"I loved the torture video," read the subject line of an email sent to Jeffrey Epstein. The sender was identified by a U.S. lawmaker as Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the 71-year-old chairman of DP World, one of the planet's largest port and logistics companies. — Read the rest

The post DP World ousts Trump-connnected Sultan after Epstein files reveal "torture video" email appeared first on Boing Boing.

According to a study comprising 43 years of data on over 130,000 patients, drinking caffeinated coffee was associated with a lower risk of dementia. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that drinking two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea—approximately 300mg of caffeine—reduced dementia risk by 18% and 14%, respectively. — Read the rest

The post Caffeinated coffee may stave off dementia appeared first on Boing Boing.

There is a Match Museum in Jönköping, Sweden, dedicated to matchsticks and matchboxes. It's one of only a handful of match museums worldwide.

I love looking at vintage matchbox art, and this museum sounds like a great place to see some. — Read the rest

The post Sweden's match museum celebrates the lost art of matchbox design appeared first on Boing Boing.

Rays of light beam from a mass of dust, glancing off banks of cloud 1,000 light years from Earth. The nebula glows not because its gases ionize but because the sun-like star at its center is nearing the end of its life. — Read the rest

The post Hubble captures death of a sun-like star appeared first on Boing Boing.

This painting by Louis Wain depicts a wonderfully playful scene of cats sledding down a hill. Some look thrilled, while others look absolutely terrified. A few have even gone flying off their sleds and landed upside down in the snow. I need to find a print of this for my wall. — Read the rest

The post This delightfully chaotic Louis Wain painting shows cats sledding downhill with pure joy and terror appeared first on Boing Boing.

This hypnotic timelapse shows a sand dollar trundling in circles on the ocean floor, leaving a precise circular trail in the sand — its very own sand art.

Sand dollars may look like simple beach treasures, but they're living sea urchins with a surprisingly elegant design. — Read the rest

The post Watch a living sand dollar spin like a tiny Roomba, etching circular sand art appeared first on Boing Boing.

A special exhibition, "Universal Theme Parks: The Exhibition," will open on February 14 at The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia's museum of science and technology. The exhibition celebrates and explains the technology and artistry behind the Universal theme parks. It is planned to be in Philadelphia until September, and then go on a national tour of science museums for five years. — Read the rest

The post Program an animatronic, design a coaster at this new Philly exhibit appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Windows 11 Pro for Microsoft is available for $12.97 (reg. $199), offering upgraded security, multitasking tools, and built-in Copilot features for compatible PCs, through March 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

If your PC is still rocking that 2016 energy, it's time for an upgrade that won't cause existential dread. — Read the rest

The post Windows 11 Pro is $12.97 and your aging PC might thank you appeared first on Boing Boing.

~ THE SLOPPY JOE COCKTAIL ~

40ml light rum (I used Bacárdi)
20ml French vermouth (I used Noilly Prat)
20ml lime juice
10ml orange curacao (Pierre Ferrand)
5-10ml grenadine (homemade)

Now, darling, I want you to put your prettiest cocktail glass in the freezer. Can you do that for me? Wonderful. Now, carefully measure all of the above ingredients into your shaker. Swirl and taste. OK? Add a decent handful of ice, bang on the lid and now you're gonna shake shake shake shake shake shake it up. Phew. Fine-strain into the pre-frozen glass — through a fine-mesh, that's it — and drink immediately. Happy Valentine's day, baby.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

With 2026 being the year of the fire horse, this spicy number has a suitable kick to mark the occasion

Here's a spicy little number that will help you see in the lunar new year in style on 17 January.

Rron Rakoci, mixologist, Huŏ, London

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. 

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.

