Paris-headquartered Naboo has raised a $70m in Series B as it accelerates its ambition to become the operating layer for how large companies plan, book, and control corporate events. The round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the same investor that backed Mistral AI in 2023, and lands just a year after Naboo closed a […]

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Databricks is having one of those years that most enterprise software companies would quietly envy. The data and AI platform says it has reached a $5.4bn annual revenue run rate, growing 65% year over year, at a time when growth across the sector has cooled noticeably. For a private company, that pace is rare. And […]

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We reported earlier today on the High Court's decision taken this morning, in which the Judge declared the government's proscription on Palestine Action was 'disproportionate'.

The judge even went as far to point out that the ban infringes on the human rights of people in the UK.

The government's choice to proscribe Palestine Action has been met by widespread public condemnation both at home and abroad. It has been viewed as an attempt to shut down solidarity that British people have shown with Palestinians through their legal right to protest.

Israel's ongoing, horrific genocide against Palestine has been met with absolute impunity by Western leaders, resulting in mass protest and civil disobedience across the UK since October 2023. This proscription of direct-action group Palestine Action in the UK has widely been declared as an authoritarian and draconian overreach into the hard-fought civil liberties of British citizens.

Today's ruling marks a positive step in the right direction. Nevertheless, as our own Skwawkbox pointed out:

However, the 'proscription' remains in place for at least another week while the government has a chance to prepare submissions on the court's finding. It remains a criminal offence, for the time being, to express support for Palestine Action. Police should, of course, weigh whether it's worth arresting people when no prosecutions are likely, but their record suggests they won't.

Court rules Palestine Action ban 'disproportionate' - but still banned for now…https://t.co/Frv3cct00j

— SKWAWKBOX (@skwawkbox) February 13, 2026

Palestine Action - anti-genocide protesters stand firm

We wrote recently about the fate of 2,787 people arrested on terrorism charges for holding up paper signs saying 'I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.' Notably, acts of protest which are in line with our legal duty as citizens in response to the widely recognised genocide of Palestinians. As we wrote:

Evidence of UK complicity in crimes against genocide continues to mount. In October 2025 the UN issued its draft report Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime detailing the complicity of states including the UK in the destruction of Gaza. Amongst other things, the UK continued to supply arms including components for F-35 stealth bombers, undertook daily surveillance flights over Gaza for Israel, maintained normal trade relations, and allowed Israel to undertake international crimes with impunity.

In December Declassified UK released its film Britain's Gaza Spy Flight Scandal, investigating the hundreds of RAF intelligence flights conducted on behalf of Israel.

MP Zarah Sultana has welcomed the court's decision, rightfully calling out how the government has abused its power to silence valid dissent from its own people:

The High Court has confirmed what we all knew: proscribing Palestine Action was unlawful.

The state must stop using "counter-terror" powers to criminalise solidarity and intimidate working-class people out of protest.

The Labour government must lift the proscription now and…

— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) February 13, 2026

Sultana's statement in full:

The High Court has confirmed what we all knew: proscribing Palestine Action was unlawful.

The state must stop using "counter-terror" powers to criminalise solidarity and intimidate working-class people out of protest.

The Labour government must lift the proscription now and drop every case NOW.

We will not stop until Palestine is free, from the river to the sea

No more blurring right and wrong

We have all had to sit by whilst we learn more seemingly every day that make clear our own leaders cannot distinguish right from wrong. Whether it's supporting mass murder in Gaza or working alongside crooks who have willingly mixed with convicted paedophiles, a corrupt and sinister pattern speaks for itself.

In fact, our own Skwawkbox reported on how Starmer's apology for working with a paedo came armed with a propaganda-like attack at pro-Palestine protesters. All of this reinforces one point: the challenges we face are linked, bound together by a system of elite power and control.

Skwawkbox wrote:

Starmer said he was sorry for believing Mandelson's lies — 'Peter' was never added as Starmer tried desperately to distance himself. Distance himself from the man he took on as his senior adviser when Mandelson's closeness to child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein was already well known. From the man he then appointed as ambassador to the US, despite knowing the same.

Then added:

And then, out of nowhere, Starmer began attacking the hundreds of thousands of people who march against Israel's genocide. He repeated the Israel lobby's lie that marching against genocide makes UK Jews scared. Nonsense. UK Jews are front and centre of every march and rally — so much so, that the BBC and others have to hide them. Leaving them in would expose that lie and the lie that all Jews support Israel, you see.

Ordinary people see clearly what leaders do not

Those with power clearly have a real problem deciphering their moral compass. On the other hand, protesters have shown unwavering moral clarity, refusing to cower in the face of police intimidation and draconian penalties as they speak out over the tens of thousands of babies and children killed by Israel.

However, the fate of those nearly 3,000 protesters is still confusing. This follows the government being granted the right to appeal today's High Court decision. As a result, there is an arguably deliberate grey area now as to whether support for the 'unlawfully' proscribed group would still result in police arrest.

Q: Does this mean I won't get arrested if I say 'I support Palestine Action."

A: Technically arrests can continue because the government granted an appeal in a week.

But police told protesters outside the court they've been instructed from on high not to conduct arrests. https://t.co/rAjSzgs9bJ

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) February 13, 2026

Human rights lawyer Shoaib Khan broke down the absurdities of the case against Palestine Action:

Court: Even discounting Pal Action's non-peaceful activities, proscription resulted in very significant interference with rights of free speech & assembly. Since Home Sec's policy was not properly applied, interference did not meet requirement that it must be prescribed by law.

— Shoaib M Khan (@ShoaibMKhan) February 13, 2026

Since the High Court handed down its judgment, supporters have flooded in with reactions to its legal stance:

Massive victory as court rules that Palestine Action proscription ruled disproportionate and resulted in a very significant interference in the right to freedom of speech and assembly. BUT proscription remains in force until hearing on 20th! pic.twitter.com/Kxjrc1P4DM

— Campaign Against Arms Trade (@CAATuk) February 13, 2026

Now Palestine Action's ban has been ruled to be unlawful, this seems like a good time to get this petition moving.

Let's get Israeli influence out of our Government for good. https://t.co/f1bW3X7482 https://t.co/Fby6z8ZHwe

— Wolfie.

Ex-Inter, Man City and Italy player Mario Balotelli says he was racially abused by fans in UAE. Balotelli currently plays for Saudi team Al-Ittifaq.

The player said:

This kind of behaviour cannot be normalised, excused, or ignored. I'm speaking out to bring awareness - not just for myself, but for every player who has been subjected to this. Enough is enough.

He added:

I've always condemned all acts of racism, but I didn't expect it here. I hope serious measures are taken to prevent this from happening again.

The Independent said neither Al-Ittifaq nor their UAE opponents on the day have commented. Balotelli played for Inter and AC Milan, Man City, Liverpool and other clubs before joining the Saudi team.

Racism in football reflects society

Football writer Valerio Moggia said racism was common in the Saudi league. In a July 2025 blog, he wrote about racism experienced by Brazilian winger Malcolm:

Malcom was seen having a confrontation with some fans at the stadium, at the end of the match. Videos of this argument circulated online, causing critics for the Brazilian's behaviour towards fans: the player's Instagram account was stormed by angry people, and some of them have resorted to racist epithets, calling him "monkey".

Moggia said:

Gulf countries are not usually linked to racial discrimination's episodes, seen as a mostly Western issue. But a closer look to Saudi society reveal that ethnic and religious biases are very common, even between Saudi citizens.

His excellent study of racism in Saudi soccer can be read here.

Social media users are calling on Yvette Cooper to resign after the High Court ruled the ban on Palestine Action was unlawful.

Just heard on the radio that the then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's proscribing of Palestine action was illegal. She must resign immediately. All those wrongly arrested and charged must be exonerated. A total misuse of the police to mask complicity with Israel's genocide.

— candyman (@PeacheyGabriel) February 13, 2026

Yvette Cooper - just go, already

Yvette Cooper studied at both Oxford and Harvard - she is not unintelligent. She knew full well that in attempting to ban Palestine Action, she was attacking our right to peaceful protests - one of the cornerstones of our democracy.

Yvette Cooper must have fully understood that her unlawful proscription of Palestine Action was an attack on the fundamental freedoms of a democratic society. She did it anyway.

After today's High Court ruling, she should no longer remain as a minister.https://t.co/Uc7NX8ax0X

— Martin O'Neill (@martin_oneill) February 13, 2026

She can't jail nuns anymore - someone get her a therapist.

It's Friday. Palestine Action is now legal again. Shabana 'migrant hunter' Mahmood is crying into her Pret lunch. Yvette Cooper is beating her husband in apoplectic rage because she can't jail nuns anymore. Spring has returned.

— Alex Yousif (@LibMarx93) February 13, 2026

We already know she has no morals - or personality.

Palestine Action: If Yvette Cooper had one iota of morality she would resign!!

— Martin O'Neill (@DrNostromo) February 13, 2026

Yvette Cooper should resign - or even better, Starmer should fire her. But Starmer won't fire a guy like Mandelson until he's really left with no choice. So I can't see that happening.

I can't see how Yvette Cooper manages to remain in govt. post end of this Palestine Action quashed conviction. I expect the Govt. to loose its appeal as well. She equated that PA where the same as AQ, ISIS, Combat18 - making a mockery of how serious terrorism is. She has to go!

— CronusTitan (@CronusTitan2) February 13, 2026

Did Cooper's top-secret information about Palestine Action ever come to light? Or did that disappear along with Cooper's last shred of integrity?

Has secret info' about Palestine Action only Yvette Cooper knew about been revealed yet, or are they in fact just a figment of her imagination?

— James Mealey (@Jamesmealey10) February 13, 2026

There's probably some blank piece of paper sitting in a folder marked 'classified' somewhere in London.

There is no question that Cooper should resign - along with any other shady minister that backed the Proscription of Palestine Action - yes, Luke Akehurst, I'm talking directly to you.

Yvette Cooper should resign, say Palestine Action activists
Palestine Action activists have called for former home secretary Yvette Cooper, who made the decision to proscribe the group last year, to resign.

In a speech outside the high court this morning, activist Lisa Minerva… pic.twitter.com/JEJOoLZ6Qg

— Gareth Jones Society

The UK's water and sewerage industry weaponised Labour's Universal Credit deductions cap to lobby for higher bill hikes - all with the aid of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Documents the Canary obtained via Freedom of Information (FOI) request reveal how industry body Water UK and Yorkshire Water separately lobbied regulator Ofwat ahead of Labour implementing the 15% cap on Universal Credit deductions.

What's more, figures they relied on to call for raising bills majorly conflict with data the Canary previously acquired from the DWP. Notably, Water UK cited a figure for the industry's annual deductions that was over four times the amount shown by the official government data.

So the documents exposed that not only did the industry cynically exploit the new deductions cap - but it appears it also inflated figures to do so.

DWP cap aiding greedy water companies

The Labour Party government first announced its so-called Fair Repayment Rate plans in the 2024 Autumn Budget.

In April 2025, the DWP brought the new cap into effect. It reduced the deductions the DWP can take on monthly payments for various debts to 15%.

However, as the Canary already highlighted, the half-assed measure amounted to little more than tinkering around at the edges of a vicious debt chasing mechanism. In effect, it merely extends claimants periods of indebtedness, instead of actually removing the debt. To make matters worse, built-in loopholes mean that for many, DWP deductions will still exceed the cap.

Nevertheless, in theory, it means that some claimants in debt will have more of their Universal Credit each month.

So of course, private sector corporations cashing in from the deductions regime weren't happy about this. Unsurprisingly, the water and sewage companies - sixth in line for deductions - was one such industry.

Water industry will lose out? Cry me a river

Less than a month after Labour announced the new cap, Water UK CEO David Henderson wrote to head of Ofwat David Black. He laid out how it would cause the industry to lose out on £200m in deductions over the next five years.

Naturally, the industry body also couldn't help but play the victim even more where migration to Universal Credit was concerned. In particular, it noted how people moving from legacy benefits like Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) would "become eligible" for the new cap. It argued that this could "increase bad debt further" for water firms. The implication was that the industry wouldn't be able to rob as many claimants of their welfare.

Following this, Yorkshire Water lobbied the regulator on 26 November 2024. In a letter headed RE: Impact of October Budget, the water firm wrote:

With the cap lowered to 15%, water charge arrears, ranked low in priority, face reduced success rates.

In the last year, we received £11 million from DWP payments, which could decrease by 50%.

Although this doesn't directly translate into bad debt, mitigating the impact will require increased debt recovery efforts and promotion of social tariffs, resulting in higher costs.

Predictably, both demanded greater 'allowances' to account for this. In simple terms, this would mean Ofwat increasing what it allows companies to charge - ergo, bill hikes for customers.

Bogus figures

Of course, the disparity between Water UK and Yorkshire Water's figures with the data the Canary obtained from the DWP also raises significant questions.

Water UK claimed industry deductions for 2024 sat at £100m. Meanwhile, Yorkshire Water suggested its slice of this alone came in at £11m.

By comparison, the DWP's data for a similar twelve-month period (March 2024 - February 2025) showed total deductions at £22m.

The first cause of the disparity could be because the department itself provided erroneous data.

However, the more plausible explanation is that Water UK and Yorkshire Water both inflated their figures to press for larger bill increases.

And notably, even Ofwat wasn't buying their calculations. Specifically, in its 'final determinations' for its 2024 price review of the industry, the regulator challenged the credibility of Water UK's claim that:

190,000 households were subject third-party deductions via Universal Credit in 2023-24, equivalent to around £100 million revenue.

Because, as it pointed out, on average this would work out at a £526 annual deduction per household. It commented how this:

seems very high relative to the average water bill.

This would be just shy of £44 a month. By contrast, the DWP's data showed that water company deductions were £20 a month on average.

Moreover, as Ofwat also highlighted:

Water UK also seem to assume that water companies can recover all the water bill through third party provision, which would be surprising given water companies are 6th in line behind other service providers (housing, accommodation, hostel, rent and service charges, gas and electricity).

Blaming welfare claimants for bill hikes

Already, the DWP's data is also throwing cold water on its far-fetched claims. The idea that the cap would cause the industry to lose out on £40m in Universal Credit deductions is preposterous. This is obviously not least because, according to official government data, 12 months of deductions are barely just over half of this in total. Furthermore, even the 40% drop in deductions is implausible.

