left-wing paper, the Guardian, was in on it. As Corbyn later told Declassified:

I do not trust the Guardian… it's a tool of the British establishment.

Prominent filmmaker Loach also represented a concern for the powers that be due to his longstanding critique of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and state repression. And he has faced significant attempts to censor and silence his work as a result.

As Fraga summarised, the whole country should be aware that the media's behaviour is "not an accident":

On many occasions, they do know they're lying blatantly. They do know what they're doing.

And that intentional behaviour serves the interests of the rich and powerful, undermining what limited democracy exists in the UK even further.

This matters to absolutely everyone in the country, and Fraga hopes The Bad Patriots can help to 'burst the bubble' and get people talking about the media's actions more. So invite friends, family members, and anyone you can to watch the film. Because only by facing this issue head on can we stand a chance of changing things.

Featured image via Journeyman Pictures

By Ed Sykes

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The Leicestershire Police and Crimes Commissioner and proud Reform UK supporter Rupert Matthews needs a hard drive check it seems. On January 4 he sparked fury when he changed his profile picture on Twitter to 'Amelia', an AI-generated CHILD used by extremists to promote hate.

Reform UK's PCC @Rupert_Matthews has set his profile picture to a still of the deeply racist AI video that was doing the rounds recently.

'She' uses the terms "paki wankers" and states that the Church and BBC are a bunch of "queers and nonces" and makes a strange remark about… pic.twitter.com/dR7UV2eulH

— Reform Party UK Exposed

It wasn't fear of illness that kept Palestinian prisoners away from prison clinics. It was fear of the "treatment" itself.

This is how released prisoner Ahmed Shaqoura describes the year and a half he spent in Israeli occupation prisons. According to his testimony, the medical clinic became another site of torture and humiliation, not healing.

In a testimony published on his personal account, Shaqoura recounts a journey that began with his arrest and transfer to the Jalameh military interrogation centre. There, he says, torture was immediate. He describes severe beatings, insults, and deliberate humiliation. His hands were bound with plastic zip ties tightened so harshly that his skin tore and his palms swelled.

The resulting medical neglect, he says, nearly led to the amputation of his hand. The injury still affects him today, both physically and psychologically.

Palestinian prisoners' road to the clinic: torture in itself

Shaqoura describes his first transfer to the clinic as an act of humiliation in itself. Handcuffed and shackled, he was forced to walk on his knees.

Every minute on that journey, he says, felt longer than a lifetime. The pain was not only physical, but a deliberate crushing of dignity.

When he arrived, there was no doctor in the usual sense. He recalls:

It was a torturer in a white coat

The man pressed violently on the wound, hurled insults, wrapped it hastily, and coldly told him to leave. This was not treatment, but a message: the pain was intentional.

Even when an interrogator noticed the swelling and ordered medical attention, nothing changed. Complaints were pointless. Shaqoura says:

They are eloquent in their words, but ineffective in their actions

Ofer Prison: medicine as oppression

After his transfer to Ofer Prison, conditions worsened.

During his first visit to the doctor there, one of his teeth broke. At the doctor's request, a guard climbed onto Shaqoura's back. The weight pinned him to the ground. The doctor then attempted to strike his eyes with an iron ruler, hitting his forehead instead.

According to Shaqoura, this was not an isolated incident.

He recounts the case of another prisoner suffering from haemorrhoids who repeatedly begged for care. When finally taken to the clinic, the man was beaten and dragged back bleeding.

Guards mocked him as they pulled him along the ground, saying: "This is how we treated you."

Paracetamol — and silence

In another incident, many prisoners developed painful boils. Shaqoura was among them.

His hand swelled to seven times its normal size. The pain was unbearable. Nights passed with cries for help unanswered.

There was no doctor, no response, and no concern. He says:

The only treatment was paracetamol — and a lot of silence.

He also describes other doctors who openly beat prisoners, treating them not as patients, but as targets for violence.

An unforgettable scene

One of the most harrowing moments in Shaqoura's testimony occurred after a prisoner was killed by guards in a nearby section.

At dawn, the body was brought in and placed in a black bag in front of the cells. The corridor echoed with laughter and mockery. Shaqoura said:

The guards joked "Tie him up tight, so he doesn't run away." At that moment, I felt even the night was ashamed of us.

Why Palestinian prisoners fear the clinic

Shaqoura ends his testimony with a clear answer. Prisoners do not refuse treatment. They fear the clinic because it is not a place of healing.

In the reality of occupation prisons, the clinic is an extension of the system of oppression. A space meant to protect life becomes another station of suffering, where pain is policy and humiliation is routine.

This is not an isolated account. It reflects the lived reality of thousands of prisoners, where human values are stripped of meaning and even medical care becomes a weapon.

