Drones are no longer just niche toys for enthusiasts. Today's models are compact, increasingly affordable and capable of capturing sharp aerial photos and video with minimal effort. Whether you're curious about flying for the first time or looking to upgrade to a more advanced camera drone, the options available in 2026 are broader and more approachable than ever.

Entry-level drones now offer features like GPS-assisted flight, return-to-home safety systems and automated shooting modes that take much of the stress out of learning to fly. Step up to more advanced models and you'll find foldable designs that travel easily, longer flight times and stabilized 4K video that holds up well beyond social media clips.

We've tested a range of drones to identify the best options across different skill levels and budgets. Whether your priority is learning the basics, capturing polished aerial footage or packing light for travel, these picks highlight the drones that offer the best balance of performance, reliability and ease of use.

Best drones for 2026

What to look for in a drone Camera features

For this guide, we're looking only at drones that are basically flying cameras, so you want the best video and photo features possible. Bigger devices like DJI's Mavic 3 Pro or Air 3S carry relatively large sensors, offering superior camera quality for nighttime cityscapes or other low-light scenes. Smaller models like the Mini 4 Pro and HoverAir X1 Max use smaller camera sensors, so they aren't as good in dim light.

Field of view and minimum aperture are also important, with most drones typically having a wide-angle focal length, though a few others like the HoverAir X1 Max carry an ultrawide lens. Some models have multiple cameras including a wide and a zoom. As for aperture, lower numbers are better and allow for shooting in dim light. Most DJI models are solid in this regard, while the HoverAir models don't perform as well.

Video resolution and slow-mo are also essential camera capabilities. Most drones these days can shoot at 4K with a frame rate of at least 30 fps, though some offer 6K or even 8K at up to 30 fps. Higher-end models can shoot 4K at up to 120 fps, allowing you to slow down the action dramatically to create a cinematic look.

Other noteworthy features include log or HDR video that supports higher dynamic range, particularly in bright and sunny conditions. Finally, the camera's gimbal and stabilization are important factors to keep your footage looking as smooth as possible. Some drones have gimbals that can rotate the camera 90 degrees to give social media creators the maximum resolution for vertical formats.

Drone features: Speed, range, safety, battery life and obstacle detection

By and large, there are two types of camera drones to consider. The first are standard drones (usually with open propellers but not always) designed to fly outside and take scenic shots. Often there's nothing to stop the props from striking skin or objects, so they can't really be used indoors or around people. Some models like the DJI Neo and Flip have prop guards that better protect bystanders and property, as well as the drone itself.

Then there's first-person-view (FPV) camera drones, which often have propeller guards and are meant to be used both indoors or outside to capture exciting footage. Standard models don't need to go particularly fast as they're mainly used to shoot fun videos for social media, but FPV drones need to move at high speeds to create excitement. Because of that speed, they're also better in breezy conditions thanks to stronger wind resistance, and they can fight gusts and return home more quickly. Acrobatic abilities (often promoted by the manufacturer in ads or packaging) are also important for FPV drones, as it allows the user to perform tricks and zip around obstacles.

Battery life is another important factor. The best drones boast a battery endurance of up to 45 minutes, while FPV drones like the Avata 2 can only fly for about half that time as they tend to be heavier and carry smaller batteries to reduce weight. As a general rule, a single battery isn't enough for any serious shooting so you'd do well to buy your drone in a kit with a few batteries and a charger.

As for range, DJI tends to dominate in this area, with its latest models able to maintain a video signal at a distance up to 20km (12.4 miles). HoverAir's models are weaker with the top-end X1 Max model limited to just 1km (0.6 miles) when using the optional beacon system. DJI also offers multiple ways to control its drones including headsets, joystick-type controllers, motion detection controllers and smartphones.

The best drones have sensors to detect obstacles in all directions. Others are limited to only avoiding obstructions coming at them from the front and some only rely on the main camera to prevent crashes. Finally, if you want to have your drone follow you around automatically, you'll need it to be able to track you around when you're vlogging, riding a bike or skiing, while also avoiding obstacles. Smooth takeoff and return-to-home features are especially valuable here for both beginners and experienced drone pilots as well.

Best drone FAQs What are the rules for owning a drone?

Anyone can buy any drone, but once purchased, all drones between 250g and 25 kg must be registered with the FAA and marked with the FAA registration number. Recreational pilots with drones over 249g must pass the recreational UAS safety "TRUST" exam and carry proof of TRUST completion when flying a drone. Commercial pilots must obtain a Remote Pilot Certificate from the FAA. You must be aware of and avoid any areas with airspace restrictions, particularly around airports.

Are drones safe to fly in the city?

In general, it is not legal to fly a drone within city limits over populations, as a crash from a high altitude could injure or kill someone. However, they can be flown over adjacent, non-populated areas in many cases. Here is a guide to where: https://uavcoach.com/where-to-fly-drone/

What is the average flight time of a drone?

Most drones can fly for around 20-30 minutes, though some advanced models like DJI's Mavic 4 can fly up to 40 minutes or more.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cameras/best-drone-120046775.html?src=rss

Consumer group Which? brought the case and now plans to bail after court indicated it would lose

The UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal has indicated that it will find Qualcomm did not abuse its market power, leading consumer advocacy group Which? to withdraw a case it hoped would see Brits compensated for increased smartphone prices.…

Sees little enterprise AI adoption other than coding assistants, buys Koi for what comes next

If enterprises are implementing AI, they're not showing it to Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, who on Tuesday said business adoption of the tech lags consumer take-up by at least a couple of years - except for coding assistants.…

The current measles shitstorm in South Carolina has been burning for several months now, dating all the way back to October of 2025. What started with a bunch of counties that were undervaccinated for measles began spiraling out of control at the start of 2026. The federal tracker for measles cases is at best woefully out of date, or purposefully obfuscating the true degree of the problem at worst. That public tracker, which is updated every Friday, claims a current nationwide count of confirmed measles cases at 910. The current measles count in South Carolina alone, for this year, is 933. Once again we have a federal government program run by RFK Jr. that is behind, unprepared, and impotent.

In the absence of federal leadership, the states will attempt to take action on their own. And sometimes those actions will result in federal pushback from the very same people who are causing the problem through inaction in the first place. I have no doubt that will be the case with a South Carolina state senator's attempt at a bill to remove the religious exemptions for vaccinations for public schools in the state.

The context here is that South Carolina has one of the most wide open programs for obtaining a religious exemption for a childhood vaccine in the country. I think only Florida might be considered more wide open, given that state has mostly removed all vaccination requirements for public schooling. In South Carolina, you essentially just have to whisper the word "religion" and you're exempt.

But that wont' be the case if Senator Margie Mathews gets her way.

Senator Margie Bright Matthews (D-Dist. 45) has introduced a bill that would eliminate religious exemptions for measles vaccinations for students in public K-12 schools and childcare settings. It's a move that's drawing both support and criticism across the state.

Matthews said the rising measles cases prompted her to step in with the proposed legislation in an effort to bolster public health and keep communities safe.

"The goal of the bill is simply to protect children and stop the spread of measles in South Carolina," Matthews said.

Yes, of course it is. And the pushback that has already begun within the state is absurd. I know enough about religion, as well as religious demographics, to know with absolute certainty that the number of "religious exemptions" in South Carolina doesn't remotely comport with the number of religious adherents to any religion that has anything to say about vaccinations. South Carolina is largely Protestant and Catholic, for instance. While Protestants have traditionally been in the vaccine hesitant camp, I have never heard a serious biblical argument made for that stance. Were one to even exist, I'm confident most of the people applying for exemptions couldn't make it.

Instead, these people are vaccine hesitant for entirely non-religious reasons. And that, I will say, is their right. But this legislation suggests that nobody's right to their religion includes the right to put the rest of their community in danger.

Senator Matthews stressed that the goal of the bill is to increase vaccination rates and limit the spread of measles.

"I plan on reminding them every time we have new cases in South Carolina, I plan on writing and requesting that my bill receive a hearing before the committee, so that we can have the influencers from South Carolina that are against this bill and that are for this bill, I would like to have public hearing in reference to it," she said.

Despite my strict adherence to being non-religious, I am, in fact, sensitive to ensuring that we maintain the secular rights of those who don't agree with me. It's that secularism that has allowed the flourishing of both free speech and thought in this country as well as, perhaps ironically, of religion itself. All of that is just aces as far as I'm concerned.