Crucially, we now have the first few months worth of data that shows the effect the new cap is having on deductions. June saw a decrease of 22% from £1.8m to £1.4m. For July and August, the decrease was around 28% from £1.8m to £1.3m in each month respectively.

At the end of the day, the industry's figures don't add up. However, what's clear is that it tried to use welfare claimants to hike customer bills. And it sure seems like it attempted to wilfully mislead Ofwat to do this.

Of course, for the shameless profiteers that are privatised water, exploiting the hardships of its poorest customers is all-too on-brand.

Featured image via author

By Hannah Sharland

Trump's personal fascist militia are pulling out of Minneapolis. But undoubtedly, this not be the last we will be seeing of them.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other US state thugs terrorised locals for months — even killing two — as they sought to bring the city under control where their presence is fiercely contested.

ICE and border patrol operations are being carried out under the guise enforcing migration laws. However, there are stirrings of a full assault on US democracy — with new leaks showing how agents are now spying on American citizens who oppose them.

Border Czar Tom Homan said on 11 February:

A significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through next week.

Bizarrely, he claimed that the move was driven by a drop in local opposition to ICE thuggery.

A small footprint of personnel will remain for a period of time to close out and transition full command control back to the field office, as well as to ensure agitator activity continues to decline and that state and local law enforcement continue to respond to ensure officer and community safety.

Homan has previously moaned that ICE were treated meanly. This time around, he's arguing that violent officers going around — dressed like special forces soldiers — are lawful, labelling them:

legitimate federal law enforcement agency. We're not out scouring the streets to disappear people or deny people their civil rights or due process.

If you say so, Tom. The mirage doesn't fool us.

Critics suggested the withdrawal was due to the optics of militarised, masked thugs swaggering about the streets and beating people up:

ICE is backing out of Minneapolis because they see how poorly this operation polls with American public. That's the only reason they're retreating - because of polls, not people's safety.

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) February 12, 2026

And on 12 February a judge ruled that the Trump administration was breaching the constitutional rights of detainees in Minnesota by blocking access to legal counsel inside "ill-equipped" and "overcrowded" facilities.

Homan was sent in to replace Border Patrol's fun-size fascist-themed boss Greg Bovino. This is the same guy who  lost his job after the street execution of local nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents.

Attack on democracy

ICE chief Todd Lyons was questioned by lawmakers on 12 February. He tried to quash rumours ICE would 'guard' US polling stations. The notion that Trump's boot-boys would do so is widely seen as an open attack on the democratic process.

Trump has floated the idea of nationalizing (federalising, in US terms) American elections — pivoting away from the traditional model in which states maintain substantial power over election processes. This is usually referred to part of 'state's rights'.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) tested Lyons at a session of the Homeland Security Committee:

You listen to what the president and his cabinet are saying, I have to ask about our 2026 elections.

She continued:

The president says we should federalize our elections, even though the U.S. Constitution was written by our founders to give that power to the states so that we would never have a president who took too much power and tried to become a king.

Lyons told Slotkin:

So, ma'am, we're civil, obviously we do civil enforcement and criminal law enforcement There's no reason for us to deploy to a polling facility.

Challenged again, Lyons maintained ICE would have no role in election security. Slotkin back referred to Trump's own comments:

I'm talking about something that I think would be extraordinary in American history, which is uniformed and massed ice agents encircling polling places.

And it's not fantasy, it's not made up. These are things that the president and his cabinet have suggested. They've suggested invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow active duty military to do the very same thing.

Lyons again denied the possibility. Slotkin told him:

Great. Well, I hope that in the privacy of that meeting, when that comes down, and the president feels like he's going to lose the midterm elections, that you don't buckle.

But democracy isn't just about elections. It is about the freedom to organise and express yourself. And the Feds are trying to stop that too.

ICE spies

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) controls ICE. And DHS is spying on activists. US reporter Ken Klippenstein has seen leaked files telling us how:

The new program, called "masked engagement," allows homeland security officers to assume false identities and interact with users—friending them, joining closed groups, and gaining access to otherwise private postings, photographs, friend lists and more.

A senior DHS offical told Klippenstein:

that over 6,500 field agents and intelligence operatives can use the new tool, a significant increase explicitly linked to more intense monitoring of American citizens.

Masked engagement is a special category of surveillance. Unlike the more passive masked 'monitoring', 'engagement' operations give state security forces a licence to enter chats and groups to obtain intelligence.

The new practice of masked engagement allows for operations where a federal government employee or contractor uses fake identities or credentials that conceal their official affiliation.

ICE operate under the aegis of Trumpian anti-immigration policy. They are much more than that.

ICE are Trump's personal posse. The agency is there to discipline the US population — if necessary with lethal force. But, as Minnesotans have just shown us, ICE can be beaten on the streets.

We must take on board those lessons, and sustain the momentum.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

The UK High Court has decided that the interpretation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission's (EHRC) interim guidance on a bathroom ban for trans people is incorrect.

However, as has always been the case with this deeply transphobic piece of legislation, it is extremely difficult to parse because it is, at its core, nonsensical.

The Good Law Project challenged the EHRC's interim guidance in the High Court. The EHRC interpreted the Supreme Court's ruling on Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs) as the basis for a blanket ban on trans people using single-sex facilities.

Instead, the Good Law Project explained:

The High Court has now said that this interpretation of the law is wrong. Service providers may lawfully allow trans women to use women's facilities without being forced to open them to cis men. And such facilities may simply be labelled for 'men' and 'women'.

Put simply:

The court has also made clear that it will likely be discriminatory to force trans people to use facilities based on their sex recorded at birth. In short, the law does not require a bathroom ban.

Trans bathroom ban faces more opposition

The new ruling states:

[1] In workplaces, it is compulsory to provide sufficient single-sex toilets, as well as sufficient single-sex changing and washing facilities where these facilities are needed.

[2] It is not compulsory for services that are open to the public to be provided on single-sex basis or to have single-sex facilities such as toilets. These can be single-sex if it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim and they meet other conditions in the Act. However, it could be indirect sex discrimination against women if the only provision is mixed-sex.

Effectively, in workplaces, it is compulsory to provide single-sex spaces, but it is not compulsory in services that are open to the public.

Since the latest release of the Epstein files, a media circus has ensued over the political and business figures connected to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The giddy fervour from some corners has been evident as people work their way through a huge number of files featuring the most powerful and elite people we know.

In a world where sexual violence is much more commonplace than we might like to admit, it is unsurprising that Epstein and his cabal of violent predators are the focus, and not the people they tortured and abused. Academic Harsha Walia had a stark and insightful summary of the situation:

Sexual violence, especially of children, is not an otherwise perverse symptom of elite rule or empire - it is literally at the CENTER of how violence and domination is structured around the world. We cannot keep treating sexual violence as a "private" issue, or as "divisive" to movements, or weaponize it to settle other political scores.

It is how power reverberates and is reproduced.

Sexual violence - especially against children - is not an aberration in our societies. It is not exclusively the preserve of the elite or powerful. It is a function at the very core of neoliberal racial capitalism. Epstein was a well-documented white supremacist and Zionist, and that is at the heart of how he and his fellow paedophiles operated.

So why is it that leftists have spent considerable time and energy since the latest release of the files defending prominent fellow leftists who allied themselves with Epstein?

Epstein files show the misogynist rot within the left

One of the most prominent leftist names mentioned in the files is that of the revered Noam Chomsky. His work has been crucial for leftists, but the academic has long known to have been friends with Epstein. Fellow academic Chris Knight has had pieces claiming to explain the reasons behind the friendship published in both CounterPunch and Novara Media.

The latter publication ran the story with the headline:

There Are Two Noam Chomskys. The One You Love, and the One That Was Friends With Jeffrey Epstein

Along with the tagline:

Not a straightforward guy.

The CounterPunch article and the one posted on Novara are similar versions of effectively the same piece.

In the version published a few days later on Novara, Knight admits:

Emails released last month by the US Department of Justice, however, now make it difficult to respect Chomsky's views on anything at all.

How generous. By Knight's own admission:

The emails even reveal that shortly before Epstein's arrest and death, in July and August 2019, Chomsky was still intending to be interviewed for a documentary that Epstein was making. It seems Chomsky remained loyal to his cherished "friend" right until the end.

Chomsky was a loyal and steadfast friend of Epstein. Epstein was a known serial child rapist, child trafficker, and overseer of one of the most brutal and extensive grooming gangs in modern times. The details of such horrific crimes were an open secret even before the release of the files. Now that the files have been released, Chomsky's wife has described their close friendship with the dead paedophile as part of "serious errors in judgement."

Bizarre response

In both pieces, Knight muses on why Chomsky would have associated with Epstein. He makes it clear that Chomsky has a reputation for associating with people he should ostensibly have opposed - CIA directors, war hawks, and other reprehensible people. Knight maintains that:

Chomsky was at no point the perfectly principled radical intellectual admired by so many of his followers. If he had been, he would have resigned from MIT long ago. Yet, had he done so, he would never have come to know the US military establishment from the inside in a way that enabled him to become that establishment's most knowledgeable and assured critic.

Who needs Chomsky to be perfect? Perfection is a far cry from a close personal friendship with a notorious paedophile and sex trafficker. Chomsky didn't step down from MIT, or stop associating with rabid Zionists not as some kind of intellectual checkmate, but because he didn't want to.

Society is far too willing to dismiss the experiences of those living at the sharp end of racial capitalism as 'identity politics.' But, we're supposed to believe Chomsky needed to pal around with some of the most morally bankrupt people for research purposes? Please.

He knew exactly what he was doing. There is no duality or cognitive dissonance in Chomsky's behaviour. He knew exactly what was doing, and he did it for decades. How could one of the most pre-eminent researchers not know the extent of Epstein's crimes? Are we supposed to accept that he's a genius researcher who can't operate a simple Google search on the background of one of his best friends?

Business as usual

Knight's passionate defence of Epstein is an obscene rehabilitation, a loving re-casting of Chomsky as somehow duped, tricked, or seduced. Knight concludes that:

It would be foolish to stop learning from his writings. It would be equally foolish to gloss over his mistakes. Instead of deciding whether to cancel or exalt him as an individual, I suggest we prioritise developing what he advocates, however hypocritically: a revolutionary politics for our times.

Since the latest release of the Epstein files, who exactly has demanded we "stop learning" from Chomsky? In fact, what is actually happening is that people are parsing through a release of files that deliberately exposes and intimidates victims and survivors of Epstein.

The choice is not whether to accept or reject Chomsky, whether to rehabilitate or castigate him. Instead, the choice facing us is a moral one: do we infantilise and clean up Chomsky's actions, or do we accept that he repeatedly and knowingly chose to not only associate with, but loved a renowned pedophile and sex trafficker?

It is no choice at all.

I was raped as a child. Like many others who have been sexually abused, every time rape is discussed in the media, there are many all too willing to degrade the horror of abuse and defend those around the abusers. As such, the many attempts at rehabilitation of those implicated alongside Epstein in any way, whether Chomsky or anyone else, feel like an attempt to defend the rape that so many of us have had to come to terms with.

Knight - or someone from his team - offered a version of his above articles to the Canary. We immediately recognised that to publish such a thing would not only violate all of our values, it would also denigrate the experiences of victims and survivors. Shame on CounterPunch and Novara for giving a platform to the reprehensible attempt to clean up Chomsky's image or work.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

London-based deep tech startup Stanhope AI has closed a €6.7 million ($8 million) Seed funding round to advance what it calls a new class of adaptive artificial intelligence designed to power autonomous systems in the physical world. The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from Paladin Capital Group, Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund, UCL Technology Fund, and MMC Ventures. The company says its approach moves beyond the pattern-matching strengths of large language models, aiming instead for systems that can perceive, reason, and act with a degree of context awareness in uncertain environments. Stanhope is developing what it terms a…

This story continues at The Next Web

As we've reported, the Reform candidate in Gorton & Denton is the academic and establishment-insider Matt Goodwin. Goodwin is now attracting controversy because he wants to tell young women when to breed:

Reform by-election candidate calls for 'young girls' to be given 'biological reality' check

Matt Goodwin argued 'young girls' should be explained 'the biological reality' that 'many women in Britain are having children much too late in life'https://t.co/bz0y5apGEA

— Reform Party UK Exposed

The US House of Representatives has passed a bill requiring proof of US citizenship for anyone voting in the midterm elections.

The House - controlled by the Republicans, took the vote on 11 February 2026 ahead of the midterms in November.

The bill passed 218-213 to approve the SAVE America Act. Only one Democrat switched sides and backed the Republican bill.

The legislation will now move forward to the also Republican-led Senate. According to Reuters:

it is expected to receive a vote but unlikely to garner the 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority needed for passage.

Democrats said the bill will impose unnecessary burdens on American voters. Additionally, it will give Donald Trump even more electoral power.

Bullshit erosion of voting rights

The legislation first emerged during the 2024 presidential election campaign. It was driven by Trump's false claims that large numbers of people who were in the country 'illegally' had been voting in federal elections.

But let's not forget, you can't be illegal on stolen land.

A similar version of the bill passed the House twice - last April and in 2024. However, it died both times once it reached the Senate.

This vote came only a week after Trump called for Republicans to "nationalize" elections.

Along with requiring proof of citizenship to vote, it would also criminalise election officials who register anyone without the proper documentation.

Republicans also added a photo ID requirement for both in-person and mail-in voting.

However, it is already illegal for non US citizens to vote in federal elections. Additionally, the Center for Election Innovation and Research found that illegal voting is extremely rare.

It found:

CEIR continues to find that sweeping allegations about noncitizen registrations or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data. In every examined case, when claims about large numbers of noncitizens on voting rolls are subject to scrutiny and properly investigated, the number of alleged instances falls drastically. When investigations do turn up rare instances of improper registration or voting, officials take swift action to ensure that American elections remain secure.

So basically, it's just another right-wing nonsense talking point that Republican friends-of-nonces are using to both demonise migrants and shut down what little democracy the US has left.

Erosion of democracy

Democratic Party leaders told Reuters that the bill is an attempt to suppress the vote. It would also undermine their electoral chances at a time when they are favoured to take control of the House.

Recently, the Democrats won a seat in the Texas state Senate, which the Republicans are seeing as a wake-up call as well as a picture of what is to come if Trump's violent regime continues.