Featured image via author

By Alaa Shamali

Democratic leaders in Congress requested Department of Homeland Security reforms on Wednesday that would leave the agency's budget untouched — and were immediately rebuffed by the GOP.

The requests, in a joint letter from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, do not attempt to claw back funding for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the two agencies at the heart of the political firestorm over their violent deployments to American cities.

Instead of cutting funding, Democrats focused on measures such as prohibiting ICE agents from wearing masks or entering homes without a warrant. Sen. Brian Schatz, D- Hawaii, the Democratic deputy whip, on Wednesday described the requests as "reasonable reforms that are 70-30 propositions with the public."

"The urgency of the moment is about stopping the violence."

That did not win them any points with congressional Republicans, who dismissed the reforms out of hand.

Progressives in the Senate, meanwhile, had not only become more strident in their rhetoric about ICE, they also called for clawing back increased ICE spending passed as part of President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill. Though some of these Democrats are sticking by their more robust demands, they nonetheless avoided criticizing their party leadership over the request for more limited reforms.

"The urgency of the moment is about stopping the violence," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told The Intercept. "If it were up to me, we would be rewriting the whole immigration laws and policies. But right now, we've got to get some constraints in place so that roving bands of ICE agents stop terrorizing American communities. That is our first priority."

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the ranking member on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, took a similar line, setting aside his stronger demands of ICE.

"I have a much longer list of things that I want to change in the Department of Homeland Security," he said, "but we are trying to put a targeted list of reforms that will end the abuse on the table so that we can get something done."

10 Demands

Schumer and Jeffries's demand list has significant overlap with previous calls from progressive members of Congress such as Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The progressives made their demands soon after the January 24 killing of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which derailed a full-year funding bill for DHS and led to a brief shutdown of several government departments. The House voted to end the shutdown Tuesday by approving full-year appropriations for other departments while temporarily funding DHS through a new February 13 deadline.

The Democratic leaders unveiled their official list of demands ahead of the deadline on Wednesday, calling for ending indiscriminate arrests, prohibiting masking, requiring ICE and CBP officer identification, protecting sensitive locations such as churches and schools, halting racial profiling, upholding use of force standards, preserving the ability of states and cities to prosecute DHS misconduct, and requiring the use of body cameras when interacting with the public. (Schumer and Jeffries immediately began watering down one of their clearest demands, suggesting in public comments that they might allow agents to wear masks in some circumstances.)

The biggest split between what Schumer and Jeffries proposed and what more progressive Democrats requested was a reduction of spending on ICE and CBP.

Those agencies received $75 billion and $64 billion, respectively, in last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act to be spent through 2029. That money came on top of the amounts already available to the agencies through their annual appropriations.

Related It's Time for Concrete Action on ICE. Sadly, We Have the Democrats.

Clawing that money back has been a top priority for advocates, who note that it has been used to supercharge hiring and spending on surveillance technology.

"These demands MUST include cuts in funding," Heidi Altman, the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said in an email last week. "The money pays for the violence. It has to stop."

Last month, Sanders proposed an amendment to the DHS appropriations bill that would have redirected the additional ICE funding to Medicaid, which he estimated would prevent 700,000 Americans from losing their health care.

Sanders's amendment drew the support of every Senate Democrat and two Republicans, but it failed on a 49-51 vote.

"Passing new laws is no assurance to me whatsoever that they are not going to continue this lawlessness."

In negotiations with the White House, Schumer is likely to be able to offer the potential support of only a fraction of his caucus for a full-year appropriations bill for DHS.

Some Democrats in Congress have already ruled out the idea that they will vote for any more funding.

"When you have a reckless and out of control agency that is unwilling to follow the law, passing new laws is no assurance to me whatsoever that they are not going to continue this lawlessness," Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told The Intercept.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., have shown no willingness to negotiate on key Democratic requests, Booker said.

"There's a lot of things I know my caucus would support, but clearly the speaker and the leader are not even interested in having those kinds of conversations," he said, "even though most of their base thinks what's happening with this agency is unacceptable."

DOA With GOP

Democratic leadership figures like Schatz have described the latest demands as an attempt at reaching consensus.

"They are not a Democratic wish list. We are simply asking that ICE not be held to a different standard than every other law enforcement organization in the country — state, county, and federal," he told reporters Wednesday.

The requests fell with a thud with Republican leaders, however. Johnson has already ruled out banning masks and requiring warrants.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., the lead GOP negotiator, called the demands "a ridiculous Christmas list of demands for the press."

Republicans have already floated the idea of another short-term extension of DHS funding to allow further negotiations.

The post Senate Dems Who Pushed Meatier ICE Reform Shy Away From Criticizing Schumer's Softer Package appeared first on The Intercept.