But just like someone's freedom of movement ends the moment their fist makes contact with my face, so too does the rights of religious freedom end at the point where it puts everyone else's children in danger.

YouTube is experiencing an outage across the United States, with users in other countries like Canada, India, the Philippines, Australia and Russia also having problems with accessing the website. The issue seems to have started at around 8PM Eastern time and reached 326,000 reports on Downdetector before starting to taper down. More users reported having issues accessing the app, but I personally lost access to the web homepage first. As of 9:22PM, users are still reporting being unable to access YouTube on Reddit.

Update, February 17, 2026, 9:26 PM ET: Updated to correct time of outage, added new countries where it's out and new reports of YouTube still being inaccessible.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/youtube-is-down-for-thousands-of-users-in-the-us-020718165.html?src=rss

PM Modi tells citizens AI will lift them up, not take their jobs

Giant Indian industrial conglomerate Adani has said it will spend up to $100 billion on AI datacenters to equip the nation with sovereign infrastructure, but will do so at slower pace than Big Tech tech companies plan to bring their own bit barns to Bharat.…

Version 4.6 can also be 'warm, honest, prosocial, and at times funny'

Anthropic has updated its Sonnet model to version 4.6 and claims the upgrade is better at coding and using computers, and also possesses improved reasoning and planning capabilities.…

After trying desperately to dodge scrutiny of the involvement she and her husband had with child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, Hillary Clinton is now adopting a different approach. Speaking to the BBC, she told US president Donald Trump to "get the files out", accusing him of a cover-up.

Her shift in tack comes ahead of the Clintons testifying before a congressional committee to give evidence about their association with Epstein. The pair had previously fought vigorously to avoid interrogation. Chairman of the Oversight Committee, Republican James Comer threatened the pair with contempt of Congress proceedings if they continued their refusal. This appears to have backed the two into a corner, and they will now appear before Congress in late February.

The BBC point out:

It will be the first time a former US president has testified to a congressional panel since Gerald Ford did so in 1983.

Clinton is now saying the pair have nothing to hide, declaring:

We don't. We have been willing to say whatever we know. We've even done it under oath, but they want us to testify, not everyone else who's mentioned many many times, hundreds of thousands of times in these files. So we've said "fine let us do it in public and we will appear in public and we'll answer all your questions…"

Clintons can't hide close ties to Epstein

When asked if she regretted links to the paedophile and eugenicist Epstein, Clinton conveniently answered the question in a different tense to the one in which she was asked:

You know, we have no links. We have a very clear record that we've been willing to talk about which my husband has said he took some rides on the aeroplane for his charitable work. I don't recall ever meeting him.

Well, obviously you have no links now, given Epstein is either dead or perhaps spirited away to so-called 'Israel'. Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell is still locked up serving a 20 year sentence for her role in assisting mass sexual abuse of children.

However, prior links were extensive. The few "rides on the aeroplane" Clinton refers to are the at least 17 times her husband Bill flew on the revoltingly titled 'Lolita Express' jet owned by Epstein. The former president appears in numerous photos present in the recent US Department of Justice document release. These show him with young girls, including one seated on his lap.

The Clinton Global Initiative honoured Maxwell in 2013 with an award for advocating ocean conservation. This was years after she had been linked to Epstein's crimes. He was convicted in 2008 for procuring a child for prostitution. Underscoring the closeness the Clintons had to Maxwell, they invited her to their daughter Chelsea's wedding in 2010.

Former president's history of abuse

Of course, Bill Clinton has a documented history of both dishonesty and abusive behaviour towards women. While their relationship was consensual, Monica Lewinsky has described his treatment of her as a "gross abuse of power" that left her contemplating suicide. Lewinsky was 22 years old and Clinton 49 when the White House intern and then-US president had "sexual relations". The latter phrase was used when Clinton repeatedly lied about the affair, so there's no reason to trust his word when it comes to his involvement with Epstein.

Bill Clinton has also been sued for sexual harassment by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, and accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick. Broaddrick said Clinton assaulted her in a hotel room in 1978.

Of course, we don't need court cases or congressional committees to tell us that the Clintons have been cruel and violent people. We need only look at their policies. During his presidency, Bill Clinton maintained the sanctions against Iraq that caused infant mortality to skyrocket, potentially killing 500,000 children.

He was crucial in accelerating the neoliberal order at home, with punitive welfare policies having devastating effects on women and children. Clinton's deregulation accelerated the financialisation of the economy that benefited Epstein and other money manipulators.

Hillary is a constant warmonger who has defended 'Israel' throughout its genocide in Gaza. During her time as secretary of state, she helped oversee the bloodbath in Libya which has devastated that country. She was filmed psychopathically cackling after the death of Muammar Gaddafi. Disgracefully she retains prestigious positions, including her role as chancellor of Queen's University Belfast.

Clintons helped make today's billionaire-dominated world

The pair have helped usher in a more unpleasant world, and contributed to an era of unprecedented billionaire wealth. It is that wealth that gives predators like Epstein the power to abuse with impunity, and creates the conditions of poverty in which desperate people can be preyed upon.

Whatever the precise involvement the Clintons had with Epstein, they remain, at minimum, culpable for engineering the climate in which he and his ilk could flourish.

Featured image via the Canary

By Robert Freeman

Anyone who's been paying even a little bit of attention to tech news lately could have made a reasonable guess that AI will be a big topic at Samsung's Unpacked next week. Ahead of the event, Samsung teased some of what's to come for AI in terms of the Galaxy S26 smartphone lineup's photography tools. 

The S26 phones will feature a new camera system using Galaxy AI that combines capturing, editing and sharing of photos and videos. "Users will be able to turn a photo from day to night in seconds, restore missing parts of objects in images, capture detailed photos in low light, and seamlessly merge multiple photos into a single, cohesive result," a company rep said. The video clips Samsung shared demonstrated the before and after results of using its AI tools, which will all be housed in a single app rather than needing to switch between multiple image editing programs.

Updated cameras are just part of what will be on the schedule for Samsung's big mobile showcase. The expected Galaxy S26, Galaxy S26+ and Galaxy S26 Ultra will likely have a lot of AI-centric features.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/samsung-teases-mobile-ai-photography-tools-ahead-of-unpacked-233000358.html?src=rss

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping.

These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity and a federal depository library, has been building its archive of the world wide web since 1996. Today, the Wayback Machine provides access to thirty years' worth of web history and culture. It has become an essential resource for journalists, researchers, courts, and the public. 

For three decades the Wayback Machine has peacefully coexisted with the development of the web, including the websites mentioned in the article. Our mission is simple: to preserve knowledge and make it accessible for research, accountability, and historical understanding. 

As tech policy writer Mike Masnick recently warned, blocking preservation efforts risks a profound unintended consequence: "significant chunks of our journalistic record and historical cultural context simply… disappear." He notes that when trusted publications are absent from archives, we risk creating a historical record biased against quality journalism.

There is no question that generative AI has changed the landscape of the world wide web. But it is important to be clear about what the Wayback Machine is, and what it is not.

The Wayback Machine is built for human readers. We use rate limiting, filtering, and monitoring to prevent abusive access, and we watch for and actively respond to new scraping patterns as they emerge.

We acknowledge that systems can always be improved. We are actively working with publishers on technical solutions to strengthen our systems and address legitimate concerns without erasing the historical record.

What concerns me most is the unintended consequence of these blocks. When libraries are blocked from archiving the web, the public loses access to history. Journalists lose tools for accountability. Researchers lose evidence. The web becomes more fragile and more fragmented, and history becomes easier to rewrite.

Generative AI presents real challenges in today's information ecosystem. But preserving the time-honored role of libraries and archives in society has never been more important. We've worked alongside news organizations for decades. Let's continue working together in service of an open, referenceable, and enduring web.

Mark Graham is the Director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive

Full scale of infections remains 'unknown'

China-linked attackers exploited a maximum-severity hardcoded-credential bug in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines as a zero-day since at least mid-2024. It's all part of a long-running effort to backdoor infected machines for long-term access, according to Dell and Google's Mandiant incident response team.…

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani faces a further test of his resolve and principles after the city's police department (NYPD) disclosed that it spies on the city's residents' online.

NYPD fesses up

On 4 February 2026, the NYPD finally admitted that it uses 'sockpuppet' fake accounts - technically 'managed attribution' infrastructure — to covertly monitor New Yorkers' online activity.