But the new legislation is nothing short of an attempt to erode democracy. Republicans know they are on borrowed time - and there is only so long their murderous, fascist police state can continue.

Republicans are running scared - millions of Americans have woken up since ICE agents murdered both Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood. Now, the Epstein files and the associated cover-up at the highest levels of government mean that Trump and his cronies will go to any length to hold onto power.

Because let's face it, once they lose that power, they're all ending up in jail.

Feature image via Reuters/YouTube

By HG

Nigel Farage has taken to X to declare that he can't be 'bullied' or 'bought', insisting that he has:

stood for the same principles for many decades.

However, others have pointed out the super-rich tax evader 'doth protest too much'. After all, it isn't hard to disprove Farage's statement when you scratch beneath the surface of his political project, Reform UK:

"Cannot be bought"

92% of Reform funding has come from climate changer deniers, the fossil fuel industry and larger polluters. pic.twitter.com/ngGNiVNhX6

— Chris Smith (@renewablesmiffy) February 12, 2026

Nigel Farage: protesting too much

Is Nigel Farage simply trying to say he's so 'bought' that no one else could change his perspective?

His funding from Iranian billionaire certainly raises questions over who he is willing to be bought by. As this X account pointed out:

"I can't be bought" says the man whose trip to Davos was financed by an obscure Iranian billionaire https://t.co/mvyrParvN3

— David (@Zero_4) February 12, 2026

He just simply tries to hide who has bought him, whilst actively working against the interests of the majority.

The Canary's own Rachel Swindon noted that Farage may win people over with charm, but the substance of his case quickly falls apart. She wrote recently:

Farage's personal brand — built on charisma and grievance — would crack, exposing a leader whose Trump playbook works for disruption but crumbles under responsibility and the scrutiny that comes with it.

A lack of scrutiny which Alan Lester highlights below:

It looks for all the world like "anti-global elite" Nigel Farage is obtaining huge donations by routing them from a "high risk" Kazakhstani / Iranian billionaire via a proxy company, flouting restrictions on foreign donations. pic.twitter.com/17H9CJfo0Y

— Alan Lester (@aljhlester) February 1, 2026

Oh, but the billionaire isn't that picky, and his price tag doesn't have to be 'huge'.

He's been known to sell videos for cash on Cameo, with no moral limit to the sorts of people he's prepared to endorse:

Must be a different Nigel Farage who someone recently tricked into videoing a glowing tribute for dead paedophile Iain Watkins - precisely because he *can* be bought for £98 on Cameo. pic.twitter.com/uD9EceV7Il

— Daniel Sugarman (@Daniel_Sugarman) February 12, 2026

Oh, the price tag gets even cheaper as Mukhtar reveals on X:

Nigel Farage: "I can't be bought."

Also, Nigel Farage on Cameo for £69.66

According to whistleblowers who spoke to Electronic Intifada (EI), press freedom organisation the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) binned its latest 'Impunity Index' because Israel was going to top the rankings.

On its 'About us' page, the CPJ says that it exists to:

defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal… reports on violations in repressive countries, conflict zones, and established democracies alike… [and] works with other organizations to ensure that justice prevails when journalists are imprisoned or killed.

Or maybe not, in this case.

Press freedom, except when we say

The CPJ Impunity Index has been published annually since 2008 and is a tool regularly used by the United Nations and human rights groups. It assesses the deliberate killing of journalists in which the killers are not punished. Israel already ranked second in the 2024 index, which measured killings in 2023 and covered only three months of its Gaza genocide.

The 2025 Index would have put Israel way ahead of any other nation - and, as The Electronic Intifada notes, it would have stayed there for years, spooking CPJ boss Jodie Ginsberg:

Since the Impunity Index usually covers a timeframe of 10 years, Israel would have been ranked near the top, if not number one, for many years to come," the whistleblowers argue.

They allege that Ginsberg "simply couldn't afford the heat she would get every year from the board, the pro-Israel donors and from Israel itself and its allies."

CPJ have denied that pressure from donors and board members played a role in the decision.

Israel has murdered hundreds of journalists in Gaza since the beginning of the genocide, along with - intentionally - more than 700 of their family members. It has also started targeting journalists in Lebanon. This is surely a reason to trumpet its impunity more loudly than ever.

Instead, Israel even gets impunity for its impunity.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

Israel's genocidal occupation military used thermal and thermobaric weapons on civilians in Gaza that 'evaporated' thousands of people, according to analysis by Al Jazeera.

Israel evaporated thousands of people

The broadcaster's investigation, 'The Rest of the Story', based on forensic data analysis rather than estimates, found that 2,842 Palestinians were "evaporated" by the mostly US-made weapons. Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal described the "method of elimination" used by rescuers at strike sites. This compared known numbers of people inside a targeted building with their remains recovered afterwards:

If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we only classify the remaining two as 'evaporated' after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces, citing blood spray or small fragments such as skull fragments.

Basal emphasised that classification occurs only after thorough searches of rubble, hospitals, and morgues produce no identifiable remains. Given Israel's blockade of bulldozers and other clearance equipment, it is likely that many more such deaths remain unclassified.

Military experts interviewed by Al Jazeera said that the occupation uses thermobaric and thermal weapons to obliterate the population across a wide area. These "vacuum" or "aerosol" bombs disperse a cloud of flammable vapour that is then ignited into an enormous explosion that produces extreme heat and a massive blast wave. Horrifying footage of Israel using such a weapon was captured in 2025:

Shocking

The experts told the station that Israel modifies the bombs it uses to make them even more devastating:

To prolong the burning time, powders of aluminum, magnesium and titanium are added to the chemical mixture…this raises explosion temperatures to between 2,500 and 3,000 degrees Celsius.

Crematoria typically use temperatures of 850-1150 Celsius to incinerate bodies.

Israel has murdered around 700,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This figure has been disputed by Israeli propagandists, but tallies with US president Donald Trump's statement that around 1.5 million people remain in Gaza that must be removed for his notorious 'peace' plan. Gaza's pre-genocide population was around 2.2-2.3m.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

Beth Winter has announced that she is standing as an independent MP for the Welsh Valleys in the upcoming Senedd election. The former Labour MP launched her campaign to be MP for Pontypridd, Cynon and Merthyr on social media.

Former Labour MP Winter running as 'independent voice'

Winter announced on the 13 Februay that she wanted to be:

A Community Independent Voice for our Valleys

In a statement posted on social media, she said she was standing because this is her home. Winter says that the valleys' "proud working class traditions" are:

proof that when organised we can take control and keep wealth in our communities.

She doesn't shy away from the fact that people are struggling and are disillusioned with Westminster politics, which doesn't serve working-class communities. This is, of course, like many communities, leaving the door open for Reform:

Today, people across the South Wales Valleys face rising bills, insecure work, poverty, and the growing threat of climate collapse. Too many families are forced to choose between heating and eating, while extreme wealth continues to grow. These injustices and inequalities aren't inevitable. They are the result of political choices, and must be challenged.

People are disillusioned and have lost trust in politicians. The vacuum that has emerged is being exploited by the far right. We cannot allow this to take root in our communities.

An MP actually from the community for the community

Instead of falling for the far-right, Winter is asking people to look at how much grassroots politics is needed in her community

It's clear there's a desire to break from establishment politics that is failing our communities. We need grassroots, community-based politics rooted in social justice, equality, peace and environmental responsibility - with real power and resources in the hands of people in Wales.

Winter makes it clear in her statement that she wants to work with and for the people she serves. In a bold move, with the community in mind, she pledges not to take a huge MP salary if elected.

This is why if elected to the Senedd I would only take a salary equal to my previous trade union employment, with the remainder made available to initiatives focused on community organising, education and training: local campaigns and community wealth building initiatives

She says that if she were elected, she would "not be beholden to any party". Which is possibly not just a dig at Labour, but also at Your Party too.

Smear campaign against Sultana and MOU Operations

Most recently, Winter got caught up in a smear campaign to discredit Zarah Sultana within Your Party. Winter was one of three directors of MOU Operations, which handled the data and finances of YP, along with Jamie Driscoll and Andrew Feinstein.

They ended up at the centre of an absolute shit storm around who controlled membership data after Sultana announced the membership portal was open, then Jeremy Corbyn, confusingly, promptly disowned the portal.

MOU Operations were painted as the ones stopping the funds and membership data being handed over. However, through leaked emails and WhatsApp messages, The Canary revealed that it was actually Your Party blocking MOU Operations.

The leak also showed that MOU Operations had no involvement in the new portal being announced and that Your Party knew this, despite this, several YP members still smearing MOU Operations.

Winter, Driscoll, and Feinstein announced their resignations from MOU Operations on 30 October, saying in a statement

We have been extraordinarily patient, and tried to resolve this quietly behind the scenes. Your Party have claimed in emails and social media statements that we delayed the data transfer. We repeatedly asked them to stop making factually incorrect claims of this nature. They gave hostile briefings to journalists. We behaved with integrity.

Driscoll has since joined the Green Party. With Winter now running as an independent, this show just how little faith the grassroots left has in Your Party.

A real community-minded MP for South Wales

Winter's would-be constituents are already celebrating the move, with comments on Facebook saying she's made the "choice of who to vote for easy". Others celebrated that someone from their own community would be representing them, instead of a "parachuted in" candidate.

Winter is someone who represents working-class socialist politics, we need more like her in this fight against fascism. not just from Reform but from the Labour government too. You can donate to Winter's campaign here.

Featured image via the Canary

By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

Just 51.9% of British Muslims say they strongly feel they belong in the UK. This marks a dramatic fall from the 93% reported in a 2016 Ipsos MORI survey. The new figures come from one of the largest ever socio-economic studies of British Muslims.

British Muslims feeling increasingly unsafe

A respondent to the Muslim Census survey said:

This is my country but I am told I'm not welcome. I fear for my family and friends who are Muslim.

The findings, titled The Crisis of Belonging, were published by Muslim Census survey in partnership with Islamic Relief UK and the National Zakat Foundation. They reveal a community grappling with rising Islamophobia, political hostility, and a growing sense of alienation. And this is the case even among those born and raised in Britain:

I was born and educated in the UK, I have over 20 years experience as a qualified solicitor. I have seen attitudes towards Muslims deteriorate dramatically and this has been on a steady decline in the last few years.

Respondents repeatedly describe a country that feels increasingly hostile. They cite media, political rhetoric, and the rise of the far right as driving feelings of fear, exclusion, and insecurity. Many say they no longer feel safe identifying as Muslim in public:

I grew up with racism and Islamophobia back in the 80s. Then life felt good. I felt part of the fabric of society. My contributions felt valued and impactful. Now I do not admit to being from the UK, because the UK government and many people in power and the media make me feel unwanted and less than. Instead I say I'm from Liverpool. The only place in the UK I do feel part of and valued within.

Others speak openly of considering emigration or having a "Plan B" should conditions worsen:

I was born here but no longer feel safe here as a Muslim and am looking to move abroad if I can.

One person said:

I was born and brought up here and have lived a mainstream British life… I have always felt totally British. I feel less so in this decade and do daydream about a Plan B elsewhere.

Another described:

We are seriously considering our plans to leave the UK should a more right-wing government come into power.

Financial hardship

Alongside this erosion of belonging, the census survey of 4,800 British Muslims exposes widespread but largely hidden financial hardship. This often gets masked by misleading income figures and compounded by stigma around seeking help.

The research reveals:

• 29.4% struggled to pay at least one household bill in the past year.
• 43% relied on borrowing, including credit cards or family loans, to meet the cost of living.
• 1 in 12 missed meals due to financial difficulty, including 6% of full-time workers.
• Among Black African Muslims, 1 in 5 report going hungry in the past year.

Despite such documented hardship, the uptake of support is strikingly low:

• 63% of those who went hungry did not use food banks this past year.
• When people sought help, they turned first to family or local councils, with just 4.2% using Zakat organisations.
• Only 2% of respondents requested Zakat or emergency charitable support in the past year.

Zakat is a compulsory act of worship in Islam, one of the five pillars of the faith. It requires Muslims who possess wealth above a certain threshold (called the Nisab) to donate a portion (typically 2.5%) of their qualifying wealth to those eligible to receive it.

The survey identifies lack of awareness and discomfort from respondents in asking for help as major barriers to accessing support. And yet, whilst poverty and a need for support is widespread, generosity remains exceptionally high. 80.7% of respondents still paid their Zakat this past year.

Rebuilding trust and belonging

As chief executive of the National Zakat Foundation, Dr Sohail Hanif has real clarity on the challenging circumstances facing British Muslims:

I travel across the country every week and meet people from many different backgrounds, faiths, and walks of life. What's clear in the 2026 Muslim Census survey is a shared sense of uncertainty and a feeling that trust between communities has weakened in recent years.

This isn't something felt just by Muslims, but across communities more broadly. Rebuilding trust and strengthening British Muslims' sense of belonging in the UK will take time and effort, but it's essential if communities are to feel connected, confident, and hopeful about the future.

The Muslim Census survey signals a growing recognition across the sector that data must drive decision-making and that understanding the realities of British Muslims is not just an academic exercise, but a prerequisite for effective charitable intervention, community support, and advocacy.

The survey concludes that British Muslims are not a community in crisis. Rather, the community is experiencing hidden need, masked by misleading income figures and divisive narratives in the media and British politics.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

You've seen this movie before: A disheveled man (Sam Rockwell) busts into a restaurant, threatening to blow up the joint unless a crew of people joins him. Like Groundhog Day, he's been through this countless times before, and he immediately starts recounting otherwise unknowable details to convince the diner patrons. Like 12 Monkeys, he's from the future — the timely twist in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is that, rather than a world-ending virus, he needs help preventing a humanity-ending AI from being born. 

Good Luck is more of a primal scream than a thoughtful articulation about where everything went wrong. There's a bit of "old man yells at cloud" energy here (director Gore Verbinski is 61, and screenwriter Matthew Robinson is 47), but it fits the film's satirical tone. Looking around at the world today, who doesn't wish they could warn their past selves about the tech industry and the new ruling class it helped breed. 

Rockwell's character eventually wrangles a ragtag crew of future saviors: Mark and Janet (Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz), a married couple of high school teachers; Susan (Juno Temple), a distraught mother; and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a sad woman wearing a princess dress. There's also Asim Chaudhry's Scott, who mostly serves as comic relief, but doesn't get any real backstory like the others. 

