This is a youtuber I've become a big fan of for the way he shows, not tells, the audience about climate change. He does a lot of on-site photography, and shows before and after photos to give you a visual representation of just how bad things are getting for Lake Powell.

I think the wildest part of this video is seeing just how low the water levels have fallen; there are house boats still afloat in the lake, but the entry points where a person would normally back their trailer to the water is now several hundred feet away from a safe ramp. According to the video, without substantial snowpack and melt this winter, the lake could fall below replenishment levels by Winter of 2026. This lake and the surrounding dam provides power to millions of people, and its failure could represent one of the first areas to experience complete access to fresh water and power.

Rishi Sunak was the UK's last ever Tory PM. At least we hope that's the case, anyway.

After leaving office, Sunak did what most successful politicians do now, and swanned off to work with the worst that the private sector has to offer. This has now seen standards activist Hugh Grant accuse Sunak and the Times of blatant malpractice:

I think that if you're going to write a piece in the Times urging the government to use and boost more AI, the fact that you are paid by a major AI company should be in the first sentence, or at least first paragraph.
I also think that the best scenario for AI is that it… pic.twitter.com/XZ9f0Ltwu1

— Hugh Grant (@HackedOffHugh) February 14, 2026

First things first, CEOs don't exist to improve quality; they exist to improve profitability (as Sunak well knows):

Rishi Sunak (now employed by an AI company) implies that AI must have value, just because "CEOs are talking about it"

Putting the merits (or not) of AI aside, I'm 37yrs into an engineering career and I've yet to hear of a CEO who wasn't an uninformed, meddling idiot. pic.twitter.com/YrS1IthcWi

— Carl Doran

Javier Milei is the libertarian leader of Argentina. If you're unfamiliar with 'libertarianism', it's the childlike belief that everyone can just get their own way all the time, and that people shouldn't look out for one another - just for themselves.

In practice, libertarianism means cutting 'red tape' for businesses so they face no restrictions on how poorly they can treat their workers. This is how that's currently working out in Argentina (complete with quotes from the UK leaders who wish to emulate this chaos):

Nigel Farage on Milei "Doing all the things he's done, that's leadership, he is amazing"

Kemi Badenoch "Javier Milei would be 'template' for my government"

He just cut holiday days to 0, employers can pay in food and 12 hour work days. The result: pic.twitter.com/WgoFxN9EX9

— Jake

Palestinian political prisoners in Ofer prison, near Ramallah in the West Bank, have been brutally abused by the Israeli occupation's repression units. This happened under the instruction and in the presence of criminal far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

The units fired stun grenades and broke into the cells. They violently assaulted the Palestinian hostages, throwing them onto the ground after confiscating their mattresses and bed sheets. Ben Gvir was wearing a hangman's noose badge on his shirt at the time, aiming to show Palestinians, once again, that the Israeli occupation has control over them.

February 2026 figures from the Palestinian Prisoners' Society (PPS) show the total number of arrests in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, since the start of the genocide in Gaza has risen to approximately 22,000. These arrests are ongoing and escalating.

On 9 February, Israeli occupation forces detained over 20 Palestinians during a large-scale detention campaign across the occupied West Bank. From the night of 11 February 2026 until the morning of 12 February alone, occupation forces arrested at least 40 civilians across the West Bank.

Between 6 and 12 February 10 Palestinian women were arrested, including one minor across the occupied West Bank. This brings the total number of Palestinian female political prisoners in Israeli occupation jails to 66, including three minors. Since  October 2023, more than 680 women have been arrested in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem.

According to the PPS, the most common "charge" against Palestinian women is "incitement"' via social media posts. Most female prisoners are held in Damon prison. In addition to the usual abuse suffered by prisoners at the hands of the occupation, they are also denied contact with their children and families, adding to their trauma. Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, female prisoners endure increased humiliation, including forced nostrils searches

The PPS claims these arrests are accompanied by unprecedented crimes and violations. These include "severe beatings, systematic acts of terror against detainees and their families, widespread destruction of homes, confiscating of vehicles, money and gold jewellery, demolition of  prisoner's family homes, and the taking of family members as hostages."

44 Palestinian journalists from the West Bank, occupied Jerusalem and Gaza, are currently being detained  by the occupation. Most are being held without charge and trial, under what the occupation calls "administrative detention". These detention orders are indefinite, and renewed every six months.

Arrests are exploited as a cover to expand settlement activity in the West Bank and, according to the PPS, the policy of daily arrests is "one of the most prominent colonial tools employed by the 'Israeli' system, to target Palestinians and undermine any form of mobilisation or resistance." This policy has affected all segments of Palestinian society.

Under international law, Palestinians have a legal right to resist their occupier, in any way they wish, including by using armed resistance. These resistance fighters are fighting against Zionist colonisers who are intensifying their campaign of illegally displacement, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing and killing against Palestinians. And their struggle against illegal occupation and repression is more important than ever before.

Prisoner's,  released prisoners, and their families are also targeted by discriminatory legislation. Netanyahu has recently signed deportation orders against two Jerusalem Palestinians. The first was released from prison in 2024, after serving 23 years in Israeli occupation prisons. The second is still currently in prison, serving an 18 year sentence, and is set to be deported once released.

The decision is based on a racist law, which aims at undermining Palestinian presence in the territories occupied in 1948 and in occupied Jerusalem. This is known as the Citizenship and Residency Revocation Law, approved by the occupation in 2023. The announcement marks the first time that this law is being implemented  to remove citizens from the state of 'Israel'.

Palestinian detainees are subjected to systematic torture,  medical neglect and deliberate starvation. And the Israeli occupation is now preparing to implement the so called "prisoners execution law". The Palestinian Centre for  Prisoner's Advocacy says that proposing the death penalty under occupation lacks fair trial guarantees, and contravenes international restrictions governing the use of capital punishment.

According to the Hebrew News Channel 13 "Implementation of the law will initially apply to Nukhba [Palestinian resistance fighters and Palestinian hostages] who were involved in the 7 October "attack", and will later apply to those [Palestinian resistance fighters and Palestinian hostages] "convicted of serious attacks" [against colonial Zionist settlers and the Israeli occupation army] in "Judea and Samaria" [the West Bank]."