Or, as the department dressed it up, to:

allow its personnel to safely, securely and covertly conduct investigations and detect possible criminal activity on the internet.

Mamdani's resolve

As a former state assembly member, Mamdani had supported proposed legislation to outlaw such tactics — the "Stop Fakes Act". The legislation never passed. Now his supporters and opponents alike are waiting to see whether he is willing to face down the police. Will he use his power as mayor to halt these underhand practices.

The test comes after Mamdani chose to endorse Kathy Hochul — "one of the most pro-Israel governors in the country" — as the Democratic party's candidate for the position.

Hochul, a right-winger who allocated massive police funding to attacks on university anti-genocide campuses, also sabotaged a nurses' strike by making it easier for hospitals to hire scab labour.

After a positive start to his tenure, the endorsement led to accusations from appalled left-wingers that Mamdani was betraying the socialist, anti-genocide positions that formed the centre of his mayoral election campaign.

If he now chooses not to confront the city's police, his credibility is likely to collapse.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

In July 2023, Richard Hermer KC, a "close confidante" of Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, proudly declared that he had "dear family members" serving in the Israeli military. One year later, he was appointed Attorney General for England and Wales, the "chief legal adviser to the Crown". But incredibly, he is not the only senior British political figure with relatives in the IDF.

Labour officials and the IDF

Last week, John McEvoy and Alex Morris reported on a Freedom of Information request which revealed that over 50,000 foreign fighters have served in the Israeli military during the Gaza genocide. Britain ranked sixth on the list, with more than 2,000 British dual and multinational citizens confirmed to have participated.

In April 2024, Conservative peer Lord Ahmad defended the "right" of such citizens to enlist in the Israeli military on the basis that occupied Palestinian territories were not recognised as an independent entity by the British government, and that the genocide in Gaza would therefore be classified as "a foreign government's forces… engaged in a civil war or combating terrorism or internal uprisings".

However, since Britain officially recognised the State of Palestine in September, it would seem that the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870, which explicitly prohibited "engagement in the military or naval service of any foreign state at war with any foreign state at peace with Her Majesty", must now apply; something that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, with her responsibility for "protecting our borders", will surely take a keen interest in!

Shabana Mahmood has gone to great lengths to mirror the anti-migrant rhetoric of Reform UK in recent months, declaring that Britain has "become the destination of choice in Europe, clearly visible to every people smuggler and would-be illegal migrant across the world.", and rehashing popular tropes of a "golden ticket asylum system" and "illegal migration tearing the UK apart".

On the subject of returning IDF militants, however, she has been silent. We do not know the names or ages of the list of 2,000+, or whether or not they intend to or already have returned to the UK. Even more shockingly, my research suggests that the list could include associates and/or relatives of Labour government ministers.

Richard Hermer

In 2023, when Conservative Party MPs accused Richard Hermer, then advising the Labour Party on a BDS Bill being brought before Parliament, of taking "political positions" on the question of Palestine, Hermer was quick to burnish his Zionist credentials, reassuring Michael Gove and co. that he was not "influenced by some form of malign intent towards Israel".

As proof of this, Hermer pointed towards growing up in "a 'Blue-Box' Jewish family", a reference to blue collection boxes that were commonly used to raise money for the Jewish National Fund, the largest builder of illegal settlements in occupied Palestine.

The JNF's UK branch states on its official website: "every Zionist home has a Blue Box." Coincidentally, the UK branch counts well-known war criminals Tony Blair and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Britain's Chief Rabbi Ephraim Marvis, amongst its "honorary patrons".

Between 2015-18, JNF UK remains a registered British charity, funnelled £1 million to HaShomer HaChadash (HH), an Israeli militia that operates in the occupied West Bank. Despite this, the Charity Commission refused to take action, saying that "there was no evidence to support the allegations that the charity acted outside of its objects."

The JNF specifies that only Jewish parties can buy or lease its land. Palestinians, even if they hold Israeli citizenship, are explicitly excluded on the basis of their ethnicity. In response to a 2004 legal challenge, the "charity" said: "The loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated. The JNF…does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state."

The IDF

Hermer also emphasised (as a way of defending his impartiality, no less!): "I have dear family members currently serving in the IDF." Even when he followed this with a caveat about opposing the "unlawful" occupation of the West Bank, Hermer's reasoning was that it was "deeply damaging to the interests of Israel."

This is the same IDF decapitating children and babies in Gaza. The same IDF who put on Palestinian women's dresses after destroying their homes and dance for TikTok videos. The same IDF that included over 2,000 British citizens as they committed a genocide.

Were Hermer's "dear family members" amongst them? Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, apparently so keen to clamp down on dangerous criminals entering the UK, seemingly doesn't know and/or doesn't care.

Labour's Attorney General added: "I actively support a range of… Israeli organisations." Hermer mentioned previously serving as an officer for the Union of Jewish Students (UJS).

Speaking to an undercover journalist, a former UJS activist named Adam Schapira confirmed that the group receives funding from the Israeli embassy in London and the powerful American lobby group AIPAC. Yair Zivan, a campaigns officer for UJS, later became a press officer for the Israeli military and adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister.

"Love being in Israel"

At the Jewish Labour Movement's annual conference in January 2025, Hermer said that he wished to see a world where you can "love being in Israel", and lamented that "somehow you have to pick one-side or the other." He revealed that he had visited the Israeli state in his youth, and as a member of Starmer's government "on more occasions than he could count".

Hermer and Starmer served in the same law chambers, and he donated to Starmer's 2020 Labour leadership campaign.

After leaving Doughty Street, Hermer worked alongside current Labour MP and former vice-chair of the Jewish Labour Movement Sarah Sackman at Matrix Chambers. As Hermer was made Attorney General, Sackman was appointed Solicitor General. Since 2024, Sackman has received tens of thousands of pounds from lobbyists Jonathan Mendelsohn, Stephen Grabiner, Michael Sternberg, Jonathan Kestenbaum and Trevor Chinn.

Sackman was also funded by Labour Together. Kestenbaum just happens to sit on the board of Labour Together, and Chinn was a major funder and co-director of the think tank in the "McSweeney era", but we can rest assured that these are further minor details Starmer knows nothing about.

Another former director of Labour Together is current Labour MP and cabinet member Josh Simons.

The Labour Together scandal

During his spell at the "think tank", Simons hired private investigators to gather information on journalists researching the corruption of Morgan McSweeney, who had used Labour Together as a private vehicle for toppling Jeremy Corbyn and propelling Keir Starmer into power.

Kate Forrester, the wife of Keir Starmer's then head of communications Paul Ovenden, ran APCO's London office when it was hired by Labour Together, and she has since confirmed that she knew about the investigation, codenamed "Operation Cannon".

One year later, the "public relations firm" hired a new member of staff, Mark Simpson. Simpson just happened to be a former adviser to Keir Starmer. Josh Simons has branded the claims that he spied on journalists "nonsense", but the contract between Labour Together and APCO tells a different story.

The contract instructed APCO to "provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up…in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together." Josh Simons ordered the investigation. Morgan McSweeney was aware of the investigation. Is it even remotely conceivable that once again, just like with Epstein-informant Peter Mandelson, Starmer "didn't know"?

At university, Simons called himself a "Marxist" and told a friend that the Israeli state "should not have been founded". Now, he's a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Israel. Simons has mentioned having "friends and family in Israel", a state with compulsory military service, and in a parliamentary debate with Conservative MP Kit Malthouse last June asserted his "right to claim citizenship in Israel".

Two months later, Simons and Sackman were amongst a group of "Labour Friends of Israel-affiliated MPs" who confronted National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell in a "testy and emotionally charged conversation" regarding the government's decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

Israel has infiltrated the entire system

In an October 2023 LBC interview with Sangita Myska, Richard Hermer KC emphasised the Israeli state's "right to self-defence" in Gaza. In fact, occupying powers have no such right within territories they occupy, as confirmed in Article 51 of the UN Charter and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Myska was fired by LBC after a heated exchange with Israeli government spokesperson Avi Hyman in April 2024. LBC instead hired Vanessa Feltz, who has also declared that she has "very close family members, lots of them", living in occupied Palestine. Myska later revealed that a LBC producer once told her: "there's no such thing as Palestine." LBC is owned by Global Media, which is chaired by Labour peer Charles Allen.