Good Luck wastes no time fleshing out its present near-dystopia in episodic chapters. It turns out Mark and Janet are also on the run from smartphone-obsessed high schoolers, who spend their days scrolling through endless TikTok-like feeds. Susan is forced to confront a horrific situation around her son (I won't get into specifics here, but it's a distinctly American phenomenon). And Ingrid is literally allergic to Wi-Fi and smart devices, which makes it hard to fit into the modern world. 

Each of these scenarios play out like mini Black Mirror episodes. Everything is heightened to the absurd, and all the problems can be traced back to unchecked technological encroachment and capitalism. Nothing subtle there. The glimpses of an apocalyptic future are even less so — all we see are destroyed cities, people trapped in VR headsets (which place them in an AI-generated reality) and robots hunting down anti-AI humans. 

Sam Rockwell in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.Briarcliff Entertainment

Good Luck is at its best when it's simply having fun. As Rockwell and crew make their way to their final destination — a child who is about to invent true AI — they encounter pig-faced assassins, Stepford-esque parents and an adorably horrific kaiju. Even when faced with half-baked scripts, Verbinski always manages to impress visually (think back to the creepiness of The Ring, or the wildly entertaining set pieces in Pirates of the Caribbean). That's as true as ever here, where the final scene evokes the hyper-tech chaos of Akira.

As much as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, evokes classic sci-fi, it still can't hold a candle to the sheer terror of seeing AI unleash a nuclear bomb in Terminator 2. And despite its zanines, it doesn't reach the madcap heights of Gilliam's Brazil or 12 Monkeys. But if you're sick of having AI products shoved down your throat, and you think the notion of "true AI" is a farce, it's a fun way to channel your rage.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/good-luck-have-fun-dont-die-rails-against-ai-in-style-154437854.html?src=rss

Meta has backed away from highly controversial facial recognition tech in its products and services before, but seemingly not so far that it isn't willing to have another crack at it. A new report from The New York Times claims Mark Zuckerberg's company wants to add facial recognition to its lineup of branded smart glasses at some point this year.

The NYT spoke to four anonymous people with knowledge of Meta's plans, who told the publication that the feature is codenamed "Name Tag" internally. As you'd expect, it would let people wearing Meta-powered Oakley or Ray-Ban glasses identify people and "get information about them" using AI.

Such technology naturally carries huge privacy and ethical risks, which is reportedly why Meta was hesitant to unveil Name Tag at a conference for the blind last year. It also may have shelved plans to include facial recognition in the first version of its smart glasses, which launched in 2023.

In an internal memo from Meta's Reality Labs viewed by the NYT, Meta said that the current political instability in the US presents a good opportunity for it to push ahead with its plans. "We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns," it said.

With the smart glasses market expected to become more competitive in the coming years, Meta seemingly believes facial recognition would give it an edge on rival products from the likes of OpenAI. As for how it would work, the company is considering its options. It could recognize people the wearer is already connected to via one of Meta's apps, or potentially display information from public Instagram accounts. The NYT's sources said that universal facial recognition, effectively allowing you to look up the identity of anyone you walked past, would not be possible.

Meta shut down Facebook's Face Recognition system, used when tagging people in photos, in 2021, following widespread public backlash over privacy concerns. Three years later, it brought it back, this time as a tool for Instagram and Facebook designed to detect scam ads that use the faces of celebrities and other public figures. Last year Meta rolled out the feature beyond the US, so Facebook and later Instagram users in the UK, Europe and South Korea could also use it on their accounts.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/meta-is-reportedly-working-to-bring-facial-recognition-to-its-smart-glasses-144721330.html?src=rss

Prices for router and set-top boxes up nearly sevenfold, squeezing telcos and raising deployment costs

Prices for memory used in routers and set-top boxes are surging nearly sevenfold thanks to AI, raising fresh fears that the industry's silicon binge could leave telcos scrambling to get customers online.…

MINNEAPOLIS ­— The struggle that killed Alex Pretti began with a shove. It ended with gunshots.

In the final moments before he was shot and killed by federal authorities in Minneapolis, Pretti attempted to intervene in a confrontation where several­ federal agents were shoving two women. In videos from the scene, Pretti crosses the street and places himself between the officers and the women before being pepper-sprayed, separated from the group, beaten, and shot multiple times.

"I could tell the second that I laid eyes on him that he was horrifically injured."

One of the women involved in the confrontation, who was the closest civilian to Pretti when he was killed, said that in the immediate aftermath of the shooting she identified herself as an emergency medical technician and moved to perform CPR. Federal agents restrained her, said the woman, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution by the government.

The woman, a registered EMT whose credentials were confirmed by The Intercept, said in an exclusive interview that it was apparent Pretti had suffered serious injuries and needed medical help.

"I could tell the second that I laid eyes on him that he was horrifically injured," the EMT recalled. "I immediately said, 'I'm an EMT! He has a brain injury! He has a serious brain injury! I need to help him right now.'"

In videos of the shooting, the EMT repeatedly exclaims that Pretti is "decorticate posturing" — a medical term for the curling and movements of the limbs after suffering severe brain trauma. Then, Pretti's body went completely limp. Videos show the EMT frantically pleading with one of the officers as other agents begin to surround Pretti's body.

"I was literally begging the agent who was holding me back to let me do CPR," she recalled. "Because I knew that if he wasn't pulseless at that point already, he was going to become pulseless very, very soon."

Immediately following the shooting, the EMT, who was carrying trauma supplies at the scene, attempted to reach Pretti before being intercepted and held back by a masked officer. The medic's identity and place at the scene were corroborated by an attorney with the Minnesota branch of the National Lawyers Guild. The EMT's account of events is supported by publicly available video evidence and court documents.

Government agencies have an obligation to give basic health care to people that they have arrested or detained, according to to Xavier de Janon, the director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild.

"If government agencies fail to keep someone alive and there is proof that it their fault, they could be liable for their actions."

"The responsibility of the government is to make sure that the person in their custody is cared for and alive," de Janon said. "If government agencies fail to keep someone alive and there is proof that it's their fault, they could be liable for their actions."

Neither the Border Patrol nor its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, the two agencies reportedly responsible for killing Pretti, responded to requests for comment.

The EMT said that while Pretti's injuries were so severe it was unlikely he could be saved, critical minutes passed between the shooting and the time when another bystander first rendered aid — a period when the EMT was trying to get access to Pretti.

"They were hellbent on not allowing anybody to help him until he was dead," she said. "I was right there, and they — all of them — made the decision to deny me access to give him the best possible chance of survival."

Before the Shooting

For more than two months, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have been besieged by agents from CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agents arrived as part of a sweeping nationwide assault on liberal cities carried out in the form of a massive immigration crackdown.

In Minneapolis, federal authorities have shot at least three people and injured scores more as their operations unfolded. Weeks earlier, federal agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old artist, while she was unarmed and inside of her vehicle.

It was against this backdrop of state violence that the EMT went in her capacity as a medic to the intersection of 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, where Pretti would later be killed. She was responding to a call for help sent out over one of the many rapid response channels that Minneapolis residents use to track and warn residents about federal immigration agents.

Related "Uptick in Abductions": ICE Ramps Up Targeting of Minneapolis Legal Observers

"There's medics dispersed in pretty much all of the rapid response networks," she said. "People try to be available to dispatch across the city because the rate of them harming people — it's just so high at this point."

On the day of Pretti's death, immigration agents were gathered outside of a donut shop in the Whittier neighborhood of South Minneapolis. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino claimed in a statement that officers arrived on the scene in pursuit of a "violent criminal illegal alien." A subsequent review by Minnesota officials found that the man border patrol agents claimed to be pursuing had no violent criminal convictions on record in the state.

Observer footage filmed on the day of the shooting captured the EMT and another woman standing in the street before an agent approaches them and begins shoving them across the road.  

"He was really kind of sending me flying backwards," the EMT recalled. "I was having to kind of run and stumble backwards to not fall."

As the women are pushed to the other side of the roadway, Pretti can be seen farther down the street, attempting to wave a car through the scene. Suddenly, he appears to notice the agents closing in on the civilians and changes course to intercept the officers.

In a statement following the shooting, DHS officials claimed that Pretti "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." The EMT said that was not true.

"He very clearly came over to assist me and the other woman as we were being hurt," she recalled. "My first recognition that he was present was feeling his arm around my waist and me looking at him and feeling very grateful that he prevented me from falling onto the sidewalk."

Read our complete coverage

Chilling Dissent

Video footage captured by another bystander shows that just as Pretti managed to stabilize the EMT, agents shoved the other woman to the ground. As Pretti and the EMT attempt to help her stand up, multiple agents surround the group and begin to spray them with cans of chemical irritant. Some of the agents continue pursuing the women, while others separate Pretti from the group and begin beating him.

"I was saying to the agents, "We're leaving! We're leaving. We're leaving!' — just trying desperately to like get them to stop," the EMT said.

She realized later, watching the video, that the same agent who grabbed her was one of the officers who shot Pretti.

Bull From Bovino

In a press conference on the day of the shooting, Greg Bovino claimed that the agents had fired "defensive shots" after "fearing for their lives."

Videos taken on the scene, however, show that, in the moments just prior to the shooting, the agent who fired the first shot at Pretti was preoccupied with attempting to pepper spray the other woman nearby. He only turns and fires multiple shots into Pretti's body after another agent exclaimed that the slain nurse had a gun.  

In the wake of the killing, President Donald Trump's border czar Tom Homan claimed that Customs and Border Protection officers had attempted to render aid immediately. That did not jibe with the account of a pediatrician who witnessed the killing from a nearby apartment complex and arrived on the scene minutes later. An affidavit from the pediatrician filed in federal court closely matches the EMT's account.

The doctor claimed that, when she arrived, agents initially prevented her from treating Pretti, had not administered CPR, and were not sure whether he had a pulse. She testified that the agents standing around Pretti's body "appeared to be counting his bullet wounds," rather than administering lifesaving care. After some time, the physician was allowed to approach Pretti.

It is unclear why agents neglected to perform CPR on Pretti following the shooting. Immediately commencing CPR on cardiac arrest is standard medical practice, and neglecting or delaying the process can significantly increase a patient's chance of death. The EMT only wishes, she said, that she could have attempted to treat Pretti.

"The trauma of that is significant," she said. "He didn't get the final act of kindness of someone trying to render him aid."

"All he did was try and help two people who were being hurt by ICE agents."

Pretti was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital shortly after being transported there. Following the shooting, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem characterized him as a "domestic terrorist."

The EMT, however, thinks Pretti's actions that day may have prevented other civilians from being attacked by federal agents in the same manner.

"I think he easily could have saved me and the other woman's life," she said. "All he did was try and help two people who were being hurt by ICE agents."

The post The Woman Alex Pretti Was Killed Trying to Defend Is an EMT. Federal Agents Stopped Her From Giving First Aid. appeared first on The Intercept.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat running for Senate in Texas, wants people to know she isn't taking corporate PAC money — in her Senate campaign. 

"In this Senate race I have not taken any corporate PAC money," Crockett told the Texas journalist Tashara Parker last month. "People don't know that because my report hasn't come out yet. But they will."

But according to her most recent campaign filings, Crockett has a loophole that lets her use corporate PAC money to help fuel her Senate run — by transferring it from her House campaign. 

Crockett's latest filings with the Federal Election Commission show that she transferred at least $26,500 in donations from corporate PACs — including those representing CVS, Home Depot, AT&T, and Wells Fargo — from her House campaign to her Senate campaign on December 19.

"It relies on technicality that you can say 'I'm not accepting contributions to my Senate campaign from corporate PACs,'" said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at the government transparency group OpenSecrets. "But they can't say that there's no corporate money flowing through her Senate campaign, because it's obviously not true." 

Throughout her time in office, Crockett's stance on corporate PAC money has shifted. She was the beneficiary of millions of dollars in spending by cryptocurrency PACs in her 2022 congressional campaign, and she's taken more than $315,000 from corporate PACs affiliated with the crypto, defense, insurance, pharmaceutical, and banking industries since 2023. She's sworn off that cash while running against state Rep. James Talarico in Texas's Democratic Senate primary, now less than three weeks away, in a cycle that's being largely defined by battles over outside spending. Early voting in the race begins on Tuesday.

"As I understand it, it looks like Rep. Crockett didn't have a hard and fast personal policy about rejecting corporate PAC money for her House campaigns. Now, as she runs for Senate, she's drawing a different line," said Michael Beckel, director of money in politics reform at Issue One, a nonprofit that works on campaign finance reform.

"Even if they've benefited from dark money or corporate PAC money in the past, lawmakers who stand up to a broken campaign finance system should be cheered," Beckel said. "That said, if politicians say they are taking steps to fight the broken campaign finance system, voters want them to walk the walk."

Crockett's campaign did not provide a comment by time of publication.

Speaking to Parker, Crockett suggested that questions about her corporate PAC support that have been raised since she launched her Senate campaign were a distraction from the party's goal to elect a Democratic senator from Texas. Crockett also criticized her opponent, Talarico, who has also said he's rejecting corporate PAC money but whose last campaign was largely funded by a casino PAC bankrolled by Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson.

"If politicians say they are taking steps to fight the broken campaign finance system, voters want them to walk the walk."

"At the end of the day, taking money on behalf of a corporation is taking money on behalf of a corporation, no matter whose name is on it," Crockett said.

Both Crockett and Talarico also have super PACs working on their behalf.

Crockett's House campaign received the corporate PAC contributions in question between March and November and cashed several of the checks months after they were received, four of them after she launched her Senate campaign on December 8. (FEC rules require committees to cash any checks within ten days of their receipt.) Crockett then transferred all of the corporate PAC contributions in question to her Senate campaign on December 19. 

A spokesperson for the FEC said the agency could not comment on the activities of specific candidates.

It's not unusual for some time to pass between when a campaign donor mails a check or makes an electronic transfer and when a committee marks that money as received, Glavin said. "But when we're talking about months, that's different." 

According to Beckel, "There are frequently disparities between when a corporate PAC reports issuing a check and when a candidate reports cashing it, but lengthy disparities raise questions." He pointed to recent reporting indicating that Crockett has not named a campaign manager, and said "the delayed deposits of campaign contributions raise questions about who she has hired to do her campaign finance compliance." 