Channel 13 also said the Israeli Prisoner's Service is expected to travel soon to a country in East Asia to "study the legal and organisational aspects of implementing the [death] penalty." Thousands of Palestinian detainees lives will be threatened by this dangerous escalation.

The systematic torture of these prisoners is an extension of the genocide and ethnic cleansing that occurs openly, on a daily basis against Palestinians. And it is the silence of the international community which empowers the Zionist regime to continue committing these crimes. Urgent action is needed to ensure the Israeli occupation is held to account. International silence only ensures the continuation of this never ending cycle of violence.

Featured image via the Canary

By Charlie Jaay

Yet another UK institution has caved in to the bullying of the Israel lobby. The British Museum has removed the word "Palestine" from its displays after demands from the notorious "apartheid lobby" group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).

Like its fellow lobby group CAA, UKLFI is under investigation for using vexatious lawsuits for political ends. The group was humiliated in January 2026 in its tenth attempt to get Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sitta struck off the medical register. The malicious case failed. But that wasn't all.

The case judge derided UKLFI's argument as biased, unreasonable and unevidenced - adding for good measure that it couldn't even meet the lowest legal standard.

But despite this discrediting judgment, the British Museum folded rather than stand its ground against racist intimidation. UKLFI boasted that the museum is in the process of changing its displays to replace "Palestinian" with "Canaanite". The group's ludicrous argument was that using "Palestine" is "historically inaccurate" and:

erases historical changes and creates a false impression of continuity…

…For example, the information panels in the Levant gallery, covering the period 2000-300 BC, have all been updated to describe in some detail the history of Canaan and the Canaanites and the rise of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel using those names. A revised text devoted to the Phoenicians was installed in early 2025.

Supposedly, the British Museum changes are for "neutrality". Zionists, who support the racist colony established in 1948 by violently expelling at least 700,000 Palestinians from their homes ancestral lands, claim that Palestine never existed. Its adherents even claim that the indigenous people simply simply "abandoned" their homes in 1948.

The group is also being investigated by lawyers' professional body the SRA for "vexatious and baseless" threats to silence support for Palestine.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

TL;DR: Try your luck at Bitcoin mining without the noise, heat, or four-figure commitment. The BlockChance Bitcoin Ticket Miner is $49.97 (reg. $149.99) and lets you participate in real Bitcoin mining like a digital scratch-off ticket. Deal ends Feb. 22 at 11:59 p.m. — Read the rest

The post Bitcoin mining, but make it a $50 experiment appeared first on Boing Boing.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about MAGA doing things "for the children":

If conservatives stopped thinking about children so much, the children would be better off and much safer.

In second place, it's an anonymous comment inserting a little optimism into the fear that Section 230 is not long for this world:

Keep in mind that a lot of commenters here did just the same at the 25th anniversary. (Myself included, but not publicly.) All is not yet lost.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with the comment that sparked the first place winner above, which was actually a reply to Heart of Dawn's comment listing some examples:

Between this, Epstein and his cohorts, being anti-vax and anti-science, doing nothing about gun control, preventing queer kids from learning about themselves and getting support, the abolishment of the Department of Education- when these people "think of the children" it's in the most cruel and callous way possible.

Next, it's a comment from Citizen about the 5th circuit ruling that only citizens get due process rights:

Catch-22?

So if ICE grabs me and whisks me off to a detention center in Texas, how exactly would I go about proving my citizenship and getting released? According to ICE in this hypothetical scenario, I'm not a citizen, and according to the Fifth Circuit, that means I have no due process rights, meaning I can't contest ICE's claim, correct? Unless I'm missing something here, in this hypothetical scenario, any citizen grabbed by mistake-or, God forbid, grabbed by "mistake"-can only be released if ICE chooses to admit that they're a citizen.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Mars42 with a comment about the disastrous data leak by an AI toy company:

I have always been told that the "S" in IOT stands for security.

In second place, it's an anonymous comment from one of several people who were not a fan of a guest post from R Street this week:

How do we flag an article for being trolling/spam?

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with another anonymous comment, this time on our post about RFK Jr. apparently lying to congress about his 2019 trip to Samoa:

Maybe it will save time to just note when the US government tells the truth

Finally, it's Thad with a quip on our post about NBC hiding the crowd reaction that JD Vance garnered at the Winter Olympics:

Fake boos.

That's all for this week, folks!

This recent article comes from a quantitative ecologist that has orchestrated an AI-assissted model. Their model predicts over a billion people will face food insecurity within the next century. The "good news" is probably only good to the people who survive this, or want to. I didn't want to editorialize the headline so I left it as it is.

This article is collapse related because the best case scenario is still horrific.

I love reading debates between people who say this is the best time to be alive VS the worst time.

Debates around the value & quality of life are interesting but all too often a necessary distraction from problems we face today - problems that are far from abstract.

Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death and if I posted this on any main sub - I already know everything people would say. Its kind of scary how well I can imagine every comment chain playing out.

A thousand years wasn't that long ago for our species. If you told anyone in 1026 AD that tens of millions of people would be starving and that is a *good* year... they would be speechless. They wouldn't be capable of imagining the scale of misery.

If you've been wondering what's next for Netflix's Terminator Zero in the time since its first season, we finally have an update, and it's a bummer. Responding to a fan on social media, showrunner Mattson Tomlin said this weekend that the show has been canceled. Despite being generally well received, Tomlin noted that "at the end of the day not nearly enough people watched it."

It was cancelled. The critical and audience reception to it was tremendous, but at the end of the day not nearly enough people watched it. I would've loved to deliver on the Future War I had planned in season's 2 and 3, but I'm also very happy with how it feels contained as is. https://t.co/Dh7G6gkBF7 pic.twitter.com/dqCSXHIytg

— mattson tomlin (@mattsontomlin) February 13, 2026

Season one of Terminator Zero was released in August 2024 and focused on the events around Judgment Day — August 29, 1997, as established in Terminator 2 — and its aftermath, jumping forward to 2022, more than two decades into a war between humans and machines. In the post about the show's cancellation, Tomlin wrote, "I would've loved to deliver on the Future War I had planned in season's 2 and 3, but I'm also very happy with how it feels contained as is."

Tomlin went on to praise the marketing team in additional replies for "trying to really make the show work," as well as the hundreds of people who worked on the show. Offering a bit of insight, Tomlin wrote, "Generally speaking, anime audiences skew younger. Terminator audiences skew older. Terminator Zero asked them to meet in the middle, and they didn't in the way the corporation needed to justify the spend to continue. I'm extremely grateful to the people who have watched it."