Hermer is not the only current Labour figure with links to the Israeli military. Labour MP Damian Egan's partner Yossi Felberbaum is a former Israeli spy recruiter from "Unit 8200". Are his relatives on the list of 2,000+? Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood apparently doesn't know, and doesn't care.

Hermer is not even the first British Attorney General to have relatives fighting with the Israeli army. Suella Braverman, who Boris Johnson appointed Attorney General once in February 2020 and then again in September 2021, also claimed to have "close family members who serve in the IDF". Are her relatives on the list of 2000+? Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood apparently doesn't know, and doesn't care.

Featured image via the Canary

By Jody McIntyre

On 12 February, a joint platform of 10 Central Trade Unions (CTUs) in India organised a nationwide strike to protest the Modi government's anti-labour, pro-corporatisation, and pro-USA policies. Those organising the general strike include the Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), the All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), and the Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS).

Industrial shutdown

There were disruptions across key sectors such as coal, banking, transport, and agriculture. The workers heeding their calls of the CTUs shut down thousands of coal fields, refineries, factories, and banking operations countrywide, the People's Dispatch reported.

This came as a huge blow for Modi's profit-driven economy.

And despite the scale of the protest, Western media has kept its distance.

Meanwhile, Claudia Webbe, a former UK Labour MP and ally of Jeremy Corbyn, is breaking the silence:

300 million workers just shut down India.

The largest strike in human history, and most of the Western media barely whispered it. That silence is complicity in Modi's war on workers' rights.

India's general strike is the future that the billionaires and ruling class fears most pic.twitter.com/5vh5eRrVfR

— Claudia Webbe (@ClaudiaWebbe) February 13, 2026

Reclaiming India's sovereignty

Claudia Webbe shared a post featuring Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who had this to say:

It seems Modi has adopted Trump's 'Make America Great Again' slogan for himself. Instead of 'Make India,' we have 'Make America Great Again'—that is what has come through in the Indo-US deal. It is shocking, and this strike action is timely. Workers and peasants are not fighting for their own interests alone. They are fighting for the interest of India. They are fighting for the sovereignty of India.

Local coverage by Wire Hindi shone the spotlight on protests in Delhi's Jantar Mantar, where workers rallied against the Modi government's controversial labour laws, introduced in 2025, for eroding their rights.

दिल्ली के जंतर-मंतर पर गुरुवार को मोदी सरकार द्वारा हाल ही में लाए गए चार लेबर कोड के ख़िलाफ़ ज़ोरदार प्रदर्शन देखने को मिला. 1/2https://t.co/xiMbtAUa0Q pic.twitter.com/arhmpzq5FB

— The Wire हिंदी (@thewirehindi) February 13, 2026

A "historic success"

The All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) posted several pictures and updates throughout the day, declaring the strike a "historic success."

AIKS, among other groups, have not held back in their criticism against Modi's government. They censured the government for crushing workers rights, bowing to US corporations, and threatening India's secular fabric.

#12thFebruaryGeneralStrike a Historic Success

The All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) congratulates crores of Indian workers, agricultural workers and toiling peasantry for making the 12th February 2026 General Strike a historic success. The anger of working people against the (1/n) pic.twitter.com/jfItzhDVeg

— AIKS (@KisanSabha) February 12, 2026

According to Maktoob Media, the strike was met heavy handedly after Modi sent in his henchmen.

They made sweeping arrests against hundreds of IT workers, trade union leaders and activists in Bengaluru.

And unsurprisingly, the crack down was captured on camera — we see you.

The Karnataka IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU) said hundreds of IT employees were arrested on Thursday in Bengaluru, along with other leaders and activists from various Central Trade Unions, during the Bharat Bandh against the Narendra Modi government's alleged anti-worker labour… pic.twitter.com/qYYm1p8ml0

— Maktoob (@MaktoobMedia) February 12, 2026

International endorsement

We have also seen expressions of solidarity emerge internationally. London-based protesters gathered at London's Parliament Square on Thursday evening.

They condemned Hindutva's "fascist bulldozer raj" and demanding the withdrawal of punitive labour and farming policies.

As Brinda Karat put it, India's sovereignty is cracking beneath Modi's divisive policies and the working class, unafraid and unwavering, is reclaiming their nation.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

Though commonly reported, Google doesn't consider it a security problem when models make things up

Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn't. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him.…

It isn't insane, and Amazon will be fine when the music stops. Other players, maybe not so much

In their recent earnings call, Amazon kinda blew the doors off of industry analyst (motto: "we'll be wrong, then take it out on your stock") projections for their capex spend.…

After a selloff fueled by fears AI could upend the outsourcing model

Indian IT professionals worried about 72-hour workweeks might soon face the opposite concern, as Bengaluru-based outsourcing giant Infosys has partnered with Anthropic to bring agentic AI to telecommunications companies and other regulated industries.…

Support us on Patreon »

Two weeks ago, we ran a bit of an AMA experiment, with a call on Bluesky for fans of Techdirt to ask Mike any questions they might have. We got lots of great responses and now, as promised, Mike is delivering the answers on this week's episode of the podcast!

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Plus 3 new goon squads targeted critical infrastructure last year

Three new threat groups began targeting critical infrastructure last year, while a well-known Beijing-backed crew - Volt Typhoon - continued to compromise cellular gateways and routers, and then break into US electric, oil, and gas companies in 2025, according to Dragos' annual threat report published on Tuesday.…

CPU adoption is part of deeper partnership between the Social Network and Nvidia which will see millions of GPUs deployed over next few years

Move over Intel and AMD — Meta is among the first hyperscalers to deploy Nvidia's standalone CPUs, the two companies revealed on Tuesday. Meta has already deployed Nvidia's Grace processors in CPU-only systems at scale and is working with the GPU slinger to field its upcoming Vera CPUs beginning next year.…

Keir Starmer's Labour party has deselected three Labour councillors and blocked them contesting May's local elections — punishment for demanding:

an independent inquiry into the election of a paedophile councillor.

When Clare Johnson, one of the three, successfully overturned the centralised deselection, she says the party orchestrated the local branch's selection vote to ensure she couldn't stand.

The councillors' primary crime appears to have been to demand the debate on Labour's 2023 selection of paedophile Tom Dewey. Party officials already knew, when they confirmed his candidacy, that Dewey had been charged for possessing the "most serious" categories of child-rape images.

Dewey subsequently admitted the offences and was convicted and added to the sex offender register. When local women party members tried to discuss the issue, Labour locked them out of its systems to prevent them.

Dewey was an organiser for right-wing pressure group 'Labour First', which supports Keir Starmer and is rabidly pro-Israel. Hackney mayor Philip Glanville was later suspended and forced to step down after images surfaced of him partying with Dewey after Dewey's arrest.

Starmer is still reeling from his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as his senior adviser — and ambassador to the US — knowing Mandelson had was close to the convicted serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson's protegee Morgan McSweeney resigned last week as Starmer's chief of staff in an unsuccessful attempt to take the heat off his boss. And the heat is well deserved. Under Starmer, Labour has a deep and ongoing paedophile and sex offender problem.

Starmer followed his Mandelson fiasco with another 'Labour nonceberg' scandal over his decision to award a peerage to his former adviser Matthew Doyle. Starmer knew, when he recommended Doyle, that Doyle had campaigned for the election of notorious Scottish Labour paedophile Sean Morton.

Earlier this month, female MPs complained to Starmer that Labour is now known as a party of paedophiles — without mentioning the victims. Labour's 'white feminists' have routinely ignored the plight of victims. Meanwhile, Starmer's record as Labour leader is an appalling continuation of the impunity of celebrity paedophiles when he ran the CPS.

Diagnostic

As well as the cases of Mandelson and Doyle/Morton, Starmer:

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

This issue is so endemic among Starmer's right-wing, pro-Israel faction as to be basically diagnostic:

• As well as Hackney councillor Dewey, 'friend of Israel' Liron Velleman has just been convicted of repeated sex crimes against a 13-year-old girl.
• In January 2025, former Blair minister Ivor Caplin was arrested in a sting operation as he allegedly attempted to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex. Local police went after local left-winger Greg Hadfield for exposing the explicit content Caplin posted on his X feed — Hadfield defeated the 'vexatious' charge in November 2025. However, no charges have yet been brought against Caplin and a court did not impose bail conditions after his initial bail expired.
• In March 2025 Sam Gould, another JLM activist who worked for Starmer's health secretary Wes Streeting, quit as a Redbridge councillor after being convicted on two separate counts of indecent exposure to a 13-year-old girl.
•  The following month Dan Norris MP, an ally of Keir Starmer, was arrested over allegations of rape, child sex offences and child abduction.  Avon and Somerset Police says its investigation is still ongoing.
•  The same Dan Norris was arrested again in February 2026 for alleged rape and sexual assault.