When she first ran for the Texas State House in 2020, Crockett campaigned hard against corporate PAC money. In a Twitter post four days before her Democratic primary that July, Crockett hit her opponent for being funded by corporate PACs and special interests, noting that she had taken zero dollars from either. 

That was no longer true by the following month. Crockett's state campaign started accepting corporate PAC money after she won her primary and advanced to the general election, where she ran unopposed. She took $11,500 from corporate PACs and companies throughout that campaign, including PACs for AT&T, Atmos Energy, Centene, and Comcast. 

By the time she ran for Congress in 2022, Crockett was the beneficiary of the second largest amount spent by special interest groups on House candidates that cycle, Axios reported. The bulk of the funding came in the form of more than $2.7 million from two crypto PACs, including Sam Bankman-Fried's now-defunct Protect Our Future PAC. Another Bankman-Fried-funded super PAC aligned with Democrats spent a little over $7,800 supporting Crockett. She also received just over $93,400 in support from PACs for the progressive groups Texas Organizing Project and the Working Families Party. 

Since Crockett entered Congress in 2023, she's taken more than $315,000 from corporate PACs. Among them are PACs for Comcast, Blackrock, DoorDash, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Cigna, and Home Depot. 

Crockett has said she wants people working at large corporations, many of which have offices in her district, like Goldman Sachs, to feel like they can support her campaign. Last year, she raised concerns that new House maps in Texas might cut large companies out of her district. "This means that I don't have Southwest Airlines, or JSX Airlines, or Dallas Love Airport or Downtown or AT&T or Goldman Sachs," she said, "and the list goes on, of amazing companies and corporations that I'm typically bringing in to make sure that we can talk about economic opportunities for the people that live in my district."

She's also said her receipt of corporate PAC money has never affected her vote on policy issues. 

"No one's ever questioned whether or not my record was tied to any money," Crockett told Parker. "At the end of the day, I've always had relationships. Especially with me representing downtown, because I've got to look out for people and make sure they got jobs, make sure that I'm pushing them to the limit when I'm looking at their diversity or lack thereof." 

Several of the companies whose PACs have supported Crockett have been linked to Trump, including several which rolled back diversity policies under his administration, like Home Depot, Walmart, and Target. One of the crypto firms that contributed to Crockett's congressional campaign gave $1 million to Trump's 2025 inauguration committee. 

In 2023, as Crockett sought a seat on the Financial Services Committee, her colleagues in the House raised concerns about having members on the committee who'd received support from the crypto industry. She's also taken votes that benefit the companies in the crypto, banking, and defense industries after taking money from their PACs. 

After taking money from crypto PACs and several executives at crypto firms, Crockett voted for both the GENIUS Act and the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, both of which the majority of her party — including most of her fellow Texas Democrats — opposed. The crypto industry supported both bills, and President Donald Trump widely praised the GENIUS Act. 

Crockett was joined by four other Texas Democrats, including Reps. Henry Cuellar and Marc Veasey, in voting to pass the GENIUS Act last year. Seven Texas Democrats voted against the measure, which also split the broader party, with 110 Democrats voting against it and 102 voting for it. (More than 200 Republicans voted in favor.) Critics have said that the measure would help Trump further enrich himself. 

Related NY Democratic House Candidate Works for Palantir Partners Pushing AI Border Surveillance

The year prior, Crockett broke with 133 Democrats to support the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, joining the minority of 71 Democrats who voted for the measure along with 208 Republicans. She was again one of five Texas Democrats to support the bill, while seven opposed it. 

Crockett has also taken votes that benefit her campaign supporters in the defense industry. 

In January, she voted with the majority of Democrats for a national security appropriations bill that would send additional weapons to Israel. Fifty-seven Democrats voted against the measure. 

Crockett has received more than $20,000 in contributions from corporate PACs representing weapons manufacturers supplying Israel with weapons it's using to carry out the genocide in Gaza, including Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Raytheon. 

Crockett's campaign did not respond to questions about how she would approach policies related to cryptocurrency regulation or U.S. military support for Israel if elected to the Senate.

The post Jasmine Crockett Swears Off Corporate Cash — But Transferred Thousands From Her House Campaign appeared first on The Intercept.

Anthropic has just closed a $30 billion Series G funding round, pushing its valuation to $380 billion and catapulting it into the rarefied ranks of the most valuable private tech companies in the world. The financing was led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment firm Coatue, with backing from a long list of global institutions, including D.E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX, alongside strategic participation from existing tech investors. That valuation is roughly double what Anthropic was worth at its last funding round in 2025, when it raised $13 billion at a $183 billion post-money…

This story continues at The Next Web

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster child for this phenomenon.

After paying Trump his $16 million bribe, CBS and Skydance (Trump's friends in the Ellison family) recently finalized their $8 billion merger. It didn't take long for the company to announce that the only way it could pay for the debt of the pointless deal is by firing a whole bunch of people in "painful" fashion.

Despite a lot of promises last summer by Paramount executives that the layoffs would come in one fell swoop, CBS News boss Bari Weiss has implemented staggered cuts as she converts what was left of CBS into yet another safe space for right wing autocrats and their dwindling cult.

Apparently "a lot of people" at CBS News are taking Weiss up on a January town hall promise of buyouts for those insufficiently deferential to Larry Ellison's ambitions:

"They include at least six producers out of the show's total of roughly 20, according to another source, who added: "Seems like people are jumping ship."

"It's a lot of people," a CBS insider said."

In her head, I really do think Weiss believes she's reshaping CBS News into a better news organization. In reality, Weiss was specifically hired by billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison to convert CBS into yet another autocrat-friendly safe space for the perpetually aggrieved.

Weiss' problem to date has been that she's not just bad at management, judgment, and journalism, she's bad at ratings-grabbing agitprop — the real reason she was hired by billionaires in the first place.

Weiss' inaugural "town hall" with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, her new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps — and the network's decision to air a story lying about the ICE murder of Nicole Good — spurred a revolt among the CBS journalists who hadn't quit yet.

Weiss' weird ego trip is playing out alongside the old traditional failures of mindless media consolidation, the last refuge of executives who are all out of original ideas, but desperately want to goose quarterly earnings, generate temporary tax cuts, and get "savvy dealmaker" stamped on their LinkedIn profile.

The thing is, merger related promises both before and after the deal are always meaningless. The layoffs are driven by debt from acquisitions, and the new CBS has been making plenty of those, including a new $7.7 billion deal to acquire the exclusive rights to MMA fights, a costly campaign to steal Warner Brothers, and that $150 million deal to acquire Bari Weiss' lazy contrarian propaganda blog.

Larry Ellison clearly wants to hoover up what's left of corporate media (including CBS, CNN, HBO) — and fuse it with his co-ownership of TikTok to create a sort of Hungary-esque autocratic state media. The only thing saving us from this outcome to date is the fact that absolutely nobody in this weird assortment of nepobabies and brunchlords appears to have absolutely any idea what they're doing.

The political and media establishment are clearly desperate to put a spanner in the Green Party's massive surge since the election of current leader Zack Polanski. The part's firm stance against Zionism has become central to this. And the establishment's latest scramble to smear Greens for opposing Israel's genocidal settler-colonial project in Palestine seems unlikely to be successful.

Green Party "Zionism is Racism" motion attracts smears

There have historically been different strains of Zionism — the Jewish nationalist movement behind the colonisation of Israel. But the dominant form today is a supremacist extremism that empowers racism, apartheid, and genocide. Zionism is not Judaism, no matter how much Israel's leaders and cheerleaders want to blur the line.

Now, Green members are campaigning for a spring conference motion that seeks to acknowledge that "Zionism is Racism" and declare the party as "an Anti-Zionist Party." They also seek a rejection of cynical attempts to "equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism" in order "to silence legitimate criticism" of Israel.

The motion is fundamentally about equality, freedom, and democracy. And if it passes, author Matt Kennard says:

This will be a watershed moment in British politics.

Israel's genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory of Gaza has fuelled a growing movement to end the apartheid state's crimes once and for all. And pro-Israel shills know full well that the Greens, under the leadership of a Jewish leader who stands in solidarity with Palestine, are helping to mainstream criticism of Israeli colonialism.

As a result, the smears are intensifying:

Green Party will likely vote to be first major UK political party that is anti-Zionist at its Spring Conference (Motion A105)

This will be a watershed moment in British politics

So the subversion steps up. This absurd article is the beginning

Anti-Zionism is anti-fascism pic.twitter.com/oP9PfM0X0L

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) February 12, 2026

Thanks to strong progressive positions, the Green Party has quickly grown to over 190,000 members in recent months. And it has taken clear positions in support of Palestine under Polanski, like calling for the proscription of Israel's occupation forces as a terrorist group.

But the party was previously more timid on Palestinian rights. And clearly there are some members still sympathetic to Israeli colonialism. Because one member has now told the historically racist Daily Mail (of all papers) that they reported fellow members to "counter-terrorism police" over the new motion on Zionism.

Green councillor Andrée Frieze, meanwhile, joined with others to criticise the "tone of, and language in, the motion". But while pro-Israel voices might dislike it, it represents pretty basic progressive positions on Israeli colonialism:

Lubna Speitan—Palestinian Green Party member and a member of the Greens For Palestine Steering Group—has proposed this important motion for the Spring Conference.

I endorse all of it. It should all be Green Party policy. Basic stuff for a progressive party.

Motion A105:…

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) January 26, 2026

Some observers believe this will be a real test for the Greens. But recent positions suggest that the majority of members will indeed lean into even stronger positions that meaningfully challenge Israeli war criminals and their cheerleaders.

Smears feed off timidity

Today, there are still attempts from pro-Israel propagandists to smear anti-genocide campaigners as antisemites. And such voices routinely claim that seeking accountability and consequences for Israel's genocidal mass extermination of Gaza's population is somehow "hateful".

But the widespread pro-Israel smears against the left during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party were a learning moment. If you give propagandists an inch, they'll take a mile. So the best way to challenge them is to call out their bullshit clearly and immediately.

No religious discrimination is ever acceptable. But that's not what criticism of Israel is about. It's political, not religious. And the vast majority of Green members have already shown their awareness of that, moving the party to strong positions on the Palestinian people's right to existence, freedom, and democracy.

The smears will not end. But as long as Greens lean into unapologetic support for human rights and opposition to Zionist racism, the smears will fail. And when the smears fail, the chances of finally holding Israeli war criminals and their cheerleaders to account will increase.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

Israel continues to perpetrate war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza while denying access to foreign journalists.

Gaza's media blackout persists

UN Commissioner‑General for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, condemned the "information blackout" and stressed that its lifting is long overdue. He warned that barring independent media fuels misinformation and obscures the truth. This situation remains critical for Gaza.

His statements thrust the issue of press freedoms into the limelight. The continued ban on foreign reporters is an old tactic the settler‑state has used to evade scrutiny. However, this ban is defective in an age of citizen journalism and social media proliferation.

Palestinian journalists, who continue to risk it all, are filling the void. Under these circumstances, social media has also become a crucial avenue for disseminating news. This includes official statements and announcements from Palestinian factions inside Gaza. It also includes mobile recordings documenting Israeli crimes. Indeed, Gaza remains at the core of global attention.

Citizen-journalists enter the fold

That said, when official sources diminish, information circulated on closed and anonymised social media platforms becomes difficult to verify, especially amidst conflicting narratives. The presence of foreign journalists helps document Israel's violations, its use of illegal weapons, and casualty counting in Gaza.

More than 250 journalists and media personnel have been killed in Gaza since Israel waged its genocidal war in October 2023, according to press freedom groups. This makes it one of the deadliest conflicts for journalists in modern history. They were slain while on duty — carrying out a public service not only to their people but to the world. Calls for investigations into their deaths from international organisations have been relentless. Yet these calls are frequently ignored.

The price Palestinian journalists have paid is not to be taken lightly. They bear the brunt and risk their lives daily. They navigate dangerous conditions, never knowing if they'll see their families again after a day in the field. Under international humanitarian law, journalists should be protected as noncombatants. And yet Israel continues to target them with impunity, wantonly…anyone surprised? Reporting from Gaza continues to highlight significant challenges.

Truth survives

Lazzarini's statement reflects a growing concern that continues to be met with indifference, silence, and inaction from many governments and institutions. Additionally, the situation in Gaza remains alarming on the world stage.

Even so, the blackout Israel is desperate to maintain has not prevented the truth from reaching the world — but it does leave a population that continues to defy Israel's genocide increasingly isolated. Despite this isolation, Gaza endures.

It is our responsibility at the Canary to pierce through the veil of silence and report what is happening behind the lines of fire. This commitment is especially vital in the context of Gaza's ongoing genocide.

Featured image via the Canary

By Alaa Shamali

Jim Ratcliffe is a rank hypocrite who abandoned the UK to stash billions offshore. The co-owner of Manchester United football club moved his tax residence to Monaco during the Covid pandemic to dodge an estimated £4bn in tax. He now lives as a tax exile whilst claiming the UK is 'colonised' by immigrants.

A billionaire who moved his tax residence to Monaco during the pandemic so he didn't have to give his money to hospitals, schools, and public services?

Spare me. https://t.co/gN5KEckEPm

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) February 11, 2026

Oi Ratcliffe - you can't complain about a system you don't pay into

Complaining about the 9 million people on benefits is a bit rich coming from a guy who enjoys the benefits of the UK system but doesn't pay into it.

His move to the the French Riviera in September 2020 was heralded by his time screaming about the benefits of Brexit. He possibly moved because we forced him to pay £110m in tax in 2019.

You might be surprised to find out that Jim Ratcliffe was one of them.
Weird that, innit. pic.twitter.com/4hvrIm7yix

— Simon Gosden. Esq. #fbpe 3.5%

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Every once in a while, a product comes along that sparks a bit of joy in our jaded hearts. This is what happened with the Kodak Charmera, a $30 tiny toy camera that was nearly impossible to get ahold of in the first couple of months after its release, selling out immediately over waves of blind box restocks. Despite the gimmick of it all, the Charmera was just too cute for some of us to resist, and we sprang when they finally started becoming more readily available. 

A few of us on the Engadget team have one now, and even with all of its shortcomings, we kind of love this thing. Here's what two of our writers think about it. 