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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Today, I'm republishing my entire post from one year ago. Please read it. It was my attempt to state clearly what the US press was not: that the US was in the grips of a coup. And that if coordinated action was not taken fast, it would be too late.

It's not that there wasn't excellent reporting in the US press. There was. But there was a total absence of simple, bold labelling of what was actually happening. The major US news organisations could or would not call it what it was.

The event that triggered my nervous system was Elon Musk's DOGE illegally entering the US treasury and gaining access to the entire nation's personal and financial data: a system-level hack on the entire US population.

This was a power grab that could not be undone. Data is like a genie. It cannot be put back in the bottle. That one act - that was then replicated across the federal government - was the beginning of what I believed, still believe, is a technoauthoritarian state.

I also channelled the voices of key experts: historians of authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Tim Snyder. They also said it loudly and clearly: it's a coup.

It's important to mark these moments, I believe. It's one year on. And this week, it's become distressingly clear that everything these historians have been warning about then, have warned about for nigh-on a decade, has now happened.

Thank you to everyone who commented on that and shared it.I never imagined it would meet with such a heartfelt response from so many people.

This week I was invited on Democracy Now, an indie American news station that punches well above its weight to talk about the Epstein piece I wrote and published here last week. I was blown away by the response to that piece and I just went to find the YouTube link to the show and I'm blown away again by the response to the interview: it's reached 1m views in just a few days.

In the interview, I say that the extraordinarily muted response of the US media to the Epstein files is evidence that America is more broken than it realises.

It's the same problem I wrote about (below) a year ago. It's not that there aren't still incredible journalists doing excellent reporting, there are. It's that US news organisations lack guts and leadership. They're failing to frame and make sense of what is in the files and what it means, failing to spell it out in headlines, failing to give it front page real estate. And of course, above all, it's failing the victims who've been failed so many times before.

A year ago, it failed to communicate the jeopardy of those first days and weeks of Trump's administration, a fast and furious illegal blitzkrieg that laid the groundwork for a surveillance state rooted in violence that we now see ICE consolidating.

And I think it's the same problem in this moment. The US media is pre-surrendering, self-censoring. That's what the historian Timothy Snyder warned against. It was the first and most important point on his list of how to avoid the authoritarian backslide: do not obey in advance. Yet, here we are.

Half the press has been captured by Trump allies and what remains is cowed, unable to meet the moment, impotent in the face of the abundant evidence that's revealed a paedophiliac cabal comprising individuals from every major US institution from universities to banks alongside tech bro billionaires, foreign agents and the US president. A cabal that disgusts almost everyone. And yet, it's barely even troubled the front pages of America's major newspapers.

In the clip, I talk about morality. It's not a fashionable or much-used word in the media. But in a world in which lies replace truth and black becomes white, we need something to hang on to. A line that we do not cross. And that line, if it's anything, is surely the rape and abuse of children? In Europe, at least, that line is holding. The revelations in these documents have caused political noise and heat and actual consequences. A long list of scalps across Europe and in Norway, in the last few days, the former PM Thorbjørn Jagland, a prominent figure in the files, has been arrested and charged.

But America, it honestly feels like you are lost. Broken. Not any of you. Not the little people. It's your storied paedophile-adjacent institutions that are failing you. The people named in these documents are still running your banks, they're teaching at your universities, they make up half the government. Where is the outrage? Where are the thundering op-eds? I've seen better headlines in Reddit than I've seen in the New York Times. Even in class-ridden Britain, we've booted out a Lord and there is serious heat for a police investigation of the King's brother.

The frog is boiling. You're in the water so maybe you can't feel it. But Epstein needs to be your wake-up call. I spent last week genuinely baffled by the US media's muted non-response to the files. But now I realise: it's the dog that didn't bark.

The silence is compliance. And the conditions for the Donald Trump's coup to be fully executed are now in place. The mid-terms are the final test. But nothing is inevitable. There is everything to fight for. But stop and really listen. The dog that's not barking now? If it's not barking now, it won't bark then either.

If you're unable to call out a coup in progress, or the cover-up of an entire cohort of paedophiles and their accomplices in positions of power across every sector of the US government and economy, it's not going to be able to summon the scare headlines needed to prevent an illegal assault upon an election.

You need to build your own alarm system. Your own media. You need to find new leaders. The billionaires are not coming to the rescue, nor their news organisations or networks or their political candidates. It's time to build your own. The call is coming from inside the house.

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Feb 10, 2025

Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America, in real time, is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn't need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation's most sensitive data and potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did. If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit - whose personnel include a 19-year-old called "Big Balls" - is now raiding and scorching the federal government, department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like. It didn't take armed men, just Musk's taskforce of boy-men who may be dweebs and nerds but all the better to plunder the country's digital resources. This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States' most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.

In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. That's a good place to start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn't the great hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and weaponization of 87 million people's personal data. But this now is the Great Hack. This week is when the operating system of the US was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the protection of the President.

If you think I've completely lost it, please be advised that I'm far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper doesn't mean this isn't not happening. It is.

In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren't eating or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what's happening. There is fact after fact after fact about Musk's illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story - the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you put the headline about the illegal coup d'etat next to a spring season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it's business as normal when it's anything but.

This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She's a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University and she said this even before some of this week's most extreme events had taken place. (A transcript of the rest of her words here.)

"It's very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it's only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive purge immediately. So that's unusual.

I don't have another reference point for a private individual coming in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his businesses and locking out and federal employees. It is a coup. I'm a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we're in a real emergency situation for our democracy."

A day later, this was Tim Snyder, Yale, a Yale professor and another great historian of authoritarianism, here: "Of course it's a coup."

History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who've lived in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying it. What I've learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley's system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That's the model here.

Everything that I've ever warned about is happening now. This is it. It's just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.

It's not that what's happening is simply unlawful. This is what David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post.

"So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they're playing a quantity game and assuming the system can't react to all this illegality at once."

And he's right. The system can't and isn't. Legal challenges are being made and even upheld but there's no guarantee or even sign that Musk is going to honour them. That's one of the most chilling points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.

Last week, I included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert about the latest developments in AI. This week I've asked Mark to do the honours.