Sacked whistleblower

Perhaps most seriously, Starmer and his then-sidekick David Evans covered up Jewish whistleblower Elaina Cohen's allegations of serial abuse of women by a party staffer.

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

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

Labour's sex offender problem is mountainous, as is Starmer's protection of them and his contempt for their victims. All of this has been almost entirely ignored by 'mainstream' media.

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

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

A "chance" meeting with strangers on a night out led to the "callous attack" and murder of a young deaf woman in Romford, last summer, by a man nicknamed "Nasty", a court has heard.

Zahwa Mukhtar, 27, was by herself socialising outside a pub in Stoke Newington Road, Hackney, when she first encountered Duane Owusu, 36, and a group he was with in the early hours of Saturday 16 August 2025.

Within a few hours, Zahwa was dead, having suffered a fatal head injury after being punched in the neck and assaulted by Owusu, who had first thrown her out of a parked car.

Her tragic murder, described as a "senseless killing of a vulnerable young woman" by prosecutor Henrietta Paget KC, was captured on CCTV outside Chadwell House care home, in Romford, and shown to jurors at the Old Bailey on Tuesday.

Owusu, of Althorne Way, Dagenham, denies murder and manslaughter.

Zahwa Mukhtar: killed last year

Ms Paget told the court how Zahwa had gotten into a silver Mercedes with Owusu and four others, including two women, who had driven from a "rave" in another area of Hackney.

Ms Paget said:

The occupants of the vehicle had been drinking and taking drugs, Ms Mukhtar included.

You will hear evidence that she was behaving erratically within the car, flirting with the boys and picking fights with the girls. Nobody knew her, and it appears that her behaviour was causing increasing annoyance.

The group were making their way towards Dagenham with Zahwa sitting on Owusu's lap in the overcrowded car.

As they neared Chadwell Heath, she began filming with her mobile phone. The footage was brief, Ms Paget explained, but was a "trigger" for Owusu, who had been "agitated and acting aggressively" earlier that night according to one of the group.

Jurors saw roadside CCTV footage of him sucking nitrous oxide, or "laughing gas" from a balloon before the car journey, and were told that Zahwa had popped one of the occupant's balloons inside the car.

After telling the driver to stop, Owusu threw out her phone before pushing her from the car. She "landed on her backside on the pavement".

As Zahwa shuffled backwards, the defendant left the car and aimed a kick towards her face and then a second "savage kick towards her head". One of the group who tried to intervene, a woman, was swung out of the way, leaving Owusu free to deliver the "blow that killed [Zahwa]".

Ms Paget said Owusu "punched her hard, to the neck, knocking her to the ground where she lay motionless". She suffered "a fractured skull and fatal brain injury" having fallen backwards.

Instead of helping her, he allegedly got into the car, shouted at others to do the same, and told the driver to drive off, Ms Paget said.

"There was no stopping him"

When Zahwa Mukhtar was attacked, jurors heard Owusu was "so mad there was no stopping him":

Ms Mukhtar was scared and pleading with him to stop.

A minute later the car returned to the scene in Chadwell Heath Lane, where Zahwa lay motionless, "with headlights illuminating her". The car stayed for only a few seconds and nobody left it.

The court heard there was a discussion about Zahwa, and helping her, but nobody did.

She was eventually found unresponsive by a police officer at 5.31am on Saturday morning when two separate passersby alerted police to a woman lying in the road. They thought she was either drunk or had fallen asleep. Despite the efforts of the emergency services Zahwa was pronounced dead at the scene less than an hour later.

Before reaching Zahwa, officers had spent 50 minutes with Owusu and the group in the Mercedes nearby after stopping the car on suspicion of drugs at about 4.40am.

Police found nitrous oxide canisters in the boot of the car, a small amount of cannabis in the defendant's gilet pocket and a "man bag" with a "small bag of white powder in it". No arrests were made, but officers told the group to find alternative ways home.

While Owusu and the Mercedes driver waited for a taxi, their conversation was picked up by neighbourhood security systems, the court was told.

The case continues

Ms Paget said:

Far from showing any concern for Ms Mukhtar, [Owusu's] concern was that their presence in the area had come to the attention of the police.

The pair began to blame one another and Owusu "berates" the driver for not being "militant", calling him "soft" and a "weak link". In response, Owusu was told he "can't control his emotions".

The defendant was arrested for Zahwa Mukhtar's murder on 17 August 2025 and answered no comment to questions during his interview.

Aspiring accountant, Zahwa, worked as a financial assistant at the Young Vic theatre in the Waterloo area of London. Ms Paget described her in court as "bright, bubbly, enthusiastic and very eager to learn".

She was deaf in one ear as a result of contracting meningitis at three years old — so she wore a hearing aid — but "coped well and was adept at lip reading" as well as British sign language.

Zahwa, from Hackney, came from a traditional background, but wanted to live like any other young person in their twenties, the court heard.

"She had tattoos, piercings and enjoyed food and travel, and remained close to her siblings, especially her younger sister," Ms Paget added.

The Old Bailey trial continues.

Featured image via the Canary

By Vicky Gayle

Lambeth Greens have launched a petition calling on Labour-run Lambeth council to cancel plans to award US-tech firm Oracle a contract worth £8m. This is due to the company's financial and political ties to Israel and Donald Trump.

A decision report published last Friday shows Lambeth council is preparing to renew its contract with Oracle. The deal offers £8.1m over five years for provision of digital HR and finance services. The council confirmed the decision on 16 February and it will come into effect on 23 February.

Lambeth Greens are calling on the council not to award the contract due to Oracle's support for the Israeli government and the current Trump US administration.

Lambeth residents can support this campaign through a new petition launched by the Greens.

Oracle - 'you must love Israel to work here'

Oracle works directly with the Israeli government and military, providing technology that facilitates Israel's ongoing genocide and war crime against the Palestinian people.

The company has also attempted to silence pro-Palestinian voices internally, effectively telling employees to 'love Israel' or find a new job.

Founder Larry Ellison has personally donated over $16m to supporting the Israeli armed forces and former CEO Safra Catz donated directly to Trump's re-election campaign.

Ellison recently took over the US operations of social media platform TikTok in a move which Israeli president Benjamin Nethanyahu welcomed. Since the takeover, creators on the platform have accused it of censoring content relating to Palestine.

Greens challenging the council deal

The Lambeth Greens, with the support of cllr Matthew Bryant, are preparing to 'call-in' the decision. A successful call-in would delay the decision for it to be discussed at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee, giving councillors a chance to highlight Oracle's complicity in Israeli genocide and ask the council to seek an alternative provider.

The call-in will also highlight Oracle's poor performance both locally, where their software has left £62.8m of invoices unpaid, and with other local authorities like Birmingham, where problems with their system contributed to the council having to declare bankruptcy.

Lambeth council has stated that it has a 'neutral position on the conflict' in Gaza. The Greens have demanded it changes this position to reflect the strong feelings of the community on this issue and to uphold Lambeth's proud tradition of international solidarity.

A number of other London boroughs use Oracle's services, including Labour run councils Croydon, Waltham Forest and Barnet.

Cllr Martin Abrams , Green Party councillor for Streatham St Leonard's, said:

Lambeth must stand with Palestine and end its financial complicity in Israeli genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleaning. A petition signed by more than 5,000 Lambeth residents clearly shows that this issue is hugely important to the community.

Oracle is unashamed in its support for Israel, proudly providing services to the government and military despite the horrors we have all seen for the past three years and before. The company's founders have donated millions to the IDF and are in bed with the morally reprehensible Trump administration.

By awarding this contract, Labour will be using residents' money to enrich an organisation and its billionaire owners who use their influence to support and sustain the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Israel.

This is the definition of complicity. Labour needs to change its unconscionable 'neutral position' on Israel's genocide, reject Oracle and get on the right side of history.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

The rate of people not in employment in the UK has risen further to 5.2%, according to new figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). With that in mind, it's clear why 82% of the UK supports an economic package that includes a Job Guarantee, polling from the Lancet shows. These new figures highlight the ongoing issue of UK unemployment.