---

Lately, it feels like a chore to carry around a full-frame mirrorless camera. My Nikon definitely feels like the right tool to precisely capture a moment in time with fast autofocus and plenty of image resolution. Other times, that perfect moment is more casual, like catching up with friends over dim sum or killing time while you're snowed in at a cabin in Vermont. In these cases, there's no reason to carry around a hulking camera and lens to snap a flawless photo that I have to edit later. Instead, something light, discreet and playful feels like the right tool for the occasion.

Jackson Chen for Engadget

That's where the Kodak Charmera comes in. It's a toy camera with a 35mm lens with a fixed f/2.4 aperture and a 1/4-inch sensor. In other words, the photos this thing takes are about equivalent to what you would get with a crappy flip phone from the 2000s that also plays Snake.

Kodak is clearly trying to wring out the longing for nostalgia within all of us, and has nailed it with the Charmera, which is even inspired by its old-school disposable Fling cameras. It's definitely not as good as the smartphone in your pocket, but there's something disarming about snapping a quick shot with a tiny block of plastic that's lighter than your keys.

Playing around with the Charmera for a few weeks gave me a healthy reminder that the sillier and more transient parts of life don't need the technical prowess of an expensive camera. Obviously, the Chamera produces photos of terrible quality at 1.6 megapixels and can't really capture anything fast-moving or in low light, but it's undeniably fun and hard to resist shooting with. And sometimes, you and your friends are just doing wildly unserious things and you want a camera that matches that energy.

— Jackson Chen, Contributing Reporter

---

Every time I pull out the Kodak Charmera in public to snap a few pictures, I'm immediately met with a barrage of questions and squeals of delight from full-grown adults: "What is that?"; "Is that a camera?"; "Does it really take pictures?"; "Can I see it?" It is the kind of accessory that doubles as a conversation starter, an effect that's turned out to be as joyous as taking pictures with the camera itself. I've been trying really hard to spend less time on social media and my phone in general lately, and having a two-inch camera clipped to me has made for a pretty fun shift in how I document the day-to-day. 

As the resurgence of compact digital cameras has shown us, a lot of people are yearning for a time of simpler tech — when we had personal devices that could do useful things, like take decent photos and connect us to our friends, but didn't consume our lives entirely. Companies like Camp Snap have shaped their entire brands around recapturing that magic, and some consumers have shown that they're willing to sacrifice in areas like image quality in exchange for a taste of it, too. The Kodak Charmera isn't the kind of product you go into purchasing with high expectations. It is clearly a toy that is only going to be capable of so much. 

Cheyenne MacDonald for Engadget

As Jackson noted, the low-resolution 1,440  x 1,080 pictures look about on par with those you'd have taken on a flip phone 15 or 20 years ago. In the right lighting conditions with a clearly defined subject, they're not so bad. But selfies, portraits and nature photos will generally look washed out. It can record videos too — and you should set similarly low expectations for these. 

Despite all that, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I'm enjoying the Charmera experience. Its crunchy photos are just good enough to feel like they're successfully preserving a moment in time. And being so tiny, it's really convenient to bring everywhere. It even came with me to CES. The Charmera takes a microSD card (sold separately), allowing for tons of storage and easy transferring. There are a bunch of built-in filters you can apply, too, which have been fun to play around with.

If I want high-quality photos, this isn't the camera I'm going to reach for. But it's great for low-stakes situations when all I care about is taking some pictures I can look back on fondly later. Consider me charmed. — Cheyenne MacDonald, Weekend Editor

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cameras/the-ridiculously-tiny-kodak-charmera-captured-our-hearts-and-lots-of-shoddy-pictures-140000245.html?src=rss

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If you opened a tech newsletter or even the internet in early 2026 and thought you'd stepped into a dystopian screenplay, or you are the main character in one of Isaac Asimov's writings, you wouldn't be alone. Headlines trumpet layoffs, companies blame "AI transformation," and somewhere in the background, billionaires cheer hot-off-the-press artificial intelligence strategies. Here's the uncomfortable truth: people are still losing their jobs, while AI gets most of the credit. According to the most recent tracking data, the pace of layoffs in tech remains high in 2026. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that U.S. employers announced…

This story continues at The Next Web

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Meta went to court this week in two major trials over alleged harms facilitated by its platform. In New Mexico, the state's attorney general has accused the company of facilitating child exploitation and harming children through addictive features. In a separate case in Los Angeles, a California woman sued the company over mental health harms she says she suffered as the result of addictive design choices from Meta and others.

In both cases, Meta has disputed the idea that social media should be considered an "addiction." On the stand this week, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that social media isn't "clinically addictive," comparing it to being "addicted" to a Netflix show.

In opening statements in the New Mexico trial, Meta's lawyer Kevin Huff went further. He told the jury that "social media addiction is not a thing" because it's not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the handbook used by mental health professionals in the US.

"According to the American Psychiatric Association, they don't recognize the concept of social media addiction in the same way as addiction to drugs and alcohol," Huff said during opening arguments that were broadcast by Courtroom View Network. "What you see on the screen is what's called the DSM, which is basically the official manual for recognized mental disorders. The American Psychiatric Association studied this and decided that social media addiction is not a thing."

But the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has never said that social media addiction doesn't exist. The organization provides information and resources about social media addiction on its website. "Social media addiction is not currently listed as a diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR—but that does not mean it doesn't exist," the APA said in a statement to Engadget.

Dr. Tania Moretta, a clinical pyschophysiology researcher who has studied social media addiction, agrees. "The absence of a DSM classification does not mean that a behavior cannot be addictive, maladaptive or clinically significant," she told Engadget. That argument, she said, "reflects a misunderstanding" of how psychiatry professionals define and classify conditions. "Diagnostic manuals formalize scientific consensus; they do not define the boundaries of legitimate scientific inquiry. Many maladaptive behaviors and clinically significant symptom patterns are studied and treated well before receiving official classification."

Meta's critics have long claimed that the company has profited from addictive features that hook children and teens. The trials in Los Angeles and New Mexico are just the start of several court battles over the issue. The social media company is also facing a high-profile trial with school districts in June, and lawsuits from 41 state attorneys general. 

Moretta said that social media addiction is a field that requires more study, but that there is already evidence that it can have harmful effects on some people. "At present, from a scientific perspective, there is documented evidence that social media use disorder is associated with both psychophysiological alterations, including changes in reward/motivational and inhibitory/regulatory systems, and clinically significant negative impacts on functioning (e.g., sleep disturbances, psychological distress, impairment in social, academic, or occupational domains)," she said. "The key question is not whether all social media use is addictive, but whether a subset of users exhibits patterns consistent with behavioral addiction models and whether specific platform design features may exacerbate vulnerability in predisposed individuals."

Both trials are ongoing and expected to last the next several weeks. In New Mexico, jurors have already heard from former employee turned whistleblower Arturo Bejar and former exec Brian Boland, both of whom have publicly criticized the company for not prioritizing safety. In Los Angeles, Mosseri's testimony has wrapped up, but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify next week. The trials will also feature extensive internal documents from Meta, including details about the company's own research into the mental health impacts of its platform on young people.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-really-wants-you-to-believe-social-media-addiction-is-not-a-real-thing-130000257.html?src=rss

One good thing about virtual private networks (VPNs) is that when they don't work, the problem is almost always solvable without technical training. Although it's aggravating when your VPN randomly drops your connection, the chances are good that you can handle the issue yourself without getting tech support involved.

If your VPN is repeatedly disconnecting from the server, I recommend dealing with the problem immediately. When you have your kill switch on as good cybersecurity habits dictate, VPN drops will kick you off the internet. Without that feature enabled, it'll expose your real identity and location online. That's not a big deal if you're just aiming to, say, stream an international sporting event, but it could be an existential issue if you're using the VPN as a workaround against government censorship. Either way, you can address the issue by working through the eight troubleshooting steps below and checking whether they've solved your problem.

8 reasons your VPN keeps disconnecting

I've organized these root causes in ascending order of how much effort the solution takes. Try the easier fixes before moving on to the more complex or expensive ones.

1. You're using the VPN on too many devices at once

Most VPNs limit the number of devices you can connect at the same time on a single subscription. Some services, like Surfshark, claim to offer unlimited simultaneous connections, but they'll still cut you off if they see signs of abuse. Generally, you can install the VPN on as many devices as you like; it just can't be actively running on more than the limit.

If you're trying to connect to the VPN on a new device and it repeatedly disconnects, check how many other phones, computers or smart TVs it's already running on. Pay attention to devices where you have the VPN set to auto-connect on startup, as you may have missed that it's running. Disconnect from the VPN on one of those devices and try again on the new one.

2. Your VPN server is slow or overloaded

The problem often rests with the VPN server you're trying to connect to. Providers regularly shut down servers for routine maintenance. Sometimes, a server is technically online, but it's under such a heavy user load that it can't maintain a connection. It's also possible that the server is so physically far away from you that the connection keeps timing out.

In cases like these, the answer is simple: use another server. Pick a different server by disconnecting the VPN and reconnecting to the same location. If the new server has the same problems, try another location, assuming you don't need an IP address in a specific country.

3. You're using an unstable VPN protocol

As I explained in my article on how a VPN works, a VPN protocol is the set of instructions at the heart of everything a VPN does. Not all protocols are the same. For example, OpenVPN over TCP prioritizes speed over connection stability, causing more frequent disconnections. It's also possible for certain networks to block some VPN protocols but not others (see #8).

If changing servers didn't help your unstable connection, try switching protocols. WireGuard, OpenVPN over UDP and IKEv2 are best for stability. You can almost always find the protocol options in the Settings page of your VPN app.

4. Power-save settings are interfering

A VPN almost always runs in the background. In some cases, a device's battery saver settings might shut down the VPN to stop the battery from draining. See if turning off power-save mode stops your VPN from disconnecting randomly (and maybe plug in your device while you're at it).

5. Your internet connection isn't stable

Your VPN needs to pass traffic through an ISP like any other online app — it just encrypts that traffic first. If you don't have a good internet connection, you won't have a good VPN connection. When you notice your VPN randomly disconnecting, check whether you have problems with your home internet connection. Resetting your modem by turning it off for at least 10 seconds may solve the problem, but you can also just wait for your internet to improve with time.

6. Another program is interfering with the VPN

Other security programs are a frequent cause of VPN disruptions. If you connect to an office VPN, for example, you likely won't be able to have a personal VPN running at the same time. Likewise, if you use an antivirus program or have a firewall on your device, it may be blocking your VPN from connecting. See if you can configure the firewall to allow traffic through a port used by a VPN protocol.

7. Your software is out of date

If none of the fixes have worked so far, you can often solve your connection problems by updating all the software involved. For optimal security, you should be installing updates the moment they're available anyway, so this will protect you even if it doesn't directly solve your VPN problem.

Update your VPN client and your operating system, then try connecting again. If you're still having problems, try updating your router. You can reach its control panel by entering its default IP address into the URL bar of your browser. Update it as well, then try once more.

8. Your network or ISP is blocking VPN traffic

There's a chance that your problem originates with your network or ISP, not on the VPN or any device you own. Some networks, especially at offices and schools, automatically block any VPN traffic they detect. These restrictions can even be imposed by entire countries, most infamously in China.

Should this turn out to be your problem, turn on any obfuscation features that may be built into your VPN. Using an obfuscated protocol, connect to a server outside the location being censored, then use the internet as normal. This will be much more difficult if you're in a country where VPNs are illegal or restricted, but there's still hope — if you can safely send an email, contact a VPN provider and ask if they'll send you a configuration directly. Proton VPN is one company that's officially willing to do that.

If you still find your VPN disconnecting mid-session, you may have a rare problem that doesn't show up on this list. Contact your VPN's support staff and do what they recommend. If possible, chat with a live support technician so you can tell them what you've already tried.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/why-does-my-vpn-keep-disconnecting-130000620.html?src=rss

One destination passengers were definitely not hoping to reach

Bork!Bork!Bork! As if to demonstrate that whatever one operating system can do, Windows can do it better, bluer, and upside down, we present a bus stopping only at bork.…

A few days ago, a Redditor posted in the community for DoorDash drivers that they received an offer to close a Waymo vehicle's door. The job paid a guaranteed fee of $6.25 with a $5 extra on top of it after the DoorDasher verifies that it has been completed. Waymo has confirmed to 404Media and TechCrunch that, yes, it is indeed paying Dashers to shut the doors of its self-driving cars. And it makes sense because, well, there's nobody to do it otherwise if a passenger accidentally leaves it open.

The Alphabet subsidiary and DoorDash told the publications that it's currently running a pilot program in Atlanta, wherein if one of its vehicle's doors is left ajar, nearby Dashers are notified. Waymo's self-driving vehicles can't leave if one of its doors remains open, so the company is framing the program as a way to enhance its fleet's efficiency. Waymo told 404Media that the program started earlier this year and that payments are structured to ensure "competitive and fair compensation for Dashers."

To note, this isn't the first time the two companies have teamed up. In October 2025, Waymo's self-driving cars became a delivery option for DoorDash customers in Phoenix, Arizona. To get a Waymo delivery, customers will have to choose "opt in to autonomous delivery" during checkout and to physically retrieve their order from the car's trunk when it arrives.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/doordashers-are-getting-paid-to-close-waymos-self-driving-car-doors-122711640.html?src=rss

A commercial for crypto during the Super Bowl LX broadcast on televisions at a bar in Los Angeles, Calif., on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. Photo: Jill Connelly/Bloomberg via Getty Images

During the Super Bowl, Anthropic ran a dystopian AI ad about dystopian AI ads featuring an AI android physical trainer hawking insoles to a user who only asked for an ab workout. Not to be outdone, Amazon ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+ in which Chris Hemsworth fretted over all the different ways AI might kill him, including severing his head and drowning him in his pool. Equally bleak, the telehealth company Hims & Hers ran an ad titled "RICH PEOPLE LIVE LONGER" in which oligarchs access such healthcare luxuries as facelifts, bespoke IVs, and "preventative care" to live longer than the rest of us. It was an anti-billionaire ad by a multibillion-dollar healthcare company. 

Turn on the TV today, and you will drown in a sea of ads in which capitalists denounce capitalism. Think of the PNC Bank ads where parents sell their children's naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them or the Robinhood ads where a white-haired older man, perhaps meant to evoke Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, curses the "men of means with their silver spoons eating up the financial favors of the one percent" from the deck of a yacht.  