China's S2000 Stratosphere Airborne Wind Energy System (SAWES) has crossed an important threshold. This is an update on a report CleanTechnica featured 5 months ago. Last month, the megawatt-class airborne wind platform, operated by Beijing Lanyi Yunchuan Energy Technology Co., completed a grid-connected test flight in Yibin, Sichuan Province, confirming ... [continued]

The post China Floating Turbine Passes Testing & Completes A Grid-Connected Flight appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Another lovely edition from Cornwall's very own Ancient Magic Books.

Taken in 2023 on a three week road trip around the West Coast of America, James Meredew's The Shady Motel & Other American Monuments is an offbeat, mostly people-less view of a tired-looking American landscape.

"I found it very strange how little people walked around the towns, it gave you an eery feeling every-time you entered a new place, I tried to capture some of that when walking around taking photos" - James Meredew

Risograph Printed
60 Pages
26x20cm
Context 135gsm Birch Recycled Inner Pages
Brown Craft Tape

Edition of 100
This book and all of its offcuts are 100% compostable

£16 and available here. We have also restocked some other Ancient Magic titles — An Daras / Portals by Rosie Kliskey (inspired by the ancient landscape of West Penwith in Cornwall) and West ~ A Cornish Surf Anthology by Pete Geall (an invitation to step into the world of spirited local surf scene in West Cornwall).

Splann!

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.

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.…

By Adam Wheeler. Photos by Aprilia Racing.

Wooden legs, marriages to motorcycles, VR46 affinity, and a laconic and often flippant approach to the non-racing component of being a MotoGP winner: Marco Bezzecchi is certainly one of a kind on the grid and has been so for the majority of his four-season tenure in the premier class. The fresh unignorable truth is that the 27-year-old must be considered as a viable championship threat in 2026.

Aside from a brief flurry of results at the beginning (two wins and three podium appearances in the first five rounds) and then the middle (one win and four podiums from six outings) of his second MotoGP season in 2023, the Italian sizzled through his hottest streak to-date in the second half of 2025. His first campaign on the works Aprilia RS-GP ended with a second career bronze medal in the standings. He only missed the rostrum four times from R10 onwards and tallied three wins in total; two coming at the final dates in Portugal and Valencia.

Yes, those successes came after he'd punted Marc Marquez off the track and into surgery at the Indonesian Grand Prix for round 18 of 22. He also profited from Aprilia's unflinching attention for the majority of 2025 due to the misfortunes and travails of teammate Jorge Martin. But there is little doubt that Bezzecchi was able to mobilize the environment he found in Noale (200km north of his home on the Rimini coast) and could harness the strengths of the Aprilia once the team had worked through issues of stability, qualifying speed and rear grip. The factory subsequently rose to second place in the Constructors Standings for the first time.

Late 2025, Bezzecchi was formidable. How much of that potential can run in 2026? "The target is to try to start in a good way," he admitted at the Aprilia Racing team launch in Milan during mid-January. "That is what we missed last year. it could be fantastic to try to start in a competitive way, fighting for top fives, top three. Then after a couple of races, we can set a clear[er] target."

The opening laps of 2026 have been logged already, and the mood has remained chipper as Bezz headed the third and final day of testing at the Sepang International Circuit and was 2nd on overall fastest times. The Sepang test comes with a big asterisk. It is usually a trial period for new ideas and solutions and the track conditions are normally very favourable for grip.

"You really need to be super-focused, and you really need to try to feel everything from the bike and try to be precise on the comments because the track is very good," he told the media in Malaysia. "The pace is very strong compared to the race. It's much, much faster." Bezzecchi could only rank 11th at the Malaysian Grand Prix in October as the Aprilia struggled to utilise effective rear traction at the 20th race of the year. It was his worst score since the wet French Grand Prix at Le Mans back in May. "It's not super-easy…" he added on the nature of the work at the Sepang test, "but it's also super-nice to ride in the track like this."

Bezzecchi has 1 brand, 1 countryman and 1 family to worry about in 2026: small numbers but big obstacles. He also must crack the conundrum of extending his form throughout a nine month, 22-GP and 44 race weekend haul. Here's why he might scale the pole and become the first MotoGP #1 not to have won a championship in other categories since Fabio Quartararo in 2021.