He's a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer, he's been participating in 'War Game' exercises with Defense Department officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn't see this. It's even worse than they feared.

"Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies, firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of government. It all at the hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations. The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have been quick to enjoin actions.

"So yes, we've experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government. It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the rule of law hold?"

Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That's the government body with the slogan 'We are the nation's first line of defense'. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful 'buyout' - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former employees - spies - have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports that new appointees are being presented with "loyalty tests".

Musk's troops - because that's what they are, mercenaries - are acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways. Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended note below) is that they've known since the summer that there would be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a living.

And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens' data, their personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When data is out there, it's out there. That genie can never be put back into the bottle.

Itt's what it's possible to do with that data, that the real nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly personalised targeting can do. It's a digital coup. An information coup. And we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.

It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power - because data is power - of a kind the world has never seen before.

Facebook's actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark Zuckerberg spoke was "Move fast and break things". That phrase has passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with it.

And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more grotesque than the last. And Musk's career is an exemplar of that, a career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of privacy, stock market manipulation. And lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing Musk for failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.

Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply gotten away with it. I know I'm repeating this, but it's central to understanding both the mindset and what's happening on the ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line on a balance sheet. The "cost of doing business".

On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, who's been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his Substack to act now and call their representatives.

"Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d'etat. Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he's doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress. Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call Congress now."

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I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece on the New York Times website first thing in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined "Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab". It quoted Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University, "programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness." It was displayed prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering noise.

There's another word for an "Executive Power Grab", it's a coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed, distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is "business as usual."

Over on the Guardian's UK website on Wednesday, there was not a single mention on the front page of what was happening. Trump's Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of American news. We just weren't seeing what's happening in the seat of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading partner, the UK government didn't even apparently notice.

The downstream potential international consequences of what is happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy and national security quite clear. What he hasn't yet had is the backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I'm wrong but it seems pretty obvious that's what Musk's Starmer-aimed tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK aren't headed for the mother of all trade wars.

And that's before we even consider the national security ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The Five Eyes - the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - is already likely breached. Trump is going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that's going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely dangling the US's membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia watches, waits and knows that we've done almost nothing to prepare. Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet implemented. Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we're on but there's no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.

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We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator seizes power is that he (it's always a he) takes control of the radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn't that Elon Musk buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in his digital takeover.

It's both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an information drone with a deadly payload. It's a weapon that's already been turned on journalists and news organisations this week. There's much more to come.

On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later, twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.

This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the opening of the Stasi archive. It's not. It's rocketfuel for a witchhunt. It's hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state. It's going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that's been in Musk's sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed overnight.

By now you may feel scared and helpless. It's how I felt this week. I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn't happening? Really? That's the plan?

This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It's a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.

My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about Cambridge Analytica's illegal hack of data from Facebook while the company's VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires. That is a reality now.

The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless. So I'm telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on itself too. The event that I've spent the last eight years warning about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated. I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where I've done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate to a global audience.

But then, it's all connected. We are living through an information crisis. It's what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try to continue to do.

And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing this work very almost floored me. But it didn't. And I've learned essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this December.

The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our human rights.

This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and I've thought about these words a lot. You have to fight even if you won't necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.

If you value any of this and want me to be able to continue, I'd be really grateful if you signed up, free, or even better, paid subscription. And I'd also urge you to sign up also for the Citizen Dispatch, that's the newsletter from the non-profit I founded that campaigns around these issues. There is much more it can and needs to do.

With huge thanks as ever and solidarity & support to friends & strangers in the US, Carole

PS: I rang Mark Bergman to get him to do a longer version of the note. It repeats some of the one above but it's an added extra in case you want to hear more…

CNN's primetime viewers have dropped dramatically over the past decade. This isn't just about one network, it may signal a broader breakdown in shared information and institutional trust, a pattern often discussed here as part of systemic collapse.

Sources: Blossom/X

Keep tabs on the critical testing sessions before lights out on 2026!

At a staggering starting price of $6,999, you have a better chance of buying a bicycle in Cerulean City than getting your hands on the official Pokémon pinball machine. The collaboration between The Pokémon Company International and Stern Pinball is undoubtedly nostalgic, letting you battle with a team that includes Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle and Pikachu, as well as catch up to 182 different Pokémon, mostly from the Kanto region, with more to be added.

Besides catching 'em all and tracking your growing Pokédex on Stern Pinball's dedicated app, you can do Gym Battles in four different biomes and eventually face off against Team Rocket. The pinball machine draws a lot of inspiration from the original cartoon, including a monitor that plays clips from the show, an animatronic Pikachu, and speakers that can play the iconic theme song.

Stern Pinball developed Pro, Premium and Limited Edition models, which can cost all the way up to $12,999. For the most expensive option, you'll get one of the 750 limited edition machines that include a Master Ball plunger, a numbered plaque and a signed certificate of authenticity. For Pokémon fans that can't afford to spend that much money on a pinball machine, you can soon find them at arcades and bowling alleys instead.

A Palestinian community, which lives in the village of Deir al Dik al-Tahta in the Tel al Samrat area of Jericho, has been attacked by Israeli colonial settlers and expelled from their homes.

The attack, which occurred on 11 February and lasted most of the daylight hours, involved around 30 masked settlers. They arrived in ATVs, cars, and tractors, and stole 120-150 sheep, a car and a tractor:

According to the community, although they called both the Palestinian and Israeli occupation police, no one came to their assistance. The settlers, who are all armed by the government, pointed guns at the heads of the Palestinians, even children, and told them to leave or they would all be killed. They threw stones and assaulted members of the community. 10 Palestinians were beaten and injured, including women and children, and one person needed stitches in his head.

The settlers bulldozed and destroyed 19 buildings, including 15 residential homes, and stole jewellery and money. All 15 families, including 15 children, have been evacuated to temporary accommodation. They are currently too afraid to return to what is left of their homes:

Just above the community is an illegal outpost and a military camp:

So for the past two years, as in the rest of Palestine, settlers and the Israeli occupation army have joined forces and terrorised the community. There is no accountability or justice for Palestinians, and the occupation can literally get away with murder. They aim to ethnically cleanse the occupied West Bank of Palestinians.

Tel al Samrat is in the Jordan Valley. This sparsely populated agricultural area of the West Bank is rich in resources, and the Israeli occupation has wanted to annex the region since 1967. In the past two years settlers violence has increased considerably. So have demolitions of residential and agricultural structures. Large areas are also being declared so called "state land" or "military firing zones", to prevent Palestinians from accessing their land. An Israeli law is then implemented, confiscating land from Palestinians.

The Israeli occupation recently expanded its control over Palestinian lands, by changing rules to land registration in the occupied West Bank. The changes will mean, among other things, it will be easier for illegal settlers to buy Palestinian land.

Featured image and additional images via the Canary

By Charlie Jaay

The hardest choice to make for building your next MacBook might be selecting a color. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple has tested colors including light yellow, light green, blue and pink for its next entry-level MacBook that's aimed at students and enterprise users.

Beyond the more vibrant colors, Gurman said that Apple has also trialed its classic silver and dark gray colorways for its cheaper laptop. Gurman added that not all of these six colors will make it to the final product, but Apple has recently shown it's not afraid to dip into flashier options. Apple refreshed the iMac in 2024 with a total of seven colors and swapped out the space gray option for sky blue for the latest MacBook Air.

Color choices aside, the latest rumors point to the upcoming MacBook having a price tag that's anywhere between $699 and $799. To achieve that lower price point, Apple is expected to port over its chips designed for iPhones, like the A18 Pro that we first saw with the iPhone 16 Pro Max. We're also anticipating Apple will compromise on specs, ports, or even the display, but Gurman reported that the company won't be skimping when it comes to the shell. According to Gurman, Apple will employ a new manufacturing process to craft aluminum shells for the affordable MacBook, instead of opting for a cheaper material like plastic to cut costs. We may not have to wait long to see the official colors of the budget MacBook, as Gurman reported that it will be announced during an event in March.

A new and improved Ducati Panigale V4 R was the last thing the rest of the WorldSBK grid wanted to see heading into 2026. The Bologna-built missile has been the most complete package in the championship for several seasons, and this year it has taken another clear step forward.

Nicolo Bulega enters the third season of his WorldSBK career with real momentum. The Italian is the clear favourite for the title, and if he delivers the dominance many expect, a MotoGP seat looks set to await in 2027. Bulega's road to redemption has been a surprise to everyone. His talent was never in question but his Grand Prix career was marked by inconsistency. In WorldSBK, that frailty has disappeared. He looks sharper, tougher and fully at home.

• Read more about Steve English' 2026 WorldSBK Preview - Ducati: Winning, The Only Thing That Matters
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Times at the end of day 2:

• Read more about 2026 Jerez Moto3 Test Day 2 Times: Quiles Tops Moto3 Preseason Testing
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We're still waiting for Apple CarPlay compatibility for Tesla EVs, but it's been pushed back thanks to a slight hitch with iOS 26, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. In the latest Power On newsletter, Gurman said that Tesla's plans to adopt CarPlay have been delayed due to app compatibility issues as well as low adoption rates for iOS 26.

It's been a long wait for Tesla drivers who want CarPlay compatibility, especially since initial rumors indicated a late 2025 rollout and Bloomberg reported that Tesla was testing CarPlay in its vehicles in November. However, Gurman's latest newsletter revealed that there were some compatibility issues between Apple Maps and Tesla's in-house navigation software, which also supports the self-driving features.

To address this, Apple released an iOS 26 update that would better synchronize the two navigation apps, especially when a driver would use Tesla's autonomous driving options. Still, Tesla is reportedly concerned enough about the low adoption rates of iOS 26 to delay delivering CarPlay to its vehicles. Gurman also noted that iOS 26 adoption rates were lower than usual, but are already going up, citing Apple's latest numbers that 74 percent of all iPhones released in the last four years are running iOS 26. 

There's still no official date for when CarPlay arrives in Teslas, but including the beloved in-car feature could be a way to boost sales for the company. According to the January registration estimates in the US, Tesla saw sales slip for the fourth month in a row.

Harvard economist Jason Furman ran the numbers on U.S. GDP for the first half of 2025 and arrived at a figure that should make every macro investor sit up. AI infrastructure investment (information-processing equipment and software) represented just 4% of GDP. But it accounted for 92% of GDP growth. Strip out the data center build-out, and annualized growth for the first six months of 2025 was 0.1%. Not 1%. Zero point one.

"Our economy might just be three AI data centers in a trench coat."- Rusty Foster, Today in Tabs

He's not wrong.

To appreciate how unusual 92% concentration is, compare it to the dot-com era. AI-related categories contributed 0.97 percentage points to real GDP growth in the first three quarters of 2025, higher than the 0.69 points that identical IT categories contributed during the dot-com peak in 2000. AI-linked investment drove 39% of GDP growth across the first nine months of 2025. During the dot-com peak, the equivalent figure was 28% (St. Louis Fed, January 2026).

By August 2025, something happened that had no precedent: AI data center expenditure's contribution to GDP growth surpassed the total impact of all U.S. consumer spending. Consumer spending is two-thirds of GDP. A category representing 4% of the economy was outgrowing it.

The numbers stacked fast. AI-related capex contributed 1.1 percentage points to GDP growth in H1 2025 (J.P. Morgan), outpacing the consumer as an engine of expansion. Hardware investment was up 41% year-over-year. Data center construction hit a record $40 billion annual rate by June. Capex among the top cloud companies had quadrupled to nearly $400 billion annually, with the top 10 spenders accounting for nearly a third of all U.S. business spending (Morgan Stanley).

Where the Growth Actually Came From

Sources: BEA via Jason Furman analysis; St. Louis Fed, January 2026; Renaissance Macro Research

The 92% figure has a real asterisk. MRB Partners analyst Shaireen Bhide argues it overstates AI's net contribution: much of the hardware going into data centers is imported (GPUs from Taiwan, networking equipment from Asia), and imports subtract from GDP. After adjusting for AI-related imports, Bhide estimates the net contribution drops to 40-50 basis points, or roughly 20-25% of real GDP growth. Bespoke Investment Group reached a similar conclusion, noting that Q1 2025 was an outlier.

Both analyses are methodologically sound. But even the adjusted numbers tell a concerning story. A single investment category driven by a handful of companies accounting for a fifth to a quarter of all economic growth is not normal. And the unadjusted figures, the ones that showed up in the BEA data and shaped policy, created a GDP headline that masked what was happening underneath. Manufacturing was stalling. Retail was weak. Job creation was slowing. The rest of the economy was barely expanding.

In 2005, residential investment reached 6.7% of U.S. GDP, its highest level in half a century. The Federal Reserve documented how residential investment had surged 40% above its long-run average share of GDP. Mortgage debt climbed from 61% of GDP in 1998 to 97% by 2006. Between 2001 and 2005, roughly 40% of net private-sector job creation came from housing-related sectors.

The economy looked great. GDP was growing. Employment was up. The problem was that the growth was structurally dependent on a single sector, and that sector was fueled by financial engineering that disguised the true risk. Sound familiar?

The AI infrastructure boom shares an uncomfortable structural similarity. Not in the specific mechanism (nobody is packaging subprime data center leases into CDOs yet), but in the concentration pattern. A narrow sector is generating a disproportionate share of GDP growth. The rest of the economy is under performing. And financial engineering is making the true exposure difficult to measure.

Two Booms, One Pattern

Sources: Federal Reserve (Bernanke 2010); BEA; St. Louis Fed January 2026; Morgan Stanley

Housing Boom: Residential investment rose from 4.8% to 6.7% of GDP, with 40% of job creation. AI Boom: AI investment rose to 92% of GDP growth, with hyperscaler capex at $400B/yr. Different mechanisms, same structural dependency.

There are real differences, and they matter. Housing had a direct wealth effect on 69% of American households. AI infrastructure investment flows to a handful of companies and their shareholders. The dot-com bust wiped out roughly $6 trillion, about 60% of GDP at the time. Oliver Wyman's January 2026 analysis estimates a comparable AI equity correction would erase approximately $33 trillion. That is more than total U.S. GDP. The WEF argues the consumption impact would be more limited precisely because AI wealth is more concentrated than housing wealth was. Cold comfort if you hold the stocks.

The housing bust triggered a financial crisis because the risk was embedded in the banking system through mortgage-backed securities. The AI boom's financial plumbing looks different. Not necessarily safer.

Off-balance-sheet debt, SPVs, and hidden leverage

Tech companies have moved more than $120 billion in data center debt off their balance sheets using special purpose vehicles, according to the Financial Times. Oracle leads with $66 billion, followed by Meta at $30 billion, xAI at $20 billion, and CoreWeave at $2.6 billion. The structures involve private credit firms (PIMCO, BlackRock, Apollo, Blue Owl Capital, JPMorgan) providing debt and equity through entities designed to keep liabilities off the hyperscalers' books.

Paul Kedrosky describes the mechanism plainly: companies create SPVs they indirectly control but don't have to consolidate on their balance sheets. Meta's $27 billion Hyperion data center deal with Blue Owl, structured through an SPV named "Beignet Investor," has just $2.5 billion in equity against $27 billion in debt. That's a 10% equity cushion. Kedrosky calls it "wildly insufficient if projected AI workloads stall or margins compress."

UBS reports that tech companies had borrowed approximately $450 billion from private funds as of early 2025, up $100 billion year-over-year. Morgan Stanley estimates $800 billion in private credit will be required between 2025 and 2028 to finance AI data centers alone. In 2025, the five major hyperscalers issued $121 billion in bonds, more than four times their five-year average. Their combined free cash flow is forecast to shrink by 43% between late 2024 and early 2026.

"In 2008, banks discovered they owned far more US housing risk than their internal reports suggested. They might soon discover the same about data-center and digital infrastructure risk."- Oliver Wyman, January 2026

Where the Debt Is Hiding

Sources: Financial Times analysis, December 2025; UBS; Bank of America

Cross-investments, round-tripping, and inflated demand

The financial engineering extends beyond SPVs. Some of the AI revenue being counted as economic growth is companies paying each other. Bloomberg mapped what it called AI's "circular deals," the web of cross-investments where companies invest in each other, creating revenue that circles back to the investor. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI, which spends most of it on Microsoft Azure. OpenAI signed a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle, which must buy Nvidia GPUs to fulfill it. Nvidia invested in OpenAI's funding rounds. Nvidia took a 7% stake in CoreWeave, then agreed to purchase $6.3 billion in cloud services from CoreWeave, effectively guaranteeing CoreWeave's revenue. CoreWeave bought its GPUs with borrowed money collateralized by the value of the GPUs themselves.

OpenAI has committed to over $1.15 trillion in long-term computing contracts, against projected 2025 revenue of $13 billion. Goldman Sachs cited "the increasing circularity of the AI ecosystem." Morgan Stanley's Todd Castagno warned it was becoming "increasingly circular" in ways that "inflate demand and valuations without creating economic value."

"Isn't it a bit strange when the demand for compute is 'infinite,' the sellers keep subsidizing the buyers?"- Jim Chanos, 2025

In central Ohio, a couple opened their electricity bill and found it had risen 60%. They hadn't changed anything. But 130 data centers had moved in around them. Virginia's Dominion Energy proposed its first base-rate increase since 1992. Bloomberg's analysis of 25,000 electricity pricing nodes found wholesale costs up as much as 267% over five years in areas near data centers. The boom isn't an abstraction. It's showing up in people's utility bills.

The system-level numbers are worse. Electricity prices jumped 6.9% in 2025, more than double the headline inflation rate (Goldman Sachs). Data centers make up 40% of electricity demand growth. PJM Interconnection, the largest electric grid in the U.S. serving 65 million people across 13 states, reported that consumers will pay $16.6 billion between 2025 and 2027 just to secure power supplies for data centers that haven't been built yet. PJM's independent market monitor called it a "massive wealth transfer" from consumers to the data center industry. Households will see prices rise an additional 6% through 2027, dragging down consumer spending growth by 0.2%.

The Council on Foreign Relations argues the AI bubble may not burst from circular financing or debt levels, but from the mundane reality that data centers and housing construction are competing for the same electricians, welders, and HVAC technicians. Tariffs and immigration restrictions are shrinking the labor pool at precisely the moment both sectors need to expand.

Who Pays for the Data Centers?

Sources: PJM Monitoring Analytics; Goldman Sachs, February 2026; Bloomberg electricity pricing analysis; CNBC; NPR

If it's transformative, show me the numbers.

If AI infrastructure investment is transformative and not just a capex sugar rush, it should show up in productivity data. U.S. nonfarm business productivity grew at roughly 2% year-over-year through Q3 2025, in line with the post-pandemic average but showing no meaningful acceleration from the hundreds of billions flowing into AI. The Fed's Kansas City branch found gains concentrated in a handful of industries, not the broad-based uplift you'd expect from a general-purpose technology.

MIT's Nanda Lab reported that despite $30-40 billion in enterprise AI investment, 95% of organizations are getting zero return. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects the AI productivity boost will peak at an additional 0.2 percentage points of annual growth . Meaningful, but a fraction of what current investment levels imply. Data centers employ few workers once built, limiting the multiplier effect through wage-driven consumption (J.P. Morgan).

This matters for the GDP dependency story. If the economy isn't getting more productive from AI investment, then the GDP growth it generates is pure spending, not productivity-driven expansion. The growth lasts exactly as long as the spending does, and not a quarter longer.

"Everybody thought it was going to require more computing power and more bandwidth than it actually did."- Jerry Kaplan, on the 1990s. The infrastructure always gets overbuilt.

Even Jeff Bezos called the AI data center buildout an "industrial bubble" at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024. He insisted the long-term benefits will justify it. Maybe. But the distinction matters. An industrial bubble means real physical assets get built that eventually find uses. The fiber-optic cables from the telecom boom carried the internet for two decades. The railroad bubble of the 1800s left behind a continental transportation network.

But industrial bubbles still cause pain. The builders go bankrupt, the investors lose capital, and the construction workers lose jobs when the building stops. When the spending represents a massive share of GDP growth, the withdrawal can tip the broader economy into recession.

The WEF's Chief Economists Outlook acknowledged this: "Economic growth during the bubble phase depends on continually building infrastructure, not using infrastructure." As long as the hyperscalers keep spending, GDP grows. When they slow, whether from disappointing revenue, rising debt costs, or simple overbuilding, the contribution reverses.

And the slowdown signals may already be appearing. Alphabet's free cash flow is projected to plummet roughly 90%. Bond spreads on AI-related debt have widened by as much as 40 basis points since September, per Oliver Wyman. CoreWeave's stock has swung from a $187 peak to $75, a reminder of how volatile debt-fueled growth models.

The Dependency Math

Sources: Furman analysis; MRB Partners, January 2026; Stress Index modeling; company guidance

H1 2025 GDP growth: 1.8%. AI contribution (Furman): 1.7pp (92%). Without AI: 0.1%. MRB import-adjusted: 0.4-0.5pp (20-25%). If capex grows 30% slower: -0.3 to -0.5pp GDP impact. If capex flattens: -0.5 to -1.0pp.

Every scenario in that table shares one feature: the economy without AI investment is barely growing. The headline says 1.8%. The foundation says 0.1%.

The US manufacturer Talon PV plans to launch a new generation of high-efficiency TOPCon solar cells into the US market, despite the sharp U-turn in federal energy policy.

The post TOPCon Solar Cells Are Killing A Key Anti-Solar Talking Point appeared first on CleanTechnica.

December saw plugin EVs at 98.5% share in Norway, up from 89.8% year on year, with BEVs alone taking 97.6% share. Full year 2025 saw EVs at 97.5% share in Norway, up from 91.3% YoY, with all the growth coming from BEVs. Overall December auto volume was 35,188 units, a ... [continued]

The post 2025 Saw EVs At 97.5% Share In Norway — Tesla Model Y Best-Seller appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The president's destructive policies enrich fossil fuel billionaires, while Beijing has bet big on the green transition

Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year - at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.

Just one day later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced the elimination of the Obama-era endangerment finding which underpins federal climate regulations. Scrapping it is just one part of Mr Trump's assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential. Any fragment of hope may lie in the fact that a president who has called global heating a "hoax" framed this primarily as about deregulation - perhaps because the science is now so widely accepted even in the US.

Celebrated Indian academic and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy has withdrawn from the Berlin International Film Festival in protest. She described this as a reaction to the jury's refusal to address Israel's two-year-long genocidal war in Gaza.

Roy said her exit was prompted by "unconscionable" statements, as she described, from the festival jury about the need to keep art and politics separate. She outright rejected their position. In her view, it was an attempt to silence debate about the crimes Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. These are "unfolding before the eyes of the world," she said.

The 76th session of the Berlin Film Festival, which began last Thursday, featured more than 200 films, with 22 competing for the "Golden Bear" award.

This year's jury is headed by the multi-award winning German director Wim Wenders. During a press conference, Wenders warned artists and filmmakers against wading into politics, stating that:

We have to stay away from politics, because if we make films of a purely political nature, we enter the arena of politics. We represent a counterweight to politics, indeed its opposite, and we must serve the interests of the people, not the interests of politicians.

Another juror peddling the same line is Polish producer Eva Puszczynska. She objected to a question about Israeli aggression on Gaza and German support for Israel, sheepishly stating that:

Many other wars in which genocide crimes are committed and not talked about.

Puszczynska downplayed the question as "very complex," suggesting that it would not be fair for the committee to provide an answer — Roy vehemently disagrees.

Roy explained that while her participation had been inspired by the political solidarity from the German public towards Palestinians, she changed her decision after hearing the jury's statements. Furthermore, she said that she was disturbed by the position adopted by the German government and cultural institutions towards Palestine.

She held the view that the jury was using the claim 'art is not political' to:

silence any discussion about a crime against humanity.

She stressed that artists, writers, and filmmakers have a moral responsibility to:

do everything in their power to stop what is happening.

Roy has consistently characterised events in Gaza represents as a genocide against Palestinian people. She held the governments of the United States, Germany and other European countries responsible for supporting and financing Israel, considering them "complicit" in these crimes.

She concluded by saying that she was shocked and disgusted, adding that history would hold accountable anyone who chose silence.

Featured image courtesy Arundhati Roy

By Nazli Tarzi

TL;DR: Get 1TB of cloud storage from Koofr for $129.99 with code KOOFR (reg. $810). Deal ends Feb. 16 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Cloud storage subscriptions are a lot like gym memberships: cheap enough to ignore, expensive enough over time to regret, and surprisingly hard to quit. — Read the rest

The post The cloud storage equivalent of finally quitting the gym appeared first on Boing Boing.

Richard Nixon in 1972 (public domain photo). 

Robert Anton Wilson used to rail about the national security state and how much power was held by unelected bureaucrats. You can see some of those comments if you search this blog for "National Security Act." See for example, this blog post on John  Barth, where Wilson writes about "the sense of uncertainty and dread that has hung over this nation since democracy was abandoned in the National Security Act of 1947 and clandestine government became official. Sometimes I find it astounding that we have lived under fascism for 40 years while continuing the rituals of democracy .... "

The New York Times recently published a piece by James Rosen (gift link) on the extensive spying the Pentagon carried out on Richard Nixon and his aides.  

The piece, "Seven Pages of a Sealed Watergate File Sat Undiscovered. Until Now," describes how Nixon finally found out about the spying. Nixon did not believe he could prosecute the people responsible and reveal the spying without discrediting the military and having his own secrets revealed, but the two people primarily responsible were sent far away from Washington, D.C., and were wiretapped.

Rosen writes, "The Joint Chiefs' spying formed only one prong of the campaign against Nixon, the most spied-on president in modern times. Declassified documents and scholarship published since 1974 have established that the F.B.I., under its director, J. Edgar Hoover, spied on Mitchell, the attorney general, and that the C.I.A. detailed its personnel to various units associated with Nixon, including the Watergate burglary team and 'components intimately associated with the office of the president,' as the agency admitted in 1975."

Now, let's try that with a human body part

Tom's Hardware: In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the experiment creator.

Free-living amoebas are a little known group of single-celled organisms that don't need a host to live. They are found in soil and water, from puddles to lakes. What makes them remarkable is their ability to change shape and move using temporary arm-like extensions called pseudopodia - literally "false feet". This allows them to thrive in an astonishing range of environments. And they pose a growing health threat.

The most notorious free-living amoeba is Naegleria fowleri, commonly known as the "brain-eating amoeba". It lives naturally in warm freshwater, typically between 30°C and 40°C - lakes, rivers and hot springs. But it is rarely found in temperate countries such as the UK, due to the cold weather.

The infection happens when contaminated water enters through the nose, usually while swimming. From there, the amoeba travels along the nasal passages to the brain, where it destroys brain tissue. The outcome is usually devastating, with a mortality rate of 95%-99%.

Occasionally, Naegleria fowleri has been found in tap water, particularly when it's warm and hasn't been properly chlorinated. Some people have become infected while using contaminated tap water to rinse their sinuses for religious or health reasons. Fortunately, you cannot get infected by drinking contaminated water, and the infection doesn't spread from person to person.

Brain-eating amoebas can be killed by proper water treatment and chlorination. But eliminating them from water systems isn't always straightforward. When they attach to biofilms - communities of microorganisms that form inside pipes - disinfectants like chlorine struggle to reach them, and organic matter can reduce the disinfectants' effectiveness.

The amoeba can also survive warm temperatures by forming "cysts" - hard protective shells - making it harder to control in water networks, especially during summer or in poorly maintained systems.

Free-living amoebas aren't just dangerous on their own. They can also act as living shields for other harmful microbes, protecting them from environmental stress and disinfection.

While amoebas normally feed on bacteria, fungi and viruses, some bacteria - like Mycobacterium tuberculosis (which causes TB) and Legionella pneumophila (which causes legionnaires' disease) - have evolved to survive and multiply inside them. This helps these pathogens survive longer and potentially become more dangerous.

Amoebas also shelter fungi such as Cryptococcus neoformans, which can cause fungal meningitis. It can also shelter viruses, such as human norovirus and adenovirus, which cause respiratory, eye and gastrointestinal infections. By protecting these pathogens, amoebas help them survive longer in water and soil, and may even help spread antibiotic resistance.

Climate change is probably making the threat from free-living amoebas worse by creating more favourable conditions for their growth. Naegleria fowleri thrives in warm freshwater. As global temperatures rise, the habitable zone for these heat-loving amoebas has expanded into regions that were previously too cool. This potentially exposes more people to them through recreational water use.

Several recent outbreaks linked to recreational water exposure have already raised public concern in multiple countries. These climate-driven changes - warmer waters, longer warm seasons, and increased human contact with water - make controlling the risks more difficult than ever before.

Most water systems are not routinely checked for free-living amoebas. The organisms are rare, can hide in biofilms or sediments, and require specialised tests to detect, making routine monitoring expensive and technically challenging.

Instead, water safety relies on proper chlorination, maintaining disinfectant levels, and flushing systems regularly, rather than testing directly for the amoeba. While some guidance exists for high-risk areas, widespread monitoring is not standard practice.

Free-living amoebas aren't just a threat to the brain. They can cause painful eye infections, particularly in contact lens users, skin lesions in people with weakened immune systems, and rare but serious systemic infections affecting organs such as the lungs, liver and kidneys.

Free-living amoebas such as Naegleria fowleri are rare but can be deadly, so prevention is crucial. These organisms don't fit neatly into either medical or environmental categories - they span both, requiring a holistic approach that links environmental surveillance, water management, and clinical awareness to reduce risk.

Environmental change, gaps in water treatment and expanding habitats make monitoring - and clear communication of risk - more important than ever. Keeping water systems properly chlorinated, flushing hot water systems, and following safe recreational water and contact lens hygiene guidelines all help reduce the chance of infection. Meanwhile, researchers continue to improve detection methods and doctors work to recognise cases early.

People cannot get infected with free-living amoebas like Naegleria fowleri by drinking water, even if it contains the organism. Infection occurs only when contaminated water enters the nose, allowing the amoeba to reach the brain. Swallowing the water poses no risk because the amoeba cannot survive or invade through the digestive tract.

The risk from swimming in well-maintained pools or treated water is extremely low. The danger comes from warm, untreated freshwater, particularly during hot weather.

People can protect themselves from free-living amoebas by reducing exposure to warm, stagnant water. Simple steps include avoiding putting your head underwater in lakes or rivers during hot weather, using nose clips when swimming, choosing well-maintained pools, and keeping home water systems properly flushed and heated.

Contact lens users should follow strict hygiene and never rinse lenses with tap water. For nasal rinsing, only use sterile, distilled, or previously boiled water.

Awareness is key. If you develop a severe headache, fever, nausea, or stiff neck after freshwater exposure, seek medical attention immediately - early treatment is critical.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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