After years of ingesting the mainstream discourse around surveillance capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, and democratic socialism, corporations are regurgitating and even surpassing the rhetoric of the modern left. Naturally, it's all a winking sleight of hand meant to corral us back into engaging with the same capitalism they portray as a hellscape — but with new and improved privatized solutions. In another widely reviled Super Bowl ad, the video doorbell company Ring tells us that every year, 10 million family pets go missing, and by opting into a web of mass surveillance, the company has reunited "more than a dog a day" with their families.

Modern advertisers descend from those ad men of the 1960s who first perfected the art of channeling our angst with society writ large into buying more junk. As historian Thomas Frank wrote in his book "The Conquest of Cool," midcentury advertisers constructed "a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the … everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption."

The machine has hummed on ever since, retrofitting capitalism's reprimands into its rationales. It churns out commercials reframing the precariat's pain not as the product of plutocracy but as the product of buying the wrong products. Advertisements pitch that the good life is to be secured by procuring high quality goods, by curating the right combination of AI assistants, locally crafted beer, paraben-free dryer sheets, Jimmy Dean breakfast biscuits, Capital One Venture X points, BetMGM spreads, Coinbase crypto wallets, on and on.

It's lunacy. Buying Levi's won't give you deep pockets. Brand promises, like all promises, are made to be broken. As AI anxiety fueled fears of mass layoffs, Coca-Cola soothed American workers' worries about "AI coming for everything" with a glossy 2025 Super Bowl ad, featuring Lauren London, where the gleaming actress flexed her dimples and told us everything would be all right. Ten months later, Coke automated its advertising with generative videos, replacing the actors they'd paid to soothe our worries about being replaced by AI with AI itself.

This cynicism undergirds all modern advertising. Commercials clinically diagnose the painful side effects of living under a despotic capitalist regime, only to prescribe meaningless placebos of Doritos and Pepto-Bismol. And should those cheap calories and antacids fail to placate us, should we find homelessness and hunger so revolting that we crave revolution, then conglomerates will sell rebellion, too. As Frank wrote almost 30 years ago, "commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright 'revolution' against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming." As economic angst threatens to boil over, production only ramps up. Corporate creatives feverishly manufacture transgression to keep up with populist-fueled demands for prepackaged dissent.

No matter how disingenuous or cynical, there is a secret wish expressed in these ads and the ways they resonate with consumers.

Day by day, Hulu and Netflix roll out new swashbuckling tales of scrappy revolutionary insurgencies to enrich their IP regimes. In 2026, trailers for Rachel McAdams's "Send Help" fulfill employees' dark fantasies of murdering their boss on a deserted island, as Carnival ads show weary lumber workers hammering their phone in a fit of fury. Promotions for smash rooms, axe-throwing alleys, and gun ranges generate billions, as big business charges pent-up proletariats to "unleash" in rage rooms and "throw, hit, punch, and swing at inanimate objects as a means to release your pent up frustrations and anger." It might seem cringe to invoke "1984" and its "Two Minutes Hate," where subjects of the totalitarian regime yell for two minutes, if businesses weren't doing it for us. 

Yet, no matter how thin, one can see cracks in this hulking machine. No matter how disingenuous or cynical, there is a secret wish expressed in these ads and the ways they resonate with consumers. Rituals are funny like that. Repeat them enough, and they sprout roots. In America, sedition is now a mantra. Mutiny, a popular sentiment. Populism is winning the war for hearts and minds. Billionaires who once spurned talk of class war now finance fiction about eating the rich. Just as advertisers who once fashioned consumerism as orgasmic fantasies now portray shopping in a dreaded wasteland. What are we to make of this capitalism forced to confess its contradictions? 

​At its core, today's advertising offers a repressed radicalism, a strange plea to revolt against the indignities corporations impress upon us.

After all, aren't Heineken's reminders to "drink responsibly" just bids for public transportation? Aren't E*Trade ads with octogenarian wage slaves a rallying cry for a robust social safety net? Coinbase is right, on some level, that the financial system is broken. But what if instead of more speculative crypto scams, they were boosting public banking? And Isn't Uber partially right, too? We should be our own bosses. But instead of shackling drivers as gig serfs, what if Uber's sharing economy gave drivers their share of the company's profits? What if we didn't have to shop at places we didn't get to own and didn't have to work at places where we couldn't afford the shop? What if we weren't so beat up and knocked down that E*Trade ads had to remind us that "THERE ARE DOGS WITH BETTER LIVES THAN YOU"? 

Advertisers always stop one step short, never allowing themselves to say the quiet part aloud, always walking us right up to the edge of a radical insight, yet remaining too afraid to incite working people to rise up.

There are, of course, other places one could find truly revolutionary art. There are the Adbusters McDonald's spoofs reading "EAT FAST, DIE YOUNG." There are the Black Workers Congress vintage 1971 labor posters with Haiti's Toussaint Louverture rallying Black autoworkers in Detroit to strike at Dodge. There are the Paul Beatty satires where characters wore "Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they'd hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labor." Yet these auteurs all feel niche compared to the pop art of Super Bowl and NCAA tournament ads. No matter how ridiculous it may seem, I've long yearned for America's prime-time advertisements, already dripping with populist contempt, to finally fulfill their revolutionary promise.

I've only seen it happen once, kind of. In the early 2020s, I was zoning out to hours of NFL when one of those inspirational Marine recruitment promos popped on — the one where jackbooted Gen Zers with square jaws punched through digital emoji clouds to transform into real men. After the ad flipped off, it was immediately followed by a nightmarish PSA where glassy-eyed, sweat-drenched veterans lurched, sobbing in empty parking lots and extended stay hotels, struggling to stave off PTSD-induced suicide. I was floored. The jump cut felt like something approaching truth, felt like ads finally reckoning with how imperialist wars for blood and oil squandered youth's promise down into a pit of stubbled, middle-aged mania.

Perhaps America can never tell the whole truth within ads, but perhaps we could tell the truth between them. Call it The Honesty in Advertising Act. From now on, every military recruitment ad could be attached to a PSA about homeless veterans. Every Kool-Aid ad could be melded with dialysis ads. Every Taco Bell ad would have to be followed by ads for Pepto-Bismol and funeral homes. Smash them all together, and they'd work like the disclaimers on cigarette cartons and liquor bottles. Surgeon General's Warning: Capitalism causes poverty, desperation, alienation, and concentration of global wealth in the top 0.0001%. Quitting now greatly reduces risks of premature death, medical debt, eviction, and environmental catastrophe.

The post The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk appeared first on The Intercept.

Watchdog says savings bank botched tech revamp, warning taxpayers remain exposed after years of delays

Britain's state-backed savings bank has been dragged over the coals by Parliament's spending watchdog, which has branded its long-running digital overhaul a £3 billion "full-spectrum disaster."…

As we've reported, the latest Epstein files have shown the degeneracy of former prince Andrew Windsor. Now, it's alleged Andrew had a victim flown in on Epstein's infamous 'Lolita Express.'

Nick Watt, "The headline in The New Stateman is: Gordon Brown, the police need to interview Andrew"

"Gordon Brown has been looking at all the e-mails, the Lolita express flights, Jeffrey Epstein's place used for trafficking"

"He says British girls were on 90 Epstein flights… pic.twitter.com/3P86nf7BJJ

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) February 12, 2026

Andrew's in trouble again

Ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed Epstein flew victims from UK airports on the 'Lolita' over 90 times:

The Epstein emails, which record the visas issued, payments made and transport organised for girls and women trafficked across the world, suggest a number of British girls were on 90 Epstein flights organised from UK airports on what was called his "Lolita Express". Among the many aspects that should sicken anyone looking at the emails is that 15 of these flights were given the go-ahead after his 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor. How the flights were allowed to continue should have been fully investigated.

Brown also wrote:

The emails tell us in graphic detail how Epstein was able to use Stansted Airport - he boasted how cheap the airport charges were compared to Paris - to fly in girls from Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. His messages link at least one to Britain and the former Prince Andrew. One email, headed "the girl", described her as "just turned 18, 179cm, very cute, speaks English, I saw her in real 3 years ago… i will send you the video in next email".

This is how the Sun reported on it on 13 February:

Tomorrow's front page: Andy girl 'flown to UK on Epstein's Lolita Express' https://t.co/9p3T9e91GF pic.twitter.com/VOJTzUmuUl

— The Sun (@TheSun) February 12, 2026

This story is building on previous accusations. As reported in the Guardian on 3 February, US lawyer Brad Edwards said of an alleged victim:

We're talking about at least one woman who was sent by Jeffrey Epstein over to Prince Andrew. And she even had, after a night with Prince Andrew, a tour of Buckingham Palace.

Former staff at the palace claim this was a frequent occurrence:

Now we know why myself and my colleagues were forced to allow the unknown females i have frequently spoke about into Buckingham Palace.
If this story is true then along with my evidence it could prove crucial to the Thames Valley Police investigation. https://t.co/sEQxS3TgwP

— Paul Page EX Royal Cop : Son of an Abuse Survivor. (@PaulPag46852754) February 13, 2026

Another blow for the royals

King Charles has said he will cooperate with any police investigation. However, this comes in sharp contrast to the fact that he loaned his brother £1.5m to bury his case with Virginia Giuffre.

Regardless, it appears that the walls may finally be closing in on Andrew. But will we really see this man hauled in front of a judge?

We hope so.

For more on the Epstein files, please read:

• The media circus around Epstein is erasing the experiences of victims and survivors (Maddison Wheeldon).
• Epstein files show how racialised trafficking erased Black girls from victimhood (Vannessa Viljoen).
• Epstein's 'broligarchy' is being ignored by the corporate media (Alice Charles).

Featured image via Ben Brooksbank (Wikimedia) 

By Antifabot

Manchester United co-owner Jim Ratcliffe recently claimed that immigrants are "colonising" the UK. Critics - and anyone with a brain in their nut - quickly condemned the remarks as racist and deeply out of touch with Britain's own colonial history.

Unsurprisingly, Reform MPs and figures on the far right quickly jumped on the bandwagon. While admitting Ratcliffe's statistics were "mistaken," Reform leader Nigel Farage maintained that the underlying argument holds up when judged against the dictionary definition of "colonise."

Spoiler alert: No, it really fucking doesn't.

Bro Farage literally just approved the term "colonised" to your face and you STILL softball him.

The mainstream media is complicit in the rise of the far right. https://t.co/iSGrPACvak

— JimmyTheGiant (@jimthegiant) February 13, 2026

Distraction tactics from the real 'colonisers'

The Oxford Learners Dictionary definition of 'colonise' is:

to take control of an area or a country that is not your own, especially using force, and send people from your own country to live there.

It's clear that immigrants have precious little control over their rights and freedoms in the UK, so it's objectively clear that this statement is false. That's even after disregarding the fake-news figures Ratcliffe and fellow racists are distributing.

Another mask falls as we hear #ManchesterUnited owner Jim #Ratcliffe showcasing his #racism. He has all that money and power and he still has to punch down. Too many on #socialwelfare too - by his reckoning. Too many rich #parasites by mine.
https://t.co/r5vWOgo0yy

— Kevin Doyle (@kevidoyle) February 13, 2026

As the Canary reported yesterday:

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, co-owner of Manchester United, has come under heavy criticism for saying that immigrants are "colonising" the UK. He said:

"You can't have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in. I mean, the UK has been colonised. It's costing too much money.

The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, hasn't it?"

The racist shithead also claimed that the UK's population grew by 12 million people in 5 years. That's bollocks too, as BBC Verify reported:

"it's actually increased by 2.7 million."

And, that statistic doesn't take into account the economic benefit of immigrants doing all the shitty jobs white people don't want. And that, in turn, doesn't take into account that we're talking about people - people who have a right to safety and welcome.

Rich racists: the actual 'colonisers'

Reform MPs are, of course, eagerly amplifying what can only be described as barely veiled racism.

Man Utd boss Sir Jim Ratcliffe is right on immigration and UK is being 'colonised,' claims Reform UK's Nadhim Zahawi https://t.co/0gPS34NQ0u

— LBC (@LBC) February 13, 2026

In January, we reported on Oxfam's latest research, which identified a direct correlation between shrinking civil liberties and rising billionaire handouts aimed at buying political influence:

In the UK specifically, the wealthiest 56 individuals hoard more money than 27 million ordinary people. In fact, in the UK:

The UK's billionaires have seen in the last year their average wealth grow five times faster than inflation-adjusted earnings.
56 people in the UK - all billionaires - have a combined wealth greater than 27 million other people, 39 per cent of the population. The average growth of a UK billionaire's wealth was £231mn in the last year.
The average UK billionaire will gain more wealth than the value of the UK's average annual salary in less time than it takes to watch a premier league football match
On average a person in the richest 1% in the UK owns 456 times more wealth than a person in the poorest 50%. The poorest half holds just 4.6% of the wealth, while the richest 1% own 21.3%. In 2024 the wealthiest 1% of UK adults had wealth of at least £2,317,452 […]
This year, the total wealth of the UK's billionaires grew by 11bn, an average of £30.3 mn a day. Meanwhile one in five people in the UK live in poverty.

Yet the far-right rarely highlight who profits from soaring costs in food, defence, and healthcare - areas Advance UK Ben Habib argues are making life harder for ordinary people.

Nor do they acknowledge how increased defence spending often destabilises other countries. In turn, worsening conditions that force people to migrate in the first place:

'@Sir_Ratcliffe in a 14 minute interview with @SkyNews explained how policies being pursued in the UK and EU are destroying our ability to feed ourselves, defend ourselves and medically treat ourselves.

He set out how western civilisation is killing itself.

On the other hand…

— Ben Habib (@benhabib6) February 12, 2026

Another Reform cheerleader and former Tory MP Nadine Dorries delighted in coming to Ratcliffe's defence:

Nadine Dorries of Reform UK defends Jim Ratcliffe's disgraceful immigration remarks.

His statistics were wrong, the substance was wrong and the language was wrong- but he was RIGHT.

Errrh?

Complete and utter gibberish. #bbcqt pic.twitter.com/BkBcRsM874

— Deirdre Heenan (@deirdreheenan) February 12, 2026

Thankfully, ordinary people are seeing right through it:

Can there be more of a traitor to the UK than Jim Ratcliffe? He offshored enough tax money to fund 120,000 nurses. People like him are the reason life has become so difficult for so many Brits.