1. Aprilia is ready?

It has taken half a decade since their first premier class podium in the MotoGP era in 2021 but Aprilia have moulded the RS-GP to be a bona fide championship foil for what will be the bike's last roll of the dice. Aprilia is the only constructor aside from Ducati to have won at least one Grand Prix every season since 2022 (the year of their first triumph) and under Massimo Rivola's stewardship and with the influence of former Ducati and KTM Technical Director Fabiano Sterlacchini (who replaced HRC-bound Romano Albesiano) for 2025 the Piaggio Group-owned brand has been creeping closer and closer.

2025 was a disaster for their project with Jorge Martin, but the fact that the firm tempted the 2024 champion away from Ducati stock in the first place was already testament to how they have been progressing in the last 24 months.

Aprilia won four Grands Prix with two different riders in 2025 despite the setback with Martin and all the disruptive speculation of the-then champion's future and status with the factory team. The Spaniard's absence thrust Bezzecchi into the fore and for a campaign where he had to prove his capability, not only as a racer but also a rider who could develop a prototype and lead a factory: roles he never had to face from the comfy confines of the Ducati-shod VR46 set-up from 2022-2024 (and where his credentials had diminished after a poor '24 with just one 3rd place finish to his credit and sliding from 3rd to 12th in the points table).

Bezz found a tight, family-esque nest that had worked effectively for Maverick Viñales. It was an extension of what he had/has at Valentino Rossi's squad and setup. "I have to be honest, it's cool because I have nice people around me in the team. But also at home, with the staff from the academy, my friends. And for the moment, I feel good," he said in Milan. The bonhomie means that he was the first rider in 2026 to confirm his future for the next two-year cycle of MotoGP. "In my mind, when I signed for Aprilia, I wanted to create a relationship. To try to be a rider for them for many years; this was my idea," he said after the 'wedding' on the eve of the Sepang test.

"It takes pressure off Marco, and that was the priority," Rivola commented on the contract extension in Malaysia. "It was our priority to continue with Marco, because we saw his commitment: there was something special. And also in his way of working. We get along quite good together."

Positive vibes in 2025 and then into 2026 led to conviction for another two years. Which, for all the camaraderie (that can be so temporal if results do not flow), means Bezzecchi is also assured by Aprilia's technical nuance. Sterlacchini's last crack with the current RS-GP means the race department have prioritised electronics and aerodynamics this year. The Italian described his thought process at the official launch. "What we want in terms of aerodynamics is to 'stretch the cover'," he said. "So, to obtain better efficiency, so you can generate better aerodynamic forces that are productive for performance. But you don't have the drawback that you have to 'pay' to have this benefit." This refinement could well be on-point thanks to the fruits of what both he and Rivola explained as the maturation of the technical crew. "You have to create a group of people that are working together to try to create in the fastest way possible solutions. Solution to the problem or solution to improve performance," he stated.

Since 2022 Aprilia have been fast, but also a little ragged in terms of consistency and durability. The overseas GPs in particular have been grim, with just one podium finish by Viñales coming in 2023 before the Phillip Island breakthrough five months ago. If both factory and rider can elevate for 2026 then they will undoubtedly be a sharper foe for the Ducati hoards. "Expectation normally is the one that kills us," Rivola said with a smile in Milan. "I'm very curious to see Marco…we need to manage that. Obviously, the expectation is high for the championship."

2. Marco is ready?

The ability was without question but there were rational doubts about Bezzecchi's attitude and aptitude to front an expensive and high-profile works effort early last year. 2024 had been horrific: only four top five results was not an impressive return for a rider of his ilk as he struggled to find the narrow window on the Ducati GP23. Marco earned props for breaking away from VR46 and seeking personal and external re-evaluation in black: new bike, new team, new culture. "It was a possibility for me to try to use this opportunity as a first-time factory rider," he reflected last month.

Martin-less, things look acceptable (two 6th positions in the first three rounds) but he kicked on from the Jerez test after round five; both as an Aprilia employee and a MotoGP protagonist. "I didn't become a leader, I just tried to be myself and I just tried to push everyone to reach what was not only my target, but also the target of the team," he said, before adding with typical nonchalance: "then, the rest came, how do you say, naturally."

Bezzecchi went from 'B rider' to 'A' by default but then 'earned the part'. "I learned a lot in how I feel the modification on the bike every time," he admitted. "Basically, in MotoGP, I think that you always have to make steps day-by-day. You can never stop, and this is what the factory is trying to do, and also what I'm trying to do in all the areas that I can. So physically and in terms of skills during the riding and in terms of also mentality."

The steps and improvements were transparent. The results came. But he was also smoothing the rough edges. Take qualifying as an example. He needed the first nine Grands Prix to reach the second row of the grid, and was then 1st or 2nd in Q2 five times from the final seven events.

Bezzecchi looked more comfortable as a Grand Prix winner. There was an aura of dependability about his presence. Although his capacity to effectively cope with the extra attention, all the requests and the scrutiny was harder to gauge. "In our sport, the pressure is always there, because when you are slow, you have the pressure to go home. And when you are fast, you have the pressure to try to win," he mused at the 2026 team presentation. "At the moment, I'm facing everything with positivity and try to use this as an advantage. I know it will not be easy. There will be some moments where maybe we will struggle a bit, but it's part of the process, it's part of the game."

Personally, I am fascinated to see how Bezzecchi deals with the possible status as a championship leader. He adopts the jokey and sometimes dismissive demeanour of his mentor at VR46 but the time could swiftly arrive when Marco has to step-up from being a character actor to a movie lead. Does he have the personality and 'tools' at his disposal to engage and inspire? To make an impact? Or will he be a champion 'blip' in the annals of the series?

3. Are the others ready?

Ducati. Marc Marquez. Alex Marquez. And a simmering Pecco Bagnaia (who might potentially be Bezzecchi's teammate for 2027). Four principal hurdles to the objective. Marc, six years younger than Marco, sets the bar and is a year entrenched with the best team and on the best bike. The only nagging slither of doubt is his fitness and the chance of another injury during the season that could cost the Catalan points or appearances. Bezzecchi's closest face-off with a prime Marquez came at the 2025 San Marino Grand Prix where only a mistake into Quercia halfway through the 27 laps cost him the lead and a chance of the win…but he ended-up only half a second behind the champion-elect at Misano.

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Bezzecchi might feel he has the match of Alex and despatched the younger Marquez without issue at the season-closing Valencian Grand Prix, but a resurgent Bagnaia could be a harder test as the Aprilia man will be all too aware of his friend's possibilities. Bezz can also turn into the VR46 enclave for insight when it's needed; Valentino also rallied against some fiery rivals with aplomb.

In truth - for the next few months at least - MotoGP needs a defiant and geared-up Marco Bezzecchi. A disruptor to 'MarquezGP' and the Ducati dominion. He'll gain extra fans and support purely by being 'the most likely one'. Overall, it is a warm, shiny stage of opportunity. "We can only work on our bikes, on ourselves, not on the others," Rivola summarised in Malaysia. "Honestly, I think it's going to be quite an interesting championship. Again, with someone leading - that is still the same - but we will stay in the slipstream."

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."

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.

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"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."

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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.

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. 

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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%

The next blackout to plunge a G20 nation into chaos might not come courtesy of cybercriminals or bad weather, but from an AI system tripping over its own shoelaces.…

Nuclear-powered datacenters in the US are moving closer as a consortium prepares to build proposed facilities for the Department of Energy (DoE) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).…

Welcome to Carbon Brief's DeBriefed. 
An essential guide to the week's key developments relating to climate change.

DANGER DANGER: The Trump administration formally repealed the US's landmark "endangerment finding" this week, reported the Financial Times. The 2009 Obama-era finding concluded that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and has provided a legal basis for their regulation over the past two decades, said the New York Times. 

RACE TO COURT: Multiple environmental groups have already threatened to sue over the administration's decision, reported the Guardian. The fate of the ruling is likely to ultimately be decided by the Conservative-majority Supreme Court, explained the New York Times. 

'BEAUTIFUL CLEAN COAL': Separately, Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring the Pentagon to buy coal-fired power, a move aimed to "revive a fuel source in sharp decline",  reported the Los Angeles Times. Despite his efforts,Trump has overseen more retirements of coal-fired power stations than any other US president, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

• CLIMATE TALKS: UN climate chief Simon Stiell said in a speech on Thursday that climate action can deliver stability in the face of a "new world disorder" while on a visit to Turkey, which will host the COP31 climate summit later this year, reported BusinessGreen. 
• IBERIAN CATASTROPHE: A succession of storms that hit Spain and Portugal in recent weeks have caused millions of euros worth of damage to farmlands and required more than 11,000 people to leave their homes in Spain's southern Andalusia region, said Reuters.
• RISKY BUSINESS: The "undervaluing" of nature by businesses is fuelling its decline and putting the global economy at risk, according to a new report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), covered by Carbon Brief. Carbon Brief interviewed IPBES chair Dr David Obura at the report's launch in Manchester.
• CORAL BLEACHING: A study covered by Agence France-Presse found that more than half of the world's coral reefs were bleached over a three-year period from 2014-17 during Earth's third "global bleaching event". The world has since entered a fourth bleaching event, starting in 2023, a scientist told AFP. 
• 'HELLISH HOTHOUSE EARTH': In a commentary paper, scientists argued that the world is closer than thought to a "point of no return", which could plunge Earth into a "hellish hothouse" state, reported the Guardian. 

The record amount of solar, onshore wind and tidal power secured in the latest auction for new renewable capacity in the UK, reported Carbon Brief.

• Human-caused climate change made the hot, dry and windy weather in Chile and Argentina three times more likely | World Weather Attribution (Carbon Brief also covered the study) 
• "Early-life" exposure to extreme heat "increases risk" of neurodevelopmental delay in preschool children | Nature Climate Change
• Climate change, urbanisation and species characteristics shape European butterfly population trends | Global Ecology and Biogeography

(For more, see Carbon Brief's in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

China's carbon dioxide emissions have "now been flat or falling for 21 months", analysis for Carbon Brief has found. The trend began in March 2024 and has lasted almost two years, due in particular to falling emissions in major sectors, including transport, power and cement, said the analysis. The analysis has been covered widely in global media, including Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg, New York Times, BBC World Service and Channel 4 News. 

This week, Carbon Brief takes a deep dive into the recent relentless rain and floods in the UK and explores how they could be linked to climate change.

It is no secret that it can rain a lot in the UK. But, in some parts of the country, it has rained every day of the year so far, according to Met Office data released this week.

In total, 26 stations set new monthly rainfall records for January. Northern Ireland experienced its wettest January for 149 years and Plymouth, in the south-west of England, experienced its wettest January day in 104 years.

Areas witnessing long periods of rain included Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, which has seen 41 consecutive days of rain "and counting", reported the Guardian. The University of Reading found that its home town had its longest period of consecutive rain - 25 days - since its records for the city began in 1908. 

The relentless rainfall has caused flooding in many parts of the country, particularly in rural areas.

There were more than 200 active flood alerts in place across England and Wales at the weekend, with flood warnings clustered around Gloucester and Worcester in the West Midlands, as well as Devon and Hampshire in southern England. A flood "alert" means that there is a possibility of flooding, while a "warning" means flooding is expected. 

"Growing up, the road to my school never flooded. But the school has already had to close three times this year because of flooding," Jess Powell, a local resident of a small village in Shropshire, told Carbon Brief. 

While there has not yet been a formal analysis into the role of climate change in the UK's current lengthy period of rain and flooding, it is known that human-caused warming can play a role in wet weather extremes, explained Dr Jess Neumann, a flooding researcher from the University of Reading. She told Carbon Brief:

"Warmer air can hold more moisture - about 7% more for every 1C of warming, increasing the chance of more frequent and at times, intense rainfall."

The UK owes its rainy climate in large part due to the jet stream, which brings strong winds from west to east and pushes low-pressure weather systems across the Atlantic.

Scientists have said that one of the factors behind the UK's relentless rain is the "blocking" of the jet stream, which occurs when winds slow, causing rainy weather patterns to get stuck.    

The impact of climate change on the jet stream is complex, involving a lot of different factors. One theory, still subject to debate among scientists, is that Arctic warming could play a role, explained Neumann:

"As the Arctic warms faster than the tropics, the temperature gradient that fuels the jet stream weakens, causing it to become slower and wavier. Blocking patterns develop that can cause weather conditions to get stuck over the UK, increasing the likelihood of extreme rainfall and flooding."

Long periods of rain saturate the ground and can have adverse impacts on agriculture and wildlife.

Prof Richard Betts, a leading climate scientist at the Met Office and the University of Exeter, said that these impacts can have harmful effects in rural areas: 

"The climate change-driven increase in flood risk is impacting food production in the UK. In 2024, the production of wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape shrunk by 13% due to widespread flooding of farmland.

"Assistance with recovery after flooding is increasingly important - obviously, financial help via insurance and reinsurance is vital, but also action to reduce impacts on mental health is increasingly important. It's very stressful dealing with the impacts of flooding and this is often not recognised."

One key adaptation for floods in the UK could be to "integrate natural flood management, including sustainable urban drainage, with more traditional hard engineering techniques", added Neumann:

"Most importantly, we need to improve our communication of flood risk to help individuals and communities know how to prepare. We need to shift our thinking from 'keeping water out' to 'living with water', if we want to adapt better to a future of flooding."

'IRREVERSIBLE TREND?': The Guardian explored how Romania's emissions have fallen by 75% since the 1990s and have been decoupled from the country's economic growth.

UNDER THE SEA: An article in BioGraphic explored whether the skeletons of dead corals "help or hinder recovery" on bleached reefs. 

SPEEDING UP: Through dynamic charts, the Washington Post showed how climate change is accelerating. 

• 16-19 February: Sixth meeting of the subsidiary body on implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Rome, Italy 
• 20 February: Webinar on the key findings from the International Energy Agency policy brief: the value of demand flexibility: benefits beyond balancing
• 20 February: UN day of social justice
• 22-27 February: Ocean Sciences Meeting, Glasgow, UK

• UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), national senior climate change expert | Salary: Unknown. Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh 
• British Antarctic Survey, marine biologist | Salary: £31,183. Location: Antarctica 
• Green Climate Fund, regional lead for resource mobilisation - Europe | Salary: $109,000. Location: Seoul, South Korea 
• Scientific American, documentary film proposals | Up to $80,000 per commissioned film

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief's weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

DeBriefed 6 February 2026: US secret climate panel 'unlawful' | China's clean energy boon | Can humans reverse nature loss?

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DeBriefed 30 January 2026:  Fire and ice; US formally exits Paris; Climate image faux pas

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DeBriefed 23 January 2026: Trump's Davos tirade; EU wind and solar milestone; High seas hope

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DeBriefed 16 January 2026: Three years of record heat; China and India coal milestone; Beijing's 2026 climate outlook

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The post DeBriefed 13 February 2026: Trump repeals landmark 'endangerment finding' | China's emissions flatlining | UK's 'relentless rain' appeared first on Carbon Brief.