Unemployment rises to its highest level yet

Labour's unemployment crisis is impacting young people the most. More than 1 in 6 people aged 16-24 are unemployed — the highest level in a decade. Overall, the number of people not in employment stands at 1.88 million.

But that's not the full picture. Another 9.4 million people are economically inactive — meaning they haven't looked for a job in three months.

At the same time, there are only 734,000 job vacancies. And that's before one considers if people have the skills for the job. It exposes the flaws in the government's neoliberal outlook — the view that the market automatically solves everything doesn't stack up.

This comes into sharper focus when considering 22% of Brits work a 60 hours of more a week, while millions don't have a job.

Job Guarantee, the solution?

A Job Guarantee could be the solution to a disorganised labour market. To avoid some people doing no work, while almost one in four do 60+ hours, roles could be shared. Previous Canary analysis found that if everyone of working age dedicated just five hours a week to public sector work that would cover the lot.

To be sure, 46% of public sector jobs are specialist that require skills like doctors or firemen. But the five hour figure shows that people could do a small amount of work a week to cover the public sector as it currently stands — which would ease unemployment rates.

Free university training should simultaneously deliver the skills for a strategic jobs of the future such as automation and AI. It doesn't mean forcing people into roles but finding the balance between a liberal approach and covering necessary roles. Higher pay packets could encourage people into positions that are strategic for the economy.

Meanwhile, a private market of small to medium size businesses should run parallel.

A Job Guarantee could ensure a modern work-life balance while scaling down damaging and unnecessary production, which 82% of the UK also supports, according to Lancet polling.

Featured image via the Unsplash/the Canary

By James Wright

The neoliberal system leaves 40 percent of Britons with less than £25 at the end of each week, a survey by the Cost of Living Action (COLA) group has found. This is pittance and unlikely to stretch far under the cost of living crisis, where even employed people are finding themselves out of pocket.

Manufactured cost of living crisis

Privatised essentials like energy and extractive supermarket chains are driving the cost of living crisis. British Energy companies alone have accrued £125 billion since 2020, according to the End Fuel Poverty Coalition.

Meanwhile, profits for the German-owned supermarket, Lidl, rose by 297% since 2021. As for Aldi, its operating profit has risen by 50% and 72% since 2020.

While costs have increased due to climate change and other factors, supermarkets are using these  pressures to break even but to fatten profit margins — otherwise known as 'greedflation'.

In other words, the fuel feeding the cost of living fire is the 'privatisation tax' on common essentials — not a natural disaster but a manmade problem.

Public ownership

A publicly owned Green New Deal could tackle the cost of energy. Just 1.2% of the Sahara Desert would be necessary to power the entire world's energy needs. Solar is gradually replacing oil because of cheaper costs. It does not appear to be happening fast enough to mitigate climate catastrophe.

Plus, energy is an essential service that would be cheaper under public ownership.

What's more, non-profit supermarkets could dramatically lower the cost of food and alleviate the pinch for ordinary Brits.

Holistic approach

Speaking about the latest survey, Labour MP Yuan Yang, co-convenor of the Living Standards Coalition, articulated the need for a holistic (all hands to the pump) approach.

The Cost of Living Action campaign has identified a critical challenge for those of us in Westminster to grapple with: that we need a holistic approach in order to create growth while tackling the cost of living crisis. As their campaign has correctly identified, this approach requires increasing incomes, reducing costs, and fairer taxation.

Conor O'Shea, campaign coordinator of COLA, spoke of the grating impact of these inflationary pressures on British society.

Millions of people are struggling with sky-high costs, and left in debt or with next to nothing left after paying bills each month. It's no wonder people are feeling so worried and angry. The government must deliver transformational change that truly responds to the scale of the crisis. That means making the essentials affordable for everyone, ensuring everyone has access to the income they need to live well, and rebalancing the tax system with more and better taxes on wealth.

If these issues are not tackled at the root, Brits will have to tighten their belts — as if they haven't done exactly that over the past decade.

Featured image via Unsplash/the Canary 

By James Wright

"If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go." —Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, September 8, 2025

From that one line, which Anil Kalhan dubbed "Kavanaugh Stops," we see story after story of just how disconnected from reality, and the Constitution, Brett Kavanaugh was in that statement.

In short: Brett Kavanaugh has some explaining to do.

Just a few quotes:

My name is George Retes. I am — I was born and raised here in Ventura, California, I'm 26 years old and I am an Iraq combat veteran…. I was going to work like normal. I show up. ICE is there. There's kind of like a roadblock. I get out. I identify myself, that I'm a U.S. citizen, that I'm just trying to get to work…. I'm getting ready to leave and they surround my car, start banging on it, start shouting these contradictory orders…. Even though I was giving them no reason, they still felt the need to — one agent knelt my back and another agent knelt on my neck. And during that time, I'm just pleading with them that I couldn't breathe…. I was an isolation. I was in basically this concrete cell. I was stripped naked in like a hospital gown. And they leave the lights on 24/7…. They just came out and they said that I was violent and that I assaulted agents. Why lie when it's on video of everything that happened? Why lie?

That's just one person's story in that PBS piece. There are two others as well. And we already know hundreds of other US Citizens have been kicked, dragged, beaten, and detained for days. It feels like every few days we hear about more such stories. And those are only the ones that get attention. You have to assume that there are many more ones that haven't yet reached the public.

It feels like perhaps Justice Kavanaugh owes us all an explanation. And an apology. And a new ruling that makes it much clearer that immigration enforcement officials have no right to just randomly stop and detain people without a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, and those facts need to be more than "skin color" or "they were being annoying to us."

The right wing extremist takeover of CBS continues to go just about how you thought it might.

CBS is under fire yet again, this time for forcing Stephen Colbert's "The Late Show" to cancel a scheduled appearance with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico because it might upset our full-diapered president. Colbert acknowledged the cancellation on his Monday evening show, saying CBS lawyers explicitly forbade him from broadcasting the interview:

"He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network's lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast."

Colbert says he was also told by network lawyers that he also couldn't mention he was told by CBS to not have him on, a request he proceeded to immediately ignore in a lengthy rant about Brendan Carr and the censorial, authoritarian, and pathetic Trump FCC:

"Let's just call this what it is: Donald Trump's administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, OK? He's like a toddler with too much screen time. He gets cranky and then drops a load in his diaper."

As we've noted previously, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been threatening to leverage the "equal time" rule embedded in Section 315 of the Communications Act to take action against daytime and late night talk shows that don't provide "equal" time to Republican ideology. He most recently tried to threaten ABC's The View.

Carr's goal isn't equality; it's the disproportionate coddling and normalization of an extremist U.S. right wing political movement that's increasingly despised by the actual public. It's also an attempt to create a climate where media giants are afraid to host voices critical of the president for fear of being drawn into expensive and costly legal battles, even though Carr has little hope of actually winning any.

The "equal time" rule is a dated relic that would be largely impossible for the Trump court-eviscerated FCC to actually enforce. The rule was originally created to apply specifically to political candidate appearances on broadcast television, since back then, pre-internet, a TV appearance on one of the big three networks could make or break and politician attempting to run for office.

In the years since, the rule has seen numerous exemptions and, with the steady evisceration of the regulatory state by the right wing, is not something viewed as seriously enforceable.

Enter Carr, who is distorting this rule to suggest that it needs to apply to every guest a late-night talk show has. It's a lazy effort by Carr to pretend his censorship effort sits on solid legal footing. It does not. The FCC's lone Democratic Commissioner accurately pointed out that Carr has no authority to do any of this:

CBS is fully protected under the First Amendment to determine what interviews it airs. That makes its decision to yield to political pressure all the more disappointing.Corporate interests cannot justify retreating from airing newsworthy content.

— FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez (@agomezfcc.bsky.social) 2026-02-17T17:07:30.811Z

It's a legal fight that CBS could easily win, but because the network is owned by Trump billionaire donor Larry Ellison, it's too feckless, pathetic, and corrupted to bother. Ellison very clearly purchased CBS (and installed contrarian troll Bari Weiss at CBS News) to create a safe space for right wing interests; one of his first orders of business was firing Colbert last year. His show is now scheduled to end in May.

Ellison has been hoping the Trump DOJ will scuttle Netflix's pending merger with Warner Brothers so that Ellison can further expand his planned media empire with the inclusion of Warner IP, CNN, and HBO. To gain approval of that transition, CBS lawyers and executives are further incentivized to be abject cowards.

The ham-fisted effort by Trump and his FCC earlobe nibblers will, of course, only act to drive more attention to Colbert's interview with Talarico on YouTube. As of my writing this sentence, the video has over a million and a half views, a number I suspect will be significantly higher in short order. The comment section is filled with people with lots of nice things to say about CBS and Brendan Carr:

Obviously this is an ugly assault on free speech and the First Amendment by a sad and desperate authoritarian government, but at its heart it's just foundationally, historically pathetic. It's also another sad chapter in the embarrassing capitulation of what's left of modern corporate broadcast media, which is positively begging for irrelevance at the hands of more modern alternatives.

To completely understand computer security, it's vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It's also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized Ethical Hacking Bundle will help you learn to master ethical hacking techniques and methodologies over 14 courses. It's on sale for $28 for a limited time.

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

We'll soon get a closer look at a bunch of features and updates Google has planned for Android and its other services. The company has confirmed that Google I/O 2026 will take place on May 19 and 20. As always, Google will stream some of the keynotes and sessions for free, including the opening keynote (during which the company makes the bulk of its major I/O announcements).

Although I/O is primarily a conference for developers, it's typically where we first learn about major upcoming Android changes, which of course affect tens of millions of people. Expect a lot of news about Google's AI efforts as well, such as what's next for Gemini.

See you all at Google I/O starting May 19th! https://t.co/KgNKbb3nMu pic.twitter.com/OD6x3IYtTi

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 17, 2026

As has been the case for several years, Google revealed the conference's dates for 2026 after enough folks completed a puzzle on the I/O website. This year's puzzle has multiple "builds" to play through, all of which use Gemini.

They start with a mini-golf game in which a virtual caddy that's powered by Gemini offers some of the most anodyne advice imaginable. The second build is a nonogram. If you've ever played a Picross game, you'll know what to do here. It's about using logic to place tiles on a grid in order to create an image. Here, Google is using Gemini to generate "endless game boards."

The other three minigames are Word Wheel (which "leverages Gemini 3 to automate level design"), Super Sonicbot (which "uses Gemini to introduce microphone mechanics where noise controls the Android Bot's altitude") and Stretchy Cat. The latter "uses Gemini 3 as a stage designer balancing game mechanics and difficulty to create endless play."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/google-io-2026-is-set-for-may-19-and-20-200805024.html?src=rss

When European tech observers talk about AI ambition, the narrative often splits neatly in two: models and infrastructure. On one side are the clever bits of code that can write, reason, and generate text or images. On the other is the gritty reality of making those bits run reliably, at scale, and in production. Today, […]

This story continues at The Next Web

Consumers have a long wait ahead of them before they can bring that kind of performance home

It's time for a new generation of faster flash storage, but not on your laptop or desktop. Micron's first PCIe 6.0 SSDs have entered mass production and promise eye-watering transfer rates of up to 28 GB/s. However, unless you're building flash storage arrays for AI, you won't have a use for them.…

Texas is suing Wi-Fi router maker TP-Link for deceptively marketing the security of its products and allowing Chinese hacking groups to access Americans' devices, Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced. Paxton originally started looking into TP-Link in October 2025. Texas Governor Greg Abbott later prohibited state employees from using TP-Link products in January of this year.

TP-Link is no longer owned by a Chinese company and its products are assembled in Vietnam, but Paxton's lawsuit claims that because the company's "ownership and supply-chain are tied to China" it's subject to the country's data laws, which require companies to comply with requests from Chinese intelligence agencies. The lawsuit also says that firmware vulnerabilities in TP-Link's hardware have already "exposed millions of consumers to severe cybersecurity risks."

Engadget has asked TP-Link to comment on the Texas lawsuit and Paxton's claims. We'll update this article if we hear back.

TP-Link was reportedly being investigated at the federal level in 2024 after its devices were connected to the massive "Salt Typhoon" hack that accessed data from multiple US telecom companies. Despite all signs pointing to the federal government getting ready to ban TP-Link in 2025, Reuters reports that the Trump administration paused plans to ban the company's routers in early February, ahead of a meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/texas-ag-sues-tp-link-over-purported-connection-to-china-193802258.html?src=rss

A warehouse that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to convert into a detention center for immigrants in Roxbury, N.J., on Feb. 16, 2026. Photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)

The scale of the Trump administration's plans to warehouse human beings is hard to fathom. Here's one way to put it in perspective: On a given day, New York City's notorious Rikers Island jail complex holds approximately 7,000 detainees. President Donald Trump's regime, which is currently holding a record 70,000 people in immigration detention, now plans to develop a network of Rikers-sized concentration camps for immigrants nationwide.

The Department of Homeland Security is racing to buy up and convert two-dozen-plus warehouses into mass detention centers for immigrants, some capable of holding up to 10,000 people. According to documents released last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to spend $38.3 billion acquiring warehouses across the country and retrofitting them to collectively hold nearly 100,000 beds.

"If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight," noted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. "The federal government hasn't operated a prison camp inside the United States that large since Japanese Internment."

When Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, last week announced that ICE's "surge" in Minnesota would wind down, it marked a significant victory for the thousands of Minnesotans who have fought back against the federal forces terrorizing their state; resistance forced the Trump regime to change its plans. But nothing is ramping down when it comes to the deportation machine at large. When billions of dollars are spent to turn industrial spaces into detention camps, authoritarian desires meet market logic: The warehouses must be filled.

Local communities are nonetheless pushing back, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable federal forces with unlimited funding, abetted by powerful private interests who stand to gain from this carceral build-out.

As The Appeal reported last week, investors on a recent quarterly earnings call for private prison giant CoreCivic were worried that ICE's unprecedented detention numbers were still not high enough. "I think people thought we'd be at that 100,000 level," one caller reportedly said of the number of people currently held by ICE. "We're at a little over 70,000."

The Trump administration has made clear that it can afford anything when it comes to the rounding up and brutalizing of immigrants and antifascist protesters.

The company's CEO stressed the major financial gains made though Trump's anti-immigrant campaign and assured callers that the drawdown in Minnesota did not, in his view, portend "meaningful changes in enforcement style or approach." That is to say, the racial profiling, cruelty, and mass roundups will continue, and private prison corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group, alongside giants of surveillance infrastructure like Palantir, will collectively make billions from DHS spending. What author John Ganz has called "ICE's function as an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob" — now with 22,000 officers — will also continue to be handsomely funded.

None of this is a surprise: When Congress passed Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocating ICE nearly $80 billion in multiyear funding, the administration made clear that money would be no object in enacting its project of ethnic cleansing and the expansion of the carceral system for targeted groups of immigrants and opponents. The warehouse purchases and related government contracts have, as The Lever reported, been a boon for Trump-connected real estate brokers and a bailout for "commercial real estate owners, who have struggled to sell their properties over the past year under the weight of macroeconomic headwinds and Trump's tariff war."

Economic stimulus based in ethnic cleansing would, of course, be despicable. But the Trump regime can't even pretend this dizzyingly expensive project serves its own base. Only a small number of interested businesses and parties stand to gain. Meanwhile, as public resistance in both Republican- and Democratic-majority locales has already made clear, everyone else stands to lose. And hundreds of thousands of our immigrant neighbors stand to lose the most.

Trump's mass deportation plan is estimated by the libertarian Cato Institute to have a fiscal cost of up to $1 trillion over a decade. And the losses? Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, the American Immigration Council found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. It's money that could be spent improving our collective lives. The $45 billion total budgeted for ICE detention centers is nearly four times the $12.8 billion the U.S. spent on new affordable housing in 2023. The huge budget for ICE mega warehouses reflects the most Trumpian mix: cronyist dealmaking in service of white nationalism.

The historian Adam Tooze has at various points recalled the words of economist John Maynard Keynes, who said in 1942 that "anything we can actually do we can afford." Keynes was arguing that sovereign governments have extraordinary capacity to mobilize finances; the constraints lie elsewhere. Tooze has stressed that the limits of what a government can "actually do" are political, technical, material, and logistical — and extremely complicated as such. But, he points out, they are not budgetary. The Trump administration has made clear that it can afford anything when it comes to the rounding up and brutalizing of immigrants and antifascist protesters. That, however, does not mean the government can actually do everything it wants.

A number of warehouse owners, facing local backlash and pressure, have already backed out of lucrative sales to ICE. According to Bloomberg, Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison's company announced that a transaction to sell a 550,000-square-foot warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, "will not be proceeding." The company made clear that the move was political, saying, "We understand that the conversation around immigration policy and enforcement is particularly heated, and has become much more so over the past few weeks. We respect that this issue is deeply important to many people."

For ICE, money is no object. But constant and relentless public protest, blockades, boycotts, and local government pressure significantly lessen the appeal for warehouse owners and potential contractors to do this fascist work.

Deals for warehouses near Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, and Byhalia, Missouri, have also fallen through. In each case, warehouse owners faced protests and mounting pressure. In some jurisdictions, backlash to ICE warehouses have come in the worst sort of NIMBY variety — including complaints from Republicans who do not want immigrant detainees brought to their town en masse. Concerns about water and sewage systems and economic strains in remote areas also abound. But if local self-interest becomes a barrier to the expansion of Trump's deportation regime, that's no bad thing, given the urgent need to hold back Trump's deeply unpopular but otherwise unrestrained forces.

We need every possible limit on what Trump and his loyalists can actually do.

The post Can Trump's Plan for Warehouse Immigrant Detention Camps Be Stopped? appeared first on The Intercept.

Gold medalists Alysa Liu and Amber Glenn of Team USA pose for a photo after the medal ceremony for the team figure skating event on Feb. 8, 2026, in Milan, Italy. Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images

At the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, competing under the American banner has put some athletes at odds with their own government, transforming them — in a handful of candid remarks — from cereal-box patriots into political liabilities swiftly pilloried by the conservative establishment.

When reporters asked American freestyle skier Hunter Hess how it felt to wear the U.S. flag in front of the world in this moment, he said it "brings up mixed emotions." Hess drew a clear line between the country he competes for and the policies coming out of Washington, saying, "Just because I'm wearing the flag doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on in the U.S."

Hess's plain, honest answer triggered one of the most striking political crosscurrents of these Games: President Donald Trump logged on to Truth Social to call Hess "a real loser" who shouldn't have tried out for the Olympic team at all. 

Hess wasn't alone in speaking out. Curler Rich Ruohonen, an attorney and Minnesota native, criticized recent federal law enforcement actions in the state, saying the operations were "wrong" and violated Americans' constitutional rights. Snowboarder Chloe Kim, whose parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea, defended her fellow teammates, saying Trump's immigration policies "hit pretty close to home" and that athletes are "allowed to voice" their opinions.  

The response from conservative media was instant: shame, dismissal, and, at times, openly cheering against the very athletes carrying the American flag.

Vice President JD Vance told reporters that Olympians are "not there to pop off about politics" and said they should expect "pushback" if they do. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds went further on social media, telling U.S. athletes that if they don't want to represent the flag, "GO HOME." 

Sports in America are advertised, sold, and draped in red, white, and blue so completely that they become impossible to separate from nationalism.

Conservative commentators also charged in on behalf of the administration. After U.S. figure skater Amber Glenn, who won gold in the team event, voiced support for her LGBTQ community, conservative podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly branded her "another turncoat to root against" to her 3.6 million followers. The outrage snowballed, and Glenn said she received a "scary amount of hate/threats," prompting her to take a break from social media altogether. (She later returned to TikTok with a carousel of images of her and teammate Alysa Liu wearing their team gold medals and addressing her critics: "They hate to see two woke bitches winning.")

The intensity of the backlash illustrates how symbolic these Games have become — not just for who wins medals, but for who gets to define what national representation means on the international stage. While the Olympic Committee and the U.S. government prefer to present the Games as a neutral display of discipline, athletic poise, and national pride, the truth is less tidy. The Olympics have always served as a global window into the political and social conditions athletes come from — and when that window opens, protest has rarely been far behind.

Seen, Not Heard  

Although the modern Olympic Charter's Rule 50 aims to ban political, religious, or racial "propaganda" from competition, the idea that the Games have ever been apolitical ignores more than a century of history. Long before the International Olympic Committee tried to censor athletic competition, athletes and states recognized there was no separating sports from politics. At the 1906 Athens Games, Irish track and field star Peter O'Connor protested being listed as a British competitor by climbing a 20-foot flagpole and unfurling a green flag bearing the words "Erin Go Bragh" — Ireland forever — and went on to win gold. 

As the Olympics entered the broadcast era and the audience stretched far beyond the stadium, political leaders were acutely aware they could use the Games' reach to bolster their legitimacy. By the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler and his propagandists transformed the Games into a showcase for the Nazi regime's image and ideology. The widely publicized spectacle of a nation unified under Nazism was engineered to sanitize the Third Reich at home and abroad, cementing the modern Olympics as a global platform for state propaganda — and, inevitably, for those willing to resist it. Jewish organizations, labor leaders, and civil rights groups in the United States and Europe tried to organize a boycott of the event, warning that participation would validate Hitler's regime and its persecution of Jews, but the effort ultimately failed. Athletes responded with the most direct act of resistance available to them: by winning, in open defiance. Jesse Owens — an African American runner — shattered Hitler's carefully staged narrative of "Aryan" superiority by winning four gold medals, turning his victories into a de facto rebuke of the regime's racial ideology. 

Decades later, the 1968 Mexico City Games delivered one of the clearest political statements in Olympic history: sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists on the medal stand in protest of racial injustice in the United States — an enduring image that turned the podium into a site of public dissent in front of the world.

American athletes, gold medalist Tommie Smith (center) and bronze medalist John Carlos (right) each raise a clenched fist and bow their heads on the podium during their medal ceremony at the 1968 Summer Games. Photo: Photo by Rolls Press/Popperfoto via Getty Images

The backlash was swift. Olympic officials expelled them from the Games, much of the press cast them as radicals, and both men faced threats and professional fallout for years afterward. Their protest remains one of the most controversial moments in Olympic history — and, as Smith later put it, entirely necessary: "We had to be seen because we couldn't be heard."

At the 2024 Paris opening ceremony, Palestinian boxer Waseem Abu Sal wore a shirt depicting the bombing of children in Gaza and told AFP it was meant to represent "the children who are martyred and die under the rubble," bringing the war's human toll visibly into the Olympic spotlight.

Across decades and continents, athletes and nations alike have used both participating in and abstaining from the Olympics to make statements about war, occupation, racial oppression, and human rights. This long history underscores a simple truth: When the whole world is watching, both governments and their critics understand the Games are too powerful a platform to leave unused.

More Than a Podium

It's important that dissent shows up at the Olympics for more than just symbolic reasons: The conditions that shape who gets to compete are deeply connected to the social and political structures in the athletes' home countries. Sports in America are advertised, sold, and draped in red, white, and blue so completely that they become impossible to separate from nationalism, transforming competition into a ritual where athletic achievement is inseparable from the story the nation tells about itself.

American Olympic success is not a vacuum. An analysis by researchers at George Mason University found that roughly 3 percent of athletes on Team USA at the 2026 Winter Games were born abroad and another 13.5 percent are children of immigrant parents — meaning nearly 17 percent of the delegation has direct ties to immigrant communities. That reality reflects how the United States develops and recruits athletic talent across communities, including immigrant families and underrepresented groups whose contributions have long powered American sports on the world stage.  

For athletes whose families or personal histories intersect with immigration pathways, this shift is not an abstraction. It's about who has secure status in the United States and who faces potential removal or legal uncertainty. The ways in which these forces shape an athlete don't stop when they step on the snow or ice, no matter what flag is on their back.

The Games are built on spectacle, but beneath the pageantry is a hard truth: Athletes do not compete only for themselves, they compete as symbols of the nation they represent. When Americans step onto that global stage, they are presented as proof of what the United States claims to stand for — freedom, dignity, equality — even as the country itself struggles to live up to those ideals. That contradiction carries a real moral weight. Competing under the flag is not just an honor; it's a responsibility to confront the distance between national image and national reality.

The post It's Correct and Moral to Use the Olympics to Speak Out About Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

Companies talk renewables while firing up gas turbines as fast as they can

Bit barns need a lot of power to operate and, as hyperscalers look for ways to generate it, they are adding more dirty energy in the form of new gas turbines. One estimate says that these new power sources could add another 44 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to the annual emissions of 10 million private cars.…