— Robert M. (@3drm) February 13, 2026

Reform keep telling us immigrants are the problem and that billionaires are the good guys who create wealth.
Genuinely think this narrative was the plan Farage Sky & Ratcliffe intended to push and instead it's exposed tax dodging billionaires as the parasite ruining the country

— Sarah (@kokeshimum) February 12, 2026

What is it that first attracted you to billionaire, Jim Ratcliffe?

Reform UK - wealthy elites, cosplaying as working class, for the benefit of billionaires. https://t.co/iRtYHpZicp

— Don McGowan (@donmcgowan) February 12, 2026

If the UK is being 'colonised', it's by super-rich billionaires who have bent politics to their will and are now cashing in on the consequences.

Featured image via Arne Musseler

By Maddison Wheeldon

Keir Starmer's Home Office has blown nearly £700,000 on court and lawyer fees to oppose Palestine Action co-founder, Huda Ammori's judicial review. The review seeks to overturn the government's ban on the anti-genocide direct action group. In addition, Starmer has used the ban to arrest thousands of mostly elderly and disabled protesters for opposing it.

Human rights groups have condemned Starmer's police-state action, with Amnesty International describing it as a:

disproportionate misuse of the UK's terrorism powers [that] should be overturned.

The court's decision on the judicial review will be announced tomorrow, 13 February 2026.

This cost is nothing compared to the millions spent, since the ban began in July 2025, on arresting the activists who opposed the ban. Furthermore, then-home secretary Yvette Coooper was caught in repeated lies to justify the ban. UK security and intelligence experts had recommended against the ban.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

A High Court judge has ruled this morning, 13 February 2026, that the government's ban on anti-genocide action group Palestine Action was "disproportionate" and breaches the human rights of UK people.

Palestine Action NOT a terrorist group (obviously)

However, the 'proscription' remains in place for at least another week while the government has a chance to prepare submissions on the court's finding. It remains a criminal offence, for the time being, to express support for Palestine Action. Police should, of course, weigh whether it's worth arresting people when no prosecutions are likely, but their record suggests they won't.

Zack Polanski perhaps summed up the verdict the best:

A court has ruled that the government's authoritarian ban on Palestine Action was unlawful.

Time to stop criminalising the people protesting a genocide - and start ending the UK's complicity.

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) February 13, 2026

Meanwhile, on the ground, supporters of Palestine Action were jubilant.

The decision was made by a panel of judges who all have strong links to Israel, underscoring just how far the Starmer regime overstepped human rights legislation. It is almost certain to try to appeal, despite the exposed web of lies it created to try to justify the ban.

Outside the court, supporters were holding signs saying "I support Palestine Action". These were the exact same ones that saw police people in their 1000s last year. Yet on 13 February, as far as the Canary team on the ground could tell no one was today:

The full judgment is available here.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

In recent decades, a huge wave of dental tourism has been expanding worldwide, driven by people seeking quick solutions to their dental problems. Today, social, professional, and personal approval play a significant role in how we are perceived, and a perfect smile is essential for fitting into a society where the growth of the internet and social media has increased the pressure to present a beautiful and confident image.

Taking care of your teeth, keeping them white, and so on has become just as important as any other cosmetic surgery on our bodies. People look for the best deals and the best dentists in a single clinic, dental tourism has become a great option in recent years, when patients cannot find what we mentioned in their countries of origin.

The most popular countries for dental tourism are:

●  Türkiye: Without a doubt, this wonderful country has become a great option in Europe because it offers packages for tourists not only to visit exotic and historical places but also to enjoy its dental services at an affordable price.

●  Mexico: In Latin America and the North, this country is a great option since dental procedures are very expensive in places like Canada and the United States.

●  Vietnam: This country is ideal in the Asian part because they train excellent professionals and are ideal for offering good prices without lowering quality standards.

There are also other ideal countries for dental tourism, such as Costa Rica, Colombia, Dubai, Poland, among others.

What are the most sought-after dental procedures in the world?

• ORTHODONTICS: Undoubtedly, crooked or gapped teeth are among the biggest factors that lower a person's mood and dental aesthetics. Orthodontics is an ideal procedure to correct these types of problems, as well as bite malformations. It involves placing a series of metal appliances that, over the months, gradually tighten the teeth and move them into their correct position.
• TEETH WHITENING: It is one of the most used procedures since most people in the world suffer from tooth stains at least once in their lives for various reasons, whether the most common ones, such as not having proper oral hygiene or the consumption of tobacco, cigarettes, tea, or mate, among others. Sometimes it turns into tartar and this can only be removed by the doctor using special equipment.
• DENTAL IMPLANTS: When we lose one or more teeth, it's possible to replace them through this procedure, which, although more complex, is a valid option. A screw is placed in the tooth root, and once the osseointegration process is complete, a custom-made prosthesis, matched to the natural tooth colour, is then attached.
• DENTAL CROWNS: They are used after the implant and act in place of the missing tooth, they are made of a biocompatible material with the mouth, they are made to measure for each patient, they are made with the natural color of the tooth and they are placed permanently, the patient automatically recovers the aesthetic and chewing function of the mouth.
• DENTAL VENEERS: These are "caps" so called because of their manufacturing method, which cover imperfections of natural teeth such as stains, cracks, crooked teeth, etc. They are made in the same color and help to make the smile beautiful and perfect.
• HOLLYWOOD SMILE: It is undoubtedly most sought after by those who practice dental tourism; its name is derived from the way famous people in film and television have a beautiful and enviable smile. The professionals provide individual assistance to each patient when it comes to this treatment, as each one is evaluated and given the procedures they need to achieve a Hollywood smile.

These are just some of the many dental procedures performed in various clinics, where patients go with the assurance of receiving top-quality care at competitive prices. Among the outstanding clinics, we must mention the dental clinic called Dentakay, located in Istanbul, Turkey, famous for its excellent price packages that include not only treatment but also pre- and post-treatment services, as well as the opportunity for patients to explore historical sites in the country, thus enhancing their dental tourism experience.

By Nathan Spears

'Lady' Victoria Hervey — ex-partner to disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor — went on LBC to smear the late Virginia Giuffre, who serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein abused for years before she lost her life to suicide in 2025.

Unrepentant

Giuffre dedicated her life campaigning against sexual abuse. Despite that, Windsor, notwithstanding his position in the royal family, denied having had a relationship or contact with Giuffre. The release of the 'Epstein files' revealed the disgraced ex-royal to be the dishonest party. He did know her and the infamous image of them was not doctored as claimed.

Hervey's interview charade mirrors Andrew's unrepentant mindset. Hervey, dismisses these events as a storm-in-a-teacup of lies that were 'unravelling.'

It gets worse, with Hervey claiming that:

just before [Virginia] passed away her lies were unravelling. ​Like, finally people were kind of realizing 'okay, this girl is making up stories,' and then she conveniently dies.

Challenged on who Giuffre's death was convenient for, she said it was:

Convenient for her.

This is not her first defence of Andrew. But tolerance for anyone cheering for rapists or excusing statutory rape is wearing thin — even the insufferable Piers Morgan shut down Hervey in a recent interview, describing her theories as as "utter s***".

It should be astounding, but isn't, given the context of the contempt shown for Epstein's countless victims by their abusers. Nor given the establishment's ongoing contempt now for their lives, reputations and the justice they deserve. Nor indeed Hervey's own history of responding to Giuffre's death with "lies catch up with you".

But Hervey wasn't finished. She also wanted to pour scorn on the horror decent humanity feels at the string of revelations of the rich and powerful and their sick crimes. According to Hervey, being in the files isn't shameful. Not being in the files is — it means you're "a bit of a loser":

To be honest, if you're not in those files it would be an insult, because it just means that you were a bit of a loser.

And Hervey just doubled down when she was challenged. In an interview shortly after her vile comments, she told Piers Morgan subsequently that she meant anyone "in the upper echelons of society" would be in Epstein's files:

https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/hervey-morgan-epstein.mp4 More questions than answers

Certainly, there are a handful of people in the files who aren't tainted by their appearance in the Epstein files. Anti-Zionist academic Norman Finkelstein came out shining, after the files showed him telling an academic who defended Epstein that Epstein and his lawyer Alan Dershowitz should be strangled.

But not the disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Not the string of sick billionaires and politicians who participated in Epstein's crimes. And perhaps not Hervey either. She appears some thirty times in the latest Epstein release — and not in a 'passing mention' way either. None of it is proof of wrongdoing. None of it is incidental, either. All of it raises questions.

For example, in a frantic email to Giuffre's lawyer David Boies last year, a redacted whistleblower correspondent accused an "OUT OF CONTROL" Hervey of running a " serious gang of coordinated stalkers" to doxx and pursue them:

Or, in another example, seemingly from the same person:

Ward celebrated with HERVEY and KRAUS the night [redacted]'s death. They will not be satisfied until I am dead as well.

I have already served HERVEY and need to serve KRAUS. HERVEY uses the felon on parole, George B Tonks, to harass me full time since she no longer legally can. I had to hire a barrister in UK to serve Lady Victoria HERVEY, and did so [because] of the way [redacted] was being pummeled publicly by this gang. The guy was on parole as a convicted federal felon and I'm a federal whistleblower, so they did nothing. Vanity Fair gave a felon in prison my phone number and said felon NEVER STOPPED THREATENING AND HARASSING. The NYPD, Chicago PD, and FBI have failed us all and now I have been so beaten down the last five years without an ounce of support aside from fellow victims…

…HERVEY speaks to Maxwell in prison. Why is any of this harassment of witnesses legal and always overlooked?

One file includes an email with a redacted sender and no mention of the recipient's identity:

You use ppl with no support systems and make them carry the weight of unimaginable power and retribution! I begged you and SIGRID YEARS to protect NM/me from LADY VICTORIA HERVEY, as you gaslighted having never heard of the royal stalkers! Fergie and Maxwell are behind all of the suffering. LAW ENFORCEMENT IS
NOT HERE FOR VICTIMS. They arc here for elites.

Another Epstein file shows Hervey being accused publicly of being an "MI6 honeypot operative" close to Trump's FBI director Kash Patel. The image used shows a redacted Hervey with Patel, wearing a 'MAGA' cap. Patel is accused by senior US congresspeople of trying to cover up Trump's involvement with Epstein.

Finger-pointing

Another DOJ file shows a chat between an unnamed sender and "Lisa Probation for Stalker", accusing Hervey of participating in illegally-obtained medical information:

Another file:

[Redacted] needs to be restrained legally and once again, I wasn't given enough compensation to even cover my
upcoming surgeries. I had to serve HERVEY in the UK, PREDMORE, etc…how am I to survive? BEDWARDS, you did ALL OF THIS to my tiny private life.

Another, to lawyer Ariel Mitchell, accused Hervey and others of working with the Trump administration, Ghislaine Maxwell's family and the royal to destroy the sender:

Ariel,

He's a felon on parole who was just released in NYC from his ankle monitor. His probation officer had promised
he would not go free, yet LV HERVEY used her "influence", as they continue to try to kill me with threats/harassment/lies/smears/releasing my home address, sharing my ss#, sharing my [redacted] trauma journal!

They work in tandem with this current administration/Maxwell/Royal family.

Another, an email to Boies and others:

They gang stalk and HERVEY/Kraus have eyes set on attacking [musician P] Diddy victims next. FBI JUST WATCHES AS WE ARE EATEN ALIVE! Six full years.

Another, from a UK citizen to an unnamed Met Police detective, describes Hervey as "besotted" with Epstein's enabler and fellow trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, and demands a 'restraining order' against her:

I would like it noted that LVH [Hervey] has many friends as politicians as per her Daily Mail interview.

Again I want a restraining order filed against her. She is NOT a journalist but someone whom is besotted with Maxwell a convicted pedophile charged with sex trafficking who participated in my OWN TRAFFICKING AND HER OWN EGO!!!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14511171/Samantha-Landry-Victoria-Secret-excitement-Trump-MAGA-influencer.html

I WANT ALL HER LETTERS TO MAXWELL CONFISCATED AND USED AS EVIDENCE. ALSO ALL CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN YOURSELF LUCIA AND LVH MUST BE SENT TO DC [redacted] INCLUDING ALL OF [redacted] EVIDENCE YOU STOLE!!

AGAIN MAY I REMIND YOU ALL THAT THIS IS AN INTERNATIONAL SEX TRAFFICKING RING!!!!

I also have have photos of Ghislaine with myself and others in Epstein Island.

See [redacted] email below. I expect you will also contact her because I want every single communication she had with Lucia Osbom and Lady Victoria Hervey!

An implicated Daily Mail

Another, heavily redacted file includes an email sent to Daily Mail owner Jonathan Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere. The email, apparently sent by a trafficked Epstein victim, informs Harmsworth that s/he is adding him to the witness list in "litigation and investigations into Epstein and Co", specifically, among other issues, because Hervey writes for his publication:

Jonathan Harmsworth,

I will be adding you to my witness list in the ongoing litigation and investigations into Epstein and Co where you personally will be held accountable for aiding and abetting Epstein's sex trafficking ring, victim-blaming and discrediting Epstein's victims to aid further those who committed and are committing heinous crimes of rape and sex trafficking accountable.

Seeming as Daniel Bates, Callahan, Lucia Osborne, Victoria Hervey, Alan Dershowitz, and Boris Johnson are enthusiastic journalists of your or in other z class stations, you to will be investigated along with Rupert Murdoch and The New York Post. Because of Callahan, I had to go into isolation and hiding for two years, and you all
put my life in danger when Epstein located me in Barcelona.

It was Sharon Churcher, a Daily Mail journalist who went down to see with a photographer and took her and her husband to the FBI in Sydney. It was the Daily Mail that Published the photo of Prince Andrew.

Over the years, how many millions/ billions have you made plugging the Prince Andrew story? I even made complaints directly to the Daily Mail many, many times at the unfair constant plugging of only one male being held accountable in an entire sex trafficking ring. Why has not one journalist held another man in the Epstein ring accountable?? NOT ONE???

Again, none of these appearances are proof of wrongdoing. But they certainly raise questions about Hervey's evident contempt for rape victims and survivors, including Giuffre.

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

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox